Growing older

I am collecting links, quotes and references for a presentation in Leusden next week. Together with my scientific assistant I am off to the conference Games of Late Modernity, where we - or he mainly - will present a co-written presentation on play with identity. Now the games and play part - including the part about Huizinga - I am fairly confident about, but modernity isn't exactly what I have been spending the last 30 years on... I thought.

But here I am, letting myself sink into Giddens and Bauman, only to discover how familiar this is. No, I am still not an expert, and if I try to claim that the real modernity geeks will shoot me down like a sitting duck. But the more I read the more I realise how much of this development of paradigms I have lived. The seperation of space and time, disembedding and reflexivity - I have seen it happen, and the everyday reading, watching, writing, in general, living with eyes and ears open has led me to an understanding which is almost more like lived time - the argument becomes embedded in my lived experience, not disembedded and learned as mediated experience.

Or is it?

It is refreshing to sit and ponder the ambivalence of experience, and feel the contradictions like an ache in my bones, like the wrinkles of my skin. I feel both ancient (I have to be, in order to feel I have lived modernity), and surprisingly young (I feel transported back to the early eighties, as I try to figure out where I lost All that is solid melts into air. And the only reason I remember that phrase is because it is so poetic.)

Yes, I know, I write as if I am 80 years old. But the truth is that I feel like I am at a perfect age: old enough that I have decades of experience as a thinking, analysing being to draw on when I need to contextualise new knowledge, young enough to have energy, strength and an immediacy of presence needed to learn new things. At this point in life, growing older is still a good thing. At least as long as you have a really good hairdresser, and don't worry too much about having to wear glasses.

Knitting a community - at IR 13.0

While I have noticed that people start giggling the moment I start to talk about knitting, I never knew how surprising it would be for people to discover that I knit. Seriously, I am a middle aged Norwegian woman, grown up in a small town, and I have children. The chance that I would not at least know how to knit is very small, and it's quite likely that I am decent at it. As a matter of fact, I suck compared to my Norwegian neighbours and relatives, likely because I spend so much time gaming.

Now that's said, I am presenting some very early thoughts on traditions, crafts and community exemplified by knitting here at IR 13.0, and I want to share with you some links from the presentation.

Davadottir sells her own creations, and shares the love of knitting with her mother.
Majken's corner is the blog of Davadottir's mother, who still lives in the Faeroe islands.
"Prunes from everyday life" is the blog of another woman from the Faeroe islands who shares her patterns and the stories of her past with us.
I am not using examples from Ravelry, but from Strikkeoppskrifter.no - a norwegian site for sharing patterns.
Gudrun & Gudrun are the designers of the sweaters from "The Killing".
On the blog "slaughter a holy cow" Liselotte asks who are copying.
The second sweater used by Sarah Lund did not cause the same kind of controversy, as Gudrun & Gudrun published the pattern.

And for some more links I looked at, but didn't manage to stuff into this presentation, two of my tags on delicious.com.

Transformed Play

Tomorrow the conference The Transformative Museum starts up in Roskilde, and I will be there together with two colleagues from ITU, Bjarki Valtysson and Nanna Holdgaard. Their contributions can be found, among many other objects, at the conference paper site. Go read them, they have put a lot more effort into their work than I have managed to make time for this spring. My presence there started out of a desire to look at and write about everyday culture, under the working title "Mundane and digital" at the ITU, and I have been cooperating with Bjarki and Nanna, as well as Susana Tosca and Lisbeth Klastrup. The paper for this conference is an attempt to catch still half-formed ideas, and it shows. Still, it feels like a useful direction to go, if I want to combine my very varied fields, those of strategic communication, social media and role-play games. And here it is, for those with special interests: limited time only, the latest edition of Transformed Play, written for The Transformative Museum, Roskilde 2012.

Social side of gaming

An interesting workshop in Stuttgart in July, for those who are into the fact that people can actually be social and gamers at the same time!

