Curating Media and Design

Power to the Pixel does great work in transmedia development, including a conference and a pitch competition (that MEDEA was actually part of and won last year!). This is their think-tank report, written by highly knowledgable theorists and practitioners in the emerging field of transmedia.

Shareable’s The New Sharing Economy panel at the South by Southwest Interactive festival investigated the social and economic impact of sharing, and the opportunities it provides. Shareable publisher Neal Gorenflo moderated a panel featuring Dori Graff of Itizen, a platform that provides a way for people to attach digital content to physical objects, Punsri Abeywickrema of peer-to-peer object sharing platform Rentalic, Kim Gaskins of Latitude Research, and John Zimmer of carpool and rideshare community Zimride. Click the above link for a rough liveblog from the discussion:

Lawrence Lessig wrote about Code being above the Law in the context of PDF readers that just wouldn’t allow you to print the pages, even though the PDFs contained texts that were in the public domain and thus should be printable. This post from Shareable takes the idea of collaborative consumption to the stage of the e-books and gives examples of services that allow for lending and sharing of e-books.

On April 29th 2011, the Center for Network Culture at the IT University of Copenhagen will be hosting a kick-starter research symposium focusing on the mobile and local aspects of today’s networked cultures. The symposium will address topics, such as:

• Mobile communication and location awareness in everyday life practices;
• New urban spatialities developed with mobile gaming and locative social media;
• Privacy and surveillance issues as they relate to location-based social networks;
• Identity and spatial construction through locative media art / performance design;
• Civic engagement and political participation through mobile social media, new mapping practices and location-aware technologies;
• Learning and education potentials of mobile and location-based media;

At SXSW 2011, I was at a so called “core conversation” with Austin scholar Clay Spinuzzi. He has done work on how and why loosely knit organizations work. This is a summary of the session he had at SXSW and on that site you find more texts of his to read.

Listen to conversations with artists, writers and other intellectuals about the politics of culture. Thanks to @pernillaseverso for sharing the link!

Free download of cultural studies scholar Gary Hall’s book on open-access publishing.