Evil Media. Eristic for Digital Societies

Evil media studies was introduced as an effective methodological tool that offers an alternative to a purely technical point of view on information technology as well as the purely aesthetic viewpoint. In this context, we can talk about the turnover from aesthetics to ethics, about leaving the user's perspective in favour of a programmer’s perspective, and about overcoming the isolation of academic debate in favour of participatory research in new media network, i. e. blurring boundaries between theory and experimental practice of digital culture.Zlá mediální studia byla prezentována jako účinný metodologický nástroj, který představuje alternativu k čistě technickému pohledu na informační technologie, stejně jako k čistě estetickému hledisku. V této souvislosti můžeme mluvit o obratu od estetiky k etice, o opuštění hlediska uživatele ve prospěch hlediska programátora, o vystoupení ze závětří akademické debaty ve prospěch participativního výzkumu nových médií, stírajícího hranice mezi teorií a experimentální praxí digitální kultury

Vernacular Creativity, Cultural Participation and New Media Literacy: Photography and the Flickr Network

Livingstone (2004) proposes that most discussions of new media literacy are characterised by historically unresolved tensions between 'critical' or 'enlightenment' views of literacy - polarised philosophical positions that see literacy as a normative and exclusionary construction on the one hand (the 'critical' view); or as an aid to progress and equality that we should aim to extend to all people on the other (the 'enlightenment' view). In this paper, I begin from a position that critically evaluates and balances these two available approaches. Drawing on cultural and media studies perspectives and methodological concerns, the paper historicises and analyses the emerging patterns of cultural competencies and cultural value that work to construct new media literacy for cultural participation in the Flickr photosharing network

A convivial-agonistic framework to theorise public service media platforms and their governing systems

This article addresses the need to find alternative ways to envision, develop and govern public service media’s (PSM) online services and data-driven systems. By critically discussing both opportunities and shortcomings of how European PSM organisations developed their online services and personalisation systems, we argue that in their own platformisation processes, PSM have partially lost their distinctiveness and have not been able to provide viable alternatives to the dominant audiovisual media platforms. Thus, building on Mouffe’s agonistic theory and Illich’s conviviality theory, this article proposes a theoretical framework to radically rethink the guiding principles and rationales driving public service platforms, in order to develop viable alternatives to the currently dominant models. By doing so, we envision the development of such services as convivial tools that are based on three principles, namely, symmetry of power (intended as hackability, openness and algorithmic conviviality), independence and environmental sustainability

Meemoo: Hackable Web App Framework

Meemoo is a modular web app framework with a focus on design for hackability. People can create and modify new media tools with this framework in a web browser without writing code. Tools are made by wiring together pre-built modules. Modules are created with web standards. This thesis consists of a software project and a performance. The software project is Meemoo[1], which is a framework for hackable web apps. The performance consisted of live animation[2] made with the Meemoo framework. The main objectives of this project: • Design a modular dataflow visual programming framework using web technologies. • The framework should afford non-coders the ability to modify creative web apps by configuring wires that represent how modules communicate. • Apps created with the framework should have source code that is easy to read and share. • Web coders should be able to extend the framework by creating modules using web standards. There should be a simple syntax to define the inputs and outputs of a module. --- [1] Project page, demos, and source code: http://meemoo.org/ [2] Performance documentation: http://youtu.be/T_tCyYGLWK

Hackable Instruments: Supporting Appropriation and Modification in Digital Musical Interaction

This paper investigates the appropriation of digital musical instruments, wherein the performer develops a personal working relationship with an instrument that may differ from the designer's intent. Two studies are presented which explore different facets of appropriation. First, a highly restrictive instrument was designed to assess the effects of constraint on unexpected creative use. Second, a digital instrument was created which initially shared several constraints and interaction modalities with the first instrument, but which could be rewired by the performer to discover sounds not directly anticipated by the designers. Each instrument was studied with 10 musicians working individually to prepare public performances on the instrument. The results suggest that constrained musical interactions can promote the discovery of unusual and idiosyncratic playing techniques, and that tighter constraints may paradoxically lead to a richer performer experience. The diversity of ways in which the rewirable instrument was modified and used indicates that its design is open to interpretation by the performer, who may discover interaction modalities that were not anticipated by the designers

Making sense of sensors

The paper explores the different projects resulting from a practical workshop on making and hacking biosensors. The workshop was part of the Sussex-UCSC Digital Media partnership initiative, funded though the University of Sussex (and the EPSRC). The projects and the workshop enable a series of reflections about biosensors and their commercially offered promises and what they might offer to other constituents in digital arts theory and practice. These reflections include: issues about expertise and how to ‘make with sensors’; how inner states of being can be communicated in social situations; non-human relations and the possibility of radical communication beyond the human; and questions about materiality and performance and the role of the manifesto in relation to devices. These points are developed to argue that despite the radical promise of biosensors to offer new forms of communication, the objects they produce often fail. However, the process of design and making open up questions about the technological horizon and possibilities for connection in a device orientated culture

Flash-based security primitives: Evolution, challenges and future directions

Over the last two decades, hardware security has gained increasing attention in academia and industry. Flash memory has been given a spotlight in recent years, with the question of whether or not it can prove useful in a security role. Because of inherent process variation in the characteristics of flash memory modules, they can provide a unique fingerprint for a device and have thus been proposed as locations for hardware security primitives. These primitives include physical unclonable functions (PUFs), true random number generators (TRNGs), and integrated circuit (IC) counterfeit detection. In this paper, we evaluate the efficacy of flash memory-based security primitives and categorize them based on the process variations they exploit, as well as other features. We also compare and evaluate flash-based security primitives in order to identify drawbacks and essential design considerations. Finally, we describe new directions, challenges of research, and possible security vulnerabilities for flash-based security primitives that we believe would benefit from further exploration