Marc Tuters

I just read this very interesting piece entitled "The Crisis in Media Art Education" by Trebor Scholz who brought the world the Institute for Distributed Creativity, whose IDC list-serve is where it's at, and I think it should be required reading for all faculty and students of this program.

In the text, Trebor starts off by discussing the triumphal rise of the Interactive Media Divisions the world over (variously called Media Studies," "Game Studies," "Media Ecology," "Interactive Telecommunications," "Software Art," "New Media," "Media Art," Computation, Engineering," and so on) before going on to lambaste these very educators, particularly in the United States, for not conducting a public debate about the values and methodologies in media art education.

Given the high cost of education here in the US, Scholz sympathizes with the pragmatic concerns of students to get jobs, but never-the-less emphasizes the need for an approach to Media Arts education that is more that "shopping for career skills". He furthermore problematizes the model of Media Arts programs emulating the film-industry model, as he argues, "there is no monolithic industry which one could enter after graduation". He also criticizes the corporate just-in-time knowledge approach that leaves out the history and politics of these tools regarding humanities or social as superfluous to the goal of vocational training.

No mere Pandora, Scholz devotes over half the paper to discussing alternatives to the current state of affairs. At the faculty level, one of his proposals includes a shift in policy whereby the development of new skills would become considered legitimate research for faculty. While at a more general level he suggests that programs consider organizing themselves around broader sets of issues rather than around specific technologies, criticizing the latter approach as tending to producing somewhat superficial projects as well as generally narrowing student's perspectives.

You can download the pdf here

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Wednesday Night, right after seminar, in the lobby of the Hollywood Standard

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Renowned for his mind bending art-house films, Peter Greenaway's most recent work The Tulse Luper Suitcases appears to be some kind of Alternate Reality Game (ARG) that centers around a character from his earlier films. The project's website states "In the last century, an extraordinary man called Tulse Luper archived his entire life in 92 suitcases. It seems he was a witness to several key events in the 20th century." The game, which seems to have started a few months ago, is set to last 18 months and occurs across multiple websites offering its players as much as three whole feature films worth of content which players unlock from puzzles in order to reconstruct Tulse Lupers mysterious life. While it appears to have all the characteristics of an ARG, there doesn't seem to be much discussion about the game within the ARG community. At the same time, academics are vaunting the project's Brechtian dimensions, while grappling with its labyrinthine structure, and lauding it as "the most ambitious work in Greenaway’s oeuvre".

Posted by Marc Tuters at 5:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am entering the 4th week of the thesis, and have decided to start a weekly progress report, aimed at my primarily advisors, my professors, my collaborators, and my supporters: Perry Hoberman, Julian Bleecker, Luke Moloney, Mark Bolas, Scott Fisher, Eric Hanson, Michael Patterson, Kyle Ng, Debrah Isaac, John Brennan, Kaspars and Elizabeth Tuters. You can also follow along with my research at the project's delicious feed.

Continue reading "Thesis Progress Report for week of Sept 17th" »

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Over the course of this past year as a researcher at the Annenberg Center, I worked on a guide to viral marketing techniques for Todd Richmond as part of a Hewlett Foundation funded project around Open Content. Hewlett has supported a variety of open content initiatives, such as MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), which have made significant progress in expanding and extending the reach of educational material into the open-source ecosystem. Hewlett was interested in new models for the organization and delivery of this "new public library" of free content. As such Todd's project, entitled Viral University Education (vue), sought to better understand and facilitate the uptake of open content by studying how viral marketing techniques might be applied to he dissemination of open content. To that end, I have compiled my research in the form of what Todd likes to call a "living book". The idea is to initiate a conversation around how viral media might be leveraged (or not) for the Open Education Resources movement. In over a dozen chapters illustrated with examples from across the spectrum of current media culture, the text explores such concepts as collective intelligence and fandom, consumer empowerment and conversational media and the psychology of viral marketing.

Posted by Marc Tuters at 1:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

photo by julian bleecker

Students were given a stock IKEA Akurum wall cabinet, with which we were asked to create an interactive experience to "interact" with one or more of the jurors. We were given a week to conceive of, design and produce the piece.

I built a diorama of three apartments Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window". The audience member picked-up a video camera and peered into the rooms, doing so, triggered audio clips from the film's samples of Jimmy Stewart's character's dialouge on the view into courtyard from his rear window. Output from the camera was displayed on a projection behind the cabinet.

photos by skeckulous

Conceptually, I sought simply to celebrate the film and it's clever mediation on voyeurism and contemporary urban life. In terms of process, I knew immediately what I wanted to do with the assignment. On the first day, Chloe Nil and created a blueprint of the film's diogetic space and settled on our characters. I made sketches and Chloe did the renderings. We went to Michaels and bought material for inspiration, half of which we brought back. I worked on the sculpture on the weekend, and physical computing during work days. Once the technical side was successfully completed, I integrated it with diorama.

Technically it involved building a set from foamcore and balsa wood, embedding with photo sensitive sensors. These ran to an Arduino micro controller, which communicated with Max/MSP .

Download file for video documentation.

Thanks again to Perry for his invaluable help with both Arduino and Max/MSP.

Posted by Marc Tuters at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

What follows is a book review of Everything Bad is Good For You, a work of cultural crictism by the prolific autodidact Steven Johnson author of, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software, Interface Culture and a new book Ghost Map, all great books, the last of which makes an interesting argument for cities by retelling the historical discovery of patient zero in London's 19th-century cholera epidemic through mapping.

"For decades we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path towards lowest common denominator standards... but in fact, the opposite is happening: the culture is getting more intellectually demanding, not less (9)." According to Johnson "the landscape of popular culture involv(ing) the clash of competing force: the neurological appetites of the brain, the economics of the culture industry, changing technological platforms (&) (t)he specific ways in which those forces collide play a determining role in the type of popular culture we ultimately consume (10)."

Continue reading "Book review: "Everything Bad is Good For You"" »

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With my proposed thesis project I want to create an aesthetic representation of my experience of my urban environment. The metaphor I am working with here is that of mapping, and more specifically the cartogram, in which data changes the familiar shape of a map to highlight selected elements, the most classic contemporary examples of which are Gastner's famous purple maps of the 2004 US election.

Continue reading "Tuters Projection" »

Posted by Marc Tuters at 7:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Max/MSP patch Download file has 4 looping recorders and you can add feedback and pitch control, so it allows you to make a little canon. It's based on Noah's "Lidell2" patch, which you can find on his blog. What you see in this image is not quite what you'd download here, it's a messier version. I have a cleaner with which I'll update this download when I manage to fix it, but it's broken right now.

Posted by Marc Tuters at 1:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Henry Jenkins will be giving a talk at the Annenberg Center entitled "YouTube to YouNiversity: Learning and Playing in an Age of Participatory Culture."

The chair of MIT's Comparative Media program, Henry is in considered to be one of the pre-eminent scholars on video games, fan culture and media convergence

The chance to meet Henry when he presented to the Networked Publics group last year, where he gave us an early copy of his tome "Convergence Culture", which, which intended for a more general audience, is of great interest to anyone in media studies. Henry's activist take on fan culture helped change my view on media studies, as he states in the book "a detente between traditions of political economy and audience research". Indeed, my current research with Todd Richmond is very much influenced by his writings. I attended the Futures of Entertainment symposium he organized at MIT, November 17-18. The event brought together major entertainment executives, to sit on panels with fan formum adminstrators, it was epochal. I highly recommend attending this talk if you can make it.

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