Celebrating 5 years of YouTube, the city theater of Amsterdam and Upload Cinema presented the YouTube Canon, compiled by new media professionals (including the INC). The shows on February 22 and 23, 2010 were sold out entirely. After enjoying YouTube classics for two hours, the audience itself was subject of a YouTube video. One thousand people sang the Numa Numa song. Here’s a world record to beat!

The event received a lot of media attention.
A selection:
http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/five-years-youtube-very-popular-poorly-researched
http://www.nu.nl/internet/2177373/filmclub-presenteert-canon-van-youtube.html
http://www.telegraaf.nl/digitaal/5957018/__Filmclub_presenteert_Canon_van_YouTube__.html?cid=rss
http://www.parool.nl/parool/nl/38/MEDIA/article/detail/278116/2010/02/04/Filmclub-presenteert-Canon-van-YouTube.dhtml

Upload Cinema is an Amsterdam based film club that brings the best of the web to the big screen. Every first Monday of the month we present a fresh program of inspiring and entertaining Internet shorts. Each month theres a new theme. The audience can submit films via our website; an editorial team selects the best and compiles a ninety minutes program, which is screened at film theatres and special venues.
http://www.uploadcinema.net/

Critical Point of View
Second international conference of the CPOV Wikipedia Research Initiative

Practical Info
Date: 26-27 March 2010
Location: OBA (Public Library Amsterdam, next to Amsterdam central station), Oosterdokskade 143, Amsterdam
Organized by: Institute of Network Cultures Amsterdam, and Centre for Internet and Society Bangalore, India.
Website: www.networkcultures.org/cpov
Conference program: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/program/amsterdam-program/
Discussion List: http://p10.alfaservers.com/mailman/listinfo/cpov_listcultures.org

About CPOV
Wikipedia is at the brink of becoming the de facto global reference of dynamic knowledge. The heated debates over its accuracy, anonymity, trust, vandalism and expertise only seem to fuel further growth of Wikipedia and its user base. Apart from leaving its modern counterparts Britannica and Encarta in the dust, such scale and breadth places Wikipedia on par with such historical milestones as Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, the Ming Dynasty’s Wen-hsien ta-ch’ eng, and the key work of French Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie. The multilingual Wikipedia as digital collaborative and fluid knowledge production platform might be said to be the most visible and successful example of the migration of FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) principles into mainstream culture. However, such celebration should contain critical insights, informed by the changing realities of the Internet at large and the Wikipedia project in particular.

The CPOV Research Initiative was founded from the urge to stimulate critical Wikipedia research: quantitative and qualitative research that could benefit both the wide user-base and the active Wikipedia community itself. On top of this, Wikipedia offers critical insights into the contemporary status of knowledge, its organizing principles, function, and impact; its production styles, mechanisms for conflict resolution and power (re-)constitution. The overarching research agenda is at once a philosophical, epistemological and theoretical investigation of knowledge artifacts, cultural production and social relations, and an empirical investigation of the specific phenomenon of the Wikipedia.

Conference Themes: Wiki Theory, Encyclopedia Histories, Wiki Art, Wikipedia Analytics, Designing Debate and Global Issues and Outlooks.

Confirmed speakers: Florian Cramer (DE/NL), Andrew Famiglietti (UK), Stuart Geiger (USA), Hendrik-Jan Grievink (NL), Charles van den Heuvel (NL), Jeanette Hofmann (DE), Athina Karatzogianni (UK), Scott Kildall (USA), Patrick Lichty (USA), Hans Varghese Mathews (IN), Teemu Mikkonen (FI), Mayo Fuster Morell (IT), Mathieu O’Neil (AU), Felipe Ortega (ES), Dan O’Sullivan (UK), Joseph Reagle (USA), Ramón Reichert (AU), Richard Rogers (USA/NL), Alan Shapiro (USA/DE), Maja van der Velden (NL/NO), Gérard Wormser (FR).

Editorial team: Sabine Niederer and Geert Lovink (Amsterdam), Nishant Shah and Sunil Abraham (Bangalore), Johanna Niesyto (Siegen), Nathaniel Tkacz (Melbourne). Project manager CPOV Amsterdam: Margreet Riphagen. Research intern: Juliana Brunello. Production intern: Serena Westra.

The CPOV conference in Amsterdam will be the second conference of the CPOV Wikipedia Research Initiative. The launch of the initiative took place in Bangalore India, with the conference WikiWars in January 2010. After the first two events, the CPOV organization will work on producing a reader, to be launched early 2011. For more information or submitting a reader contribution: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/reader/.

Buy your ticket online at: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/practical-info/tickets/ (with iDeal), or register by sending an email to: info (at) networkcultures.org. One day ticket: €25, students and OBA members: €12,50. Full conference pass (2 days): €40, students and OBA members: €25.

