This is New Media Politics!

The symposium is over.

What were your experiences? Where do we go from here?

Below you will find four topics with our introductory comments. Please comment in any way you wish on any of them. Or start a new topic.

Let's keep the discussions going!

Frames and Framing

Which were the frames? Who participated in what? On what conditions? These were critical questions raised during the symposium. There was a deliberate measure of surprise both in the introduction of and in the transition between the three “things”; The encounter with Rosengård and the “movement the voices and faces of the street”, the gathering around the Malmö festival live blogging, and the sewing circle stitching together. By introducing three quite different new media politics projects, each considered as a different form of “thinging” experiment, and by giving very few cues in the introduction of and in the transition between them, we anticipated that participants would get a unique experience, not only of the three projects but primarily of three different forms of participation in exploration of controversial things.

What was the actual experience of this? Should frames have been more explicit? Did you rather experience being framed, trapped to participate in a collective experiment you did not want to be part of? What are your general views on how to deal with frames and framings? We can’t get away from them. How should we deal with them?

Post your comments by clicking the "comment" link below.

The Power of Representation

“You should have been there. It was great!”. “It is so ugly!” Questions of representation and boundaries of collectives especially surfaced during the “thing” on controversial issues in the Malmö festival blogging intervention. The format of the “parliament of things” itself turned out to be a controversial thing. Historically, we gather to thing because we are concerned, not because we are a consensus community. We have different stakes and interests but also a willingness to find “fair” and “practical” ways to settle controversies. In this particular thing we wanted the participants to elicit and highlight controversial issues sparked by the Malmö festival blogging experiment. What rather became controversial issues were questions of representation and participation, while our intention was that “representatives” in the common thing could be stakeholders such as persons, media, and objects. This did not seem to have been communicated well. For example the excellent performance of the poster “You should have been there. It was great!”, or the aesthetic (?) comment “It is so ugly” on the power of the participating whiteboard are striking examples. Both participated in interesting ways, as did the “non-committed” video from one of the “groups”.

Any comments on the power of the whiteboard? Views on who the participants were? More general comments on the power of the non-human participants? Or on the calling to the thing? Ideas about if and how to reorganize another thing on controversial issues (also as research approach)? And then there is of course the question of which things you want to participate in? Does this mean to commit oneself to belong to a certain community? Does it mean taking part in “task-oriented decision-making” or more generally some kind of “closure” on controversial issues? The thing is open!

Post your comments by clicking the "comment" link below.

Street Fighting Man

“But what can a poor boy do, except to sing for a rock’n’roll band?” Jagger and Richards put it succinctly. What can you do if you are white, middle class? And maybe middle aged and male as well? The discussions during the symposium frequently returned to the question and problematics of the trip to Rosengård. Was it ethically justified? And more generally, what is it we think we can accomplish by collaborating with people living under quite different circumstances? And is “collaborate” actually the correct word? Is it rather the case that we use “them” for our own purposes? The argument against these statements is of course that, yes, we are aware of all these problems, we have thought of them before the symposium, we basically deal with them everyday and we believe that all other alternatives are worse. But does that argument hold?

What are your views on how to conduct academic work – or artistic – work on matters such as new media politics?

Post your comments by clicking the "comment" link below.

Quality in Collaborative Digital Media Production

A key part in the notion of new media politics is the idea of new ways of producing media, ways where non-professionals (the so called former media consumers now turned into producers) create new forms of media productions, either in collaborations with professionals or in other forms of coalitions. From a democratic point of view, this is great. But from an aesthetic? During the symposium some rather critical comments were made about the quality of the work produced by the bloggers during the Mamö festival and about the quality of the filming in Rosengård (we are not talking about the problem with the broadcast to the Black Box but about the filming as such). However, we did not have the time to discuss this in detail.

What kinds of qualities did the work of the bloggers have, and what kinds of qualities more generally do these new kinds of media products – available on YouTube and other places on the web – actually have?

Post your commments by clicking the "comment" link below.

Malmö Festival Interventions

(watch the clips in the player above or use this link http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=DDC1DE528A95C14E)

The Malmö Festival is held in the centre of Malmö one week in August every year. It started in 1985 and is the biggest urban festival in Scandinavia, with more than one million visitors each year. The festival focuses on live, music (for free) at a number of outdoor venues and on a large number of food stands, serving food from all parts of the world. The city of Malmö is totally dominated by the festival during the week.

This year, in collaboration with the cultural organization Inkonst and the design company TAT (The Astonishing Tribe), researchers from K3 arranged an experiment, where six locally well known culture personalities during the whole week with mobile phones filmed things taking place at the festival. The bloggers, as they were called, were free to shoot whatever they wanted. It was possible to follow their reports live, either over the Net or in a tent located in one of the festival areas. Their clips were also put on YouTube. It was furthermore possible for viewers to communicate with the bloggers by sending text messages.

The bloggers were:

• Anders Carlsson, artistic director of the theatre group Institutet
• Rakel Chukri, journalist
• Saga Gärde, actor and film maker
• Gudrun Hauksdottir, club arranger
• Behrang Miri, hip hop artist and leader of the culture organization The Voices and Faces of the Street
• Johanna Ritscher, one half of the artist and design duo Collabo Queens
• Erica Sandström, the second half of the artist and design duo Collabo Queens

The objective of the experiment was to investigate what could happen when a contested event – which the Malmö festival for different reasons is – is represented in a novel way. The bloggers had no experience of working with video and only one of them works as a journalist. What would they focus on, and how? And what would that say about the possibilites and problems with working with new media? What would it say about new media politics?

All in all, the bloggers produced almost 200 clips, each clip normally lasting a couple of minutes. We have here attached five of these clips as well as a short film introducing the festival and the bloggers. We do not want to close down the discussions beforehand by identifying important themes in these clips. Suffice to say that we have chosen these clips because we believe they can lead to important discussions. So, just a short introduction:

Clip 1. Short movie introducing the Bloggers and the festival
Clip 2. Anders Carlsson in Front of VIP Tent and then Fine Arts Showcase. Anders realizes there is a VIP tent at the festival. He then proceeds towards a concert with the band Fine Arts Showcase, where he interviews the leader of the band.
Clip 3. Rakel Chukri and the Man in the Leather Mask. Rakel interviews a man who has just performed.
Clip 4. Behrang Miri at a Reading of Poems. Behrang films a poetry reading organized by the local newspaper. The poems are written by young people who have sent them to the newspaper. The local newspaper is also there filming the event.
Clip 5. Saga Gärde with a Tree. Saga films a tree that makes interactive music.
Clip 6. Gudrun Hauksdottir Gives Her Views About the Festival. Gudrun shares her opinions about the festival.

If any of the video clips in the above player does not work, use this link

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=DDC1DE528A95C14E