Aubree and I presented our final project, “The Visual Artist in Second Life” in class and in Second Life this afternoon for our last Studies in Digital Media and Culture class. I took the picture above of the two of us late last night as we were finishing up our artist hut installation in Artropolis (SLurl).
We began our presentation today by joining other students from our class in Second Life at the hut’s location. Inside the hut, students had a chance to walk around and see pictures featuring different aspects of the project. Aubree talked about the hut and the photos and I walked the class through the final project site.
It was fun to join our classmates in Second Life today. It provided another layer of experience related to topics within our ethnography project. I’d like to thank both Craig Freeman and Jeff Lipsky for their participation in this project and for sharing their experiences as visual artists in Second Life.
Aubree and I are coming down to the home stretch with our virtual ethnography project. I just posted a bunch of excerpts from our full-length interview with Jeff Lipsky over at blip.tv. These short videos are related to the themes on our final project site, which will be finished soon.
In the meantime, check out this video (above) with Jeff talking about his avatar, Filthy Fluno and issues of identity for artists in Second Life.
I spoke with Mara Altman of the Village Voice today. She’s doing a piece on “public access television and it’s relevancy in the age of YouTube”. She found me through my blog post, “YouTube = Public Access?“. We talked a bit about my graduate thesis project and some of the questions I’m looking for answers to (including the questions above) with the help from folks in access.
I told her that YouTube can be viewed as complimentary to, but should not viewed as a replacement for, Public Access TV. I said that you can’t find YouTube centers across the country that provide opportunities (found at most Public Access TV centers) for people to gain the necessary skills, tools, and knowledge to create and share stories through media about stuff happening in their communities. I said that while some cable subscribers may not like the programming on their public access channels, it should be considered within the context of local Educational and Government content, as well. PEG provides one of the few forums left on TV where people can find local news and information that is both relevant to their community and created by the public, not by commercial outlets.
I also told her about some of the innovative things happening in public access TV, including geotagging/geovlogging projects like Zip Docs at CCTV and Map Iowa City at PATV. I mentioned that while many access centers are realizing that they need to get up to speed with new Internet distribution technologies, the Alliance for Community Media has a new website using WordPress for its content management system.
We also talked a bit about how current state and federal legislation threatens funding for public access TV and local control of our public-rights-of-way (not to mention the issue of redlining). I asked her if she’d heard about saveaccess.org (which she had) and said if she wants to find people who oppose PEG TV, all she needs to do is pick up the phone and call any one of the many astroturf groups (see “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing” Common Cause Report PDF) that are popping up across the country.
She was very nice and helpful in recommending the folks at Bronxnet to speak to for my thesis project. I look forward to learning more about them and their access center.
I don’t know when her story for the Village Voice will come out, but I look forward to reading it to see what others had to say on this topic.
Mark Frydenberg invited me back to Bentley for a CIS Presents lecture this past Monday to discuss creative uses of social networking tools in education. I spoke to a room of about 60 students about my collaborative graduate thesis project and the tools I’m using to allow others to participate in sharing their experience and knowledge.
The podcast is available for download from the CIS presents blog.
Make Internet TV is up. The site looks great and has a lot of great resources for learning how to make your own video and audio recordings:
This guide has step-by-step instructions for shooting, editing, and publishing online videos that can be watched and subscribed to by millions of people.
They also have a Make Internet TV wiki set-up where people can contribute their own tips about how to make better internet tv.
I haven’t talked much about my past life as a recording engineer/producer on this blog. That’s probably because I haven’t recorded much over the past year and a half. But, I’ll be heading back into the studio soon to finish Matt’s record which has been at least 7 years in the making!
My good friend, Matt is an amazing songwriter. He and I played in a band together with Jim in high school, covering Replacements and Husker Du songs alongside originals. Around 2001, when we were back at the Longhouse Recording Studio in Porter Sq. Cambridge, he and I recorded basic tracks for his album with amazing local musicians Steve Scully and Joe McMahon. 6 years later we’re still working on the record and we hope to finish it soon.
Here’s a track for the record that Matt and I have been working on:
“The New Math“, by Matt Smith. Steve Scully, drums; Joe McMahon, bass; Matt Smith, vocals, piano, keys; Colin Rhinesmith, engineer/producer, arranging.
“The New Math” is licensed by Matt Smith under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivs 3.0 license. In other words, you are free to share it as long as you give Matt Smith attribution. Don’t sell it and don’t alter the song in any way, because he hasn’t given you permission to do that. But you are allowed to enjoy it.
I recently noticed that Emerson College now has RSS feeds available for those interested in subscribing to their news, accouncements, events and workshops on their e-Campus front page = very nice.
In the ever-blurring lines between PEG access TV and citizen journalism initiatives like NewAssignment.net, etc., CCTV (where I serve on the Board) received a grant last week from the Institute for Interactive Journalism. This is a very exciting development in the transition from PEG access TV to PEG access on the web. I look forward to following this project.
Last month I mentioned that I was interested in using a wiki for my thesis. Not for the purpose of dumping my ideas somewhere on the web, but to invite real participation from the community I’m exploring. At that time, I (1) wondered if this was possible to do at Emerson College and (2) was interested to learn if there were other examples out there on the web.
Since then, I received a comment from an incoming graduate student (who found my blog through a “thesis & wiki” search on the web) at the University of Ottawa who is also interested in this idea of writing a collaborative thesis in wiki form. I also spoke to my thesis advisor who gave me a thumbs up on the project. So, I now have the go ahead from the College to use a wiki to participate collaboratively with others who could share their experience and knowledge for the benefit of the project = very cool.
As I mentioned on the Community Media in Transition blog, Emerson College’s Instructional Technology Group were total rockstars and helped me to not only set-up the wiki but they made it available for anyone who would like to participate.
So, if you are currently or have worked at the intersection of PEG Access TV and new media technologies (web-based platforms) please consider participating in this collaborative graduate research project to share your knowledge.
I’ll also be setting up a new blog (soon) at cmediachange.net where I will be blogging more regularly about the project.
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