I'm looking for examples of websites that have successfully enhanced a research community (academic or artistic) with a dynamic online/social/mutual-portfolio presence. Blog and social media based hubs, perhaps, that showcase the possibilities of web portfolio/research integration for academic and creative purposes. I've been asked to help implement a website/blogging platform for a community of 20 MFA students.

Basically I'd like to gather up some examples of dynamic websites attached to academia (or similar i.e. the arts). These examples will be then passed on to my superiors with an eye to developing our own platform that takes the best approaches we discover and adds/mutates them to our needs. The cream of the crop in terms of design, content and implementation.

The perfect fit would (perhaps) give each student their own (blog) space from day one, and have the content they choose to share dynamically interface with the other students as the course unfolds. We might use it as a portfolio format (the students are studying art and writing) or we might integrate it with the theoretical components of the course, use it to share tutorial feedback, or even open the reading we do to the wider world.

Ideally we will do this cheaply, with open-source software.

Send me some impressive and inspiring examples!

Cheers in advance

[ED: Nearly all of the text in this post is taken from R. Gerald Nelson's independently published, occasionally problematic but more often brilliantly concise treatise DDDDoomed. Anyone concerned with issues of and methods pertaining to digital image dissemination, authorship and context should make an effort to purchase and read this chapbook. I cannot recommend it enough.]

"With new blogs springing up every day, beautiful images & words are springing up with them. I try to credit everything I put on this blog. I know sometimes I fail. Many of the images I feature are scanned by me from an extensive library- I only scanned them. They are not mine to claim. I am always surprised, amused, dismayed when I see bloggers paste watermark images over images they have scanned, or even more surprising- claim ownership of images from magazines, the content of magazines barely having even reached subscribers- by adding footnotes to their blogs like:

I bring all this up because the state of the themed queue - a Disney practice if there ever was one - seems to very much be in a state of flux right now. Less than a month ago (at the time of this writing) Walt Disney World opened her brand new "next generation" queue at the Winnie-the-Pooh attraction in Fantasyland. It is as fully accomplished as one could reasonably expect. Despite the small footprint, there is a very successful woodland atmosphere and some charming activities. Crawl through Pooh's house (much more fun than walking around it, by the way). Stomp on a circle and a gopher pops out of a hole. Turn a crank on a box filled with balls to make them jump around (while wondering what this has to do with the 100 Acre Wood). But honestly, it's all very nice.

by Hito Steyerl

The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.

The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution. The poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction. The image is liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digital uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance. The poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming.

by Brian Holmes

===> INTRODUCTIONS

-The Affectivist Manifesto:

Artistic Critique for the 21st Century

-Toward the New Body:

Marcelo Expósito’s “Entre Sueños“

-Recapturing Subversion:

Twenty Twisted Rules for the Culture Game

.

===> POTENTIALS

01-Network Maps, Energy Diagrams:

Structure and Agency in the Global System

02-Do-It-Yourself Geopolitics:

Global Protest and Artistic Process

03-The Potential Personality:

Trans-Subjectivity in the Society of Control

Now available for free online:

The Mind's I: Fantasies and reflections on self and soul (ISBN 0-553-34584-2) is a 1981 book composed and arranged by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett. It is a collection of essays and creations about the nature of the mind and the self, tied together with commentary by the editors.

This book is an exploration of the human mind and soul, ranging from early philosophical and fictional musings on a subject that could seemingly only be examined in the realm of thought, to works from the 20th century where the nature of the self became a viable topic for scientific study.

For folks that haven't checked it yet, the newly re-launched SAME HAT TUMBLR is up and running!

The SAME HAT! Tumblr is curated and run by 8 contributors. It features art/videos/music and random whatever from the bowels of the internet-- all stuff loosely related to the imagined community that is "SAME HAT".

You may have heard of determinism, the theory that absolutely everything that happens is causally determined to happen exactly as it does by what has already gone before — right back to the beginning of the universe. You may also believe that determinism is true. (You may also know, contrary to popular opinion, that current science gives us no more reason to think that determinism is false than that determinism is true.) In that case, standing on the steps of the store, it may cross your mind that in five minutes’ time you’ll be able to look back on the situation you’re in now and say truly, of what you will by then have done, “Well, it was determined that I should do that.” But even if you do fervently believe this, it doesn’t seem to be able to touch your sense that you’re absolutely morally responsible for what you next.

The case of the Oxfam box, which I have used before to illustrate this problem, is relatively dramatic, but choices of this type are common. They occur frequently

The question is pretty simple: in the not-too-distant future you and I will have had our entire genomes sequenced (except perhaps those of you in California) - so how much hard drive space will our genomes take up?

