Reading Time: 8 minutes This is the final installment of a three-part series on the work of the University of Southern Queensland’s Digital Life Lab. Part 1 & Part 2 “Not my world. Not my accent. Not my story.” We could be talking about marginalised communities working with visiting artists, or institutions trying to address social exclusion. We could… Read more »
Reading Time: 6 minutes This is the second of a three-part series on the work of the University of Queensland’s Digital Life Lab. Find Part 1 here. Last time, we touched on a quote by the father of ubiquitous computing, Mark Weiser. Twenty years ago, he wrote that, “Machines that fit the human environment, instead of forcing humans to… Read more »
Reading Time: 5 minutes It’s always, ultimately, been about writing your own story. Modern information science and technology – the knowledge and practices that underpin the ways we entertain and inform ourselves, store knowledge, contact public representatives, commit crime or enforce the law, manage our finances or our health – have been wildly transformed since the heyday of the… Read more »
Reading Time: 8 minutes I have tried again and again to become another person. I have spent years trying to think my way into different people’s heads, language, rhythms. These people have sometimes been real people. More often they have been narrators and characters. Sometimes, though, they have been writers – writers I tried to be. One was the… Read more »
Reading Time: 5 minutes Last year, I almost made an empathy game. It never quite progressed far enough to merit a title, but it did have a main character, some painstakingly-drawn pixel background art, and a mini-game where you could choose what to watch on TV from a list of fictional programmes with names like “Nature Squash” and “Changing… Read more »
Reading Time: 8 minutes A version of this illustrated article was given by J.R. Carpenter as a Keynote Address at the New Media Writing Prize Award Event at Bournemouth University in January 2017. Things Rarely Turn Out the Way I Intend Them To According to a note, I wrote in a primary school scrapbook when I was eleven years… Read more »
Reading Time: 8 minutes How a social enterprise uses football and digital media to bring the problems and perceptions of homelessness into play. Homelessness—one of the world’s most intractable, wicked problems, which is compounded by poor awareness and great stigma—affects millions of people worldwide. Combining an event involving a globally recognised sport—football (soccer)—and an array of digital media tools… Read more »
Reading Time: 5 minutes Recently, my collection of flash fiction, The Paradise Project, was published simultaneously as an ebook and in a book-arts edition using technology that would have been familiar to Johannes Gutenberg: hand-set type impressed on handmade paper with a hand-operated press. As the two versions progressed, I had a stunning realisation: publishing has circled back to its… Read more »
Reading Time: 6 minutes As a publisher of short-run artist books, I often feel like each publication I make is being thrown into a forest. I run over, look around, repeatedly glance over my spreadsheet of sales, and wonder if it has made a sound. With the proliferation of e-books, blogs, and other (free) forms of online publishing, the… Read more »
Reading Time: 7 minutes So how do you define this thing called literature? How does that book in your hand compare to text glowing from a tablet? How do those story podcasts drifting from speakers measure up to the intricately sprayed pieces of textual graffiti luring you into otherwise forgettable laneways? If you asked Christopher Walken as he floats… Read more »