Re: FW: [IP] more on Ireland counts the cost of MIT Media Lab fiasco

[Florian Cramer]

Am Mittwoch, 05. Oktober 2005 um 19:49:55 Uhr (-0400) schrieb Gurstein, Michael:
> > Original URL:  > mit_media_lab_ireland/>
> >
> > Ireland counts the cost of MIT Media Lab fiasco
> >
> > By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco (andrew.orlowski at
> > theregister.co.uk)

[...]

> > The European Media Lab was launched at the height
> > of the tech bubble but closed its doors in
> > January this year. Its output may disappoint the
> > Irish government, but it won't surprise anyone
> > familiar with the original MIT Media Lab.
> >
> > [snip]

You left out the juicy bit:

| The institution was founded in the 1980s by Nicholas Negroponte
| as a way of relieving gullible corporations of their money. The
| haphazard and often whimsical "research" was scorned by real computer
| scientists, but succeeding in its goal of attracting attention from
| a gadget-happy mass media. Negroponte even funded his own tech porn
| publication: Wired magazine, to promote the utopian adventure.
|
| And they're still at it. This year we featured the Labs' Clocky - a
| shagpile-covered alarm clock that runs away from you.
|
| The only difference with MIT Media Lab Eire is that the taxpayer,
| rather than, private donors, were invited to sponsor the playpen.
|
| We can't improve on the Sunday Times description of the scandal,
| written by John Burns, which begins thus:
|
| "One of its biggest research projects was a sensor to read peoples
| minds. But MediaLab Europe (MLE), a project that cost the Irish
| taxpayer almost ¤40m, must have thought the Irish government was
| already telepathic. It refused to tell ministers how many people it
| employed, what they were paid, or to provide audited accounts."

This seems somewhat symptomatic for the whole so-called "new media" cyberkitsch,
and I wouldn't be too sad if these were the signs of its ultimate collapse and
vanishing. I wouldn't be surprised if in one or two decades, people will 
consider
"new media" retrofuturist camp, just as "cybernetics" before.

-F

-- 
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Creative Industries in Beijing: Initial Thoughts

[Ned Rossiter]

[this brief report has been written for Leonardo magazine and the ISEA'06 Latin
American-Pacific/Asia New Media Initiative, http:// 
isea2006.sjsu.edu/prnms.html]


'Creative Industries in Beijing: Initial Thoughts'

Ned Rossiter


During a teaching stint at Tsinghua University in May this year, and then
following the trans-Siberian conference organised by Ephemera Journal in
September, I started preliminary research on creative industries in Beijing. 
What
follows is a brief report on my experiences, perceptions and meetings in 
Beijing.
My interest is to discern the constellation of forces that might be taken into
consideration in future analyses as the research project develops.  I should 
also
state that this brief overview of Beijing's creative industries is part of a
collaborative project that undertakes a comparative study of international
creative industries.  The research seeks to go beyond economistic 
interpretations
of creative industries by focussing on inter-relations and scalar tensions 
between
geo- politics and trans-local, global cultural flows as they manifest around
issues such as labour conditions, IPRs, social-technical networks and cultural
practices.

 46rom the start, there are many factors and variables that make it questionable
to even invoke the term "creative industries" in the Chinese context. Such
complications amount to a problematic in translation of the creative industries
concept.  For the most part, there is little variation at a policy level as
governments internationally incorporate the basic ingredients of creative
industries rhetoric (clusters, mapping documents, value-chains, creative cities,
co-productions, urban renewal, knowledge economies, self-entrepreneurs, etc.) 
into
their portfolio of initiatives that seek to extract economic value from the
production of cultural content and provision of services. This would suggest 
that
creative industries, as a policy concept, is divorced from the materialities 
that
compose cultural economies as distinct formations in national and metropolitan
settings.

Yet even an overview as cursory as the one I set out here, it's clear that there
is vibrant activity and energy going on across a range of cultural sectors in
Beijing. One of the most notable is the Dashanzi Art District, situated in the
outer limits of the city, not far from the airport expressway.  Designed by
Bauhaus architects from the GDR in the 1950s as an electronics factory for the
military, 798 Space has emerged over the past few years as the scene of
avant-garde, experimental work. Adjacent galleries, performance spaces, fashion
and design outlets, bookshops, cafes, studios and artist's residencies provide 
the
requisite signals of a cultural complex that is often compared to the high 
moments
of New York's Soho.

While Dashanzi is very much a space under construction and inseparable from both
its history as a military electronics factory and contemporary art cultures
peculiar to Beijing, there is nonetheless a strong sense of familiarity - it's
hard not to associate Dashanzi with the phenomenon of high cultural tourism and
cultural precincts common now in many global cities. Such a perception is
reinforced in terms of the economic geography of the area: real estate 
speculation
and expensive apartment development have played a shaping force in the past few
years, with artist's rents escalating and plans by government and the landowner
Seven-Star Group to demolish the factory site and establish a high-tech
development zone.

According to newspaper reports and the Wikipedia entry on Dashanzi, such a
development would enable re-employment of some of the 10,000 laid-off workers 
that
Seven-Star Group is responsible for. Should these plans go ahead, there may well
be construction and basic servicing work available for some, but it is hard to 
see
the possibility of long term employment for these workers - some of whom are 
still
working in a few small factories that continue to operate on the site. The
proposal for the high-tech zone is modelled on Beijing's so-called Silicon 
Valley
in Zhongguancun, which is located near the prestigious Tsinghua and Peking
universities. Tsinghua University in particular has strong R&D links with this
high-tech investment zone, and make the privatisation and R&D efforts by
Australia's elite universities notably underwhelming at the level of
infrastructure and pace of development. Whether or not such developments in
Beijing and other Chinese mega-cities are able to become profit-generating
innovation machines is another matter. Or perhaps it's enough to be in the
business of providing high-skill services across a range of geo-economic scales
rather than expect content to be king. In any case, the business model for the
majority of new media content production in Western economies remains haphazard 
at
best.

Over the past five years, Zhongguancun has transformed from a modest residential
area to a high-tech commercial zone (albei