I just finished reading a really wonderful essay by Curtis White in the April issue of Harper’s Magazine. The essay looks at US traditions of religion and reason and places them both in contrast to Thoreau’s thoughts on humanness and spirituality. A culture of death created by money and a corporate society are countered by individual resistance and instence on a stance in opposition to society. I certainly am not doing it justice, but is definitely worth a read.
exquisite corpse: the psp game!
Well, it doesn’t exist yet but how cool would that be?
Eli has been talking up video editing on portable computers for a while now. And as far back as y2k, Play had their Pocket Producer app that was interesting if not always useful. But in class this week, we started talking about the idea of video editing on the PSP (brought up by guest chatter Ryan Junell.) Pretty interesting, right? But simple in-camera effects and edits aren’t anything new. You can do that with a bunch of the Powershots and Cybershots already out there — unfortunately, it’s not much fun.
So if you could implement it on something like the PSP, why not make it a game?
Think of it as a palm-top front-end for a ccMixter for video?
Gameplay could consist of weekly remix contests like the GYBO challenges. Users could download the relevant clips to their portable devices and get a week to make their own iterations. They post their final submissions back up to ccMixter and the clips with the highest rating after three days wins. Include Keyworx-like functionality, and allow folks to create live collaborative VJ events that could be viewed by others.
Guitar Hero and Taiko Drum Master prove that games based on “content” do work, but neither put a lot of emphasis on community or collaboration which — to me — are the more interesting parts of cultural communities as a whole and hip-hop (including remix and mashup) culture specifically. While we’ve learned that adding community to FPS and RPG games make them infinitely more compelling, we have yet to accept the same with our media. Until then, we’ll be stuck with efforts that do little more but to serve our feudal lords.
http://www.kenyattacheese.net/braintag/2006/04/13/exquisite_corpse_the_psp_game.php
Fake TV News
While prepping for my Media Literacy class on journalism and mainstream news, I came across this site on Fake TV News. Even for a critical (and old) media consumer as myself, it is still pretty amazing how constructed and manipulated our news environments.
Teaching this class has awakened my awareness about how much consumer society and corporate agendas are seemlessly woven into our experience of reality and our information / communication systems. Consumption, capital, corporations – you know they are there, but its good to get a wake-up call every once in a while.
Communicating Vision
I’ve encountered several instances lately when I’ve found myself in the challenging place of trying to communication my vision. I see things so clearly in my mind, yet the language to make it clear to other evades me. I’m usually really excellent at this. Maybe I am finding myself in these situation where I am still not clear and the specifics are not clear and hence other not so much.
I do know this:
- communication is essential to communities, a community unable to communicate its values, ideals, and needs will find it difficult to grow or compete
- the tools and systems of modern communication have never been more accessible, but so many still are without access to or the skill in using these new tools
- corporations and governments are rapidly changing how we organize society, and if communities don’t advocate for the public sector we will loose a core ingredient for a true democracy
- I want to be one of those working to make sure that all of this happens and I want to work with other committed souls who have this as their mission
And so I found this:
Developing and communicating vision from the Community Toolbox.
Media Arts Stories
I particiapted in a NAMAC regional meeting today were about 20 other thouhgt leaders were in attendence sharing thier stories of inspiring and impactful media arts experiences. There were so many recurring faces and a few new ones to me. I really felt the span of generations. So many wonderful experiences from a range of media arts educators, activists, adminstrators, exhibitors, etc. The common threads revolved around seizing opportunities, articulating visions, being open to new ideas and discovery, and most importantly acting.
George Fifiled talked about the first Boston Cyberarts festival and how it distilled a community of people aorund art and technology. Wendy Blom about the Southeast Asian Water festival in Lowell and how it transformed how she thought about public access television. Danielle Martin talked about having to quickly improvise a digital storytelling workshop for hearing impared girls. Joe Doullette shared his story of mentor a young filmmaker. Laura Simmons recounted the formation of the her People of Color Collaborative and creating new opportunites. I could go on, but you get the idea.
It was a good gathering.
Connect – towards a sustainable communications ecosystem
So what does it mean to have a sustainable communication and information ecosystem. How do you build community capacity to insure that the information and communication needs of all are met? How do you ensure that local skills and infrastucture are built. This is the direction that I’ve begun working in at UML these days.
