global.mc.mediascapes

[globalmultiplicities-blog]

Smithsonian American Art Museum Acquires Video Games

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has acquired two video games for its permanent collection, “Flower” (2009) by Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago of thatgamecompany and “Halo 2600” (2010) by Ed Fries. These acquisitions build upon the museum’s growing collection of film and media arts and represent an ongoing commitment to the study and preservation of video games as an artistic medium.

“

The best video games are a great expression of art and culture in our democracy,” said Elizabeth Broun, The Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “I am excited that this new

medium is now a permanent part of our collections alongside other forms of video, electronic and code-based art.”

see also: http://www.americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/archive/2012/games/?utm_source=Video+game+acquisition+[October%2C+2013]&utm_campaign=SAAM+enews&utm_medium=email

[globalmultiplicities-blog]

Goethe Open Space appointed Zoe Zhang Bing, independent curator, as curator for the 2013–2014 art programme

9m2 Museum consists of the following projects: Ni Youyu, Zilch (15 November–5 December 2013) Wang Sishun, The Indeterminate Boundless (13 December–3 January 3 2014) The Museum of the Unknown, Society Meditation – Drift (10–30 January 2014) Aaajiao, The Screen Generation (21 February–15 March 2014) All these solo projects endeavor to cast light on the status quo of Chinese contemporary art from the following aspects:

– Self-construction and identity of Chinese contemporary art under the background of cultural globalization; – The inheritance of traditional culture and aesthetics in the contemporary context; – Interdisciplinary art practice and social intervention; – The evolution of contemporary art language within an information-based social structure.

[globalmultiplicities-blog]

International Journal of Design, IJDesign, IJD, SCI, SSCI, A&HCI

onclusion

Nisbett (2001, 2002, 2003) proposed that the thought patterns

of East Asians and Westerners differ greatly and classified these

differences as holistic and analytic. Holistically-minded people

have a tendency to perceive a scene globally, in other words, to

perceive the context and the field as a whole. They also tend to

focus on the relationships between objects and the field, meaning

that they are more field-dependent. On the other hand, analytically-

minded people have a tendency to perceive an object separately

from the scene and tend to assign objects into categories.

Analytically-minded people are more field-independent.

In this study, Chinese, Koreans (both holistic thinkers), and

Americans (analytic thinkers) were recruited for the experiment.

Findings from the analysis suggest that the Chinese, Korean, and

American participants employed different viewing patterns when

viewing a webpage. The Chinese and Korean subjects showed

more similarities to holistic thought patterns, while the American

subjects showed more similarities to analytic thought patterns.

The present findings indicate that holistically-minded

people and analytically-minded people have unique ways of

perceiving a webpage. These characteristics of perception reflect

some aspects of Nisbett’s (2001, 2002, 2003) proposition about

cognition. It is suggested that webpage designers should be aware

of the cognitive differences existing among holistically-minded

people and analytically-minded people, and that webpage design

should be carried out according to the target audience’s specific

cognitive style in order to enhance perception and usage of the

webpage

[globalmultiplicities-blog]

[globalmultiplicities-blog]

Author Guidelines

MER requests that authors use the style of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association for manuscripts. Manuscripts should not exceed 8,000 words including footnotes, references, tables, and figures. An abstract of 200 words or less, summarizing the main points of the article, should accompany the manuscript. The authors' names, affiliations, telephone numbers, and email addresses should appear on a separate title page, and only on this page, to ensure anonymity in the review process. The manuscript must be in Microsoft Word document format. Manuscripts should be double-spaced, with wide margins and pages numbered consequently. All tables and camera-ready figures should be included within the same document file as the rest of the manuscript. All manuscripts submitted to MER should adhere to the ethical standards for research and publication outlined in Publication Ethics.

  Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

The submission adheres to the ethical standards for research and publication outlined in Publication Ethics.

The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration.

The submission file is in Microsoft Word document file format.

The text is double-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed at the end.

The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines, which is found in About the Journal.

The instructions in Ensuring a Blind Review have been followed.

[globalmultiplicities-blog]

The Yes Men Fix The World

[globalmultiplicities-blog]

Saskia Sassen compares the impact of two kinds of socio-technical formations on the public sphere: electronic capitalist elites concentrated in global cities and globally networked, local social activist movements. Both have the power to transform existing political and economic systems.

[globalmultiplicities-blog]

CULTRIP is a 5-minute short film of fiction where the four leading characters of a videogame provide key elements to understand and delve into the concepts and definitions of the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. The film is conceived as a make-believe videogame where Big Blue, Green Power, Orange Glass and Pink Boots are the heroes that show the importance of promoting creative industries and culture for human and economic development. Young Edel Rodríguez (Mola) is the illustrator who conceived all the characters and, with the help of a creative ten-member team, namely, advisors, producers, scriptwriters, editors and post-producers, created a fun-filled and dynamic audiovisual material. The video constitutes a new and effective promotional product that also forms part of an international campaign headed by UNESCO to include culture in the revision of the Millennium Development Goals in 2015.

