Sharing or Collaboration or ...?

User Generated Content and social media create the tendency for confusion between sharing and collaboration. Sharing of content alone does not directly lead to collaboration. Examples of this include blogging, micro-blogging, video and photo sharing, which effectively say: "This is who I am. This is what I did." The content is the social object, and the author is directly attributed with it. This work is a singularity, even if it is shared with the world via these platforms.

Street with your view

How would you like the world to see you?

On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburghs Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more... Street with a view introduces fiction, both subtle and spectacular into the doppelganger world of Google Street View.

Digital Interactive Documentary

How do we relate to reality? Does digital interactive media facilitate and push towards more active, dynamic and collaborative documentation of reality than analogue media?

Sandra Gaudenzi, PhD researcher and lecturer at Goldsmiths Interactive Media, looks at documentary making as a dynamic form: "Digital interactive documentaries can be seen as “living systems” that continue to change themselves until collaboration and participation is sustainable, or wished by the users, or by the systems that compose it."

1000 stories by Florian Thalhofer

Two filmmakers, each in the other’s country – a German in the U.S., an American in Germany. They interviewed people they came across and reported and translated their experiences into short films.The two journeys took place simultaneously, between October and November of 2007. The routes were not planned beforehand; almost all of their encounters were by chance. In the U.S. Florian Thalhofer traveled by motorcycle, in Germany Marc Simon went by car. What emerged is a portrait of two countries seen from the perspective of the outsider.1000 stories

Involving public in research

For some time now I have been documenting my thoughts and findings on the debate surrounding public and private spaces. This has not served only as a personal archiving method but also a mechanism to continue rigorous scholarly research after my master studies in Design Academy Eindhoven. Thinking out loud helps you to structure and develop your thoughts. Just now I am realising how widely discussed subject public space is - everyone seems to have their opinion (and of course they have their right). However all the studies done do not reach the wider audience - they stay written in books, researched by various other scholars.

Through this blog I hope to collect examples of cross media projects and explore the use of social media in order to increase the interactivity and public participation in my research on public space from the outset of the project.