mCenter Director Mimi Sheller discusses her forthcoming book Aluminum Dreams: Lightness, Speed, Modernity (MIT Press, 2014)
For more information please contact mimi.sheller@drexel.edu
* please note that the European pronunciation of “aluminium” has been used throughout for a global audience
Posted in Research
Tagged Aluminum, Caribbean, Sustainability, Technology, Tourism, Transport
The artist team Ecoarttech (Leila Nadir and Cary Pepperment) will be presenting a Philadelphia premier of their work Indeterminate Hikes+ as part of the class Urban Vitality & the Arts, taught by Mimi Sheller and Hana Iverson. Ecoarttech work on the overlapping terrain between “nature”, built environments, mobility and electronic spaces and technologies. They will be in conversation with Dr. Christian Hunold, Associate Professor of Political Science in Drexel’s College of Arts and Sciences, whose research interests revolve around sustainability and the politics of renewable energy; and writer Bernard Brown, who writes the Urban Naturalist column for GRID Magazine.
You can find more information on ecoarttech and their other work at http://www.ecoarttech.net/
This event is free and open to the public, but is part of an instructional course so please to attend please contact: Mimi Sheller, director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy, mimi.sheller@drexel.edu.
Posted in Events
Tagged Art, Events, Mobile Media, Sustainability, Technology, Urbanism
Aluminum has become the most important single bulk material of modern warfare. No fighting is possible, and no war can be carried to a successful conclusion today, without using and destroying vast quantities of aluminum.– Dewey Anderson, 1951
Dr. Mimi Sheller will be speaking on “Aluminum Wars” at the research Seminar of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University on Friday, April 26th. All seminars are held at 12 noon in the Academy’s Ewell Sale Stewart Library & Archives unless otherwise noted. These technical seminars are intended for scientists and college-level students. Guests from other research and higher education institutions and organizations are encouraged to attend.
The talk is based on Dr. Sheller’s forthcoming book Aluminum Dreams: Lightness, Speed, Modernity (MIT Press, 2014). This chapter concerns the ways in which aluminum was crucial to warfare, but also how the contemporary culture of innovation and entrepreneurship remains deeply entwined with the military-industrial complex, with serious implications for our ability to address ethical issues concerning global pollution, environmental destruction, and the huge impacts of aluminum production on marginalized people.
For more information please contact: mimi.sheller@drexel.edu
mCenter Director Mimi Sheller will be featured in a video installed in the new Mobile World Center, in the heart of Barcelona.
The Centre is Mobile World Capital’s permanent exhibition & venue, to spread and demonstrate the latest mobile technologies and solutions to citizens.
The Centre permanent exhibition is an open platform to all citizens to understand, learn & experience the mWorld. At the first floor you will find:
The Centre exhibition will always be in constant evolution showing latest trends, events and facts from the mWorld.
We welcome all companies, citizens and mLovers to participate, so if you would like to present or suggest some potential content for the centre, please do contact us at: centre@mobileworldcapital.com
At the 2nd floor of the Centre you will find a highly versatile space dedicated to Mobile events (mEvents).
A unique, contemporary and innovative space of 440m2 that hosts approximately 150pax for event. The centre also offers catering and AV Services.
For the latest agenda of mEvents at the centre please visit mobileworldcentre.com
If you would like to find out more about how to use this space or can you collaborate with the Mobile World Centre please email: centre@mobileworldcapital.com
Barcelona, Spain, placed in Fontanella 2, in the corner of Plaça Catalunya with streets Portal de l’Angel and Fontanella, in a flagship building of Telefónica Movistar.
In the summer of 2011, GSMA selected Barcelona as the world’s first Mobile World Capital from 2012 to 2018. The GSMA represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide. Spanning more than 220 countries, the GSMA unites nearly 800 of the world’s mobile operators with more than 230 companies in the broader mobile ecosystem.
The Mobile World Capital will radically accelerate the global growth of mobile and Barcelona will be the global showcase for innovation.
The Mobile World Capital Foundation & Telefonica have worked hand in hand to create a unique, open platform called Mobile World Centre; a state of the art exhibition showroom where citizens are able to understand and experience how mobile is enhancing our lives.
The Mobile World Centre, located in the heart of Barcelona, brings mobile technology closer to all citizens, share a global vision of the mobile future and be a source of information for the other Mobile World Capital channels; Mobile World Hub, Mobile Word Festival and Mobile World Congress.
For further information please visit:
We invite submissions to the following Call for Papers for the 2013 RGS-IBG (Royal Geographical Society – Institute of British Geographers) annual conference. This will take place in London from Wednesday 28 to Friday 30 August 2013. Please note the opportunity for a postgraduate paper prize.