[globalmultiplicities-blog]

Discover Channel Asia: Smart City, Seoul

[globalmultiplicities-blog]

Urban Data Challenge at OKcon 2013, Geneva

see:

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/how-london-leads-the-way-in-techno-wizardry-6556813.html

Hiring the bikes has been made easier by smartphone apps, which show in real time where the closest available bikes are, the best routes to cycle, and where there are spaces to deposit them. Smartphone apps such as these are becoming essential tools for Londoners. Others show where you can find Oyster card outlets, broadcast live images from traffic cameras so you can avoid jams, tell you the quickest way to travel by Tube, and the MRSA rate at your local hospital.

These apps are also revolutionising the way government communicates with citizens. It is an area where London is leading the world, attracting interest from across the globe.

The radical thing about these apps is that the Government doesn't produce them. Transport for London didn't develop the bike apps - instead, it just released the bike hire information in real time, and London's entrepreneurial software developers did the rest. Over a weekend, various sophisticated, consumer-friendly smartphone bike hire apps appeared on the market.

Transport for London couldn't have done this - it's a transport company, not an IT laboratory. The developers can do it faster, cheaper, and be far more innovative in giving consumers what they want. It is not just a win for the Government and the public but also for the economy - it is helping to create a thriving developer community.

[citybreaths]

Paris, by lenscapbob

“‘The City’ is not a framework but a social practice in constant flux. The more it becomes an issue the more it is a source of contradictions and the more its social manipulation is linked to the ensemble of social and political conflicts.”

- Manuel Castells (1972)...

[midhyu]

Chris Milk, Aaron Koblin, THE JOHNNY CASH PROJECT, 2010-ongoing

Through this interactive website, participants may draw their own portrait of Johnny Cash to be integrated into a collective whole. As people all over the world contribute, the project will continue to evolve and grow, one frame at a time.

[jabwell813-blog]

We’re definitely moving toward “control” societies that are no longer exactly disciplinary. Foucault’s often taken as the theorist of discipli­nary societies and of their principal technology, confinement (not just in hospitals and prisons, but in schools, factories, and barracks). But he was actually one of the first to say that we’re moving away from dis­ciplinary societies, we’ve already left them behind. We’re moving toward control societies that no longer operate by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication. Bur­roughs was the first to address this. People are of course constantly talking about prisons, schools, hospitals: the institutions are breaking down. But they’re breaking down because they’re fighting a losing battle. New kinds of punishment, education, health care are being stealth­ily introduced. Open hospitals and teams providing home care have been around for some time. One can envisage education becoming less and less a closed site differentiated from the workspace as anoth­er closed site, but both disappearing and giving way to frightful con­tinual training, to continual monitoring of worker-schoolkids or bureaucrat-students. They try to present this as a reform of the school system, but it’s really its dismantling. In a control-based system noth­ing’s left alone for long. You yourself long ago suggested how work in Italy was being transformed by forms of part-time work done at home, which have spread since you wrote (and by new forms of circulation and distribution of products). One can of course see how each kind of society corresponds to a particular kind of machine—with simple mechanical machines corresponding to sovereign societies, thermo-dynamic machines to disciplinary societies, cybernetic machines and computers to control societies. But the machines don’t explain any­thing, you have to analyze the collective arrangements of which the machines are just one component. Compared with the approaching forms of ceaseless control in open sites, we may come to see the harsh­est confinement as part of a wonderful happy past. The quest for “uni-versals of communication” ought to make us shudder. It’s true that, even before control societies are fully in place, forms of delinquency or resistance (two different things) are also appearing. Computer pira­cy and viruses, for example, will replace strikes and what the nine­teenth century called “sabotage” (“clogging” the machinery)

[jayaprada]

Marketing has become the center or the “soul” of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos.

Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control (via jayaprada)

[ajnabee-blog-blog]

Summary of the Characteristics of The Society of Control. On Control Societies: A Deleuzian Postscript. Jia-Lu Cheng.

[globalmultiplicities-blog]

Tree Planet

[thegeekcritique]

Gamers solve decade old HIV puzzle in ten days

Scientists from University of Washington have been struggling for the past decade to decipher the complex structure of an enzyme that exhibits AIDS-like behavior, and which might hold a critical role in building a cure for the disease. Gamers playing spatial game Foldit have managed to collectively determine the enzyme’s structure in ten days. Puzzled by the intricate structure of the M-PMV retroviral protein, an enzyme that plays a key role in the development of a virus similar to HIV, scientists have striven to find its chemical key for ten years now. Each enzyme has millions of possible combination in which it can fold its atom bonds, and determining its precise structure is a very laborious enterprise even for high-end computers with large processing power.

As a long-shot University of Washington biologist sent the virtual 3D model of the M-PMV to the online game Foldit, where gamers folded and turned it into a myriad of combinations. Eventually, and remarkably enough, the gamers obtained the optimum one – the state that needed the lowest energy to maintain.  Now unlocked, scientists have a concrete means of understanding how the enzyme works, and consequently how to attack it.

To read more, click here.