Recently from our blog

  • 15 May 2012

    The beginning of May, weeks 139 and 140 of the DCRC, marks a transition into assessment and recognising the efforts of our students and pushing forward with nurturing the seeds of new research. We have PhD students moving into the final stages of writing up and moving towards examination, as well as undergraduate end of year shows. 139 is a prime number and the number of one of the ports used as part of the Microsoft Windows NETBIOS file sharing system. 140 is, of course, the character limit of a post on Twitter - based on the original calculation of an SMS message limit at 140 8-bit characters.

  • 14 May 2012

    It has never been more important to study the media. As Lord Leveson lifts the Fleet Street flagstones to glimpse the tangle of power, influence, secrecy, disdain and corruption writhing beneath them, as social media are accused of rewiring children’s brains, of destroying the very sociality they proclaim but also celebrated for toppling autocratic regimes, as popular magazines proliferate new forms of disgust for their readers’ bodies, and as photography, video, animation and the written word fuse, split and evolve in the new primal soup of the Web, the work on display in this exhibition offers a magnifying glass for the study of this rapidly mutating media ecosystem.

  • 02 May 2012

    As the summer term begins, week 138 was a period of travel and several projects progressing. DCRC Director Jonathan Dovey was invited to present research concerning value networks in pervasive media in Lüneburg and PhD researchers Dan Dixon and Sy Taffel have been involved in conferences and workshops. 138 is the sum of four consecutive prime numbers (29+31+37+41) and on page 138 of New Media: a critical introduction, written by DCRC researchers, the concept of 'hyperrealism' is discussed as 'a distinct and dominant aesthetic in popular animation', developed by Disney, in relation to the notion of 'hyperreality', offered by Baudrillard and Eco.