Brief History of New Media

According to our plan today is the deadline to deliver the posters. Dublin and Helsinki teams should post their design to the course’s mailing list. In each end we will then print the posters, hang them somewhere and have on Wednesday a session on Flashmeeting to present and discuss about them.

The Wednesday session takes place in a Flashmeerting at 15.00 – 17.00 (Helsinki time), 13.00-15.00 (Dublin time). Please prepare 30 minutes presentation about your poster for the session. Here is the link to the Flashmeeting:

http://flashmeeting.open.ac.uk/fm/f61f03-8185

We will again meet in the FlashMeeting. You may login to the session in here:

http://flashmeeting.open.ac.uk/fm/e53b63-7902

Olga Goriunova will give a lecture on software and art. Olga is a researcher, writer, curator and artist based in Moscow. She is one of the leading figures in the net and software art community. For the last few years she has been co-organizing software art festival readme, co-administrating software art repository runme.org, editing related publications, and for instance making a software piece: suicide letter wizard for microsoft word.

We will again check the second exercise brief and the schedule. We made some changes in it in the last meeting. The course schedule page is now updated.

We will finnis with a little discussion on Web 2.0 - something that is disucss a lot at the moment in the field of New Media. We will watch together a little move about Web 2.0. The movie is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

The online session takes place again with the FlashMeeting. You may login to the session in here:

http://flashmeeting.open.ac.uk/fm/ae0193-7815

We will start with a presentation of the first exercise from the Helsinki students. They have been working with the Wikipedia article on community art with the focus on “online community art”.

Researcher / Designer Andrea Botero Cabrera (Media Lab, Helsinki) will give a lecture about the Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). She will pull together number of interesting links between people and project that were and are related to this institution.

We will also have a look of the second exercise brief and start the work in it.

Finally we will start (you may finnish the movie later) to watch together BBC’s “fantasy documentary” from 1990, called Hyperland. The film was written by Douglas Adams.

We will have a look of everyones work. Please send your file beforehand to the mailing list. In the online session we will use the FlashMeetings. You may join the session in here:

http://flashmeeting.open.ac.uk/fm/0c7347-7711

You may login as a guest.

Join the online session (Skypecast). Clicking the link will open your Skype. Give your user name and you will be automatically add to the conference.

During the third online session we will:

• Each give 5 minutes presentations of the Vannevar Bush’s article As we May Think.

Join the online session (Skypecast). Clicking the link will open your Skype. Give your user name and you will be automatically add to the conference.

During this second online session we will:

• We will discuss about your topics for the first exercise. Have a look of the exercise brief. The last slide is not updated. The timetabe in our case is: Before 07.03.2007 exercise return to the mailing list, presentations in the online session same day, 07.03.2007.
• Everyone will give a 5 minutes talk about the home reading, Vannevar Bush (1945): As We May Think
• We will start to watch together the video of Doug Engelbart’s Demo from 1968. You may finish it later before the next meeting.

You may login to the online session with your Skype name. The session opens on Wednesday at 15.00 (13:00 in Dublin).

During the first online session we will:

• Get to know each other (prepare to present yourself with 3 links/websites)
• Try to define the term “New Media”
• Get familiar with the brief of the first exercise: Wikipedia editing
• Discuss about the first reading: Jorge Luis Borges (1941): The Garden of Forking Paths

The online course with students from Helsinki, Riga and Dublin starts next Wednesday at 14.00 (Helsinki, Riga) / 12.00 (Dublin).

This blog will be used for day by day announcements and for delivering learning materials used in the course. To keep track on the progress in the course you should regularly visit this blog and/or register to the web feed from the blog. What is a web feed?

For asynchronous communication we are using Google groups’ mailing list and for synchronous sessions on Wednesdays we will use Skype (skypecast and chat). You may already download and install Skype to the computer you will use in the course. More instruction is given in the maling list.

Before Wednesday I will also include to this blog a page with a detailed program of the online lectures and the course exercises.

PS. The stuff already on this blog are from the Media Lab course that took place during the autumn semester. Feel free to check the archives.

Retrospective Futurism

Tutors and participants of the Brief History of New Media course at Media Lab Helsinki warmly invite you to the exhibition “Retrospective Futurism” that will be open from 7.12.06 until 14.12.06 in the lobby of the main entrance of the University.

The exhibition gathers the results of our last course exercise. Through posters and brochures of historical imaginary devices you are asked to question the taken-for-granted assumptions in contemporary new media services and artifacts.

WELCOME !

Images from the exhibition opening and final critique session (photo: S. Marttila)
7.12.2006 - 13:00 Taik - Main entry lobby.

Deadline for announcement of topics has passed. Participants of the course are now working on the following technologically unrealistic artifacts, but hopefully culturally feasible and challenging:

TOPICS

Miska & Jukka: Instant messaging for dadaists, applying poetic techniques like “exquisite corpse” to IMS technology.”

Su-Kyeong & Niklas An online-dating service concept for medieval monarchs.

Martin & Ti: A mobile phone for Native Americans/American Indians - making smoke signalling possible thorugh GUI

Tuomo & Atle: Portable Carving Board -device for ancient egyptians

Diana & Blanca: El navegante - a collector to illustrate the routes and findings from the New World - a GPS navigation system for the latin navigators

Pii & Jukka: Photoshop, Illustrators and other photo editing or painting programs to Maya culture

Aleksi & Marcus: Virtual reality as a secret weapon of the cathollic church in the medieval times.

Jarno & Jenna Private Gallery - World in a Box - a new luxury product to an english upper-class gentleman, 19th Century

Jan & Tuomas Tuomas - A Web forum for the 19th century Finland
CLARIFICATIONS

During this 2 last weeks we have had interesting discussions on the forum and in tutoring sessions about the topic of the exercise and how to approach it. It has been a good exercise for us in “Brief giving”, as I really thought we cover all details but some thing were not clear for all. Some clarifications where in order:
- There IS technology: electricity, networking technology, some types of displays, processors, control devices, etc. Your focus is NOT TO THINK about how the technology is possible. Don’t focus on how it is built.

- Please, don’t do “human systems” only! It’s not the focus and idea of this exercise. Making a “human system” only would be TOO EASY, because when thinking about a human system, you wouldn’t have to think and speculate how technology can be embedded into society

- You can have parts of the system “powered” by humans.. it happens today also, but is not good idea to put all the power in them cause humans are very complex, flexible and intelligent, it is easy to make a networked system with humans that will work than one where there is some technological limitations and possibilities

- AND PLEASE DO NOT USE MAGIC extensively… like: “the thing will automatically translates korean into sanscrit with one key” as that type of stuff is not possible yet. Magic is allowed if you are talking about the hundred of women burnt as witches during inqusition… but then again “what” was the magic?