Alright, as promised, I will provide you with a little report on my experiences with and impressions of this year’s 4S conference in Sydney, Australia. The conference’s overall theme had been “TRANSnational” STS, something that was well reflected altogether by the conferences content and also by the ‘performance’ of its participants, with many of them traveling very far to make it to the conference venue. The 4S took place, once again, [Read more…]
Ducknography, meetings of diversities, and more STS relata at the EASST 2018
Well, dear readers, the EASST 2018 conference at Lancaster University, England, has already been for a while. However, I want to provide you with a few little impressions on this year’s EASST conference. In regard of the event’s chronology, I put this before my 4S conference report. Now, first of all: What a peculiar, charming and exciting conference venue. [Read more…]
A quick thought on science of science and stories of stories
Before I post a short report on the (spoiler so far: great) 4S conference 2018 in Sydney, Australia, I want to share a thought that had been inspired by a very compelling discussion I had at the conference with Nicholas Rowland and Barbara Bok but also is somehow a product of the whole conference itself and its vibrant discourses. [Read more…]
CHI 2018 – New experiences, old dramas. A field report.
I had the great pleasure of visiting th
is year’s ACM SIGCHI (i.e. ACM’s “Special Interest Group Computer Human Interaction” – while one has to recognize that the common disciplinary term is “HCI: Human Computer Interaction”) conference in Montreal, Canada. The conference took place between the 20th and the 26th of April. So, yes, it’s been a while, but as you will see there was a lot of stuff to process. Anyway, they had invited me to join their “Hacking and making at time-bounded events”-Workshop, which was investigating [Read more…]
If POP goes POP – observations at the re:publica 2018
This year the re:publica conference celebrated its 18th anniversary. Because the conference has received huge media attention over the past 12 years, it’s safe to say that not only digital natives, netizens and nerds are familiar with the term, but also people interested in digital technology in the broadest sense now know that re:publica is a media convention dedicated to digital topics. However, unknown indeed might be the meaning of this year’s motto: POP – which is not to be read as an abbreviation for ‘popular,’ but rather as an acronym for ‘people of power.’ Such a motto clearly set high expectations that the convention would turn political. [Read more…]
i4c – The Magic in Virtual Reality – International Conference and Exhibition for VR and AR
Since 2016, the Bavarian Film Center and its partners have organized the i4c – an international conference about virtual reality and 360° film. This year’s conference carried the title The Magic in Virtual Reality and took place from the 28th to the 29th of June at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts. The event was supported by the Creative Europe Desk Munich and the Bavarian government under the umbrella of “Immersive.Bavaria”. [Read more…]
VRHAM! The First German Festival for Virtual Reality and Arts Hamburg
VRHAM!, the first German festival for Virtual Reality (VR) and Arts Hamburg was running from 7th to the 17th June located at the Hamburg’s Oberhafenquartier. VRHAM! showcased a wide variety of VR experiences by national and international artists, ranging from 360-degrees videos and computer generated worlds to VR-installation, where the user can move in the VR-experience. Further, many of the works include experiences at the intersection between theatre, cinema, visual arts and literature. However, beside this great diversity among the works, most of the experiences were related to the two festival’s topics: [HOME] and [SHIFT]. Inspired by this year’s motto of the Triennal of Photography Hamburg, “Breaking Point”, the event focused on the topic about Belonging, Safety, Migration, Nomadism [HOME] on the one hand, and on the topic about Personal Change, Paradigm Shift, Variety [SHIFT] on the other hand. [Read more…]
When You Win a Hackathon: an Ethnographic Odyssee…
Frequent readers of this blog will remember that I do research on hackathons as (uprising) socio-economic institutions and time-spaces of social creativity and inventiveness. You might also remember that my team and I actually had won an IoT and public transport themed hackathon.
As a result, we have been invited to present our project concept and ideas at the local public transport corporation. This was very exciting, appreciating and, most of all, a great opportunity to shed some light on an issue I mostly had to speculate about: the transition from hackathonian invention to full-scale innovation projects within established organizational contexts. [Read more…]
Messenger Security, Trust, & Infrastructures
Now it happened – I had to install WhatsApp. I opposed the idea of using this app for a long time now, but it is the only communication channel to a new community I just “entered”. And so I complained and then complied. However, installing yet another messenger triggers many different questions in regard to that little piece of software on my phone. And I was especially wondering about the values inscribed in a communication system … especially one I so long opposed. [Read more…]
Artifical Intelligence, Machine Learning & Deep Neural Networks – Meeting the MIT Media Lab
Attending the 4S in Boston, we also had time to visit the city and its unique research institutes. Andrea used the time to revisit her former colleagues at the Action Lab (Northeastern University), where she stayed during a research internship in 2010. Amir Farjadian, a former colleague, is now working on models for human-machine cognitive interaction under anomaly at the MIT Department of Mechanical Enginieering and facilitated contact to the MIT Media Lab. [Read more…]