The new Future Places website is up and running, and festival plans are progressing! The Future Places digital media festival will take place at the new Edifício Douro (Fundação da Juventude), in Porto, Portugal, from October 7th to October 19th. Future Places kicks off with two workshops on October 7 and 8, bringing together members of the international digital arts community and addressing both technical and conceptual issues in digital media production. Workshop topics will be announced shortly.
The call for entries invites submissions of web, digital video, and installation art work, as well as electronic music, 3D graphics, cell phone art and productions related to locative media, games and hybrid realities. The deadline for entries is July 11.
The festival will also include panel discussions focusing on a variety of digital media topics, featuring academic and industrial perspectives. Prospective panelists can view the call here. The deadline for panel proposals is July 31.
I’m currently in Lisbon for the first week of the Summer Institute, and tonight, I’ll be meeting with some students interested in the internships that we’ll be offering starting this coming semester. The internship page has further information about the program.
In short, we’re working to place qualified graduate students and early-career professionals at digital media companies in the Austin area for either a semester or a summer. These internships should provide some good learning and professional development opportunities for students. We’ll be providing some workshops aimed at professionalization to supplement the internship experience.
If you’re interested in learning more about internship opportunities, check out the internship page. And, watch here for application details, which we should have posted by mid-to-late June.
The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas site now features links to videos and Powerpoint presentations from the Ibero-American Colloquium. The Colloquium, which immediately followed the 9th International Symposium on Online Journalism last month, provided a venue for journalists and researchers to examine digital journalism in the Americas, Spain, and Portugal. A video of a Colloquium presentation by João Canavilhas, a Portuguese researcher who received support from the Digital Media branch of CoLab, can be found here.
The UT Austin branch of the CoLab Digital Media group was also a general sponsor for the Symposium this year. The Knight Center is directed by Professor Rosental Alves, who will lead an Online Journalism workshop at the Summer Institute in Lisbon in June.
The atmosphere at Offf Lisbon 2008 was as fun as ever, with designers and artists from around the world converging at LX Factory—a beautiful 19th century industrial space—to celebrate digital design and inspire each other to push it a bit further everyday.
There was something for everyone, with presentations covering typography, motion design, web design, generative art, data visualization, installation, advertising, print, performance, illustration, film, and animation. Eternal rebels Fakepilot and Joshua Davis managed again to draw laughter tears out of the crowd with their edgy and ironic takes on design, inspiration and business. Other highlights include All of Us’ fun interactive spaces and objects; Fallon’s greatest hits that somehow never get old; Random International’s PixelRoller (a paint roller that paints pixels!); and Devoid of Yesterday’s beautiful cinematic stories.
This edition of Offf just left me wishing for a wider and, well, less corporate, art exhibit (maybe next year?). It was also unsettling to see TMN (major cell phone service provider) take over the festival’s image to a point where it was impossible to distinguish between Offf’s identity and the corporate advertising messages: “A wi-fi! A wi-fi! My kingdom for a wi-fi!”?
Anyway, it was fun and interesting and inspiring, and I hope to see you all at Offf Lisbon 2009.
We’re getting ready to inaugurate a new, month-long program of several workshops with the New University of Lisbon. Several UT faculty members are gearing up to teach a variety of film, journalism and TV-related classes including screenwriting; digital documentary; online journalism; music for film, video and games; digital Hollywood; and advanced graphics rendering and simulation. All this will be highlighted by a Cinematheque-based film series focusing on innovation and technology in film (from King Kong to 2001, a Space Odyssey), curated by Professor Tom Schatz. Professor Schatz will deliver two public lectures around the series’ theme of technology. All together, the month should be the scene of an interesting set of exchanges that, we hope, will prompt some new ideas and new projects among all of the participants. We plan to use moodle for course support (this worked well last year with Karen Kocher’s documentary and Geoff Marslett’s animation workshops in Portugal), and look forward to seeing what sort of “digital media” community will emerge from the experience. The “official” descriptions, etc., can be seen at http://www.utaustinportugal.org/Events.aspx?event=167.
April 15, 2008 – 10:07 am
Mark Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Howard Shelanski of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology will be featured speakers at an event next Monday at the LBJ Library at UT.
The next President’s policy team will have the opportunity to shape a significant debate on the future development of what is clearly already becoming the United States’ primary social and economic infrastructure. This forum will bring two prominent members of the Internet policy community to Austin to discuss two major policy areas posing fundamental choices for the United States and its Internet infrastructure in an increasingly competitive global environment. After remarks from Professor Shelanski on broadband policy and Mr. Rotenberg on security and privacy policy, three local technology leaders will participate in a panel discussion.
The event will be from 5:00 to 7:00 PM in the LBJ Library Atrium, 10th floor. Admission is free and refreshments will be served. See the event announcement from the Strauss International Center or the Upcoming listing for more details.
FTC Reviews Behavioral Targeting Practices
An article today on the Washington Post site—FTC Wants to Know What Big Brother Knows About You–discusses the United States Federal Trade Commission’s ongoing review of behavioral targeting practices among companies such as Yahoo! And Microsoft. While many ad-supported websites have used content-specific advertising—displaying ads for dog food when a user performs a search for “puppies”—behavioral targeting takes this one step further, looking at users’ actions across different websites. Supporters of the practice argue that this deeper understanding of users’ interests leads to more accurately targeted ads, higher ad revenue for publishers, and the continued growth of free online content. Although the files on users’ behavior allegedly assure anonymity, assigning numbers rather than names to particular users, this seems like a flimsy defense of consumers’ privacy.
How hard can it be, after all, to link a set of searches and transactions to a particular individual? Moreover, what motivation would companies like Yahoo! have to maintain this screen of privacy? Google attempted to distance itself from behavioral targeting last year in the media, after the company came under fire for its purchase of online advertising giant DoubleClick. Now that the deal is complete, however, and other giants like Yahoo! and Microsoft are increasingly making use of behavioral targeting strategies, will Google continue to take the high road?