Discursive Objects

17-25 October 2015, 11h – 18h Gagelstraat 44, 5616RR, EIndhoven Aldo Bakker, Maarten Baas, David Bernstein, Martin John Callanan, Chmara Rosinke, Sarah Daher & guests, The Grantchester Pottery, Richard Healy, Anton Hjertstedt, Vincent Knopper, Pieteke Korte, Nynke Koster, Pottery Yacht Club, Corinne Mynatt, n-o-m-a-n, Studio Minale Maeda, Superstudio The first exhibition for Work at Home situates art, design, and transdisciplinary practices in the home space. In what might be a likely setting for ‘design’, outside of the white cube it presents an alternate context for how we experience contemporary art today. The presentation of ‘art’ and ‘design’ suggests a mutual inclusion of both devices which we use to frame human experience. Beyond ‘home exhibition’ histories, the structure of the visitor experience is as a lived-in space, and presents potentials of what a contemporary collection of art and design might look like today. Presenting in the home creates a new paradigm that explores the evolving publicisation of our private space

Copy rights: The politics of copying and creativity

This article analyses the politics of copyright and copying. Copyright is an increasingly important driver of the modern economy, but this does not exhaust its significance. It matters, we argue, not just for the distribution of rewards and resources in the creative industries, but as a site within which established political concerns – collective and individual interests and identities - are articulated and negotiated, and within which notions of ‘originality’, ‘creativity’ and ‘copying’ are politically constituted. Set against the background of the increasing economic value attributed to the creative industries, the impact of digitalization on them, and the European Union’s Digital Single Market strategy, the article reveals how copyright policy, and the underlying assumptions about ‘copying’ and ‘creativity’, express (often unexamined) political values and ideologies. Drawing on a close reading of policy statements, official reports, court cases, and interviews with stakeholders, we explore the multiple political aspects of copyright, showing how copyright policy operates to privilege particular interests and practices, and to acknowledge only specific forms of creative endeavour

Copying, copyright and originality; imitation, transformation and popular musicians

With copyright becoming ever more important for business and government, this article argues for a more nuanced understanding of the practices and values associated with copying in popular music culture and advocates a more critical approach to notions of originality. Drawing from interviews with working musicians this article challenges the approaches to copying and popular music that pitch corporate notions of piracy against creative sharing by citizens. It explores differing approaches to the circulation of recordings and identifies three distinct types of creative copying: i) learning through imitation, ii) copying as transformation, iii) copying for commercial opportunity. The article then considers how copying is caught between a commercial necessity for familiar musical products that must conform to existing expectations and a copyright legislative rationale requiring original sounds with individual owners. The article highlights how legacies from a long history of human copying as a means of acquiring knowledge and skills leads to a collision of creative musical practices, commercial imperatives and copyright regulation and results in a series of unavoidable tensions around originality and copying that are a central characteristic of cultural production

Sowing the Wind and Reaping the Whirlwind? The Effect of Wind Turbines on Residential Well-Being

This paper investigates the effect of wind turbines on residential well-being in Germany, using panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and a unique, novel data set on wind turbines for the time period between 2000 and 2012. Using a Geographical Information System (GIS), it calculates the distance from households to the nearest wind turbines to determine whether an individual is affected by disamenities, e.g. through visual pollution. The depth of our unique, novel data set on wind turbines, which has been collected at the regional level and which includes, besides their exact geographical coordinates, their construction dates, allows estimating the causal effect of wind turbines on residential well-being, using difference-in-difference propensity-score and spatial matching techniques. We demonstrate that the construction of a new wind turbine in a treatment area of 4000 metres around households has a significantly negative impact on life satisfaction. Moreover, this effect is found to be of transitory nature. Contrasting the implicit monetary valuation with the damage through CO2 emissions avoided by wind turbines, wind power turns out to be a favorable technology despite robust evidence for negative externalities

Amsterdam CineGrid Exchange A distributed high-quality digital media solution

The SNE group is an active participant in the CineGrid initiative. We built the first integrated CineGrid portal. In this report we describe the rationale behind the architecture of our solution. We provide a component-wise description of design and functionality

Techno-economic assessment of the use of solvents in the scale-up of microbial sesquiterpene production for fuels and fine chemicals

Sesquiterpenes are a group of versatile, 15-carbon molecules with applications ranging from fuels to fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals. When produced by microbial fermentation at laboratory scale, solvents are often employed for reducing product evaporation and enhancing recovery. However, it is not clear whether this approach constitutes a favorable techno-economic alternative at production scale. In this study empirical correlations, mass transfer and process flow sheeting models were used to perform a techno-economic assessment of solvent-based processes at scales typical for flavors and fragrances (25 MT year−1) and the fuel market (25 000 MT year−1). Different solvent-based process options were compared to the current state of the art, which employs surfactants for product recovery. The use of solvents did reduce the sesquiterpene evaporation rate during fermentation and improved product recovery but it resulted in costs that were higher than, or similar to, the base case due to the additional equipment cost for solvent-product separation. However, when selecting solvents compatible with the final product formulation (e.g. in a kerosene enrichment process), unit costs as low as $0.7 kg−1 can be achieved while decreasing environmental impact.BT/Bioprocess EngineeringBT/Biotechnology and Societ

Emergent innovation through the coevolution of informal and formal media economies

Well-established distinctions between amateur and professional are blurring as the impact of social media, changes in cultural consumption, and crises in copyright industries’ business models are felt across society and economy. I call this the increasingly rapid co-evolution of the formal market and informal household sectors and analyse it through the concept of ‘social network markets’ – individual choices are made on the basis of other’s choices and such networked preferencing is enhanced by the growing ubiquity of social media platforms. This may allow us better to understand sources of disruption and innovation in audiovisual production and distribution in wealthy Western markets which are as significant as those posed by informal practices outside the West. I examine what is happening around the monetization and professionalization of online video (YouTube, for example) and the socialization of professional production strategies (transmedia, for example) as innovation from the margins