about this publication: Global gaming networks are heterogenous collectives of localized practices, not unified commercial products. Shifting the analysis of digital games to local specificities that build and perform the global and general, Gaming Rhythms employs ethnographic work conducted in Venezuela and Australia to account for the material experiences of actual game players. This book explores the materiality of digital play across diverse locations and argues that the dynamic relation between the everyday life of the player and the experience of digital game play can only be understood by examining play-practices in their specific situations. Thomas Apperley is a Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of New England.

colophon: Author: Tom Apperley, Design: Katja van Stiphout. Printer: ‘Print on Demand’. Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2009. ISBN: 978-90-816021-1-2.

This publication is available through various print on demand services.

Download the free pdf.

Number five within the series will be launched soonish.

So, that’s it, we did it…and it was huge, bright, exciting, different, new, busy, crowded, fun, exhausting, magnificent, difficult, great, geweldig, tietenaffengeil and so many other things that there are not enough words to describe it, so from now own let me just say, as a sway to sum it up, AWESOME.

pictures by Bart Dykstra www.bartdykstra.com

It took 6 months of intense work, problems, coffees, meetings, late days at work, solutions, e-mails, tweaks, construction, design, presentations to get to this point, and it was all on the line, but with the last weeks of great focus and the last few days in Dortmund with everybody showing great commitment we crossed the goal line…and boy, how we did it!

We got a little rain at the end, but that didn’t make the crowd (we got the terrace pretty crowded, people was dancing, seeing, listening to the music, having a drink, or all together) enjoy it any less. We’re very happy with how the system worked and how the projection looked, and we’re not the only ones, as you could only hear good words for our project walking around…some even overheard how it should be brought to Amsterdam…let’s hope that happens, you know we’re willing to redesign and adapt our experience to make it happen in Amsterdam!

pictures by Bart Dykstra www.bartdykstra.com

It’s important for us to remark that, after this great success, we believe it’d make no sense to let the project die, and we’re willing to adapt it and give it a whole new life in new events and locations. We are waiting for your ideas and suggestions, and looking forward to see what you want to do with it!

To show you the full potential of the project, we’ll soon release a mindblowing registration shot and edited by Hugo van der Meer, from Keyframe productions, a series of photographies from Bart Dykstra and a documentary that Marteen van der Burg shot for iTunes University about the project and the learning process of the student team.

The music, by Berlin based artist Kid Simius (watch this kid, in a few years it won’t be weird to anybody to see his name with Daft Punk or Kraftwerk!) also harvested lots of comments of surprise and admiration, wondering how can he not be a star yet, and when will he perform at some of the top locations in Amsterdam…we also hope to see that happening soon!

The dancers from Mine-Sports put on a great performance, Jan introduced the event with a charming multilingual speech, Beam Systems made all the technique perfect and with they’re “invisible” work they spared us the need to worry about the technics.

We’re grateful, so we also have to thank everybody in the E-culture Fair/Dortmunder U organization that made things easy for us, the initiators of the project and sponsors: Virtueel Platform and Institute of Network Cultures, and to everybody else that helped during the development of the project (Kars Alfrink from Hubbub, people from TrouwAmsterdam, Hugo van der Meer, Bart Dykstra, Marteen van der Burg…)

I can’t finish this post without thanking personally the rest of the team, (leaded by Jan, who solved a million problems for us) for their effort, their work, their commitment, their jokes, the lunchs and dinners, the beers and, in one word, the time together. It was great, it was fun, and WE ROCKED!

Linz, 2 – 11 September

Geert will give a presentation about ‘The Meaning of Open is Obfuscated’ at Ars Electronica. This, on the 4th of September within the session Open Source Life III – Repair Society. Andreas Hirsch (AEC), interviewed Geert for the Ars Electronica Catalogue. Download the full program here.

Altijd al aan de wieg willen staan van opzienbarende kunst en op zoek naar transdisciplinariteit en de grenzen van artistieke en technologische mogelijkheden? Doe mee aan de Designers & Artists 4 Genomics Award en maak kans op een project van 25.000,- euro.

De DA4G Award heeft als doelstelling jonge opkomende kunstenaars en ontwerpers te stimuleren in de bio-kunsten. De winnaars van de Award krijgen de kans een project uit te werken in samenwerking met en gebruikmakend van Nederlands meest vooraanstaande Genomics Centres, bijvoorbeeld op het terrein van duurzaamheid, voeding, gezondheid, bioinformatica, agricultuur en veiligheid.

