Category: My Lectures

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Art & Culture My Lectures My Projects

Some eBook Downloads and Commentary

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I’ve always been interested in publishing — from the zines I made as a teenager, to the articles I’ve written for magazines over the years, to the blog I kept as a Master’s student (back when it was a hot thing to blog), and now for the past three years at V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media, initiating and leading the e-publishing programme as part of my Blowup series of events.

Over this past three years, there have been many lessons learned in terms of both producing and distributing content in eBook form. In May this year I was invited to give a talk entitled The eBook as a Vehicle for Re-dissemination and Creation, as part of Off The Press: Electronic Publishing in the Arts, a conference convened by the Institute for Network Cultures and hosted by the Boijmans Museum. The talk sums up some of my thoughts on the eBook as a form — in particular as a unique platform to give new life to old content, to repackage and remix, and to inspire groups to rapidly generate content which responds to current events (“booksprinting”).

As 2014 draws to a close, I looked back over the year and thought it timely to share the link to my talk on e-publishing alongside links to download the eBooks that I produced at V2_ this year (which all relate to themes of innovation, materiality, and extreme scenarios). They are free to download, so enjoy, and happy holidays!

Responsible Technological Innovation (in collaboration with the Risk Science Center at the University of Michigan)
Blowup: New Materials, New Methods
Outer Space as Extreme Scenario

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Art & Culture My Lectures

Forked Identities, Mentioned-and-not-mentioned, Authority, and more

This year I was delighted to present at PICNIC, as part of a panel on the future of cultural criticism. The panelists engaged with the topic of journalism in the cultural realm and how it is changing in the face of “everyone’s a critic” in our digital age. The main points that I addressed were the binary of mentioned and not-mentioned in contemporary art criticism (concept courtesy of Boris Groys), how authority is built online, and what I call “forked identities”.

I think my points on mentioned/not-mentioned and building authority are pretty clear from my presentation (embedded below), but to elaborate on “forked identities” a bit: I have about 5 Twitter accounts, 9 friend groups with varying access to my profile on Facebook, and 2 public blogs plus many other websites that I contribute to now and again. In each of these situations I am presenting a slightly different facet of myself. This is just how it is in our contemporary communications environment. I want the ability to communicate my most colourful opinions to a close circle of 7 friends on Twitter, while highlighting only my professional achievements on my fully public Twitter feed with over 500 followers, or this blog. My identity has been forked into several sub-identities, which is (of course) not unlike how I conduct myself in varying social situations in real life.

Here is my Prezi (I added a few slides to it after the fact, to assist in comprehending it, as I thought it a bit opaque as a stand-alone without these modifications):

All the news that’s fit to … on Prezi

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Art & Culture My Lectures

The Future of Journalism and Cultural Blogging


Thinking of coming to PICNIC in Amsterdam next week? Be sure to come to a session I am speaking at on September 22 entitled Cultural Criticism in the Age of New Journalism, with Claudine Boeglin, Diana Krabbendam, Wilfried Ruetten, and moderated by Raymond van den Boogaard, Chief Arts Editor, NRC/Handelsblad.

This panel will be followed immediately by the launch of Cultural Bloggers Interviewed, a book by LabforCulture. The launch will feature myself in a Q & A with Annette Wolfsberger, who conducted the interviews for the book. Will I see you there? DM me on Twitter or drop me a line if you will be around.

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Art & Culture My Lectures

Advocating for Free Culture

Recently, I gave a talk at transmediale as part of their Free Culture Incubator series. I’ve embedded the video below. I highlighted three case studies that I think exemplify how advocating for the arts successfully can make profound differences to how we experience urban spaces.

Firstly I mentioned BeautifulCity.ca, a campaign to introduce a billboard tax in the city of Toronto, with the tax money distributed to art and culture projects. They were very successful in winning the first battle, which was implementing the tax, but now they need people to speak up once more in favour of how the budget is actually allocated. Check out their Facebook event for more details on how you can help this terrific project.

I also mentioned Ile Sans Fil, the wireless community group that I used to work with, that built a grassroots infrastructure in Montreal that is wildly successful. They were also pioneers of using their infrastructure as a platform to distribute art and community content to their users. They have been so successful at building infrastructure and in their advocacy work that wireless internet infrastructure is now an issue in the Montreal municipal elections.

Last but not least, I mentioned Manchester Open Data City, a huge initiative by FutureEverything. FutureEverything is leading the advocacy around making Manchester the UK’s first open data city, by identifying data that can be made available, and looking at issues of data interoperability, quality and management. I’m programming the FutureEverything conference this year, and can tell you that Open Data and its implications for citizen participation and creativity will be a hot topic. Hope to see you in Manchester this May for FutureEverything!