Jeanette Ginslov is Medea’s Artist in Residence this spring. Her roots are as performer, choreographer and artistic director in South Africa, but for the last five years she has focused more on interdisciplinary platforms investigating the crossover between the media/dance/cinema/video and the internet. Her work centers around affect, haptic and digital materiality on several platforms: stage, screens, online and new media applications. Ginslov is currently working with Prof Susan Kozel at Medea on the project AffeXity that draws together screendance, visual imagery and mobile networked devices.

On May 14, Jeannette Ginslov gives a Medea Talk about the developmental stages of the AffeXity project, the interdependence of the collaborators, the relational and dynamic formation of technical and human intervention, the encounters of the carnal and the digital, the dialogic and temporal scaffolding of encounters of techne and the hands that attempt to capture affect.

Medea Talk with Jeanette Ginslov
When: Monday, May 14, 16:00-18:00
Where: at the MEDEA studio, Östra Varvsgatan 11, Malmö
Whom: The Medea Talk is for free and open to everyone. It is followed by Q&A and conversation.
More info about Affexity: affexity.org
Sign up: Limited availability, sign up here

More about AffeXity
AffeXity is a two year long research project. The first phase of research was conducted during Ginslov’s residency at the Laboratorium, Dansehallerne Copenhagen in November 2011. In the project’s final phase, they wish to see the project becoming a “social choreography”. Anyone will be invited to shoot and upload short screendance videos, using their “body in city” as a location of affect, archive their material onto a social media dance and technology platform and finally use Argon to facilitate a “performance” in their own city. These should reflect our premier of AffeXity in Malmö, November 2012.

More about Jeannette Ginslov
Her roots are in Performance Art, protest theatre and contemporary dance theatre within the context of an Apartheid South Africa as a performer, choreographer and artistic director. The classical and contemporary dance training in South Africa, New York and France afforded her the tools to practice and research sites of resistance through the body and movement. In 1998 she studied a Master of Arts in Choreography based on the Body and the Dance Factory as sites of Resistance, exploring postmodernist feminist dance practices and choreographic strategies.

She left South Africa in 2008, in order to study for an MSc in Media Arts and Imaging Screendance, at Dundee University Scotland. In 2009 she started exploring other sites and modes of production with the use of online platforms and became associate producer dance-tech.net. She is a moderator for content on dance-tech.net that uses the most advanced social software platforms and internet rich multimedia applications. She is also the creator of MoveStream that provides an interdisciplinary platform that investigating the crossover between the boundaries usually found in media/dance/cinema/video and the internet. It provides a fresh and adaptive evolving domain for the public to engage with culture, choreography and performance. As a networked phenomenon, it encourages a much needed flow and exchange in Screendance discourse.

Related articles:
- Mobile social choreographies: Choreographic insight as a basis for artistic research into mobile technologies – article published in Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media
- Medea’s residency program
- The AffeXity project

How Electronics Connect Us to the World
In this Medea Talk, David Cuartielles discusses the specific needs that lead to the creation of the Arduino platform, but he also explores the opportunities it created for literally exploring the world and getting an understanding on what is that matters in when creating objects that connect to the network to get us more connected to each other.

David Cuartielles makes a quick overview on the history of Arduino and presents concepts and projects envisioned by people around the world. He puts a special focus on the projects developed during his last workshop on electronics at a small village in Oaxaca, Mexico, where the attendants do not own computers and have little or no knowledge about the internet.

What happens when you bring traditional craftsmanship together with electronics at one of the most remote places you could ever think of? What happens when the only way to access your knowledge base (in this case the internet) is yourself? What is truly relevant from some dissemination activities within science, technology, and design?

If you prefer to listen to this presentation as an audio podcast, please subscribe to the podcast Media, Communication and Design on iTunes or click here for more alternatives.

See David Cuartielles’ presentation in the video embedded below or directly on YouTube.

