creativity/machine

I made this today with my built-in iSight, Gawker and iMovie.

Weird to see how you spend your day! Plus, I need to find time to get my hair cut.

Kodak-au-go-go!

This steampunk keyboard does all kinds of unspeakably pleasurable things to me. Steampunk, by the way, is defined by the maker as the practice “wherein the craftsman demonstrates the construction of artifacts from an age of steam and brass”, and also refers to a genre of speculative fiction:

The term denotes works set in an era when steam power was still widely used—usually the 19th century, and often set in Victorian England—but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells, or real technological developments like the computer occurring at an earlier date.

via boing boing and MAKE.

I’ve workshopped the affective and/or visceral dimensions of our engagement with ‘obsolete’ technologies before, thinking about the example of majestic theatre organs, in a post called love and the mechanical sublime, andanother one about typewriters. There’s much more thinking to be done though, and there’s definitely a kind of steampunk vibe behind the widespread recent scholarly enthusiasm for the more curious objects from the history of new media, especially in early modernity and the Victorian era, as well as popular histories like Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet. Which reminds me, anne mentioned this new book to me the other day, must check it out too:

Residual Media, Ed. Charles R. Ackland, U of Minnesota Press.

In a society that breathlessly awaits “the new” in every medium, what happens to last year’s new? Ample critical energy has gone into the study of new media, genres, and communities. But what becomes of discarded media? In what manner do the products of technological change reappear as environmental problems, as “the new” in another part of the world, as collectibles, as memories, and as art?

Residual Media grapples with these questions and more in a wide-ranging and eclectic collection of essays. Beginning with how cultural change bumps along unevenly, dragging the familiar into novel contexts, the contributors examine how leftover artifacts can be rediscovered occupying space in storage sheds, traveling the globe, converting to alternative uses, and accumulating in landfills. By exploring reconfigured, renewed, recycled, neglected, abandoned, and trashed media, the essays here combine theoretical challenges to media history with ideas, technology, and uses that have been left behind. From player pianos to vinyl records, and from the typewriter to the telephone, Residual Media is an innovative approach to the aging of culture and reveals that, ultimately, new cultural phenomena rely on encounters with the old.

Or am I just fetishising the means? And if so, and more importantly, how can something that feels so good really be wrong?

via the email:

The Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) offers a fellowship awarded by SEPHIS to a student from any country in the South to spend one academic year in Bangalore, India, beginning July 2007.

The main purpose of the fellowship programme is to help develop alternative frameworks for research and teaching as well as new theoretical paradigms that take into account the specific experiences of non-Western societies.

The student can either register with CSCS for the Ph.D. in Cultural Studies (validated by the Manipal University, Kuvempu University and Bangalore University) or register in his/her own country and do the CSCS coursework for two semesters.

Details and application instructions at the website.

This Wiki is an invitation to collaborate on building a learning and research environment based on Yochai Benkler’s book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, available under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Sharealike license.

A good idea, and one that tests and amplifies the basic propositions of Benkler’s arguments. But I hope the space will also be used to generate a sustained critical dialogue around the issues raised in the book, as well as to “build a learning and research environment” based on it…

On the plan for ‘growing’ the Wiki

The basic idea is to make this Wiki a place for at least five things:

1. Collaborate on writing a summary of the ideas and claims of the book (see Table of Contents)
2. Collaborate on writing commentaries and elaborating and refining the presentation
3. Provide an easy platform through which to access underlying research materials:
   *those used in the book’s notes
   *and resources that are useful for further research, refinement, and updating
4. Describe, link to, and analyze examples of the phenomena the book describes
   *The purpose is not to “make the case” for the book or find “gotcha” counter examples. What we are trying to do is provide a real research tool, annotated bibliography, and platform for collaborative learning. Examples and counter-examples should be selected and described with that purpose in mind.
5. Demonstrate and discover what is valuable in a learning platform
   *Through separate pages devoted to ideas and experiments of what can be done with an online book to make it a learning platform, we hope to expand the range of uses to which this Wiki can be available.
   *Through creative, systematic and interactive uses of this wiki, we hope to enhance our individual and collective skills & experience in a wiki world

There is a link from the wiki to the Crooked Timber seminar on the book, which was an early site of critical dialogue, including responses from Benkler to the contributions of participants.

Time for a spring clean, even though it’s nearly the end of summer. This is a theme called freshy. I was a sucker for the shininess! I’ve had a bit of a play with the colours, but it needs some more customising, when I have more time.

[update] Sorry Christian! Let’s remember the maxim about emulation and flattery…

…to the phd.

I submitted my thesis for examination today. But not before:

1. getting a flat tire on the way to work yesterday
2. my ibook’s hard disk dying, also yesterday, subsequent to which…
3. While waiting for my new macbook pro to be formatted (WOO!), I completed the edits on a windows machine, which then…
4. crashed, meaning that
5. for some reason, the final version of my thesis doesn’t open on a mac
6. So I had to borrow a windows machine to do final, final edits and printing

Throughout all of that I was ridiculously serene and faintly amused, which is not like me. I don’t know what’s happened to me really, especially considering I’ve just lost all my emails and word docs since last October, which is when I did my last proper backup (except for my thesis drafts, which I was paranoid about, thank god). I feel more than a little bit silly about being so lax about backing up data. But as for the phd thing, maybe all the external fuck-ups helped me to be less paranoid about my fear of complete failure. Anyway, it’s printed, bound, and officially under examination, 3 years to the day after I started. Which is not a product of my virtuosity so much as it is a product of my clenched-jaw pragmatism, because…

As of today, I’m a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation at QUT. More on that later, for now, just a weird surreal feeling. I can’t describe how light and strangely undirected I feel.

But I do have plans for the future, big ones. More after I stop floating.

PS if anyone has any ideas about how I might rescue the word document so that I can actually do the inevitable corrections on my Mac, please, please, let me know.