The internship information has just been updated to help answer some of the most common questions. Internships are available to graduate students and early-career professionals who are affiliated with the UT-Portugal Digital Media Collaboration. The program is designed to provide hands-on work experience in the Austin digital media industry. Internships are available on a first-come, first-served basis and include significant financial support covering housing, insurance, and airfare to Austin.
Further information on the internships is available on the internship page, right here.
The next international Online Journalism Symposium is coming in April. Organized by Professor Rosental Alves at UT-Austin, this symposium is renown for its cutting edge analysis and research regarding the status of online journalism. For more information see http://online.journalism.utexas.edu.
A piece of news that should be of interest to folks both in industry and in the academy: A couple weeks ago, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a law that would have limited the sales and rentals of video games to minors. The court found the California statute to be a violation of minors’ rights based on the 1st and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It’s possible the victory for the industry will be a short-lived one: the case is likely to continue winding its way through the appeals process and may eventually land in the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court previously ruled in 1982 on issues of minors and video games in the case of the City of Mesquite vs. Aladdin’s Castle, Inc. In that case, the court ruled that limitations on minors’ ability to play coin-operated video games violated minors’ rights to free speech and to freedom of association. That case effectively established games as a protected form of free speech.
You can read more about the recent court decision here, and if you’d like to read up on the earlier case I mentioned, the text of the decision is available here from FindLaw.
The team will include Bryan Sebok of the UT Film Institute and Don Turnbull of the School of Information. They will meet with, among others, representatives of web startups including the social wine discovery site Adegga, the mobile photo and text sharing service Handivi, and the social media workflow tool Tarpipe; with companies in the technology transfer portfolios of IST, U.Coimbra, U.Porto and InovCapital; with interactive media researchers at FCT/UNL; and with organizers of the emerging creative industries pole in Porto.
The European Commission is planning to force cell phone companies to standardize their cell phone chargers so that all phones will use the same style of charger. The goal is to cut down on the amount of waste caused by the variety of chargers currently used. Cutting down on e waste is great, but the move should also eliminate a major irritation for consumers — many of whom, like me, have piled up obsolete but perfectly workable phone chargers lingering around from dead cell phones.
Hopefully the EC push for standardization will lead to broader standardization as the companies in compliance eliminate their non-standard chargers. Of course, the industry is already claiming standardization is an impossible pipe dream. Read more about it at Telecom Paper.
A number of folks associated with the Digital Media Collaboration are going to be participating in SXSW. I’m going to be on a panel interrogating the question, “Are Women Taken More Seriously on the Web?,” organized by Laura Roeder of Roeder Studios.
Ivan Franco of industrial affiliate YDreams is leading a panel on “New Interfaces for Performance.” Affiliated faculty member Bruce Pennycook is participating in the discussion.
The whole panel schedule for the festival is available at the SXSW web site.
Hope to see some of you there — we’ll be posting further updates on festival activities as we near the event.
Two Digital Media research projects have been funded by FCT for the coming two years, one dealing with the Portuguese population’s experiences with computers and the Internet and another directly developing new DM applications. Dr. Cristina Ponte (UNL) and Dr. Carlos Guedes (INESC-Porto) are Principal Investigators for the respective projects.
Kinetic controller driven adaptive and dynamic music composition systems is a joint research project led by INESC-Porto (Dr. Carlos Guedes, Dr. Fabien Gouyon) with partners UT Austin (Dr. Bruce Pennycook), Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Tomas Henriques), YDreams, and Casa da Música. The outcome of the project will be the creation of a modular toolbox for real-time dynamic music generation that will allow for easy creation of software applications for music, dance, theatre, installation artists, interactive kiosks, computer games, and internet/web information systems.
The applications to be developed are aimed both at highly specialized users striving for standard professional quality in digital media applications and non-specialized users including people with disabilities, children and the elderly for use in sound-based interactive games. The toolbox will be implemented in YDream’s YVision framework for developing interactive installations and it will be freely available through project Digitopia, a platform for the development of digital music communities at Casa da Música.
More information will be coming on Dr. Ponte’s research plans.
Rhizome at the New Museum is accepting submissions for their commissions program through April 2. This funding opportunity should be of interest to some of the folks involved in CoLab Digital media programs. From the web site:
The goal of the Rhizome Commissions Program is to support emerging artists by providing grants for the creation of significant works of new media art. By new media art, we mean projects that creatively engage new and networked technologies to works that reflect on the impact of these tools and media in a variety of forms. Commissioned works can take the final form of online works, performance, video, installation or sound art. Projects can be made for the context of the gallery, the public, the web or networked devices.
Proposed projects can be at any stage of production, from conception to distribution. Applications must be made and submitted online. Grant amounts range from $1,000 to $5,000 and can be applied to any aspect of the work, including labor costs, technology, or materials. In this funding cycle, Rhizome will award nine grants: seven grants will be determined by a jury of experts in the field, and two will be determined by Rhizome’s membership through an open vote.
Artists who receive a commission will also be invited to speak at Rhizome’s affiliate, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and to archive their work in the ArtBase, a comprehensive online art collection.
Application details and further information is available here.
The Digital Media Program congratulates additional winners in the ZON Multimedia Creativity Prize. These winners come from a variety of multimedia fields and each of the winners will receive support to study at UT Austin.
In the applications category, the firm Comm Together won first prize for its “Astrolab 0.1” application, a multimedia multi-platform display that allows users to look up information relating to visual representations of spaces and equipment.
The prize in Multimedia Content was split between two first-place winners. Maria Teresa Restivo led a prize-winning team that developed eBook that provides interactive access to measuring concepts, methodologies and techniques for both university students and professionals working in engineering, physics, bio-engineering and other related areas. The prize also went to Luís Madureira Pinto’s website surfertoday.com, which is a web portal for aquatic sports, made in Portugal but accessed all over the world.
Congratulations to all of the winners at the ZON Prizes!
Congratulations to Nuno Rocha, winner of the national ZON-sponsored multimedia competition in Portugal. The prize includes the opportunity to spend time at the University of Texas as part of the UT-Portugal program and also carries a 100,000 Euros award and the opportunity to air his work on television and movie theatres.
Nuno Rocha accepts the Zon multimedia prize.
Nuno Rocha at the ZON award ceremony
Nuno Rocha is interested in becoming a director, and he completed a degree in Porto last year from the Polytechnic of Porto (ESMAE). The work was done inexpensively with the support of friends and inexperienced actors, but you wouldn’t know it from watching this charming film. You can see a trailer here, and the full film should be available publicly soon. We hope Nuno will visit Austin for the upcoming SXSW interactive and film festival in March.
U.S. Law and Video Games
A piece of news that should be of interest to folks both in industry and in the academy: A couple weeks ago, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a law that would have limited the sales and rentals of video games to minors. The court found the California statute to be a violation of minors’ rights based on the 1st and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It’s possible the victory for the industry will be a short-lived one: the case is likely to continue winding its way through the appeals process and may eventually land in the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court previously ruled in 1982 on issues of minors and video games in the case of the City of Mesquite vs. Aladdin’s Castle, Inc. In that case, the court ruled that limitations on minors’ ability to play coin-operated video games violated minors’ rights to free speech and to freedom of association. That case effectively established games as a protected form of free speech.
You can read more about the recent court decision here, and if you’d like to read up on the earlier case I mentioned, the text of the decision is available here from FindLaw.