De 20 beste ideeën worden tijdens PICNIC10 op 24 september gepitched en worden gematched met Nederlands meest vooraanstaande Genomics Centres.
De 3 winnende projecten zullen medio 2011 tentoongesteld worden in Naturalis, Leiden.

Sluitingsdatum voor voorstellen: 8 september 2010!

Meer info, voorwaarden en aanmedingsformulier.

Volg ons op facebook.

What was the compelling reason for you to get involved in a project concerning Wikipedia?
As a designer, I dedicate myself to inventing new ways of understanding the world through images. I use existing images in almost every project: the Fake for Real memory game I showed during the conference is a good example of this. This is a game that pairs images to make a statement about simulation in ourl world. Another example would be the Next Nature book (to be published early 2011 by Actar, Barcelona). This book talks about what we call ‘culturally emerged nature’, or ‘the nature caused by people’. Through hundreds of images and observations we analyse the influence of technology and design on our daily lives. These projects can be looked up on respectively http://www.fakeforreal.com and http://www.nextnature.net

A lot of images that we use are created by ourselves (co-editor Koert van Mensvoort and me) but even more come from all kinds of sources: some traceable, others not. We strive to credit all authors and would love to pay them a good fee for using their material – if this was possible, which it isn’t. Paying for all visual content would quadruplicate the costs of such a publication, which would make it impossible to get published. As for the credit part: we will always credit artists for creative images, but for small or generic images – even commercial ones, we’re not going to do this, it’s just way too time-consuming. Also, a lot of the times it’s realy hard to trace back the origins of an image in today’s copy/paste culture.

When I heard of the Wiki Loves Art contest I was immediately sympathetic to the initiative, because I think these kinds of best-practise projects are crucial to change the way people (in this case: museums and cultural institutions) think about intellectual property. They have to realise that limiting the availability of resources limits cultural production in a very direct way. Next to that, I am interested in everything that signals new forms of cultural production and the crowdsourced archiving of images certainly does that.

Read more

Everyone Is a Designer in the Age of  Social Media presents the Choice Generation of 2010. Looking back at the first edition of  Everyone Is a Designer in 2000, when we proposed the idea of democratization of design, a decade later this programmatic statement has become reality. We are designing our social lives, make our own choices, and create it all together! This book signals a new aesthetic movement of collaborism: a combination of socially, technologically and economically driven systematically generated visuals. A hierarchy of levels and layers, pulldown menus, buttons and blogrolls that give us access and possibilities to create visuals using style sheets, templates, renderings and frameworks for the look & feel of today’s design.

Contributions by Matthew Fuller, Alexander Galloway, Peter Lunenfeld, Ellen Lupton, Lev Manovich, Koert van Mensvoort, Metahaven, Rick Poynor, Ned Rossiter, Bruce Sterling, Clay Shirky, McKenzie Wark

In 2001 BIS published the first Everyone is a Designer, Manifest for the Design Economy and reprinted it several times. Now this little bestseller of the beginning of this millennium is out of print for several years. The editors Mieke Gerritzen en Geert Lovink now revisit the subject based on the assumption that since 2001 the proposal of the democratization of the design world has become reality in 2010.

This completely new version of the book will look at the position of design itself in the ever expanding areas it finds itself in. The growth of design schools seems unstoppable. The designers born after 1980 have a total different view on visual culture, on esthetical products, visions and history than the people born before the eighties. The (communication) esthetics are in constant temporary state, design became a dynamic and unstable area.

All these developments poses new questions on the status of the designer and its trade. With visual contributions, quotes and short essays from dozens of international designers, thinkers, critics and strategists this new booklet present a new Manifest for the design economy of 2010 and beyond.

The book can be purchased at BIS Publishers for € 15,-.

Vito Campanelli – Web Aesthetics,
How Digital Media Affect Culture and Society

Design: Studio Léon & Loes, Paperback, 392 pages, 14 x 21 cm
English edition, ISBN 978-90-5662-770-6,
€ 23.50

INC in association with NAi Publishers Rotterdam.

Web Aesthetics
We live in a world of rapidly evolving digital networks, but within the domain of media theory, which studies the influence of these cultural forms, the implications of aesthetical philosophy have been sorely neglected. Vito Campanelli explores network forms through the prism of aesthetics and thus presents an open invitation to transcend the inherent limitations of the current debate about digital culture.