There's a call for papers, and I have had the tip of a claw in there, fiddling with it, but the University of Hohenheim crew is running this without me.

Hopefully I'll be able to be there. Germany is an interesting country, gradually opening up to the more anglified traditions of game studies, and I haven't been to Stuttgart in more than 30 years.

IR 11.0 is over - thanks all

There should have been some kind of face-to-face debrief after IR 11.0, and I will at some point in the not too far future write the AOIR board with what I think they need to know (functionality of the conference organising system f.ex.,) but for now I'll just take it here.

As some noticed, I was extremely ambivalent on facebook before I went to Gothenburg. I was ambivalent in real life as well. Although some felt that there was good reason to criticize the decisions I had made about the schedule and the responses they got to their requests before the conference, neither decisions nor responses were based on lack of consideration. I had a certain number of rooms, a certain number of contributions, and a certain number of hours, and I had to make all of that sum up to a functional conference. However, the scheduling, gruelling work that it was, was just the tip of the iceberg. It covered the last 4 months of a one-year effort, an effort that started in October 2009.

This conference removed that already elusive concept "spare time," and even cut into the sacred raiding time. Rather than settling to blog, play with photos, write friends or chat, when I picked up the computer I'd start responding to emails or work on some conference detail. I am not whining. You see - I liked that. I got to write a lot of people I have not seen for years, people I have only read (about) and some total strangers who turned out to be extremely interesting scholars. What's not to like!

However, I did get tired. The last weeks before the conference I just had to give up on raiding all together, because with teaching and administration and the conference, I was working 10-12 hour days. Not quite that long weekends, but still, it's not like I followed regulations. And so, as the conference approached I dreaded it more and more, as the workload just kept increasing.

Then it started.

Most things went right. Some went wrong, and nobody could have done anything about it. (I am still really sad about Jon Bing being ill though. I think that was the biggest low of the conference.) Some were fixed before they went really wrong. But most of all, I loved the fact that people were happy there. The compact conference site, the excellent food and the work people put into their presentations and their research - as well as into each other - made it all work out surprisingly well. And the feedback afterwards still warms me, even if I was so spent at the banquet I couldn't even say thank you politely.



I am still proud of this plaque though, although I really don't know where to put it or how to deal with actually owning it. Makes for a fun conversation piece, and yes, it does warm, along with the praise on the aoir list and the twitter stream, now that I have realised the conference was a success!

Games: Design and Research

Next week there's a small, but ambitious conference in Volda: Games: Design and Research. It's organised by Norwegian game researchers loosely connected, mainly Kristine Jørgensen (conference chair), Ragnhild Tronstad, Faltin Karlsen, Sara Brinch and me, and financed by Volda University College, University of Bergen, and the Norwegian Research Council.

If you are in the neighbourhood, feel free to drop by for a lecture or two. This conference can not accomodate more than the people participating, but the lectures are open.

IR 11.0 chairs

No, we don't have a problem with seating for the Internet Research 11.0 conference. I just thought you'd like to see the conference chairs! Here we are, from the left to the right: conference co-chairs Ylva Hård af Segerstad, Ann-Sofie Axelsson, and me, the program chair, in Gothenburg discussing the work that needs to be done before we meet you all in October.

IR 11.0 submission guidelines

As program chair for IR 11.0 I get several questions along the same lines. So, for those out there who might actually google me in order to find answers, here's the submission guidelines for IR 11.0 Sustainability, Participation, Action:

Submission guidelines for IR 11.0 Sustainability, Participation, Action

All contributions should be submitted to https://www.conftool.net/aoir-ir11/

Each individual is invited to submit a proposal for 1 paper or 1 presentation. A person may also propose a panel session, which may include a second paper that they are presenting. An individual may also submit a roundtable proposal. You may be listed as co-author on additional papers as long as you are not presenting them. This limits each participant to three presentations, all in different formats.

For all participants: Please choose your topics of interest and expertise when you register for the conference. Also please indicate if you wish to review for the conference.

