‘Playful Identities’ research blog

I am just home from a really interesting mini-seminar in Eindhoven, organised during the Dutch Design Week 2005. The meeting was about Ambient Intelligence and ways in which artist make use of these tools. The organiser René Paré had invited a couple of interesting speakers to tell about their work: Elmo Diederiks from Philips Media Interaction, Edwin van der Heide, an autonomous artist that explores the relations between architecture and sound, and Alex Vermeulen, an artist working on the faultline of technology and art.

Especially interesting was a remark made by Edwin that he tried to avoid the notion of narrativity in his work, as he feels that it constrains him too much. Instead he explores the creation of interacting and learning environments.

A little more info about the workshop at:
http://www.dse.nl/~mad/events/WAA/index.html.

Read the full notes I made of today below.
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Friday October 14 2005, I attended an small meeting organised by the Cyberspace Salvations research group. There were 6 people present: Peter Pels & Stef Aupers (Cyberspace Salvations), André Nusselder (AIO EUR), a masters’ student and an AIO in theology at Leiden. André was invited to tell about his promotional thesis. Below the notes:

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Yesterday evening I went to a Cyberspace Salvations lecture at the Waag Society for the second time. I was with my collegue Jeroen Timmermans, Yuwei Lin, a researcher from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Mylene, my girlfriend. To my surpise, there was no Mark Pesce in the flesh, but only a projection of him on a piece of cardboard and his voice through the PA speakers. However ‘high-tech’, it wasn’t as good as the real thing, a bit hard to follow sometimes due to bad sound quality.

Read full notes below
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Wednesday evening, September 21, I was at the second Cyberspace Salvations lecture (missed the first one) at Waag Society, Amsterdam. Cyberspace Salvations is a cooperative project by several Universities in the Netherlands, together with Waag Society that researches the “re-enchantment” of the world under influence of new technologies.

Talked to two members of the research team afterwards and made some sort of vague promise with Stef to work together on some fronts. Could be useful, as our projects look alike a lot. They also organise a couple of smaller meetings which I hope to attend.

Below the full notes of the meeting.

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Monday, September 19, I was in Delft for a meeting with researchers from the Technical University Delft and two Australian researchers. Present were:

Seumas Miller - Australian National University - Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics; privacy issues
Cathy Flick - Charles Sturt University - ICT industry, codes of ethics, policies, trust, privacy
Jeroen van den Hoven - TU Delft; prof. Ethics of Technology; privacy issues, moral identity
Alper Cugun - MSc student TU Delft; social issues, online communities
Noëmi Manders - PhD researcher TU Delft; ethical aspects of identity management
Bibi van den Berg - PhD EUR; ambient intelligence
Jeroen Timmermans - PhD EUR; playful identities
Michiel de Lange - PhD EUR; playful identities

There were some interesting topics discussed. Read the full notes on the meeting below:

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Steven Clift, initiator of the political activation & internet project E-Democracy.org was in Amsterdam yesterday at the IPP (Institute for Public and Politics). About 15 people - amongst them researchers from Radbout University Nijmegen and the Amsterdam School of Social Research - were present to hear about the project and the way it has recently switched to an open source mail/web-politics system.

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