Imagine if photography was only used to create images for product catalogues. No artistic use came to mind, no aesthetics deemed nesessary. It’s not a strange thought experiment. This, following Bolter and Grusin’s book Remediation, is roughly speaking what happens to any new medium when it enters society. Painting for example didn’t really start going…

A little while ago I came across a manifesto called Not In Our Name, Marke Hamburg (Sign and Sight has an English translation). In this manifesto a group of 200 artists/squaters criticise their supposed role in the cycle of life of their city, Hamburg. Using artists as tools to ‘spice up’ a city leads to gentrification, they say.…

You might have seen the documentary series “Britain from Above” (if not, go check out its excellent website). It showed us some beautiful computer generated visualisations of GPS data overlayed on a satelite map of great britain. Director Cassain Harrison explained how he had surprisingly little trouble getting access to these sources after he asked…

With the coming addition of the Dutch part of Google Streetview, my street won’t be the same. Well, that’s not true. Here in Holland these pictures-of-streets services have been in use for some time. But those pay-services were focused on official use, often being used by government agencies and businesses. But now, with Streetview, these…

A GPS recorder is like a camera in the sky with a very long shutter time. That at least was what Cassion Harrison, the director from Britain from Above claimed at the AnyMedia workshop at the International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam last November. It’s a metaphor that I’ve been playing with ever since, and especially now…

During the last museumnight in Amsterdam the Amsterdam architecture institute Arcam decided to have an evening about the situationists. Apparently the Dutch situationist Constant had (co-)written a pamphlet fifty years earlier about his ideal city. The pamphet, it was revealed, could just as easily be interpreted as a joke instead of as an actual serious…

“Internet, television, mobile phones and television..  they don’t destroy the world, they enrich it. More beautiful, warmer and more intense, especially for young people”. From the manifesto of The Music factory (TMF), an MTV-clone owned by MTV. The animation’s rhetoric keeps refering to a generation gap, talking about youth who don’t let themselves be shaped…

Hurray, the web and beyond, a conference on ubiquitous computing, the mother-notion behind all these visions of our computer-infested lives. I’m definitely going, if only to hear how Adam Greenfield is getting along with his fresh perspective on Ubicomp (and to ask him if he would please use a better bibliography-system in his next book).

One of my teachers recently pointed me towards this fun little documentary called “How William Shatner changed the world“. In it, Shatner explains how the concepts created for Star Trek laid the basis for a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy. For instance, during one segment Motorola’s Martin Cooper, proclaimed inventor or the cellphone, claims he got…

This post at Pasta and Vinegar got me wondering. Some pizza delivery companies are starting to let you track the delivery of your pizza online, giving you up-to-date information on the location, and thus arrival time, of your pizza. I personally try not to think about the status of a pizza I ordered because it…

One of my favourite TV shows of all time has got to be “the secret life of machines” by Tim Hunkin and Rex Garrod. Hunkin starts this episode about radio by stating that “there’s something rather magical about radiowaves. They’re actually a sort of invisible energy”. It’s this idea of invisible energy that has proved…

In 2004, Wilfried Houjebek’s .Walk project won the 2004 software-art prize at Transmediale in Berlin. In this project he gave people two bits of paper with instructions on how to walk through the city. The first bit contained something like this: Walk into the first street on the right. Walk into third street on the…