iPad – Dr. Kasprzak

Blowup

Tomorrow I have the pleasure of launching the series I have been working on in my capacity as Curator at V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam.

The name of the series, Blowup, was inspired not only by Antonioni’s film but by the notion that blowing an image up reveals detail; blowing an inflatable object up creates form; blowing something up explosively can be festive or threatening.

The first event in the series is entitled Wild Things, and is about art for animals to appreciate, inhabit, or interact with. Three incredible speakers: Amy Youngs (US), Wilfried Hou Je Bek (NL), and Elio Caccavale (IT/UK), plus one cat: Barbie (NL), will be presenting over the course of the evening.

If you are anywhere in the Benelux region, you should rush to V2_ tomorrow night (July 7) and get there by 8 PM to enjoy the evening. For most readers, you are far enough away that I cordially invite you to tune in via webstream. V2_’s streams are really excellent, I would almost dare to say it’s even better than being there, because we use multiple cameras and the camera operators are so good. You will miss out on the custom cocktail, the “Wild Zebra”, but you can attempt to replicate this at home by making a White Russian and trying to make chocolate stripes on the side of your glass. Ya, I know — tricky. Just make White Russians and visualise the stripes. You can even participate in the online chatter by Tweeting about the programme using the hashtag #v2_!

So if you are nearby, see you there; and if not, get comfy in front of your computer, and tune in to: http://live.v2.nl tomorrow, July 7, at 8PM Central European Summer Time.

Also — every Blowup event will have an e-Book reader released with it. Keep an eye out, I will amend this post with the download URL for this, the first Blowup reader!

A Quick Guide to SXSW’s Panel Picker

The South by Southwest conference panel picker allows anyone who considers themselves to be part of the SXSW community to vote on panels that will appear at next year’s conferences in music, film, and interactive technologies. It’s a good, simple way to get people involved in the content they would invest their time in seeing.

As you can see from the pie chart, SXSW organisers are no fools, however: say what you like about the “wisdom of the crowd”, the advisory board and staff still run the show (and that’s a good thing).

What struck me after a quick browse was a certain homogenous feel to the panel titles. Nearly all of them are twisting themselves into pretzels to sound clever and punchy in a peculiarly uniform tone. Few simply tell you exactly what the panel content will be, and one wonders if the public voting feature exacerbates this kind of look-at-me marketing. The contrast between conferences meant to appeal to the general public and academic conferences couldn’t be more pointed, through the prism of this one tiny feature. For example:

Semi-random* sampling of SXSWi proposed panel titles:

The Thousand Wang Challenge: Chatroulette As A Game
Old is the New Black: Content’s Comeback
Boldly Go Where No Ad Has Gone Before
Invade my Privacy, Please!
Curation Is King and Content Is Its Bitch

Semi-random* sampling of academic panel titles (I chose the College Art Association conference from last year):

Dressing the Part: Textiles as Propaganda in the Middle Ages, Part I
Authors of Cultural History from the Ottoman Empire to Nation-States
Innovation, Agency, History: Centering the Italian Fourteenth Century
The Importance of Art in Economic and Social Revitalization: The Creation of Modern Cultural Economies
From Fiction to Archive: Reconstructing Public Memory in South Korea

But I digress (interesting as conference panel titles are). I promised a quick guide, and so here is the guide part. Here’s what you need to know:

Vote thumbs down:

Anything remotely to do with SEO (search engine optimisation, for the uninitiated)
Panels with offensive, inane, and/or punny titles
Panels about the iPad (just because)
Panels that will tell you how to make money on your _______ (insert whatever)

Vote thumbs up:

Anything else that sounds remotely interesting.
For your friends, of course.

Good luck!

Oh, and share your faves please — there’s no way I’ll get through all 2,500 or so panel proposals.

(* – Like any good storyteller, I might notice data that supports my thesis more often than data that doesn’t.)