I’ll be blogging on ideas related to my dissertation at a new site called tangible imaginaries.

I updated my portfolio as part of the preparation for advancing to candidacy in USC’s iMAP program. As a hybrid theory/practice program we not only write on three exam areas, but also are expected to present a portfolio of work to our committee. I included a fairly wide variety of projects — some of them dating… Read more »

The following portfolio represents a range of work and methodologies, including: physical computing, mobile design, experience prototyping, design research, performance, and experimental video.

I’m sitting here testing out Facebook’s new timeline feature, and a couple things jump out at me: 1. For a platform that has, for years now, supported a sense of ephemerality through Newsfeed, they are now in the process of rebranding themselves as a personal narrative platform (think 21st century version of the family album or scrapbook)… Read more »

[vimeo 20234305] Here is my recent talk at the DIY Citizenship conference.

I’m really interested in this notion of “hacking contexts.” This seems aligned with what I’ve been thinking about as ‘ritual design’ (in contrast to platform design). It feels like an area that’s calling out for a more clearly defined methodological tool kit, so I’m excited by Grenzfurthner’s explanation of his approach. And I love his… Read more »

[youtube LeaAHv4UTI8] Here’s the talk I mentioned in my last post. I couldn’t find Wesch’s talk from OVC online yet, but this seems to be the same material at TEDx.

Lindsay Grant recently posted a provocative argument about the purpose of redesign over at the HASTAC blog. In work for the Beyond Current Horizons project, Gunther Kress argues that contemporary conditions call not so much for taking a critical stance towards media, but an approach of re-design. Rather than analysing and deconstructing media artefacts, re-design… Read more »

This semester I’m excited to be taking Henry Jenkins’s new Civic Media course at USC. As one of our first assignment, we’re reading a few of the recent white papers that focus on new directions in civic media. These included: The Center for Social Media’s Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics, The Knight Commission’s, Informing Communities:… Read more »

Just saw this nice summary of the event over at HASTAC. The Mobile Design Boost is a hosting a 4-day entrepreneurial design workshop. Looks like its part of a partnership between Startl and IDEO. Nancy Kimberly explains.

Following up on NPR’s ear-stabbing economic coverage, here are some interesting comments from Brad Delong in response to David Weigel’s firing. I think they apply equally well to the kind of obligatory false balance that has become par for the course from NPR. [They] never wanted to be perceived as impartial in the sense of… Read more »

NPR’s latest economic coverage makes me want to stab my ears with ice picks. Here is the formula: misconstrue side A as only wanting to improve the economy through stimulus without concern for the deficit, then misconstrue side B as having a reasonable argument that deficits are scary so lets stop feeding the kids because… Read more »

Adam Greenfield wrote a great post about urban environments as a kind of “software under active development.” While he’s not the first to express these sorts of ideas, he unfolds the metaphor of city-as-software in a particularly compelling way. What if we imagined that the citizen-responsiveness system we’ve designed lives in a dense mesh of… Read more »

I just started using prezi, and something just occurred to me… [prezi width=480″ height=”360″]http://prezi.com/lwxhkofwgnyb/view/[/prezi] As you fly across various words and phrases and layout architectures of prezi, it’s not just the frames, words, or objects that you zoom into that count. It’s the spaces in between and the stuff that’s gets passed over that structures… Read more »

Over at my blog on the Interactive Media site I’ve been recording my assignments for the Experiments in New Media course with Elise Co and Nikita Pashenkov. Here is the latest proposal that I’m doing with Michael Annetta. This particular design exists for a future world where traffic is a kind of thematic commodity. I… Read more »

[youtube urZKX4kk6zI] (If you read the whole thing, this will all tie back into Maury Povich. I promise…) I last posted about how I’m in the middle of reading Stephen Duncombe’s Dream: Re-imagining progressive politics in an age of fantasy. Duncombe (like Lakoff) is concerned about progressives’ inability to frame empirical reality within a compelling… Read more »

After having read a compelling interview of Stephen Duncombe on Henry Jenkins’s blog, I decided to order Duncombe’s book Dreams: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy (for more info see his website). I’ve just started reading the book, but so far I’m finding it a fascinating compliment to the arguments of Lakoff and… Read more »

[vimeo 9101669 400 225] So much has happened since I last posted that I have developed a bit of the writer’s constipation. Instead of a comprehensive update then I’ll just dive right in. I recently presented the Synaptic Crowd project in one of the HASTAC panels at the recent AIS conference. The video I presented… Read more »

On April 19th I’ll be presenting a version of my project, Synaptic Crowd: Vox Pop Experiments, for the HASTAC III conference, Traversing Digital Boundaries, at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). I’m interested in understanding how identity performance adapts to the contextual uncertainty of online media where audiences are distributed unpredictably across space and time. The… Read more »

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVBE7L37bgw] In the previous post I talked about how Palin uses folksiness to signal a particular kind of community engagement—one that often doesn’t make sense to those on the left. I borrowed from Robert Putnam’s writing about the decline of community engagement in America in order to point out a fundamental difference between what he… Read more »

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiQoej_9-Js] Yesterday, Elon James White’s This Week in Blackness released a hilarious new video in which he dissects the recent vice presidential debate and questions the mysterious power of “folksiness.” (The full version can be found here.) I found myself particularly drawn to the excerpt above where Elon asks the question: “Why do people like… Read more »

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU&hl=en&fs=1] I’m a little late here, but this talk by Michael Wesch provides some really nice background on his work. He’s great at taking the hugely complicated topic of social media and presenting succinct and straight forward explanations about the way that the web is restructuring human relationships. For those of you not familiar with… Read more »

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDvlalPW8QE] Welcome To My Study by artist/comedian Mitchell Magee. From his artist’s statement: Although deriving much from a formalist vocabulary of the 1960’s, I think of my work as displaced objects from some forgotten window display, or the leftover prop from a play, or part of a sign from some unknown business. I’m guessing this… Read more »

Hilariously enough, I spent the past week feverishly trying to find a new place to live and moving all my belongings for the second time in a month. This was not planned at all, but instead came as a quick reaction to a few unexpected surprises with the place I moved into on July 1st…. Read more »

I’m in Los Angeles right now taking part in the DIY video conference at USC. The panels have been pretty incredible so far. I wanted to get here for the first one called “State of Research,” but I realized late last night that I wasn’t realistically going to be able to drive all night. I… Read more »

So I am establishing this blog as a place to update friends and other folks about my experiences at graduate school. I just started a program in digital arts and new media at UC Santa Cruz. Hopefully this blog will be a place where I can also share video and other artwork that I’m producing…. Read more »