Click on image to go to video. Transcription of talk here. Related: James Bridle’s The New Aesthetic and Bruce Sterling’s An Essay on the New Aesthetic. Continue reading

Berkman Luncheon Series: Dalida Maria Benfield: Unexpected Development: Decolonial Media Aesthetics and Women’s ICT4D Video :: April 17, 2012; 12:30 pm :: Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor, Cambridge, Massachusetts + webcast :: RSVP required for those attending in person via this form.

ICT4D (Information Communication Technology for Development) powerfully frames women’s grassroots video production in the Global South, much of which is distributed widely through YouTube. Often, these videos reproduce racialized and gendered discourses — legacies of colonialism — in their narratives of economic, social, and technological progress. Continue reading

Jer Thorp’s work focuses on adding meaning and narrative to huge amounts of data as a way to help people take control of the information that surrounds them. Continue reading

Discourse and Discord: Architecture of Agonism from the Kitchen Table to the City Street — A Public Symposium co-presented by Northern Lights.mn and the Walker Art Center :: April 12-14, 2012 :: Walker Art Center, 1750 Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis, MN + webcast on channel.walkerart.org. Continue reading

This Is Not A Protest Song! Art, Civic Engagement And Networking :: Lectures: March 21, 2012; 9:30 am – 2:30 pm (open to all) :: Workshops: March 21-22 :: Wissenschaft & Kunst, Bergstraße 12, Salzburg, Austria.

This symposium covers questions of art, political engagement and activism by focusing on practical working methods.

Throughout history, art has been assigned a range of roles. Aside from the beautification of life, distraction or representation, the acquisition and transfer of knowledge and experiences are still seen as highly important. Continue reading

In The Urban Crisis: To celebrate the launch of its two new graduate programs focused on urban transformation, Parsons The New School for Design has organized In the Urban Crisis, a lecture series featuring leading voices shaping the global dialogue about city development. Organized by Miguel Robles-Duran, the series highlights core themes of the MS in Design and Urban Ecologies and MA in Theories of Urban Practice, both launching fall 2012, which explore the ways cities are shaped and reshaped through planning, public policy, development, and architecture.

All In The Urban Crisis events will be held at 6 p.m. in the Kellen Auditorium, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, 66 Fifth Avenue, and is free and open to the public. Speakers include: Continue reading

David Weinberger on Too Big To Know:

We used to know how to know. Get some experts, maybe a methodology, add some criteria and credentials, publish the results, and you get knowledge we can all rely on. But as knowledge is absorbed by our new digital medium, it’s becoming clear that the fundamentals of knowledge are not properties of knowledge but of its old paper medium. Skulls don’t scale. But the Net does. Now networked knowledge is taking on the properties of its new medium: never being settled, including disagreement within itself, and becoming not a set of stopping points but a web of temptations. Networked knowledge, for all its strengths, has its own set of problems. But, in knowledge’s new nature there is perhaps a hint about why the Net has such surprising transformative power. Continue reading

The Medium is Not the Message: On the Future of New Media Studies by Florian Kramer [to Graduates of The Media Department of the Universiteit van Amsterdam, September 2011]:

Dear graduates,

Let me make a wild guess: Perhaps it has become more difficult for you to say what media are – and what media studies are – than a few years ago when you began to study them. A paradox of “media” is that, in our time, they seem to be everywhere at first glance yet nowhere when it comes to critical study. Every person on the street would agree that our everyday life is permeated by electronic media, the Internet, mobile phones, electronic gadgets. Everyone is aware of their economic impact. Even the link between these communication technologies to cultural and social movements is not esoteric anymore, in the year after WikiLeaks and two days after the Pirate Party won nine percent at the state elections in Berlin. Continue reading

Into the Diagram: Two Public Lectures by Brian Massumi and Erin Manning :: December 13, 2011: 6:00 pm :: Artspace, 43-51 Cowper Wharf Road, Woollomooloo, Sydney.

Artspace and National Institute of Experimental Arts, CoFA present two lectures by Brian Massumi and Erin Manning, leading philosophers and practitioners of movement, affect and relationality. Together their lectures Animality and Abstraction (Massumi) and The Dance of Attention (Manning) explore the virtual, abstract and powerful dimensions of diagrams. Continue reading

Giselle Beiguelman, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil from The Politics of Digital Culture on Vimeo.

Related: Interaction and Agency in Real Time Systems by Jo-Anne Green (presented at Soft Borders, Sao Paulo, 2010).