The Web is the medium that stands between the new media and society and, more than any other, is stimulating the worldwide dissemination of ideas and behaviour, framing aesthetic forms and moulding contemporary culture and society.

Campanelli observes a few important phenomena of today, such as social networks, peer-to-peer networks and ‘remix culture’, and reduces them to their historical premises, thus laying the foundations for an organic aesthetic theory of digital media.

Vito Campanelli is a media theorist and lectures on the theory and technology of mass communication at the University of Naples – L’Orientale. His essays about media art are regularly published in international periodicals such as Neural. He works as a freelance curator and as a promoter of events in the domain of digital culture. He was also co-founder of the non-profit organization MAO – Media & Arts Office.

> Pre-Order now at NAi Booksellers

Alledaagse digitale data gaat ontoegankelijk worden. Vooral ‘born-digital’ materiaal zoals games, weblogs, internetkunst maar ook muziekfiles en digitale foto’s zullen als gevolg van software innovaties, browser updates en nieuwe systemen verloren gaan. Virtueel Platform, het sectorinstituut voor e-cultuur, presenteerde deze week de uitgave Archive 2020 met daarin de meest urgente problemen en het pleidooi voor duurzame toegankelijkheid van digitale kunst en cultuur.

Terwijl culturele instellingen al wel video’s, foto’s en documenten digitaliseren dreigt tegelijkertijd recent materiaal uit het digitale domein te verdwijnen of ontoegankelijk te worden. ‘Born-digital’ is digitaal materiaal dat geen overeenkomstige analoge tegenhanger heeft. Zonder maatregelen, zo stelt Virtueel Platform, gaan veel weblogs, online kunstwerken, websites, wiki’s en games verloren.

Voorbeelden van verloren born-digital materiaal
De eerste generaties internetgames zijn bijvoorbeeld door sneller internet niet langer bespeelbaar, muziek op DAT is nauwelijks meer te beluisteren en materiaal op verouderde systemen als Cd-i, Laserdisc en inmiddels soms ook al CD-ROM is niet meer af te spelen. Denk verder aan de scripties en andere teksten in wordperfect en op floppydisk: niet meer te gebruiken. En ook de geschiedenis van het internet vervliegt omdat oudere versies van sites niet meer te bekijken zijn, hoogstens vinden we via systemen als de waybackmachine slecht functionerende homepages terug.

Archive2020
Virtueel Platform onderzocht in 2009 en 2010 samen met een groep digitale specialisten en wetenschappers de gevolgen van digitalisering van cultureel erfgoed op de lange termijn. De conclusies van het onderzoek Archive 2020 gaan onder andere in op methoden van documenteren, emulatie versus migratie strategieën, de ontwikkeling van nieuwe software en hardware en het belang van kennisoverdracht.

Met Archive 2020 waarschuwt Virtueel Platform voor de risico’s van het verloren gaan van digital born materiaal, geeft inzicht in de uitdagingen en biedt als oplossing aanbevelingen voor archivering van de dynamische digitale wereld. Naast het gebruik open standaarden, gaat het om kennisdelen, het tonen van best practices en vooral ook bewustwording dat er maatregelen nodig zijn om over tien jaar nog digital born materiaal te kunnen bekijken. Ironisch genoeg, in dit digitale tijdperk, behoren mondelinge kennisoverdracht en zelfs het printen van internet tot de reële mogelijkheden.

De publicatie Archive 2020 is een uitgave van Virtueel Platform en is kosteloos te bestellen via info[@]virtueelplatform[dot]nl of als PDF te downloaden op www.virtueelplatform.nl/archive2020_book.

Go here to listen to the original interview of  May 18, 2010

Paul Keller, one of the founders of Creative Commons Nederlands, recently sat down with me to talk about freeing society’s creative silos, a conversation ranging from how we might circumvent stale copyright law to the surprisingly robust underground of p2p networks innovating in the margins.

Keller hails from Kennisland, a future-oriented Dutch think tank that puts its stake in an economy driven less by the production and circulation of 3-D goods than by creative knowledge flows. An overarching goal is to bolster society’s cultural commons and improve access as far as possible to these resources. Their partners include Creative Commons, Images for the Future, Communia, and Wikimedia.

Kennisland is working with several cultural heritage institutions on copyright issues. What have you found to be so deficient about the current copyright system?

