I've just learned that the World Barista Championships are being held - where else - in Seattle on Saturday April 16. I must and will go. Who's going with me?
Liz: March 2005 Archives
I've never deliberately promoted spam before, but Mike just received an email promoting a perfect storm of American cultural memes: an online community linked to a reality tv show:
Tagged is an online community all about you, your friends and what you love. At Tagged.com, you can show off, sound off, discover friends and be discovered. Are you it?
You "get discovered" for the reality tv show by getting 77 "tag team" points. One point is awarded for every registered person who Friendsters - oops, "tags" you - and 11 points are awarded for every non-registered person you recruit to join the site.
Except for the reality tv show, there's nothing especially noteworthy about the site. But with the show...it plugs into the twin demons of popularity and fame. Diabolical genius.
It's an oblong of white plastic that reminds me a little irrationally of the obelisk at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, rendered small enough to dangle around the neck. It's mysterious and charged with futurity. It doesn't tell you what song is playing or what's next or much else. That's the thing. As a result, each song fades out with a frisson—what'll be next? This experience is basically what the device sells. Not "shuffle"—everyone's computer and chunky iPod Paper-weight already offer that. The point here is, only that. You left your choices at home. You're hostage to what's coming, and the risk that it might suck. And this makes the day gleam, a little. Contingency, the ancients called it.
I walk past a homeless-looking guy and we stare at each other. His body is covered with the traces of his daily life, stains on his thrashed sweatshirt, red splotches on his cheeks. This is a chance encounter, the other contingency. For a second I think I am thinking about him, how very empathetic of me, but behind that I am wondering what he thinks of me, a de-bodied body with my technology worn outside my clothes for all the honest world to feel.
{thanks to Maya}, who also said this:
I just yearned to live in a time when vaudeville happened, when Broadway and burlesque happened, to walk through New York streets of 75 years past, to use the period artifacts in their period--toothbrushes, eyeglasses, transportation, talking movies, shoes. To eat, to drive, to wear slips and read newspapers, to do all the day-to-day humdrum stuff of life, but have the activities and objects enlivened by the novelty of my own anachronism. I'd like to not know what's appropriate in language and action, while at the same time knowing what's coming next, historically.
The iPod frenzy has moved to a new level with the big fuss about podcasting - which I admit does seem convenient. My hope is that subscribing podcasts of, say, my favorite radio station will get me to use my iPod more, in much the same way I started using the cameraphone once people I liked joined Flickr.
Which would be great. If not lifechanging the way Flickr has been. Podcasting is a new spin on time shifted radio - similar to the way I once recorded my favorite radio shows onto cassette tapes and listened to them over and over again. Only automatic and managed from an RSS feed on a desktop.
The only problem is, I don't much care for automation.
Podcasting is a great new broadcasting medium. But it's still broadcasting. By any standards, it's less conversational than AM talk radio. IPods are great for listening. But they don't contain any means to respond to what you hear. So I can't get that excited about yet another medium that in which I have to listen to long speeches without any easy way to answer back.
The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised, will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.
I will be there, talking up a storm. Please come!
>New Media Education and Its Discontents
Conference- Friday, May 6th, 2005
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
>Call for Participation
(Submission Deadline March 21, 2005)
This conference is organized by the Institute for Distributed Creativity
in collaboration with The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Elebash Recital Hall
The Graduate Center
City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue, New York City
Join us for an intensive one-day conference about new media education.
Connect with other new media researchers and educators, present and discuss urgent topics in new media education, exchange syllabi or swap resources.
The conference will be podcast and live blogged. Bring your USB memory key and laptop.
Many educators point to a widespread tension between vocational training and a critical solid education. There is no stable "new media industry" for which a static skill set would prepare the graduate for his or her professional future in today's post-dotcom era. Between Futurist narratives of progress with all their techno-optimism and the technophobia often encountered in more traditional narratives-- how do we educate students to be equally familiar with technical concepts, theory, history, and art?
How can new media theory be activated as a wake-up call for students leading to radical change? Which educational structure proves more effective: cross-disciplinary, theme-based research groups or media-based departments?
Does the current new media art curriculum allow for play, failure, and
experiment? How can we introduce free software into the new media classroom when businesses still hardly make use of open source or free software? How can we break out of the self-contained university lab?
Developed out of the WebCamTalk 1.0 speaker series this conference will introduce concrete examples of meaningful connections between media production in the university and cultural institutions as well as technology businesses. Guest speakers will also address ways in which they introduce politics into the new media lab.
Between imagined flat hierarchies and the traditional models of top-down education, participants will give examples based on their experiences that offer a middle-ground between these extremes. Further questions address anti-intellectualism in the classroom and the high demands on educators in this area in which technology and theory have hardly any precedence and change rapidly. In response to this-- several distributed learning tools will be presented that link up new-media educators to share code, theory, and art in real time.
>Possible Topics:
-Vocational training versus solid critical education
-Creation of meaningful connections between art, theory, technology,
and history
-Education of politics, politics in education
-Shaping core curriculum
-Educational blogs
-Distributed learning tools: empowering students for the knowledge commons
(organizing academic knowledge and connecting new media educators)
-Intellectual property issues in academia
-Use of wireless computational devices to connect people on campus and in
the classroom
-Uses of social software in the classroom
(wikis, and weblogs, voice over IP, IM, social bookmarks)
-Battles over the wireless commons
-Models for connecting university lab with outside institutions and
non-profit organizations.
We are looking for proposals for presentations and demonstrations.
Presentations will be limited to 20 minutes. Demonstrations of open source or free software should not exceed 10 minutes. Collaborative presentations are encouraged. Suggest a format for your presentation that would maximize dialogue and exchange.
>http://conference.newmediaeducation.org
Please mail submissions for consideration by March 21 to Trebor Scholz:
idc [at] distributedcreativity.org
Send a short summary of your presentation (500 words), a brief biography, name, affiliation, email address. Feel free to include media material with your proposal. Texts presented at the conference will be considered for publication in a planned book.
Please do not hesitate to contact Trebor Scholz at
idc [@] distributedcreativity.org if you have any questions.
Join iDC mailinglist to contribute to discussion:
http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc
>Conference Committee:
Stephen Brier (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
Timothy Druckrey (Media Critic, NYC)
Richard Maxwell (Queens College, CUNY)
Trebor Scholz (Institute for Distributed Creativity, SUNY at Buffalo)
>Post-Conference PARTY:
9pm
The Thing.
459 W. 19th St
New York, NY 10011
They adapted the component that generates clicks - or "squeaks" - as a user scrolls through the on-screen menu in order to extract vital information from the latest generation of the device. This allowed them to install an alternative operating system and make their iPods run games and other new programs.
I can't help but be reminded of old movies where a thief slooowly turns the wheel of a combination lock and listens to the tumblers fall in order to crack a safe.
So much more elegant than bringing out the blowtorches, don't you think?