PAPERS (individual or multi-author) - submit abstract of 600-800 words. Please both cut and paste the abstract in, as well as upload one document either in .doc or .pdf format. The system does not accept other formats. Please indicate all co-authors, and nominate a main author, but be sure to remove all identifying information from the abstract itself. Be aware that you can only be the main author of one paper. Full references and formal citations are not required in abstracts, but please be aware that one main issue with papers not accepted to conferences is when they don't demonstrate a good working knowledge of other relevant research, discourses and corresponding authors. If you choose to not use formal citations and references, make certain to attribute ideas, thoughts and quotes to the correct sources in the text.

FULL PAPERS (OPTIONAL): For submitters requiring peer review of full papers, manuscripts of up to 8,000 words will be accepted for review. These will be reviewed and judged separately from abstract submissions. Please cut and paste the abstract in, and upload the papers either in .pdf or .doc format. The system does not accept other formats. Please indicate all co-authors, and nominate a main author. Be aware that you can only be the main author of one paper. Be sure to remove all identifying information from your paper.



PANEL PROPOSALS - submit a 600-800 word description of the panel theme, plus 250-500 word abstract for each paper or presentation. Indicate all participants on the submission site but not in the body of the proposal. Collect and upload the descriptions for all participants in one document, either in .pdf or .doc format. Finally, please cut and paste the submission into the system.

ROUNDTABLE PROPOSALS - submit a statement indicating the nature of the roundtable discussion and interaction, in less than 800 words. Indicate all participants and their expertise in relation to the proposed topic. Upload the proposal in one document, either in .pdf or .doc format. Also cut and paste the submission into the system.

Papers, presentations and panels will be selected from the submitted proposals on the basis of multiple blind peer review, coordinated and overseen by the Program Chair.

Important dates, as of 19 February 2010:

Submissions Due 28 February 2010
Notifications of Acceptance 28 Apr 2010
Abstract Revisions Due 15 May 2010
Full Papers Due 21 August 2010
Pre-Conference Workshops 20 Oct 2010
Main Conference 21-23 Oct 2010

IR 11.0 - Sustainability, Participation, Action

The conference website is up and running! It is still being built and tweeked, but even so it's infinitely better than no site at all! Add this website to your bookmarks, right along the URL for where to submit your paper!

IR 11.0 submission site now open

To submit your papers for IR 11.0 - Sustainability, Participation, Action, please use the submission site to be found here.

The CFP can be found here, but the link to the conference organising site has not yet been added.

Games and entertainment technology

IADIS - International Association for Development of the Information Society - are organising a conference in Freiburg, Germany, in July 2010. They have a call for papers, deadline is February 19th, and the conference is called GET - Games and Entertainment Technology. The CFP is very wide, generally, if you do something related to electronic games as a researcher, designer, programmer, teacher or artist, you'll fit. They also invite for very diverse types of presentations, from posters to full papers, as well as corporate exhibitions and showcases.

Sustainability, Participation, Action

Call for Papers
Internet Research 11.0 - Sustainability, Participation, Action

The 11th Annual International and Interdisciplinary Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR)
October 21-23, 2010 University of Gothenburg/Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

The challenge of this conference is to find multiple avenues for participation and action towards a sustainable future. In a society increasingly aware of social and ecological imbalance, many people now see information and communication technologies as key technologies for solving problems associated with an unsustainable future. However, while information technology may solve some problems, it can magnify others. As pointed out by world forums such as the United Nations and the European Commission, use of ICTs contributes to the unsustainable consumption of energy and resources. Similarly, unequal access and exploitative practices remind us that IT is not a utopian answer to complex social problems. A sustainable future is not only about greening processes and products at any cost, but also entails social responsibility, cultural protection and economic growth. Therefore the conference has a multi-dimensional focus, where the Internet is seen as a possible liberating, empowering and greening tool.