More about Arduino
Arduino is basically a circuit board, which by being linked to a computer or a mobile telephone can be programmed to turn off lights, controlling a robot or reading temperatures, and a lot more. Arduino was created in March 2005 by the Malmö University researcher David Cuartielles together with Massimo Banzi and David A. Mellis. The goal was to simplify and democratize computer usage around the world.

The Company Arduino currently has four employees and a number of consultants. As of now, more than 400 000 printed circuit boards are sold worldwide and Arduino web had 53 million visits last month. Arduino is also used by major players like Google and has been praised in magazines such as Wired Magazine and The New York Times.

More about David Cuartielles
David Cuartielles was born in 1974, in Zaragoza, Spain, and has a master’s degree in telecommunications from the University of Zaragoza. He worked as a development engineer at Infineon Semiconductors in Munich, Germany before moving to Malmö in January 2001. He is working at Malmö University, writing his PhD thesis, teaching at K3, and as a researcher at Medea. He also operates four different companies. One of them is the Arduino. David is a frequent speaker all around the world. He has, among other things given a TedXTalk.

Release of the publication Internet of Things
Four times a year Media Evolution releases a publication of the factors affecting media industries. In connection with David’s Medea Talk, they release their brand new publication the Internet of Things. It goes in depth with how the media industries can benefit from a network of connected things.

“När världens stora telekomföretag tävlar om att överträffa varandra i det förutspådda antalet uppkopplade enheter vi kommer ha omkring oss i framtiden, Ericsson-chefen tror på 50 miljarder 2020, kan vi lugnt konstatera att det är mycket som kommer vara uppkopplat. I den här publikationen tar vi reda på vilka förutsättning det finns för mediebranscherna “.

Medea Talk with David Cuartielles
When: Thursday, March 1, 16:00-18:00
Where: at the MEDEA studio, Östra Varvsgatan 11A, Malmö
Whom: The Medea Talk is for free and open to everyone. It is followed by a Q&A.
Publication release: In connection with David’s Medea Talk, Media Evolution releases their new publication the Internet of Things. It goes in depth with how the media industries can benefit from a network of connected things.

Image credit: mozillaeu CC:BY

Lucy Suchman’s Medea Talk explores recent developments in the study of digital media that recover the entanglements of bodies and technologies. Drawing on a series of examples from her own research and others within science and technology studies (STS) and design, she makes the case for an understanding of information as irreducibly social and material, virtual and real. In October, Lucy Suchman was also appointed as Honorary Doctorate at Malmö University.

If you prefer to listen to this presentation as an audio podcast, please subscribe to the podcast Media, Communication and Design on iTunes or click here for more alternatives.

“Restoring Information’s Body: Remediations at the human-machine interface”
See Lucy Suchman’s lecture in the video embedded below or directly on YouTube.

Embedded below is Ylva Gislén’s introduction to the lecture (or here on YouTube)

More about Lucy Suchman
Lucy Suchman is Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, and Co-Director of Lancaster’s Centre for Science Studies. Before taking up her present position she spent twenty years as a researcher at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, where she was a founding member and Manager of the Work Practice and Technology area. Her research has involved ethnographic studies of everyday practices of technology design and use, as well as interdisciplinary and participatory interventions in information technology design.

Her 2007 book Human-Machine Reconfigurations (Cambridge University Press 2007) includes an annotated version of the text of her earlier Plans and Situated Actions: the problem of human-machine communication. The sequel adds five new chapters, looking at relevant developments since the mid 1980s both in computing and in social studies of technology. Lucy served as Program Chair for the Second Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work in 1988, and for the first Conference on Participatory Design of Computer Systems in 1990. In 2010 she recieved the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award.

