Centre for Media Research
Three key projects comprise research in this strand: organised networks, international creative industries, and creative work in digital media. The organised networks project brings together key strands of thought and practice about organisational techniques, scalar transformation, and content distribution and production methods associated with network cultures.
Research on the creative industries consists of international collaborations that seek to further enrich the analytical and policy understandings of the creative industries. Detailed case studies integrated with an analysis of political, economic, cultural and social forces will produce a more accurate assessment of the issues facing creative industries’ development in regional, national, and international settings.
Our third project involves creative uses of digital media, for example the use of locative media, to research connections between the introduction of broadband digital technologies in rural Northern Ireland, and revised constructions of place, public sphere and notions of “democracy”.
Transdisciplinary Research on Creative Industries in Beijing (CIB), Mobile Research Laboratory, Beijing, May-July, 2007, http://orgnets.netFrom May to July, 2007, Dr Ned Rossiter initiated and managed a Mobile Research Laboratory that undertook a counter-mapping of Beijing's creative industries (http://orgnets.net).
The project builds on MyCreativity: Convention on International Creative Industries Research co-convened in Amsterdam last year with Prof. Geert Lovink, Institute of Network Cultures, HvA. This transdisciplinary project brought academics together with urban research organisations, artists, curators, media producers and policy-makers in order to undertake transdisciplinary research on Beijing’s creative industries.
Through collaborative practices of self-organization, one of the primary aims was to create autonomous education platforms and business initiatives within Beijing's creative industries as a pilot study for related projects in Europe. Unlike the usual mapping documents on the creative industries, which are typically derived from compilations of statistics on economic growth in the sector, this project produced an alternative map of the creative industries in terms of the following vectors of research:
Research partners include Tsinghua University, Peking University, Created in China Industrial Alliance, Beijing Film Academy, Urban China as well as local artists, architects and curators. Adopting a range of new and old media technologies, the Beijing research provides a unique perspective for media analysis within transnational and inter-cultural frames.
The celebration of network cultures as open, decentralized, and horizontal all too easily forgets the political dimensions of labour and life in informational times. Organized Networks sets out to destroy these myths by tracking the antagonisms that lurk within Internet governance debates, the exploitation of labour in the Creative Industries, and the aesthetics of global finance capital.
Cutting across the fields of media theory, political philosophy, and cultural critique, Ned Rossiter diagnoses some of the key problematics facing network cultures today.
Why have radical social-technical networks so often collapsed after the party? What are the key resources common to critical network cultures? And how might these create conditions for the invention of new platforms of organization and sustainability?
These questions are central to the survival of networks in a post-dotcom era. Derived from experiences participating in network cultures, Rossiter unleashes a range of strategic concepts in order to explain and facilitate the current transformation of networks into autonomous political and cultural 'networks of networks'.
The conference was a resounding success, thanks to Ned Rossiter, Geert Lovink and networkcultures.org and congratulations to Ned who, during the conference also revceived the first copies of his new book (Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institution)during the conference.
The speakers and research was of a very high standard, the event was impeccably organised and to quote Geert Lovink:
Please find links to a plethora of images taken from the three day conference, on the right. You can select them one at a time or use the "Next" and "Previous" buttons to the left and right of the images to scroll through the entire catalogue- thanks.
This course takes place from the 16th-18th of November featuring Dr. Ned Rossiter and a plethora of international delegates, including representatives from the CMR that will be discussing the trends affecting media and creativity in the current socio-economic climate.
Our own web co-ordinator/ designer will be documenting part of the proceedings, soon to be available here as well as from the My Creativity site.
Orgnets