More info: www.networkcultures.org/cpov. Contact: info (at) networkcultures.org, phone: +3120 5951866

On 12-13 January 2010, Critical Point of View: WikiWars will take place in Bangalore, India. WikiWars is a conference on critical Wikipedia research, organized by CIS India, in a collaboration with the INC. Registration is now open here.

Critical Point of View (CPOV): WikiWars Conference Bangalore, India
Date: 12-13 January 2010
Location: The Bangalore International Centre, The Energy and Resources Institute, 4th Main, Domlur II Stage, Bangalore – 560 071 Karnataka.
Speakers: Geert Lovink, Rut Jesus, Anne Goldenberg, Shunling Chen, Stuart Geiger, Beatriz Martins, Dipti Kulkarni, Mark Graham, Phillip Schmidt, Alok Nandi, Dror Kamir, Asha Achuthan, Linda Gross, Heather Ford, Elad Wieder, Nathaniel Tkacz, Sunil Abraham, Usha Raman, Roy Krovel, Ivan Martinez, Nupoor Rawal, Srikiet Tadepalli, Tejaswini Niranjana, Nishant Shah, William Buetler, Eric Ilya Lee, Anas Tawileh, Yi-Ping Tsou, Amie Parry, Johanna Niesyto, Eric Zimmerman, Stian Haklev, Anja Kovacs, Isaac Mao, Scott Kildall, Nathaniel Stern, Rut Jesus, Anne Goldenberg, Shai Herdia.
View the WikiWars timetable here.
Registration: http://www.cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wikwarsreg
More information: http://www.cis-india.org/events/wikiwars

For those of you who can’t make it to Bangalore, it will be filmed and videos will be available on the CPOV weblog by the beginning of February. http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/

On March 26-27, the Institute of Network Cultures will organize the second CPOV conference, in the public library.
Event: Critical Point of View Conference Amsterdam
Date: 26-27 March 2010
Location: Public Library Amsterdam (OBA), Oosterdokskade 143, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Confirmed speakers include: Ramon Reichert, Jeanette Hofman, Mathieu O’Neil, Joseph Reagle, Charles van den Heuvel, Dan O’Sullivan, Alan Shaprio, Scott Kildall, Patrick Lichty, Richard Rogers, Andrew Famigletti, Teemu Mikkonen, Mayo Fuster, Athina Karatzogianni.
More information and CPOV news: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/

Paul Klotz is an applied art engineer and light designer who focuses on interactive light installations for public spaces. By means of light and sound installations which react to and integrate the movements of the passersby or of the people which interact with them, he attempts influence the movements and behavior of people in public spaces.

Although some of his projects have a more obviously political dimension, such as the thermometer project, which aims to create awareness of environmental pollution, the primary function of his creative lighting installations is aesthetic and stems from his passion and fascination with light as medium. The content of his light installations is generated as a response to the data gathered by sensors at the location of the installation. In the thermometer installation for example, the light bar of the thermometer fluctuates according to the people or vehicles that are passing by, indicating the level of danger for the environment.

It would have been interesting to further find out from the artist: Why light? Besides the artist’s passion for it, how does light as medium in particular influence interaction with the installation and between individuals? How does the creative use of light in public space shape that space?

More information about Paul Klotz’s projects can be found on the artist’s website.

For more urban screens reports please go to: www.networkcultures.org/urbanscreens.

Mettina Veenstra is the principal researcher and coordinator of the theme public spaces at Novay Research. Novay is a research institute for ICT driven innovation. Her presentation today at the Urban Screens conference focused on what public displays can do for public space in terms of stimulating encounters and interactions between people in public spaces. They aim to explore the role as public displays as external stimulus to create contact between people, a process called triangulation, with art being an important form of it. The speaker identified eight applications of public displays: information, entertainment, art and culture, advertising, communication, better services, e-participation (the stimulation of discussion on environment and other local issues) and influencing (colors or imagines that can improve the mood of people).

But why is it important to foster social interactions? According to Mettina Veenstra social interactions lead to social capital which is important for our well being and our economy. Some important issue which the research institute takes into account when creating installations for public space are: create local content, and allow people to interact with the screens by means of games for example. A list of their projects can be found on their website.

Another issue that is being researched by Novay is the integration of sensors and facial recognition technology in order to create context aware applications which can offer personalized information. The presentation was rather uncritical of the role of surveillance technology in public space.

On the fourth of December, Trouw Amsterdam hosts the Urban Screens 09 seminar, about the City as Interface, or: from urban screens to media architecture in the city. At 1 pm, the Urban Screens Reader will arrive at the venue, which will be launched at 3.45 pm.

Follow us on Twitter: #urbanscreens, and Flickr (tag: urbanscreens). A report will be available on this blog soon.
See you at Trouw!

More information is online at www.networkcultures.org/urbanscreens/09/