Monmouthpedia

This week saw the launch of , “the world’s first Wikipedia Town” – Monmouth, Wales.  Wikipedia says the project will,“…cover a whole town, creating articles on interesting and notable places, people, artifacts, flora, fauna and other things in Monmouth in as many languages as possible including Welsh.” On Monday I heard Roger Bamkins, Chair of [...]

On Crowdfunding

In his seminal 2001 book, The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich proposed that,”new media transforms all culture and cultural theory into an “open source”. This opening up of cultural techniques, conventions, forms and concepts,” he suggested, “is ultimately the most promising cultural effect of computerization”. Opening up is just what we are seeing now in [...]

The Connected Documentary

Are you happy?

Today we launched The Are you happy? Project website. The project invites people to provide their answers to the question which provoked such a memorable response when it was posed by Marceline Loridan and Nadine Ballot on behalf of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin on the streets of Paris fifty years ago, in the seminal 1960 [...]

Where Documentary meets Web 3.0

I’m working on a proposal for a project that experiments with the Semantic Web and just came across Kate Ray‘s informative, witty documentary on the subject. It’s an engaging overview featuring key players, and reveals the philosophical disputes around this emerging generation of web technology. It’s makes nice use of music too –  I particularly [...]

Sunflower Seeds

There’s lots of coverage today of the new installation in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The Chinese artist Ai WeiWei has covered the hall floor with 10 million porcelain sunflower seeds that have been hand made and individually painted, work which took 1,600 artisans over two and a half years. According to the Guardian review, “Ai also likened the [...]

Arcade Fire

Since my recent post about The Johnny Cash Project, its director Chris Milk has followed that up with the launch this week of another very interesting participatory piece, a collaboration with Google Creative Labs and Aaron Koblin in his role as Technology Lead there. The Wilderness Downtown offers an interactive experience of the Arcade Fire song “We [...]

Mass Observation

On Wednesday I was in Brighton for “Engaging Mass Observation”, a conference looking at the post-1981 holdings of the Mass Observation Archive. Mass Observation is an ancestor of today’s participatory culture – started in 1937 by painter, poet and filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, journalist Charles Madge and anthropologist Tom Harrisson to gain an understanding of British society [...]

Suns – the art of Flickr

This terrific mosaic is one of a series that Penelope Umbrico has created from photos posted on Flickr. She made it after over 5,000 sunsets turned up when she did a search on the site. Each piece in her series reflects the number of hits she got I searching “sunset” on Flickr on a particular day. [...]

Documentary Now!

Last week I was at a gathering of around 200 academics and practitioners (quite a few of whom these days span both worlds) for the annual Documentary Now! Conference at Birkbeck College, London. There was an entertaining keynote from Florian Thalhofer - the Berlin-based inventor of the Korsakow System – who described the development of his [...]