The conference will focus on how the Internet can function as a conduit for the development of greater global equality and understanding, a training ground for participation in debates and cross-cultural projects and a tool for mutual action; in short a technology of empowerment. The flip-side of the internet as a tool for empowerment is the issue of exploitation. Exploitation of resources and people is what has led to the current crisis, and issues of exploitation are highly relevant online, from abuse of the commons to censorship, fraud and loss of privacy and the protection of the rights of the individual.

Sustainability, Participation, Action invites scholars to consider issues concerning empowerment and/or exploitation in relation to the Internet. We ask scholars to specifically consider issues concerning integrity, knowledge production, and ethics in relation to the Internet and sustainable development. How do we, as Internet researchers, regard our work in relation to the unsustainable current situation and the possibilities of a sustainable future? How far can we take the Internet, and with it, people, individuals, groups and societies in order to create an arena for participation and action, all key elements in imagining a sustainable future? How can we apply previous knowledge to serve future solutions?

To this end, we call for papers, panel proposals, and presentations from any discipline, methodology, and community, and from conjunctions of multiple disciplines, methodologies and academic communities that address the conference themes, including papers that intersect and/or interconnect the following:


Internet and an equal and balanced society
Internet as an arena for participation
Internet as a tool and arena for action
Internet and an informed knowledge society
Internet and a green society
Internet and e‐commerce, dematerialization and transportation
Internet and security, integrity and surveillance
Internet and a healthy society
Internet as an arena for cultural expressions, and source of a culture of its own.

Sessions at the conference will be established that specifically address the conference themes, and we welcome innovative, exciting, and unexpected takes on those themes. We also welcome submissions on topics that address social, cultural, political, legal, aesthetic, economic, and/or philosophical aspects of the Internet beyond the conference themes. In all cases, we welcome disciplinary and interdisciplinary submissions as well as international collaborations from both AoIR and non‐AoIR members.


SUBMISSIONS
We seek proposals for several different kinds of contributions. We welcome proposals for traditional academic conference PAPERS and we also welcome proposals for ROUNDTABLE SESSIONS that will focus on discussion and interaction among conference delegates, as well as organized PANEL PROPOSALS that present a coherent group of papers on a single theme. All submissions should be submitted here.


DEADLINES
Call for Papers Released: 24 November 2009
Submissions Due: 21 February 2010 (Details here)
Notification: 21 April 2010
Full papers due: 21 August 2010

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS
All papers and presentations in this session will be evaluated in a standard blind peer review.

Format
PAPERS (individual or multi-author) - submit abstract of 600-800 words
FULL PAPERS (OPTIONAL): For submitters requiring peer review of full papers, manuscripts of up to 8,000 words will be accepted for review. These will be reviewed and judged separately from abstract submissions
PANEL PROPOSALS - submit a 600-800 word description of the panel theme, plus 250-500 word abstract for each paper or presentation
ROUNDTABLE PROPOSALS - submit a statement indicating the nature of the roundtable discussion and interaction
Papers, presentations and panels will be selected from the submitted proposals on the basis of multiple blind peer review, coordinated and overseen by the Program Chair. Each individual is invited to submit a proposal for 1 paper or 1 presentation. A person may also propose a panel session, which may include a second paper that they are presenting. An individual may also submit a roundtable proposal. You may be listed as co-author on additional papers as long as you are not presenting them.


PUBLICATION OF PAPERS
Selected papers from the conference will be published in a special issue of the journal Information, Communication & Society, edited by Caroline Haythornthwaite and Lori Kendall. Authors selected for consideration for submission to this issue will be contacted prior to the conference.

All papers submitted to the conference system will be available to AoIR members after the conference.

PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS
On October 20, 2010, there will be a limited number of pre-conference workshops which will provide participants with in-depth, hands-on and/or creative opportunities. We invite proposals for these pre-conference workshops. Local presenters are encouraged to propose workshops that will invite visiting researchers into their labs or studios or locales. Proposals should be no more than 1000 words, and should clearly outline the purpose, methodology, structure, costs, equipment and minimal attendance required, as well as explaining relevance to the conference as a whole. Proposals will be accepted if they demonstrate that the workshop will add significantly to the overall program in terms of thematic depth, hands on experience, or local opportunities for scholarly or artistic connections. These proposals and all inquiries regarding pre-conference proposals should be submitted as soon as possible to both the Conference Chair and Program Chair and no later than March 31, 2010.

FEE WAIVER
In order to increase the diversity of participation in the AoIR annual Internet Research (IR) conferences, the Association of Internet Researchers will make available up to three conference fee waivers per year. The number of fee waivers will depend first of all upon the ability of the conference budget to sustain such waivers (a judgment to be made by the AoIR Executive Committee upon the advice of the AoIR Treasurer and the local organizing committee) as well as upon the quality of the applications for fee waivers.

Applications for fee waivers are invited from student or faculty authors whose paper or panel proposals have already been accepted via the AoIR IR conference reviewing process. All applications should be directed to the Vice-President of AoIR, and must be received by June 30 of the conference year. Late applications cannot be considered. More information and submission guidelines will be published in a separate announcement.

CONTACT INFORMATION
Program Chair: Torill Elvira Mortensen, Volda University College, Norway. torill.mortensen@gmail.com
Conference Co-Chairs and Coordinators: Ann-Sofie Axelsson, Chalmers University of Technology and Ylva Hård af Segerstad, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Important Dates

Submissions Due 21 February 2010

Notifications of Acceptance 21 Apr 2010

Abstract Revisions Due7 May 2010

Full Papers Due 21 August 2010

Pre-Conference Workshops 20 Oct 2010

Main Conference 21-23 Oct 2010

Security, risk, crisis

I am in Trondheim at a conference about safety and risk, where I have been invited to be on a panel organised by the Research Council of Norway, who organise their own conference in conjunction with "Sikkerhetsdagene" - the security days. The topic for the panel is media, crisis and panic.

I have to admit this feels a bit out of my field, but when I arrived just in time for last night's dinner, I was greeted enthusiastically by a friend I barely had time to get to know before he left Volda, and since lost touch with, Professor Peter Burgess at PRIO, the International Peace Research Institute of Oslo.

"What are you doing here?" I asked, subtle as ever. "Oh," he responded, "this Norwegian question, how to answer that?" It turns out that these are his people, as the research group he is leading in PRIO is concerned with security. And so it clicked into place, the talks I had noticed him doing earlier, about Security in Europe. Meeting him saved the evening for me, and reminded me why I missed him when he left Volda for other fields. Some people understand what you're talking about, you know. Which, after all, is why we go to conferences: To meet the people who understand what we're saying, and listen to the ones talking our own tribal language.

The panel I am on is quite interesting, in relation to both my teaching and my research. The session is lead by one of Norway's most interesting law and informatics scholars, who is also a science fiction author (yes, this is one of my long-time heroes) Jon Bing (he has wikipedia entries in both book- and new-Norwegian). Leading the panel debate is Eva Bratholm, a former journalist now leading the information department of Norad, Norwegian Agency of Development Cooperation. Then there's Tone Bergan from The Directorate for Civil Protection and Emergency Planning, two full professors, Tore Bjørgo and Rune Ottosen, and ... me.

*smartassed overconfident finishing remark deleted*

Sustainability, Participation, Action

Next year's AOIR conference, IR 11.0, is in Gothenburg October 6-9th 2010, and the local chairs are the lovely ladies Ann-Sofie Axelsson and Ylva Hård af Segerstad. They have a program chair who is not quite as lovely, actually a grumpy old bitch, but you know, program chairs need to be the bad guys. I have said yes to that job, and I am looking forwards to it. Ann-Sofie and Ylva are both very enthusiastic about making a conference that aims at the future, and while I tend to be a little tentative about the future I desperately want there to be one. I do however think we need to cooperate if we want a future, and we need to act - preferably in some sort of agreed way.

