Monthly Archives: October 2008

Some people are stupid…

Now, I am aware the Creative Commons Licenses are seen as problematic by some people in the FLOSS scene. Having said that, I think it is outrageous when someone uses a fairly generous flavor of the CC license, and still gets ripped off by someone else who refuses to listen when notified that they are violating even those minor requirements.

My friend Aaron posts about such an incident in his blog, and I refer you all to it here, in an effort to at least let people know what a JERK Jillian McDonald is being.

Goth Morris Dancers


Goth Morris Dancers
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

I also went to Folsom Street Fair where there were Goth Morris Dancers. –That’s why I went, of course. Isn’t that what brings most people? 😉

More on the fair later…

And note that neither the other pictures on my Flickr set for the fair, nor the fair’s site itself, are work safe. NOT SAFE AT ALL. Just so you know.

Update…

Ok, I still have two interviews left from summer– Brenno de Winter and Florian Cramer. Florian’s was 3 hours long, and was actually recorded! So that may take several entries at least…

But I’ll put that on hold, for a bit. In a week I leave for IR 9.0, the Association for Internet Researchers 9th annual meeting, which is Copenhagen this year. I got two panels accepted but they got compressed into one because they were short on rooms and we lost a panelist, though that will be a pain, but on the other hand it should be a really fun panel. Also a good one; I know the work of all the participants from articles and other conferences and I am also happy to report that they already sent me full papers, which I’ll link to soon. So none of those half-assed “done on the plane the night before” slide shows here. 🙂

Also, on the last weekend of September, I went to San Francisco for Arse Elektronika where I got to meet Johannes Grenzfurthner and some others from Monochrom. I also met Aaron Muszalski, who was speaking at AE, and Richard Kadrey, author and photographer, who also spoke and did a reading. I managed a short interview with Johannes and talked to Richard at length on Friday before meeting him for an interview on Saturday. –They were all great! So reports on all of that are coming up.

Nancy Mauro-Flude Youthful Veteran of Dutch New Media


Nancy Mauro-Flude
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

As mentioned earlier, I spoke with Nancy and Audrey together and this is Nancy’s half of that conversation, plus info from a few, brief, subsequent chats.

I had been thinking of Nancy as part of the new generation in the Dutch new media art scene, but in fact she’s been involved for 15 years though she only finished her MA at Piet Zwart in Spring 2007. Now on the one hand, maybe I am just ignorant, but also wonder why have I not heard of her before? I’m tempted to think this supports my contention that’s women’s participation is just not being documented. But in fact the scene is not very well documented overall. I will need to look at many examples before I can say for sure that one group of participants has been differently reported than another.

Anyway, Nancy has been on the scene for quite some time but in this conversation we mostly talked about the Genderchangers and differences between that environment and her experiences learning about tech in other venues. Nancy didn’t seem to feel she had encountered as much impatience over her lack of tech experience in academic programs, but she took it for granted that she’d had to prove herself to “the boys” in other tech groups, or just generally techie guys.

I find very surprising how little attention she seems to have garnered, because she has been doing interesting, technically ambitious work for quite some time, yet doesn’t seem to get what I would consider the attention she deserves. Particularly interesting to me are the projects that combine a performance, which is ephemeral, with creation of an artistic tool which may have many future uses. For example, one of her most recent projects is Bag Lady. Follow this link to a description/review by Mirko Schaefer.

I need to talk more with Nancy, and get the story of those 15 years.