Our aim at Kennisland has been to improve access as far as possible to digital cultural resources, to make them available under free licenses or without restrictions. Now if you decide to license something, you need to know who was involved in producing something, then you must find them and negotiate with them, and that’s usually when it ends. Because with large diverse collections, it can be very difficult to find the people who own copyrights in your archive. So we’re looking to find practical solutions for existing projects, but also shaping policies and practices on the national level to overcome these hurdles. How can you align stakeholders so that material becomes available? All the talk about innovations taking place in the shadows, in an unregulated sphere that ignores copyright and the interest of authors – it’s simply not an option for organizations funded by public money and run by boards with respectable retired ladies and gentleman. You need to negotiate these problems in a way that doesn’t put too much burden on archives and respects the rights of the producers and authors involved.

For instance, copyright still is organized around national boundaries. Organizations may have permission to display something on the internet in France but not in Belgium. From the perspective of an internet user that is absurd, but if you don’t have right to do so, and you risk being held liable, you probably won’t make it available.

So how does Creative Commons then nuance the law to address the way digital technologies are changing cultural production and circulation?

Copyright law usually makes the distinction between private and public. Private is what I show in my own house, legally defined as people I have personal bonds with, in a close community. A public performance requires permission from the copyright holder, while with a private doesn’t. The internet has of course dramatically enlarged the range of our public. If I look at my flickr collection of pictures, hundreds of thousands of people have looked at them, while it it is still essentially the same collection that started its life in a shoe box on my shelf that maybe 5 people looked at back in the days. You can argue that the private has become global, and as a consequence this public-private distinction doesn’t work well for triggering copyright anymore.

In place of this public/private distinction, the difference between commercial and non-commercial uses might be a much more relevant. In a way Creative Commons introduced this idea. The non-commercial sphere needs much less regulation and restrictions, and it is probably a good thing if copyright holders focus on generating income from commercial uses of their works. These days not making a copy of something is damn difficult to do. The unique is the exception and copies are the new normal. There needs to be some kind of acknowledgement of this, or the rules that govern copying will stop functioning.

You were one of the founders of Creative Commons Nederlands seven years ago. Can you talk to me about what effects its licenses may have had on the public domain since? What are some of your successes?

I don’t see the main value of Creative Commons in licensing individual works, someone’s blog that isn’t that interesting to use in the first place. What’s more substantial is when a large platform like Flickr becomes tightly integrated with Creative Commons. Flickr is an amazing resource for freely licensed imagery that can be very useful in educational settings, and the cc licensed imagery there provides value to a large group of people. It’s becoming a real threat to professional photographers because you find so much freely licensed stock imagery there.

Another recent case was the decision of the Dutch government to release information published on government websites under CC0, a statement that the government doesn’t assert copyright at all. Here we see Creative Commons as a tool to support government policies about how we can best structure access to information in the networked environment. So we are trying to spread this idea that what’s important isn’t if it’s 3 or 17 videos become available, but that sharing information is beneficial to entire organizations, so that they start integrating these instruments into their platforms and procedures.

We see this happening more and more. One of the most signifficant projects we’ve done is with Buma/Stemera, the collective rights management organization for authors of musical works in the Netherlands, exploring if it is possible to combine collective rights management and individual rights management. When we started talking to them, they had the perception that we were working against them: you want to make stuff available for free, and we’re in the business of extracting money from people who want to use music, so you should get out of our way. Instead, we’ve come up with an understanding of how one approach can drive the other, the free availability of material can actually drive your ability to extract money.

So with the aid of Creative Commons, large amounts of digital objects are being released by massive silos, such as Flickr, Youtube, and the Dutch government, as you mentioned. How do you see this changing the role of the public archive?

We see a transformation of archives away from being the central place where we store stuff that no one uses, into resources that people actually want to use. In this process the real innovation probably isn’t happening at the central archiving nodes, but at the fringes of the network, in the distributive archive and metadata systems, where you make sure that I have access to what you archive, and you have access to what I archive. Peer-to-peer networks are a natural way of selecting what’s worthy of being preserved and what’s not. If there’s at least one person assigning enough value to one object to keep it, then it’s available to the entire community. There’s no policy that says we can only conserve more of our glorious history. Underground bittorent communities that specialize in specific genres of film, for instance, are surprisingly responsible archives, operating outside the realm of copyright permission. It’s fan driven, distributed and very responsive. One would expect those networks to do a lousy job of preserving, but in the end they can be far more complete than centralized systems that have to stick to the rules.