The CFP isn't done yet, but will be soon now, as the Super Scandinavian Consortium is on its feet and cooperating. It can't get better than this: A Norwegian to mess things up by asking importune questions, and two Swedes to cover over and make things run smoothly after all. And if you don't get that last reference, you're not Scandinavian, and have a long way to go yet...

But you can start with a trip to Gothenburg! See you all there in 2010!

Flow, seduction...

Just updated the link to my paper from "Other Players" in Copenhagen 2004. The online conference proceedings have disappeared, but I found an electronic version of the article, and now the link leads to my own version.

I have no idea what happened to the conference proceedings, but I hope you enjoy the paper, even if it's aging.

After Leipzig

I just returned from the GCO - Game Convention Online - in Leipzig. Invited by some of the members of the very interesting Hans Bredow Institute in Hamburg, I was fairly unprepared for the Leipzig experience.

GCO is a new convention startet as a cooperation between several actors with a vested interest in getting a larger "messe" or convention together to work, both as an attraction for the city of Leipzig, as a meeting spot for a group of game developers who are somewhat less oganised than the very established MMORPG designers, and as a place to promote and test games.

Just add academia, and you have quite a lot of different interests in the same object.

The different cultures became obvious from the first evening. In a regular academic conference I'd have been sadly overdressed for an opening, but the formal invitation where I had to write down the name of any company I wanted to bring was a hint that this wasn't a matter of a quick talk by some Headmaster before the wine and the cooling finger-food. Next to the expensive suits of the German businessmen and politicians I was still a sad, rumpled mess. What luck that I am a geek, and could wear an air of excentric distraction with authority obviously only aquired by much practice.

In the next few days the security level, the service in the speaker's lounge and the shuttle service to the hotel indicated that I was still in a culture not quite familiar. Also the sluggish internet connection at the conference grounds (totally lacking in the speakers' lounge - how did they expect us to prepare in there - free coffee does not make up for no net) and the lack of free wireless at the four-star hotel were indications that I was not in Academia any more.

The great part of the conference was however the opportunity to meet and listen to German scholars. I did spend a lot of time agreeing with Ren Reynolds that "There has been research done in this field, you know," but that's a common response in too many occasions, sadly. One of the better moments was spoiled by the speaker suddenly sorting the ludologists under "effect studies" - even after years of "please do a few google searches before you talk" that was a new one.

What I did find was where the psychologists studying games hunt. They are in Germany. According to one game researcher I talked to, most of German game research is on effects and consequences of games, with a heavy bias towards the problems games may lead to.

If we can somehow integrate the German game scholars in the European community, they might be a very valuable asset, as this is an angle which rarely is carefully discussed and explored in more game studies based English language conferences and journals. But such an integration needs to be desired by those who work within the field, and so far the lack of knowledge about what has become "common knowledge" among a fairly large group of game scholars is more a hindrance to being taken seriously than a challenge (which we need) to the hegemony of certain ideas in the game studies community.

Pointing to the side

What am I talking about at State of Play? Peek into my blog on the Gamers' space project.

Games Convention Online

Despite the title, this is a convention over online games, not an online convention. Yeah, it confused me at first.

It's a grandly planned conference over online games in Europe, taking place in Leipzig. Despite having travelled extensively in Germany at one point, I never went to Leipzig, and checking the map I realised why. Most of my travels in Germany happened in the late 70-ies, early 80-ies, and my only trip into the then East-Germany happened in 1981, with a trip to Berlin, East-Berlin and Potsdam.

This is an extremely interesting part of Europe, which I have neglected visiting since travelling with children made it harder to jump on a train and roll through Europe for days on end, stopping at random places to sleep whereever there'd be a cheap hostel. Now the children travel quicker, lighter and easier than me, being the age I was when I was exploring Europe by the railway, and I am worried about not having booked hotels in advance. Who'd have thought the map of Europe would change so much, just in the time it takes a child to be born and grow into an adult?

