February 14th:

Paolo Ruffino

‘How to open an engine: narratives of production and consumption in video game culture’

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The concept of the prosumer has recently received attention from video game criticism, game studies and industry experts, strongly interested in the possibilities and implications of turning consumers into producers. The release of open source engines of the most popular video games, the diffusion of games based on user-generated content (such as Second Life and Minecraft), ‘independent’ games, artistic experimentations and even the hacking of video game hardware have often been presented by critics and journalists as a revolutionary approach to the consumption of digital entertainment. Yet I will suggest this is not an entirely new phenomenon. These narratives of production and consumption are in fact a redefinition of the practices that were already part of the earlier video game industry and gamers community. In my research project I have been analysing the discourses and practices of video game culture that outline narratives of prosumption. I have been looking at some of the ways in which these have been presented in order to see what kinds of discourses are established in the context of video game culture. Through both historical and contemporary examples I will outline in this presentation the role played by narratives of production and consumption in framing the discursive formations surrounding the video game prosumer. I will discuss some of the recurring metaphors, such as the ‘open engine’, for their implications and derivation from discourses about software engineering, Web2.0, creative industries and ‘independent’ media.

Bio

Paolo Ruffino is a Visiting Tutor and Mphil/PhD student at the Media and Communications department at Goldsmiths, University of London and Lecturer in Game Cultures at London South Bank University. His research project is based on a cultural analysis of video game consumers and, particularly, of the emergence of the prosumer in the video game industry. It involves a study of the concepts of consumer and producer, the history of the medium of the video game and phenomena such as ‘modding’, independent gaming, open engines and game art. He has been studying media theory and semiotics in Rome, Copenhagen and Bologna. His interests include video game theory and culture, digital media and ‘new media’ art.

Tessa J. Houghton

‘#blackout: the viral counterpublicity of online protest’

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On 18/01/12, numerous websites, including Wikipedia and Google, ‘blacked out’ in protest against the ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’ (SOPA) currently being heavily lobbied for within the US political context. This massive online protest will have been many netizens’ first encounter with the #blackout form; however,  it is borrowed from previous ‘digital rights’ campaigns in other locations. In 2009, ‘the lights went out’ all over the New Zealand internet as NZ and international netizens participated in the ‘NZ internet blackout’, a ‘performative hacktivist’ campaign (Samuel 2004) that catalysed viral online protest against the threatened domestic implementation of ‘3-strikes’ or graduated response-style anti-filesharing legislation. Despite the eventual passing of the legislation (albeit in much-modified form), the blackout garnered extensive global participation, illustrating the latent counterhegemonic power inherent in hacktivist campaigns.

This presentation interprets the blackout through a critical discourse analysis and a public sphere theoretical framework built upon the radical or agonistic tradition. It shows that socially-mediated counterpublicity can generate successful counterhegemonic projects and even bring about legislative change, and in doing so, makes the argument that our understanding of what the modern public sphere is should allow for more unruly forms of democratically legitimate communication.

Bio

Dr Houghton is Assistant Professor in Media and Communication in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. Her co-edited book Nexus: New Intersections in Internet Research (Peter Lang, 2011) brings together collaborative research from the alumni of the 2009 Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme, and she is currently co-editing a volume on flows of online control and resistance. Her research interests include public sphere theory, online activism, digital politics and rights, and the digital divides.

December 6th:

Isis Hjorth (Oxford Internet Institute)

‘Peer-production of culture: Independent film making in the Wreckamovie community’

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Ruth Catlow is an artist, co-founder and co-director with Marc Garrett of the Internet arts collective and community Furtherfield. Based in North London Furtherfield exists to co-create extraordinary art that connects with contemporary audiences to promote emancipatory alternatives to existing artistic traditions; providing engaging, inclusive and provocative digital and physical spaces for creating, appreciating and participating in practices in art, technology and social change.

Catlow, works with the tools, meanings, metaphors and processes of networked media and commons-based peer-production to engender shared visions and infrastructures for other possible worlds. Her socially engaged work has been exhibited worldwide and is featured in archives as well as in a number of books and academic publications. Since 1998 she has collaborated with others to create artworks and experiences that intervene in contexts not normally associated with art. Projects include Rethinking Wargames (Lo-fi Netart commission 2003), Node.London (2006) VisitorsStudio (Grand NetArt Prize 2009) DIWO (Do It With Others) E-mail Art (2007-10) as well as WeWontFlyForArt (2010) and Zero Dollar Laptop (2010-ongoing) -both as part of Furtherfield’s Media Art Ecologies programme. She was co-editor of ‘Artists Re:Thinking Games’(2010) and of ‘Collaboration and freedom – the world of free and open source art’ (2011). She is adviser to Tiltfactor and Head of School at Writtle School of Design.