Copyright in this sense is like a one way mirror: one the one side you have this institutional world of archiving, and on the other side, you have these informal activities that are doing very interesting things but are invisible to the institutional players who can’t look back through the mirror. From the perspective of these informal communities, institutions are still operating in structures based on a time when the main characteristic of the archives were thick walls, controlled temperatures and enough space to have everything in one place. The current copyright model does not enable them to fundamentally transform the way they grant access, and as a result a lot of material that could be available to society is hidden away.

There’s a criticism of Creative Commons floating around that claims these licenses don’t address how artists will make money once their content is offered up for free, and that it doesn’t prevent companies from exploiting all this open content created by unpaid labor. How do you answer these complaints?

The criticism you refer to argues against this idea that free availability can be a good thing, because if something is given away free, how will the artist be paid? That’s a relevant question, but Creative Commons isn’t necessarily the organization with an answer to this. We are not making a claim that the Creative Commons licenses are the tool to use if your primary objective is to earn a living from producing artistic works. Creative Commons has always been careful to say we don’t oblige people to use our licenses. Our licenses are tools that you can use if you have come to the conclusion that you want to share something.

Right now there is a much more fundamental problem with generating income from artistic production. In a recent interview with the BBC Mick Jagger stated that he is rather skeptical of the current discussion about how musicians can earn money from selling recordings of their music. He observes that in the history of modern music, the period from 1970 to 1997 is about the only period that a substantial group of musicians managed to earn a living by selling music as a recorded good. This period probably needs to be seen as an exception, while we are currently treating it as the rule. So How do you value the production of cultural goods in society of resource abundance, and what economic mechanisms can reimburse people who do that? How do we regulate it or not? What’s the point of value creation when everyone has access to everything? Creative Commons, copyright – neither are the final answer to that question. We need to rethink this not from a rights-based perspective, but from an economical perspective. So far we haven’t found the business model that will solve these discussions.

Earning money by selling cultural goods, where I give you a cultural good and you give me money, and this ends up being a good deal for the artist, is the absolute exception. So it’s probably more productive to look at what’s wrong with copyright as an underlying system. Copyright currently justifies a simple binary transaction. I have cultural goods, you have money, and we do a proper exchange, or otherwise I’m in violation of copyright. Given that everybody can make copies of pretty much anything, this is clearly not the smartest system for organizing knowledge transfer or the distribution of cultural goods. Creative Commons is built on top of the existing copyright system to offer ways to escape these effects.

Will the Graphic Designer become a Software Developer?
Is Design the new Science?

Het Graphic Design Museum zoekt tijdens de INFODECODATA tentoonstelling met dit symposium antwoord op deze vragen.

Datavisualisatie, het vakgebied dat zich bezighoudt met het visualiseren en structureren van gegevens, heeft een prominente plaats verworven binnen de grafische vormgeving. Het legt de link tussen grafische vormgeving, informatica en wetenschap en helpt onze explosieve informatiewereld in beeld te brengen.

Hoe structureren ontwerpers complexe gegevens? Waar en hoe vindt de gebruiker de informatie?

De professionele designer zoekt naar een metapositie om zijn leidende rol in dit proces uit te oefenen. Het feit dat film, fotografie, drukwerk en productontwikkeling iets is wat nu ook door de niet-opgeleide ontwerper of kunstenaar wordt gemaakt heeft consequenties voor de professionele ontwerper.

SPREKERS
Jack van Wijk – Hoogleraar Visualisatie, TU/e (NL)
Lev Manovich – Kunstenaar en Professor in the Visual Arts Department., UCSD (US)
Yuri Engelhardt – Assistent Hoogleraar in Media Studies en Informatie Visualisatie, UvA (NL)
Raul Niño Zambrano – Lector Informatie Visualisatie en Researcher voor IDFA, HKU en UvA (NL)
Jelte van Abbema – Ontwerper (NL)
Catalogtree – Daniel Gross/Joris Maltha – Ontwerpers (NL)
Sophie Krier – Ontwerper/Onderzoeker (NL)

Voertaal: Engels.
De toegangsprijs bedraagt € 7,50 (museum ticket).
RSVP voor 5 juni 2010 via annemiek@graphicdesignmuseum.com
Voor meer informatie www.graphicdesignmuseum.com