<nettime-ann> Open Media research seminars, Coventry School of Art & Design

[Gary Hall <gary.hall@connectfree.co.uk>]

.
Coventry School of Art and Design and the Department of Media and 
Communication
invite you to
OPEN MEDIA
a year-long series of research seminars on the theme of openness in 
media in all its forms

All the seminars are free to attend and open to all

OPEN MEDIA

Digital Media have today become ubiquitous and all pervasive. Our lives 
and experiences are being mediated non-stop by a host of mobile and 
web-based devices which offer the possibility of merging, mixing, and 
mashing-up texts, images, sound and other data formats. In the digital 
age we are no longer confined by the boundaries that once governed 
traditional media. Notions of authorship, expertise, authority, 
stability, ownership and control from above are all being challenged by 
the prosuming multi-user and crowd-sourced use of borderless multimedia 
applications. People can produce and publish their own books via 
Lulu.com, promote their art on online gallery sites, and advertise their 
music via Myspace and Youtube. They can educate themselves via iTunesU, 
call friends abroad for free via Skype, connect and update the world via 
Facebook and Twitter, and fund projects via Kickstarter.

These developments have led many to claim that the web and digital media 
offer unprecedented democratizing possibilities for media producers, 
consumers and critics. However, reality is of course more complicated 
than that. A lot of (public and tax-funded) media are still behind 
pay-walls. Our private data are hosted and distributed by commercial 
social media platforms. Blogs are still not taken seriously in the 
academic world. Google is digitizing our books. Many makers of music 
mash-ups are being sued for copyright infringement and fears regarding 
ebook piracy continue to rule the literary world.

The concept of openness is often employed as part of a radical critique 
of the closed-off worlds of what might be called ‘traditional media’. It 
is variously used to urge for the right to transparency, the ethics of 
sharing, the value of re-use and the benefits of connecting. But 
openness also has its drawbacks. If cultural products are freely 
available, who then pays the producers of those products? Does open data 
pose security risks? And who gets to control the data? Who governs our 
creative outputs? In what way can we control and keep a check on the 
media we use? Is there still a place for authority and expertise in open 
media, or are these notions being explicitly challenged? In what ways 
can media be open, and can they ever really be truly open? What are the 
limits of openness? Where does openness end? Or should we perhaps just 
focus on degrees and aspects of openness? How can we compose a media 
critique when media - including our critique itself - are constantly in 
the process of being upgraded, updated, merged, mixed and changed?

This series of research seminars will explore various aspects of 
openness. Special attention will be given to the benefits and drawbacks 
of openness, and to the many possibilities openness offers for the 
future of media production, use and critique.

Programme: November-December 2010

Tuesday 9th November
Federica Frabetti (Westminster Institute of Education, Oxford Brookes 
University) - 'Open Software and Digital Humanities'

Tuesday 23th November
Mafalda Stasi (Coventry University) - Transmedia and fan cultures

Tuesday 30th November
Shaun Hides and Peter Woodbridge (Coventry University) - 'Open Source 
Education: A Radical Case for the Arts and Humanities'

Thursday 9th December
Daniel Rourke (Goldsmiths, University of London) - 'Errors in Things and 
the "Friendly Medium"'
Note: in ET 130 (Ellen Terry Building) Jordan Well, Coventry CV1 5FB


All seminars are free to attend and open to all
Time: 4:00-5:30 p.m.
Venue: RCG25 (Richard Crossman Building) 44 Jordan Well Coventry CV1 2, 
UK (unless otherwise stated)

For further details on how to get to Coventry see:
http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/university/maps/Pages/Travelinformation.aspx

All enquiries please contact:

Janneke Adema | Email: ademaj@uni.coventry.ac.uk | 
www.openreflections.wordpress.com | http://twitter.com/Openreflections


--
Gary Hall
Research Professor of Media and Performing Arts
School of Art and Design, Coventry University
Co-editor of Culture Machine
http://www.culturemachine.net
Co-founder of the Open Humanities Press
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org
Website http://www.garyhall.info

Latest: 'Affirmative media theory and the post-9/11 world’
http://www.garyhall.info












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