Andrew calculates that a genome will take up about two CDs worth of data, but that's only if it's stored in one possible format (a text file storing one copy of each and every DNA letter in your sequence). There are other ways you might want to keep your genome depending on what your purpose is.

The executive summary For those who don't want to read through the tedious details that follow, here's the take-home message: if you want to store the data in a raw format for later re-analysis, you're looking at between 2 and 30 terabytes (one terabyte = 1,000 gigabytes). A much more user-friendly format, though, would be as a file containing each and every DNA letter in your genome, which would take up around 1.5 gigabytes (small enough for three genomes to fit on a standard data

This sort of acting out is typical behavior from somebody whose parents didn't give them enough attention growing up.

Having once made the statement above, I have declined all opportunities to enlarge upon it or defend it. That seemed to be a fool's errand, especially given the volume of messages I receive urging me to play this game or that and recant the error of my ways. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say "never," because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.

What stirs me to return to the subject? I was urged by a reader, Mark Johns, to consider a video of a TED talk given at USC by Kellee Santiago, a designer and producer of video games. I did so. I warmed to Santiago immediately. She is bright, confident, persuasive.

Four times a year 3quarksdaily runs a competition for great blog writing. This month it's the Arts and Literature prize. An article of mine from October (Mapping the Cracks: Art-Objects in Motion) is in the running, all I need now are some votes...

• To check out the details of the prize go here
• To see the list of nominations go here
• To vote directly go here

That should keep you busy, there's lots and lots to read. But please remember, vote for my article: Mapping the Cracks: Art-Objects in Motion

My mild-mannered English husband Adam lives quite a colorful existence in his dreams. Having benefited from hours of delight at his dead of night musings, I thought it was only fair to share them with the world.

Critics have called alien epic Avatar a version of Dances With Wolves because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy. Spoilers...

Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it's a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?

Avatar imaginatively revisits the crime scene of white America's foundational act of genocide, in which entire native tribes and civilizations were wiped out by European immigrants to the American continent. In the film, a group of soldiers and scientists have set up shop...

Another binary myth fundamental to Western culture is the eternally popular hubris/nemesis complex. According to this idea, those who transgress against the natural order always get their just desserts. Hubris is a Greek word, meaning, “an impious disregard of the limits governing human action in an orderly universe” (Encyclopedia Britannica 2006). The great and gifted are most susceptible to sin, and in Greek tragedy usually the hero suffers from this tragic flaw. Expressed in countless myths, ranging from the Tower of Babel to Jurassic Park, hubris applies to various breeds of arrogant and boastful behavior. Often it is an evil or misguided scheme to enhance and extend power with the use of tools.

This general arrangement seems to be elucidated metaphorically by the second law of thermodynamics (all closed systems eventually get consumed by entropy).....

Three frames is all you need

Welcome to the Atlas Obscura, a compendium of this age's wonders, curiosities, and esoterica. The Atlas Obscura is a collaborative project with the goal of cataloguing all of the singular, eccentric, bizarre, fantastical, and strange out-of-the-way places that get left out of traditional travel guidebooks and are ignored by the average tourist. If you're looking for miniature cities, glass flowers, books bound in human skin, gigantic flaming holes in the ground, phallological museums, bone churches, balancing pagodas, or homes built entirely out of paper, the Atlas Obscura is where you'll find them.

This is a remarkably uninformed article about what effect a huge nuclear war would have upon the human race. The author seems to think that the radiation would create a race of bald, big brained super humans (Homo Superior) with no wisdom teeth and only four toes on each foot. Depending on the number and disposition of these new super humans they would either a) kill all the normal humans, b) be killed by all the normal humans, c) enslave the humans, or d) co-operate with humans and help them.

Of course this all relies on the well known evolutionary behaviour of synchronized mass-mutation, where by large numbers of a species spontaneously develop the exact same set of beneficial mutations.

Adding to the author’s credibility is the caption on the third page: “These cows were exposed to the radiations of the first atomic blast in New Mexico, in 1943.”

Funny, I always thought the Trinity test was in July of 1945. But apparently it was in 1943. The plot thickens.

I, for one, welcome ou

A new brain-imaging study is shedding light on what it means to "get lost" in a good book — suggesting that readers create vivid mental simulations of the sounds, sights, tastes and movements described in a textual narrative while simultaneously activating brain regions used to process similar experiences in real life.

"Psychologists and neuroscientists are increasingly coming to the conclusion that when we read a story and really understand it, we create a mental simulation of the events described by the story," says Jeffrey M. Zacks, study co-author and director of the Dynamic Cognition Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis.