OPEN REFLECTIONS

  • Einmal ist Keinmal

     Memory comes when memory’s old I am never the first to know    –        Fever Ray  – Last Tuesday I attended the excellent lecture series The Old Brand New, in the Stadsschouwburg in Amsterdam. The speakers that evening were the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans and the French dancer/choreographer Boris Charmatz. Their talks were reflections on the evening’s…

  • Highlights from APM – Day 2

    The second day of the Academic Publishing in the Mediterranean region (APM) conference started with a session (entitled Strength in numbers) on cooperation between and the (future) role of university presses.   The first speaker was Roman Schmidt (Sens Public, editor-in-chief of crossXwords), who, in his very inspiring lecture entitled Request for comments: discussing the…

  • Highlights from APM – Day 1

      Last week, on the 19th and 20th of March, the first Academic Publishing in the Mediterranean Region (APM) conference was held, an offshoot of the APE (Academic Publishing in Europe) conference, which was held for the fourth time last January in Berlin. Both conferences want to transgress the traditional sectoral boundaries that exist in…

  • Schyzophonia. On Remix, Hybridization and Fluidity

    I read Lawrence Lessig’s Remix a few months ago, a great book with a stimulating positive approach to the whole piracy and copyright problema, focusing on finding solutions which cater to the increasingly prevailing remixed and remediated forms of digital art and culture, in which the hybrid has become common ground. Lessig discusses new musical…

  • Open Your Mind and Participate! Or Not…

    The online environment offers limitless possibilities for learning and other ways of thought expansion. Like the before mentioned video lectures on the net, the institutions of higher education are increasingly seeing the benefit (for themselves and society at large) to free education from its brick and mortar constraints. But not only YouTube seems to be…

  • Information Dramatization

      Over the last couple of years (how time flies…) I have come across a fair amount of good movies and clips that try to grasp in one way or another some of the aspects of the information revolution we are and have been witnessing around us. From simply trying to state what is information…

  • Ancient texts in new worlds

    I am now the proud owner of number 167 of the hand-bound limited second edition of Anthony Grafton’s little booklet called Codex in crisis.   The colophon states amongst others:   Cover paper Neenah Classic Laid in Peppered Bronze Text paper Mohawk Superfine in Bright White Flyleaf paper Frazier Pegasus in Black     Codex…

  • 2009: Open Access Year
    2009: Open Access Year

    2009 has been declared Open Access year. Thus reports SURF, the collaborative organization for higher education institutions and research institutes in the Netherlands, aimed at breakthrough innovations in ICT. The involved parties are the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Dutch higher education sector…

  • Freedom on trial?

    To continue the freedom of knowledge and information debate on a more practical level, as most of you might have heard, bittorrent tracker The Pirate Bay (which I have written about before here) is currently on trial. Interesting enough the people behind The Pirate Bay and similar Swedish organizations, like Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge,…

  • In praise of Eleutheria

    ‘Beauty is pregnant with potentiality’ – Bracha Ettinger   Again, delving deeper into the rabbit hole, let’s try to entangle the concepts in the web of free knowledge definitions. In the previous post we mainly discussed the difference between free information and free knowledge. But we were not quite finished. We were still basically stuck…

  • Bits of Freedom

    As promised before, I would like to dig a little deeper into the meaning and complexities of the concept of free information, referring to the well known aphorism ‘information wants to be free’. No better way to start than by throwing in some good old definitions we can all find scattered on the web. So…

  • Open Your Mind

    In previous blog posts I mentioned the rise of video surfing and the development of the Internet from a text based medium to one based on remixed mediality, increasingly dominated by an image based culture. This YouTubification of the Internet is seen by some people as a bad development which can be detrimental to our…