Category: media

media, culture and society

Media room project, part 1

It would of course be nice to be able to dedicate weekends just for resting, but since there are always various deadlines that require an academic to work also during weekends, you might as well dedicate all mornings and late evenings to house repair or building projects — logical, isn’t it?

I have been spending some hours lately downstairs doing my “media cave”. This is essentially just a small home theatre room, located at cellar level, but it should offer us rich opportunities for enjoying that DVD or HD movie in the dark, or playing games in the big screen. Looking some high resolution digital photos in this scale would be nice to try out, too.

The starting point was to build a tech centre at the back of the room; this is still half-finished, but I aim for a sturdy table fixed to the back wall, and on top of that there will the ‘equipment tower’: a rotating cabin filled with amplifiers, media players, computers and game decks. It is build for rotation and to such a height since I am too fed up to plugging and unplugging cables that lie among piles of dust somewhere at the back of some heavy piece of furniture. This time, every connection is planned to be accessible at the comfortable, working height. And since I am building it on top of large, round bearing, it rotates easily to show all those connectors and cables (the bearing is one I got from Isku’s “Multiplan” tv furniture, it claims to be able to handle max 100 kg mass). Near the ceiling there is the new video projector, Sanyo PLV-Z5; a nice, moderately priced thing with sharp and colourful image. (I wanted mine in black, and ordered it from Germany where prices are a bit lower.)

The actual projection surface has taken most of work so far: the front wall was uneven fibreglass wallpaper which needed to be whet, dusted and then covered with another, special wallpaper (a smoothing wallpaper, ‘tasoitustapetti’, made by Sandudd; see the link: http://www.sandudd.fi/fileadmin/kuvituskuvat/Tasoitetapettiohje.pdf).

Now I am having a break after one round of painting. The entire back wall will be painted several times with Tikkurila’s Harmony indoor paint, hue H499. It has non-reflective matta surface and as light grey it will give better dark levels on LCD projectors than an entirely white wall would had done. More on its use: http://www.tikkurila.fi/kotimaalarit/index.jsp?cid=valkokangas_edullise&hid=01.01.06.01.
There are still several steps remaining on this, and there are half-a-dozen rooms (and the garden, the courtyard and the garage) with several other projects waiting after this, but — you need to start with the essentials, after all! 😉

Virve Peteri's PhD defence

Virve Peteri’s PhD defence
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

Virve bravely defended her thesis “Mediaksi kotiin” (a study on domestication of media technologies) against a sociologist from Turku (from all places!) today in Linna Building. Her study is one of the few thorough qualitative studies that examines how new media (computers, mobile phones, home theatre equipment etc.) are being taken into the lives and also situated in people’s homes. You can access the entire study online (in Finnish) here: http://acta.uta.fi/teos.phtml?10916

Independence is fire in the air

(I discuss this also in the global group blog I participate in: http://topics192.blogspot.com/2006/12/finnish-independence.html). There was again some really great fireworks in the central square of Tampere today, to celebrate the Finnish Day of Independence; this is also my first YouTube video — what a masterpiece! 🙂

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiHWn7OoNQM

(YouTube video embed code does not work with WordPress, but I attempted to install “MyTube” plugin, and embed the video below using it:)

TiHWn7OoNQM

ubimedia & media adventure seminars

Next week it is again the time of MindTrek mediaweek, the new media festival. I will be presenting in two different seminars, Mediaseikkailu (Media Adventure) is focused on educators, and I will be talking about kids and games; the second one is titled Ubimedia, and there my talk will be on pervasive games. Links: http://www.opeko.fi/mediaseikkailu/ & http://www3.hermia.fi/in_english/ubimedia_seminar/

elephants dream open content movie

Open content production is an important part of digital culture and participatory media culture. This night, I watched Elephants Dream, which is an international collaborative production (coordinated from the Netherlands, some Finns also in the core team). The movie is just 10 minutes and more of a technological proof of concept production-wise, rather than a landmark in any artistic sense (mostly this can be taken as a humoristic homage to the Matrix movies). But to have this kind of tools available in the open source is of course a really promising development.

henryjenkins.org

A brief blurb: please check out professor Henry Jenkins’s blog in http://www.henryjenkins.org/ — with two very interesting new books just out, this site is currently active with posts and discussions covering multitude of phenomena within the converging media culture. A treat!

power of narrative

march of penguinsthe winged migrationContinuing on the subject of DVD and broadening scope of media available in general, some days ago we watched two nature films after each one: La marche de l’empereur (March of the Penguins, 2005) and Le peuple migrateur (Winged Migration, 2001). Both are semi-documentary, French big-screen nature movies (a rather rare species, even with its own tradition, going back to the days of Jacques Cousteau). I liked both, but the Penguin one I truly enjoyed. There was several unforgettable scenes in the Winged Migration, conveying the sense of flying among birds better than anything before, but the March of Penguins was a coherent, powerful narrative. And in a linear, narrative media that truly appears to be an important part.

PS. Check out this year’s programme in Games and Storytelling (starting in Tuesday with Sandy Stone’s presentation); the theme this year is ‘multiculturalism.’

indexing movies with google

I have recently updated my dear DVD movie collection pages (maintained with Collectorz.com Movie Collector software, handy for its Internet database integration search functions), and the public index is here:

http://www.uta.fi/~frans.mayra/movies/

Having some kind of search in this folder is important when I try to check some details of my collection while on the road, but it appears that search is not easy, at least, not in this case. I have attempted using some javascript search functions, and then moved to use the Google search, which almost always works, more or less. But now, for some reason, this folder remains outside Google’s index (even if their robots should reach it just fine), or then there is something else wrong in my search page…

Edit: I worked with the Movie Collector and the Aqua Frames template a bit more, and now the javascript version of search is working. There remains some issues with the template, though.

jenkins on convergence culture

I usually write and read too much in work to have much energy left to blog about research lit over here, but an exception: I have been reading today the new book from Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture (New York University Press, 2006), and I wholeheartly recommend it. Approaching media convergence as human activity rather than bunch of multimedia features, this book discusses important concepts with the help of such cultural texts as Survivor, American Idol, The Matrix, Star Wars, The Sims, Harry Potter, and 2004 American presidential campaign, among many other interesting subjects. Fans, participation and collective intelligence are in Jenkins’ key focus while exploring the ongoing developments in convergence culture.

Amazon.com link.

ds lite, game and comics classics

Today I got my Nintendo DS Lite, plus a pack of classic Atari games from 1970/80s from a Brussels media store. (Already loving what touch screen control means for the gameplay of Centipede, for example.) With some Neil Gaiman comics that previously were missing from my collection, it looks like I have multiple ways to spend the remaining summer vacation.