I’m very excited to be one of the tutors for Medialab Prado’s Open Up Workshop the February in Madrid. The plan for the workshop is to develop projects for the digital façade of Medialab-Prado’s building. Jordi Claramont, Casey Reas, and Víctor Viña are also participating as tutors.
The program itself is really fascinating, bringing together ideas about art, publics, politics, and platforms. I’m looking forward to analyzing the process in terms of platform studies but from the perspective of active creation of an platform rather than through the analysis of a pre-existing system.
And really, who doesn’t like the prospect of creating something for a huge LED façade?
Very excited about the inaugural meeting of a reading group I proposed at The Public School on Theory and Practice. We’ll periodically meet and interrogate this oft-encountered dichotomy in a variety of domains and contexts: politics, philosophy, art, ethics. The idea is that by looking at the issue from a number of angles, domains, and styles of thought, we will generate new connections and new articulations, and hopefully erode the boundaries between the two.
I’ll be leading the first session on January 24 with Sarah Kessler trying to lay a foundation and find some orientation for the class for other folks to pick up going forward.
More info and sign-up here.
Digital Arts and Culture
Just got back from presenting my paper The Other Software at DAC09 as part of the Software / Platform Studies Track. This was my first presentation of a peer-reviewed paper at an academic conference and it was somewhat of a trial by fire, but I think it went well and at least there were some positive tweets in response. The paper is a criticism of the materialist approach taken by Friedrich Kittler in his famous essay There is No Software. I believe all the papers from the conference (and there are many wonderful ones) are going to be posted at escholarship.org and I’ll post a link once they’re up.
This weekend the DMA is host to the Mobile Media 09 symposium and workshops. The Symposium was organized by Casey Reas and the workshops were organized by Casey, Myself, and the good folks at The Public School. We decided to try something a bit non-standard and used The Public School to generate ideas for workshops and get people interested. It was difficult for sure, but saturday will be a great day with workshops on iPhone SDK development, Python + Arduino + Nokia N810, and Writing the Mobile Web applications.
Giving a talk at the Boards Summit, 2009 titled A Lone Gunman Approach to Mobile Applications. The talk argues discusses techniques and strategies for developing applications for mobile platforms using web technologies.