Penny Whitehead and Daniel Simpkins (Independent artists)

Penny Whitehead and Daniel Simpkins are two artists/organisers working collaboratively since 2006 across a number of experimental disciplines, communicative channels and media. They are currently based at Static Gallery where over the last year they have been developing an ongoing series of projects around free and self-initiated education. They approach their art practice as a means of political agency through which to interrogate and re-imagine the systems, spaces, institutions and situations of contemporary urban life.

James Wallbank (Access Space Sheffield)

For more than a decade James has developed and led action research exploring the impacts of creative digital engagement on personal, community and economic development. He works to shape ethical relationships with technology which are environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable. Currently he is CEO of Access Space Network, an organisation which provides the UK’s longest running free, open media lab. He works locally and internationally to seed similar creative digital communities. James has worked on projects with Oxford E-Research Centre, Sheffield Hallam University’s Culture, Communications and Computing Research Institute (C3RI), Sheffield University’s Interdisciplinary Research in Socio-Digital Worlds (IRiS) Centre and “Imagination” at Lancaster University. He has authored several influential documents, including “Lowtech Manifesto” (1999), “Grow Your Own Media Lab” (2008) and “The Zero Dollar Laptop” (2010) which have spawned transnational networks of practice. James works with diverse groups, including young people, adults in danger of social and economic exclusion, people with disabilities, artists, designers, asylum seekers, professionals and technical experts. He is a frequent presenter at research conferences, universities and digital media festivals and delivers technical training for enterprises and community organisations. He has an MA in Art & Design and is a self-taught LPIC1 Engineer.

Richard Stacey

‘The end of anti-social media: what happens when media goes social’

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Bio

For the last 25 years I have worked, agency side, within the public relations and communications business in London, Sydney, Brussels and Prague and covered almost all aspects of the business from corporate communications, crisis and issues management through to consumer brands. Some of the names I have worked for include: IBM, P&G, Diageo, The European Space Agency, The European Commission and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. Within the agency world I am usually described as a planner – because I do the strategic, big picture, counsel stuff. I am only partially comfortable with this label, because I also “do ideas and creative”. Perhaps the best way of getting a handle on my experience is to describe me as 60 per cent planner, 30 per cent creative – and 10 per cent manager, since I have also run agencies. For the last six years I have focused on the emerging world of social media – because the more I have understood about what is going on here, the more I have realised that it is the future of media and communications.  My work here is based around helping organisations move into this space and stopping them making mistakes and wasting money – something that is happening all too frequently now that everyone is jumping onto the social media band-wagon. I now work for myself, because I don’t want to be chained to a desk in London and want to be responsible for myself, rather than other people. He has recently become a Huffington Post, blogger  and was part of the expert panel at the Europcom - European Conference on Public Communication Conference  in Brussels.

Gabriela Mendez Cota (Goldsmiths, University of London)

‘Mediating Agriculture in the Age of “Open-Source”: Potential Contributions from Cultural Studies’

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How can contemporary agricultural issues inform debates around ‘openness’ in media and cultural studies? How can these debates in turn productively ‘mediate’ agricultural struggles in the context of technoscientific knowledge production? As a way of approaching these questions, I will re-trace my own steps from new media studies to an examination of the cultural politics of an agricultural struggle, and back to new media studies via ‘open source agriculture’ as a relevant instance of the promises and challenges of ‘openness’ in a digitized world. First, I will present a sketch of my current research on Mexican ‘maize nationalism’ as it is being deployed against genetically engineered maize. Second, I will explain how my work for Living Books About Life has allowed me to unlock the cage of nationalist discourse in order to imagine different, more complex ways of resisting the enclosure of life by transnational agribusiness. Finally, I will raise the more specific question I’m concerned with at the moment: if ‘open source agriculture’ is a potential, at least partial solution to the capitalist enclosure of life, how can media and cultural studies engage with it in a critical, productive way?

Bio

Gabriela Méndez Cota is a doctoral student in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. Drawing on her humanities training, she has worked on issues related to technology, such as technological blind spots in Western philosophy and the status of technology in contemporary critiques of metaphysics. More recently she has been investigating the ethical and political aspects of particular understandings of technology. Her PhD thesis develops a critical interdisciplinary approach, rooted in philosophy and media and cultural studies, to the complex relations between agricultural biotechnology and the cultural politics of Mexican nationalism.

William Merrin (University of Wales, Swansea)

Open Sourcing Knowledge: Towards a University 2.0

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The links between the university system and broadcasting have rarely been analysed. Universities began as media studies – as theological training schools for the medieval church: that dominant broadcasting system which, from its centralized hub, crafted and produced a single doctrine, carried through its technologies – the monasteries, manuscripts and pulpits – for mass consumption by a captive population. Though universities grew in secularity and independence over the following centuries they followed the same model of informational production and distribution; a model most fully realized with the growth of mass education from the late 19th century. From then until the new millennium a specialist institution and centralized, bureaucratic organisation would control the production and distribution of knowledge, with its experts mass-distributing its message to consumers through its lectures and texts: mass society, mass education and mass media were intimately related. This paper, therefore, asks what happens when that age is over. What happens in a post-broadcast era defined by new alignments of productive, distributive and consumer power? What happens to disciplines in an age when the ability to discover, create, share, debate and legitimate information and ideas has changed so fundamentally? How can academic pedagogical and publishing practice change in the digital era? Can it cope with the open-sourcing of knowledge and is a University 2.0 even possible?

Bio

William Merrin is a Senior Lecturer in media at Swansea University. He is the author of Baudrillard and the Media (Polity, 2005) and co-editor of Jean Baudrillard: Fatal Theories (Routledge, 2008). In November 2006 he coined the phrase ‘media studies 2.0′ to argue for a transformation of the discipline to meet the needs of a different, digital-era. He is currently writing ‘Media 2.0′ and (with Andrew Hoskins) ‘Media Ecology/Archaeology’ for Routledge to explore these issues.

PowerPoint

File

Clare Birchall (University of Kent)

‘”If a right to the secret is not maintained, we are in a totalitarian space”: Why WikiLeaks might not be as radical as it thinks’

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BIO

Clare Birchall is Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Kent. She is the author of Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip (Berg, 2006), co-editor (with Gary Hall) of New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (EUP, 2006), and editor of a special issue of Cultural Studies (21 (1) 2007). She is the reviews editor for Culture Machine and is involved with various online projects including Liquid Theory TV, Liquid Books, and the Open Humanities Press.

Daniel Rourke (Goldsmiths, University of London)

‘Errors in Things and the “Friendly Medium”’

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BIO

Daniel Rourke is a writer and researcher based in London. His work explores the forgotten territories of text and writing, through experiments with alternate art history, post-humanist philosophy, digital noise and fictional science. Daniel is currently undertaking a Practice-Based PhD in Art and Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Find him on the web at MachineMachine.Net

UPDATE

Daniel has made some ‘excess’ material related to his talk available. Browse the Open-Media /stream for related material.

More information about this material and the slides accompanying his talk are available here.

The slides will also be made available together with the podcast of Daniel’s talk here.

María Mencía (Kingston University)

‘Open Meaning in Digital Writing’

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Literature in the same way as art, has found a place in the electronic medium, artists and writers create works using code as the invisible language, and natural languages as the surface of the work (the visual textualities) to question issues in connection to literary traditions, aesthetics and new media theories. Programming, generative text, narrativity, interactivity, networking, multi-linear structures, multimodal textualities, navigational decisions, the performance/involvement of the reader and the experience of the work are all characteristics of digital writing. In the presentation I will introduce digital poetic projects by different practitioners as well as my own which address some of the above notions through their creative research practice.

One of the works that will be discussed is Rui Torres Poemas no meio do caminho.

It can also be read using a vertical codex-styled navigation here.

The actual piece in English can be found here.

The blog where versions of the poems are posted by readers when they click on the symbol “@”, can be found here.

BIO

María Mencía is an artist and Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at Kingston University. She holds a PhD in Digital Poetics and Digital Art by the University of the Arts, London. She studied English Philology at the Complutense University in Madrid, Fine Art and History and Theory of Art at the University of the Arts London. Mencía’s practice-led research questions the mark as a meaningful and visual form, phonemes as ‘semantic’ units, the creation of new meanings in mediated textualities of image-sound-text. It draws from different cultural, artistic and literary traditions such as: linguistics, fine art, visual, concrete and sound poetry, with digital poetics, electronic writing, and new media art theories and practices.

Her practice in experimental, textual, generative and sound poetics is in collections such as the First volume of the Electronic Literature Collection, K. Hayles, N. Montfort, S. Rettberg, S. Strickland eds. The Electronic Literature Organization, UCLA Department of English, Los Angeles, as well as, in various e-lit and e-poetry databases at research centres, and has been exhibited at art galleries, international conferences and festivals such as ISEA, FILE, BEAP, onedotzero, Caixaforum, ICA and TATE Modern.