DCRC - Digital Cultures Research Centre

As we move into the latter part of November the near-term horizon shifts into 2011 and in the research centre we are taking forward plans for activities and events that will happen in the new year. However, in the immediacy of the present DCRC researchers have run an event and hosted a visiting international academic. We were also delighted to receive invitations for Jon Dovey and Martin Lister to give keynotes at an international conference on 'New Trends and Hybridisations in Audiovisual Discourses in Contemporary Digital Culture', more on that soon.

Thursday, 18th November, saw the successful running of the Second Fashion Popcorn event, which brought Stephen Whelan of Stink TV to the Pervasive Media Studio to talk about cross-media advertising. DCRC researcher Constance Fleuriot and Featherhouse's Emily Fleuriot hosted the well attended event, which featured Krstl, the location-based media delivery platform, created by PM Studio Research Director Tim Kindberg. DCRC involvement with Fashion Popcorn forms a part of our ongoing mission to knowledge exchange and the application of our research.

The DCRC were also pleased to welcome Nick Taylor, of York University (Toronto), who made a flying visit on 16th November to discuss his ethnographic research into the professionalisation of video gaming.

Our upcoming events i-Docs and Postdigital Encounters are attracting quite a bit of interest, we encourage those interested to consider applying. The closing date for i-Docs submsssions is drawing near: 26th November 2010.

This week week saw the online publication of Enivornment and Planning A Vol. 42 Issue 11, featuring Sam Kinsley's article "Representing 'things to come': feeling the visions of future technologies", also available in our Publications section.

Some interesting links

Bruno Latour was recently videoed at USC Annenburg speaking about the nature of the concept of networks and the bluring of the delineation between qualitative and quantitative research by social networking technologies. In the lecture Latour appeals for an ecological perspective, which he shares with Isabelle Stengers <the video>.

Russell Davies, of Wired fame, recently blogged about the use and abuse of the term 'postidigital', which DCRC researcher Charlotte Crofts has briefly blogged on the Postdigital Encounters site <read more>.

The New York Museum of Modern Art has adopted an Augmented Reality 'invasion' created by the Conflux Psychgeography Festival, which allows users to add and view digital artworks fixed in the locale of the musuem <read more>.

Also on the theme of Augmented Reality, blogger Gary Hayes recently wrote about 'the future of location based augmented reality story games', which gives a nice overview of some existing and imagined AR games <read more>.

Mike Kuniavsky, co-founder of Adaptive Path and Ubicomp innovator, recently gave a talk entitled 'Information as Material' in which he explores what it means for design if we treat information as a material, with associated properties. This in many ways ties together the preceding links <read more>.

The journal Fibreculture has just opened a Call For Papers on "Networked utopias and speculative futures", which ought to be of interest to people in the DCRC network. Please check it out! <read more>.