What is context? Since context is a concept that can be applied to many domains and functions as a base for interdisciplinary research (and practice), it is relevant to start here with a brief description of this concept, as described by Kaiyu Wan: The word “context” is derived from the Latin words con (meaning “together”)…

Eef Masson addressed in her lecture “Experience and Experimentation in the Sensory Moving Image Archive Project” several issues with regards to digital archives, and more specifically in the context of the Sensory Moving Image Archive Project. The aim of this project is “to establish how these groups [artists, the creative industries and researchers] can explore,…

The digitization of collections and archives adds a new dimension to the pre-existing materiality of sources; this implies that the research can be done on a much larger scale (Van Dijck 2016). For this reason, the development of tools for research is getting more and more critical. With digitization, the use of the archives has…

The archive in digital space, whether born-digital or digitized from an existing collection, presents us with a variety of challenges related to its ontology. The first instinct may be to say that the digital is a deceptively ‘flattening’ medium—while it ostensibly contains all other media, it reduces their materiality to pieces of software displayed on a…

Archives, as we know them, are usually associated with academic fascinations as repositories and containers of the past, proving old materiality with an added value of originality and therefore, validity. According to Helen Freshwater, the ways of approaching the archives have changed after their consolidation as an accumulation of documentary evidence in the first decades…

The metaphors we use to describe our thoughts, practices and projects matter. In this TiM session, Eef Masson presented the Sensory Moving Image Archive -SEMIA-. This is an interdisciplinary project that challenges our traditional conceptions about what a digital archive is and what could it be. Their point of departure is the distinction between searching…

Arun Saldanha’s lecture, which was called Stratification of cyberspace: from experience to waste, was for me a step outside of my academic comfort zone. In my own research, I focus mainly on theatre and spectatorship which I am exploring through a cognitive neuroscientific lens. This does not mean that Saldanha did not address interesting and…

When speaking about digital media and cyberspace, we—scholars, critics, users—still tend to forget that even the most ephemeral-seeming media have a material past, present, and future. While this kind of alienation is a problem of all consumption under global capitalism, awareness of the specific histories of digital commodities like videogames strikes me as only a…

What is the connection between technology, environment, and race? Are the utopic promises of an inclusive space in the ‘technosphere’[1] impossible to reach? Is it time to question how the stratification of cyberspace leads to an uneven distribution of global scale? Arun Saldanha reflected upon some aspects of these questions. The title of his presentation…

“Geographers talk about maps, distances and all questions related to objective space science, but where does that leave the experience of a place?” (Saldunha, 2019). Drawing on Guattari’s analysis on the computerization and evaluation of the technological evolution, Arun Saldanha started his talk by discussing the experience and globalization in geography. For the market to…