‘Playful Identities’ research blog

I decided to rework the literature page from linking to other people’s work to featuring my own output. You can find some of my work so far on the page my writings. Happy reading!

The Mobile City conference, which I organized together with Martijn de Waal, has been a great succes! The auditorium of the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam was packed with around 200 people from various backgrounds and disciplines. Great speakers, workshops, interesting project presentations, a discussion panel, and a very lively atmosphere.

Read more about it, watch photos, and see some video registrations at the conference website’s coverage area.

[update: website structure changed: all content of The Mobile City '08 now here]

Below the announcement of The Mobile City conference I am co-organizing:

The Mobile City conference 27 & 28 February 2008

NAi (Netherlands Architecture Institute) Rotterdam, The Netherlands

“The Mobile City” is a two-day conference about locative & mobile technologies, urban culture and identity. The Mobile City brings academics, architects, urban professionals and media designers together to address the question: what happens to urban culture when physical and digital spaces merge? Keynote speakers are Stephen Graham, Tim Cresswell, Malcolm McCullough and Christian Nold.

Background

The physical, geographical city with its piazza’s, its neighbourhoods and crossings intersects with the ‘virtual space’ of electronic communication-, information- and observation-networks of GSM, GPS, CCTV, UMTS, WIFI, RFID, etc. At the same time, the domain of digital space is increasingly becoming physical, an “internet of things” is emerging. Another example is the rise of ‘pervasive games’, digital games with a physical component in urban space. Is it still useful or even possible to talk about the city as being only physical? Or about the digital world as purely ‘virtual’ (in the sense of ‘not real’ or immaterial)? The physical city and the spaces of digital technologies merge into a new “hybrid space”. Hybrid spaces are shaped by the social processes that concurrently take place in digital and physical spaces. What is the influence of these developments on the ideas we have of time, space and place, citizenship and identity?

Conference questions

Locative and mobile media can be understood as interfaces between the digital domain and the city, as bridges between the social processes that formerly took place in more separated domains (digital or physical) but now are spilling over into each other. The Mobile City will ask the following questions:

• From a theoretical point of view, what are useful concepts to talk about the blurring/merging of physical and digital spaces?

• From a critical perspective, what does the emergence of locative and mobile media mean for urban culture, citizenship, and identities?

• From a professional point of view, what does all this mean for the work of urban professionals (architects, designers, planners), media designers, and academics?

The full program text is available at our website, www.themobilecity.nl/background

Weblog

The conference organizers have set up a special weblog devoted to the themes of the conference at www.themobilecity.nl. Relevant contributions are welcome.

Call for Participation - Workshops

On February 27th two small scale intensive workshops will be held. The first session is about Urban Culture and locative media (with Stephen Graham and Christian Nold), the second session about mobility and new technologies (with Tim Cresswell and Malcolm McCullough). Please send a very brief bio with relevant current and past activities, and short motivation to info@themobilecity.nl. Indicate what you would like to contribute to, and get from the session(s). Only a limited number of places is available. When interest supersedes availability, the organizing committee will select participants. Registration closes at January 31st.

Call for Participation - Project Presentations

During the main conference on February 28th, Keynote speeches will be alternated with short project presentations about locative and/or mobile technologies for artistic purposes, business, research, etc. We are thinking of: locative media art, commercial locative services, pervasive gaming, mobile marketing campaigns, geo-tagging or geo-storytelling, research projects etc. etc. Your presentation will have to fit in 10 minutes, and be as concrete as possible. Your project will also be featured on our website. If you wish to present, please send us an email about your project at info@themobilecity.nl. Please do so before january 31st.

February 27th: Small scale in-depth workshops

February 28th: Main conference with:

* Stephen Graham - Professor of Human Geography, Durham University

* Tim Cresswell - Professor of Geography, University of London

* Malcolm McCullough - Associate Professor University of Michigan

* Christian Nold - Independent artist and lecturer based in London

From the Netherlands, experts such as Rob van Kranenburg (Waag Society), Nanna Verhoeff (University of Utrecht) and Marc Schuilenburg (Free University Amsterdam, Studio Popcorn) will also participate.

Practical

The Mobile City takes place 27 and 28 February 2008 in the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

More info, call for participants, and registration: www.themobilecity.nl.

