This is the second of a two-part post. See the first post. A very nice feature of the campus (using these photos is leading me to talk much more about the campus itself than I intended, but there you go) was its landscaping. Much of the landscaping being implemented during my time at the OU … Continue Reading
Recalling the OU (Open University), through already-hazy hindsight [part 1]
Last week, I visited my former place of work, The Open University in Milton Keynes (hereinafter ‘the OU’) for a couple of meetings. And it reminded me that I had intended to write down a few reflective thoughts about this rather odd but special place, which I left at the end of December 2009. Now, … Continue Reading
The iPad in incredible, amazing, unbelieveable and gorgeous adjectives
This edited video by Neil Curtis gives a nice 180 second overview of the over-the-top adjectives used by Steve Jobs and associates at the recent launch of the new Apple iPad. No repeated scenes here, this was all really in there – and some amazing, wonderful, unbelievable adjectives were even left out. Not that this … Continue Reading
Computing arts and humanities matter
A couple of months ago I noticed this intersesting event, The Computational Turn, which will be held at Swansea University on 9 March 2010. The conference promises a slightly unconventional take on the ‘arts and humanities’, considering the ways in which digital or computation-based technologies and techniques are fundamentally transforming the means and forms through … Continue Reading
Easy how-to guide on constructing a news clip
This is really brilliant stuff. Charlie Brooker on his excellent BBC show Newswipe (which I think is easily superior to The Daily Show) encapsulates how to construct a news clip. It rests on the idea of news clips having an easily recognizable form; which reminds me of the classic debates in studies of media effects … Continue Reading
Visualizing cyberscapes
Caught wind of a really interesting new blog called Floating Sheep. As many will be aware, more and more of the data we see emerging through the Internet is geo-coded, that is, it is associated to a particular location on the earth (for example, by longitude and latitude). And, increasingly this data is user created. … Continue Reading
Visit ‘Digital Cities’! Erm… if you have a time machine
After browsing through Wired UK’s November 2009 issue on the digital city, somehow, through some chain of accidents and accidental thoughts, I had come to believe, strongly, that The Building Centre in London was currently hosting an exhibit on Digital Cities: London’s Future, and indeed, that said exhibit was just about finished. I kept reminding … Continue Reading
Remembering Roger Silverstone
Academic events come and go, and are sometimes quite unremarkable occasions; at their worst, there can be an underlying feeling of ‘going through the motions’. Attending ‘The Work of Roger Silverstone’ at the University of Sussex yesterday, I felt very far from one of those mundane academic gatherings. This was Silverstone encapsulated in a very … Continue Reading
Intermingling McLuhan, Latour, Harman and Kittler
In the lead up to starting this blog I have kept a list of possible future posts. Call it a repository of best intentions. One of those best intentions was to think through – probably in more than one post – the connections and disconnections between recent relational materialist writing like actor-network theory and writing … Continue Reading
Revisiting the work of Roger Silverstone
Although I’d always been aware of Roger Silverstone’s work in media studies, for some reason, I had managed to virtually ignore him until I came across his last book, Media and Morality. And even then – somewhat embarrassingly – my attention was piqued by the mere fact that the book’s subtitle (on the rise of … Continue Reading