Read more about Lucy Suchman

Medea Talk with Lucy Suchman
When: Thursday, October 20, 16:00-18:00
Where: at the MEDEA studio, Östra Varvsgatan 11A, Malmö
Whom: The Medea Talks are for free and open to everyone. It is followed by Q&A.
Moderator: Ylva Gislén, director Konstnärliga forskarskolan

Embedded below is a recording from March 2nd of a discussion between the director Paul Kelly, Bob Stanley from Saint Etienne and Martin Theander, journalist. Also have a look at the documentary embedded below.

Above: Paul Kelly, Bob Stanley and Martin Theander talk about the documentary

Above: What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day? (Fast forward to 11:05 to watch it!)

What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day?
Paul Kelly (and Bob Stanley) works with an ongoing poetic documentary of London. Named after a 1970s West Ham goalkeeper, What have you done today Mervyn Day (2005) is a dreamy snapshot of the Lower Lea Valley and is an oral history of a part of London that is being developed to house the 2012 Olympic Games. This eastern fringe, the capital’s last remaining wilderness, represents an unruly kind of beauty. Accompanied by a Saint Etienne soundtrack, it is Paul Kelly’s follow up to Finisterre (2003) and it both documents the changes that the Lea Valley has seen and looks forward to its future.

“Plastic was invented here,” says Paul Kelly. “You had the Bryant and May match strike here, which led to the Labour movement. The Lea Valley is where the 20th century was born.”

“The Olympic village will wipe out almost all of this, and it’s a good thing too, says Bob Stanley. (…) But lovers of urban decay and fabulous dereliction are urged to go there sharpish. It’s your last chance to take a field trip to the birthplace of the twentieth century in all its beautiful, chaotic squalor.”

“Music, cities and films”

When: Wednesday, March 2

• 16:00 The Movie: What have you Done Today, Mervyn Day (50 minutes). The film will be shown without subtitles.

• 17:00 Discussion with Paul Kelly and Bob Stanley.

Where: at the MEDEA studio, Östra Varvsgatan 11A, Malmö

Moderator: Martin Theander, journalist, writer and director

Bonus Track: After the talk we will show Paul Kelly’s documentary of female punk pop group Dolly Mixtures: Take Three Girls:The Dolly Mixtures Story (40 minutes).

The Medea Talk is for free and followed by a Q&A.

Bob Stanley at Vinylbaren
Tuesday, March 1, Popskolan will arrange a talk with the music icon Bob Stanley, from Saint Etienne, at Vinylbaren, Bergsgatan 18, 18.00-22.00.

If you prefer to listen to this presentation as an audio podcast, please subscribe to the podcast Media, Communication and Design on iTunes or click here for more alternatives.

Arlene Birt presents two projects that she’s done as artist-in-residence at MEDEA and a behind-the-scenes view on her work on how to visualize ‘background stories’. One project is a visual mapping of the sustainability-oriented systems at work within the Västra hamnen area through a collaboration with Unsworn Industries to show this information using the parascope technology they’ve developed. Another project, Bicycling Counts (view video on YouTube), visually communicates the benefits of bicycling – in terms of CO2 saved, money saved and calories burned.

Arlene Birt’s work on sustainability, which rides the line between art and education, has previously been featured in Creative Review (UK), U.S. News and World Report, BusinessWeek.com, worldchanging.com, SEED Magazine, and at the Barcelona Design Museum.

Related posts
Artist-In-Residence Projects Summarized
Arlene Birt – Artist-in-residence

Susan Kozel’s MEDEA talk is about dance and social media. “Social Choreographies” is a research initiative but is also a way of looking at the urban world: seeing how we already ‘dance’ with our technologies and how, if we feel like it, can enhance the embodied quality of our mobile lives. She will talk about the IntuiTweet project that uses Twitter to access and exchange movement intuition. Can a social networking platform also be a way to enhance the performance of every day lives? Do Social Choreographies result? She will also talk about a few earlier projects that integrated bodies with sensing technologies.

MEDEA Talks presents: “Social Choreographies”

Friday, October 29 15:00-17:00

Moderator: Tanja Mangalanayagam, Project Manager at Skånes Dansteater