Anyway, this isn't about Europe, it's about games. At the same time I wonder, can it not be about Europe? Or about Asia, Africa, Oceania, Australia or America, for that matter - it's all about culture, change, humanity and society.

I'll be talking in this session:

„Nutzung & Potenzial“:
In diesem Themenblock der Konferenz bilden die Nutzungsgewohnheiten, -präferenzen und -folgen auf Spielerseite sowie die damit einhergehenden Erwartungen, Chancen, Herausforderungen und Risiken den Schwerpunkt. Faktoren, die die Angebotsauswahl und Spielenutzung beeinflussen, sind ebenso relevante Themenbereiche wie aktuelle Nutzungsmodi, Genrepräferenzen, tatsächliche und potentielle Vergemeinschaftungspotenziale und Spielzeiten. Damit einhergehend sind auch Fragen exzessiver Spielenutzung zu thematisieren. Zu beachten sind die Potenziale von Online Games und Mobile Games etwa für Sozialisation und Berufsfeldkompetenzen

However, when I can, I'll sneak over to this session:

„Gesellschaft & Politik“:
Im dritten Stream sollen die gesellschaftlichen Auswirkungen der steigenden Nutzung von Online und Mobile Games im Zentrum stehen. Welche Debatten in welcher Form in der Öffentlichkeit geführt, und welche Risiken und Möglichkeiten den Spielen zugeschrieben werden, können eine differenzierte Sichtweise auf das Phänomen erlauben.

Auch die regulatorischen Herausforderungen, die sich aus den Spielinhalten und -formen, der aktuellen Technologie, der Vereinbarkeit von Erlösmodellen mit dem Verbraucherschutz und den veränderten Rollen der Akteure sowie den sozialen Komponenten der Angebote ergeben, werden hier Thema sein. Zudem sollen die bisherigen Reaktionen von Gesetzgeber, Regulierungsbehörden und Politik diskutiert werden.

And if you want to see the topics in English, you'll find the program here. Me, I am taking this opportunity to start brushing up my German. It used to be much better than my English - before those two young adults were born.

I know what to do now

This week-end, things fell into place. I know what to do now. It's a really odd feeling, kind of a mixture between waiting for a dentist appointment and being in love.

I have been trying to write abstracts for AOIR and the Nordic Media Research conference, but not successfully. Every time I have tried, I have ended up with this huge project that has been getting in the way of any small things, like papers and articles. The project is horribly ambitious, it's going to demand a network of researchers and lots of funding, and there's no way I can do any of it before either conference. But it doesn't want to go away.

So, I am giving in to it. I am going to start planning a large research project. OK, fates, I am giving in, do you hear me? Stop nagging!

And yes, that worked. Now that I have put the PROJECT into my schedule - my pretty immediate schedule - I can start working on other things. It's going to demand some compromise. I will, for instance, for the Nordic Conference of Media and Communication research, base my abstract on a talk I gave this fall. I have the material ready, the research almost all done, all I need is to write the paper/article. Easy-peasy, and I was planning to do that anyway. For AOIR I'll run with an idea I had quite recently - and nope, I am not announcing it here just yet. That would ruin the whole blind-review process. I'll let you all know if it's accepted :) If it isn't, I'll pretend I never meant to go to IR 10.0 anyway. It's in Milwaukee. How does one even GET to Milwaukee?

Well, now you know. I just wanted to say this. A purely therapeutic blogpost for me, but at least you got links to a couple of conferences out of it.

DAC 2009

The website for the Digital Arts and Culture 2009 conference is up. This year it's in Irvine, California, in December.

DAC09 will be held on the campus of the University of California Irvine, for three and a half days in mid-December 2009

The Themes for this iteration of DAC:

* Embodiment and performativity
* Mobile/locative/situated/wearable practices
* Software/platform studies
* Environment/ sustainability/ climate change
* Interdisciplinary pedagogy
* Cognition and Creativity
* Sex and sexuality

Organiser and chair is Simon Penny.