Site Archive

Imagine a world without free knowledge
Written by David Tames on January 18, 2012
Filed Under Featured, General, Law, Politics, Web
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Right now the U.S. Congress is considering legislation (SOPA and PIPA) that could fatally damage the free and open Internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, Wikipedia is blacking out their English language edition beginning at midnight January 18, Eastern Time. I join Wikipedia in encouraging...  Continue Reading...

Researching Macro Trends
Written by David Tames on October 15, 2011
Filed Under Business, Featured, Filmmaking, Media Technology
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While I was preparing my presentation, “Seven Macro Trends,” I reached out to people I thought might have some ideas and/or examples I should weave into my presentation. I’m indebted to their wonderful and generous contributions. What follows are the highlights of their responses...  Continue Reading...

Cartographies of Time
Written by David Tames on December 4, 2010
Filed Under Art, Books, Featured, Narrative
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I love St. Mark’s Bookshop, every time I go to New York I make it a point to make the trek to Third Avenue between 8th and 9th Streets and spend time browsing there, especially through the new book section, where I came across Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline by Daniel Rosenberg...  Continue Reading...

A framework for thinking about cyberspace
Written by David Tames on December 1, 2010
Filed Under Books, Critical Theory, Featured, New Media, The Media
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Daniel Downes suggests in Interactive Realism: The Poetics Of Cyberspace (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005) that it is people who construct social reality through their interactions, critiquing the “transformative turn” in media studies. Distinguishing clearly between the Internet...  Continue Reading...

Spaces Speak, Are you listening?
Written by David Tames on November 29, 2010
Filed Under Books, Featured, Sound
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In their book, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architecture (MIT Press, 2007) Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter remind us that we experience spaces not only through visual perception but also through our auditory perception. They explore auditory spatial awareness (experiencing...  Continue Reading...

Did digital imaging throw documentary into an ontological crisis?
Written by David Tames on August 20, 2010
Filed Under Art, Camera, Critical Theory, Documentary, Featured, Photography
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Scholars have long discussed the ambiguity and subjectivity inherent in photographic representation with its seductive verisimilitude. Bill Mitchell’s The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (The MIT Press, 1992), the first book-length critical analysis of the...  Continue Reading...

Expanded Cinema: Still fresh after forty years
Written by David Tames on August 17, 2010
Filed Under Art, Books, Featured, Filmmaking, New Media
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A few months ago I pulled Gene Youngblood’s classic Expanded Cinema (E.P. Dutton & Company, 1970, available online) off the shelf and read it again. The pages in my well worn softcover edition were falling out, the glue having dried over the two decades I’ve owned the book....  Continue Reading...

Memory and the end of reality
Written by David Tames on August 11, 2010
Filed Under Art, Critical Theory, Featured, New Media, Writing
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The transformation from media as a form of cultural production to media as entertainment has lead us into a crisis as we enter the fifth phase of history. Marshall McLuhan (1962, 2005) divided history in four phases: 1. culture of oral communication, 2. manuscript culture, 3. the Gutenberg...  Continue Reading...

Sixty-seven excellent documentaries available through Netflix
Written by David Tames on August 28, 2009
Filed Under Documentary, Featured, Films
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Students and friends often ask me for suggestions on what documentaries I recommend watching, and they are often frustrated that many of my suggestions are not easily obtainable. Many classic documentaries are hard to find: they are only available for purchase at high prices or through libraries,...  Continue Reading...