The conference fee is € 25,-
Organization

The Mobile City is organized by:

* ‘New Media, Public Sphere, Urban Culture’ project at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (RUG).

* ‘Playful Identities’ project at Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) and University Utrecht (UU).

* Netherlands Architecture Institute Rotterdam (NAi).

Contact

Conference organizers: Martijn de Waal (RUG), Michiel de Lange (EUR), Oene Dijk (NAi). Email: info@themobilecity.nl

Sponsors

The conference is sponsored by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research through the NWO-research program Transformations in Art and Culture.

The Mobile City is kindly sponsored by Dienst Kunst en Cultuur, gemeente Rotterdam.

The conference organization wishes to thank the Vereniging Trustfonds Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam for their kind financial guarantee.

The next few months I’ll be posting more often on The Mobile City conference blog than here. The Mobile City will be organized end of February 2008 in Rotterdam, and will discuss the interplay between locative technologies, and urban culture and design. So head over there now…!

I’ve been in Australia for a few days now, and finally some time & energy to blog. My travel to Australia and Indonesia started out well. After a grueling 12 hour flight to Kuala Lumpur, a cheerful looking fellow approached me at the gate and told me “This is your lucky day, you are the lucky passenger number 163 million!! you will receive gifts…blabla” and asked me whether I had some time to spare at the airport. I had to wait 10 hours for my continuing flight to Sydney, so I thought this could be fun… The KLIA airport celebrated its 9th year anniversary, 2nd time best airport, and the arrival of its 163 millionth international passenger, which was…me!

I was taken to the VIP lounge, could take a nice shower, which was very welcome. Later that morning a crazy ceremony with band and directing manager airport present. Called on stage, photographers, film crews, interviews, got all kinds of presents, amongst which a return flight KL-Perth, free night stay in a KL hotel, some other stuff like coupons for food & drinks, perfume, etc.
A totally ‘ludic’ experience :). For those who read bahassa Malayu: an article in Berita Harian. Name spelled wrong, I did not come from Stockholm (never even been there), and some complete nonsense quotes about my name being called in the airplane and being afraid of having trafficked something forbidden… Cerita Harian…

Pics:

My research group is organizing a two-day visit (June 12 - 13 2007) to the Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands, by sociologist and psychologist Kenneth Gergen. Gergen is most widely known for his book “Saturated Self: dilemmas of identity in contemporary life” (originally published in 1991, second edition 2000). He is also known for his idea of “absent presence”.

The first day of his visit, Tuesday June 12, he will give a public lecture called:

Playland - Transformations in Technology, Identity and Culture

Kenneth Gergen will speak about the influence of modern communication technologies on human identities. He will specifically focus on the rise of play elements in digital culture en the transition in thinking about identity as monolithic entities

After the lecture there will be time for questions from the audience.

The lecture is in English.

Date: June 12 juni 2007

Time: 15:15 - 17:00.

Location: Room B2, Campus Woudestein, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Directions: http://www.eur.nl/adressen/plattegronden/

More information about Kenneth Gergen: http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/kgergen1

Entrance is free.

Hehe, finally got it working. What an immense hassle to migrate bijt.org to a new host without bandwidth restraints…
I’ll try and post something right away…

we have arrived in abuja safely. Picked up from the airport by driver and an armed man… That moist smoky air and thick sound of crickets… Absurd style of driving: drive right side, pass right side. Cook pierre at daniels (esther’s cousin in abuja) place is from benin. Weird that one of the first conversations here in anglophone nigeria is in french….
tomorrow we go to kaduna to meet some film people from the “new age film company”. See if they are interested in collaborating.

Tomorrow me and Esther Polak are going to Nigeria on the NomadicMILK fieldtrip. Packing my bags now… I will try to post some new stuff here once in a while when we are able to get online.

Apparently our telcom operator in Nigeria MTN has gprs access too, so I’ll check that out as soon as I am there. However, as you can see here, there are still some white areas in Nigeria…(and that’s only the GSM network).

Hey, there are people inspired by me :). Check out Darryl Cressman’s article about mobile gifting.  Darryl is from the School of Communication, at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. He visited us with Norm Friesen a couple of weeks ago in Rotterdam.

I see my preliminary article is spreading it’s way onto the Internet (a huge link dump here about mobile phone & art). About time for me to finish the paper…