Here is part of a concept paper I have been working on that I’ll be brainstorming with ohters next week.
overview
Communication and information systems are forming an ever-present ecosystem that is becoming harder and harder to separate from our daily lives. These systems are the roads, shipping lanes and railways of the 21st century form the bedrock of commerce and culture. Without access to the technologies that form these systems, both creative and consumptive, communities will simply not be able to compete. Individuals who lack access and the ability to use these systems will find they are unable to be engaged citizens. Some may find they are unable to support themselves or to participate substantially in the culture around them.
mission
CONNECT collaborates with community-based organizations and individuals to create communication capacity within a social and economic development context.
vision
CONNECT sees the opportunity to form sustainable communication systems that serve a variety of information needs for those in the Merrimack Valley and contributes to the overall health of the region. At the core of this system are content production & distribution activities, learning opportunities, community-based research and technical innovations that span across university, city, regional, and community organizations.
There is more, but you get the idea.
Talkr: Creating Audio Podcasts of Your Text Blog Entries
From Andy Carvin’s Waste of Bandwidth – http://www.andycarvin.com/archives/2006/03/talkr_creating_audio.html
I’ve just started experimenting with a rather funky tool called Talkr. Essentially, Talkr is a podcast generator for text blogs, and it has enormous implications for people with visual impairments and limited literacy.
When you look at a typical blog, it’s mostly text. This may be no problem for many people, but if you’re reading skills aren’t strong or you don’t see well, text blogs can be quite a challenge. Meanwhile, thousands of Internet users create their own podcasts, which are basically blogs containing audio files. Apart from being really cool for everyone, podcasts are particularly useful for people who can’t read or see well. But they’re not exactly practical for the hard of hearing, either, who would benefit more from reading a text blog. Theoretically, it would be great if every person who wrote a text blog would record a podcast of it as well, but very few, if any bloggers bother to do this.
Enter Talkr. Talkr is a Web-based speech synthesizer that takes the texts of blogs and generates and MP3 file, with a computer voice speaking the text. For people who just want to visit their favorite text blogs and listens to them, Talkr works as blog management tool; you simply add your favorite blogs to your account, and it will create a computer-generated voice mp3 for each entry. Meanwhile, for all of you bloggers out there, Talkr lets you embed a computer-generatd mp3 into each of your blog entries, and supplies you with an RSS feed for them. This means that users can either come to your blog and click a link to listen to the mp3, or they can use iTunes or another podcast management tool to subscribe to the feed and receive each new mp3 file automatically. [continued]
Live Mixing of Sampled Material
This video demonstrates software that takes audio and video material, splits it up into beats, places it in a database, and then retrieves individual beats when audio is input in to the system. Very cool
Brand Identity vs. National / Ethnic Identity
This semster I’ve been teaching a Media Literacy class at UMass Boston. Today the topic was advertising, brand identity, emotional branding, and the increasingly blurry lines between commerce and content. I was using Frontline’s “The New Pursuaders,” as a key discussion point.
At one point in the report an expert says that brands, like Apple, attempt to create a sense of community and belonging around them. That brands are filling voids left by the erosion of schools and churches.
It seems to me that in a globaizing world controlled by corporations brands are the new types of national flags. Kinda of like the world of Rollerball where the turf is the minds and dollars of cosumers. I asked my class if they felt that these newly constructed brand identies were any different than the early construction of clans, tribes, and nations.
One student indicated that national / ethnic identity was different because it is part of her and who she is. Will the next generation or the generations after being saying the same about their identification with a constellation of consumer goods that represent their “clan?”
WAM @ MIT
I participated in a panel yesterday that was part of the Women, Action and Media conference at MIT. The panel focussed on “Increasing Media Coverage Women’s Issues in the South. Danielle Martin and myself were asked to present community-based and new media approaches to address the issues of women in the global south. Daniell has a nice powerpoint on her website which covered her topic of new media.
It occured to me after the presentation that the power of blogs and the Web 2.0, is not in the ability to become mass messaging systems, but rather to facilitate and ease dialogue and conversation. The ability to bring more people into contact with one another and for ideas to flow more rapidly.