Personal Rapid Transit – John Hersey for the Boston Globe
Technology is offering a potential new dynamic in how transport is delivered and used. There is a move from what were once ‘private’ ways of being mobile towards ‘shared’ modes. Traditionally, shared modes have been buses, coaches, trams, trains and air. Now there are shared cars through car clubs, personal rapid transport (PRT), and taxi services, and shared bicycles such as the London Barclays bike scheme. Mobile technologies and the rise of the ‘app’ have become particularly useful in facilitating shared transport opportunities (e.g. Barclays bike hire scheme in London).
Speculating on urban futures, Sheller and Urry (2003) considered the notion of public/private and the potential reconfiguration of the city with shared automated ‘pods’. Feasibility studies and trials of personal rapid transport systems are now underway. Yet as Latour (1996) explores in his tale of Aramis, future visions of re-scripting mobility practices demand complex enrollments between politics, technical developers, communities, etc. Do such sociological interpretations and theoretical ideas assist in the implementation of shared schemes and the social diffusion of new collective mobility mechanisms?
Sharing transport presents challenges to the notion of individual ownership, and opens new debates around:-
This session seeks abstracts that present evidence from new ‘shared’ schemes, theoretical concepts of sharing and social practices, and new methodological approaches for modelling use and networks, and understanding of the user experience of shared transport.
Please email your abstract of 250 words (max) to Juliet Jain Juliet.Jain@uwe.ac.uk and Graham Parkhurst Graham.Parkhurst@uwe.ac.uk by the 30th January 2013.
Sheller, M. and Urry, J., ‘Mobile Transformations of “Public” and “Private” Life’, Theory, Culture and Society, 20: 3 (2003), pp. 107-125
Sheller, M. and Urry, J., ‘The City and the Car’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 24, No. 4, (2000) pp. 737-57
Eligible author presenters are encouraged to submit a paper for the Postgraduate Paper Prize, which is will be sponsored by Emerald Publishing in 2013. There is a first prize of £100, and a runner-up prize of a book chosen from the Emerald transport titles.
To enter for the prize, a full paper of not more than 6000 words should be submitted to the Secretary of the TGRG (Kate Pangbourne, k.pangbourne@abdn.ac.uk) no later than 5pm on the Friday of the week prior to the conference.
Eligibility is restricted to post-graduate students (or those who have had their viva within six months of the date of the conference) presenting their own work. There is a presumption that the papers ought to be sole authored.
Posted in Conference
Tagged Automobility, Call for papers, Mobilities Theory, Technology, Transport, Urbanism
Drexel University is opening a cross-discipline research/tech incubator center. The Expressive and Creative Interaction Technology — or ExCITe — Center is being created in 11,000 square-feet of converted industrial office space on the first floor of the University City Science Center building at 3401 Market.
The ExCITe Center will bring together translational research being conducted at Drexel’s colleges of Engineering, Arts & Science, Media Arts & Design and Information Science Technology in the same space. Music technology, humanoid robots, app development, video games, and digital knitting machines will converge with many other technologies in one creative space. The center will also serve as an incubator for local innovation partnerships.
“The opening of the ExCITe Center reflects Drexel’s commitment to re-imagine the urban research university for the 21st Century,” said Drexel President John A. Fry, in a statement. “We seek to foster creativity, innovation, collaboration and a commitment to community. The ExCITe Center will be a place that brings all of those core values together to create real economic opportunities for our city and region as well as a significant impact in society.”
Research in the ExCITe Center will include all aspects of expression and interaction, from performing arts technology to civic and city-scale computing. It will also, build on Drexel’s existing collaborations with arts and cultural institutions, regional development organizations and government.
“The ExCITe Center brings together not only technologists and researchers, but also designers, artists and musicians, city and transportation planners and civic innovators and entrepreneurs,” said Dr. Youngmoo Kim, the director of the ExCITe Center. “It’s a place for creative and passionate people who want to work together to transform Philadelphia through innovation and the digital creative economy.”
Three projects picked for seed funding from ExCITe were announced earlier this year, including one in which the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy is a collaborator, Sonic City.
They are: “Virtual Opera” led by the Opera Company of Philadelphia with the Curtis Institute of Music; “Cerebral Palsy Rehabilitation Gaming” led by Drexel’s Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design with the School of Biomedical Engineering and the College of Nursing and Health Professions; and “Sonic City” led by Neighborhood Narratives Project with Breadboard, Azavea, Drexel University Goodwin School of Education, College of Engineering, and the mCenter in the College of Arts and Sciences.
A truly multidisciplinary effort, Sonic City is a city-scale art and engineering project designed to engage the bus system as a creative interface for people to interactively engage the sounds of the city. Diverse neighborhoods of Philadelphia are connected through a sonic interface made up of real-time and recorded sound that will be experienced in bus shelter “installations” modified by the movement of the bus system. Real-time recordings of the city gathered through geo-spatial sensor-networks, along with seeded music and spoken words will be mixed with sounds contributed by the public via smartphones and the internet. The project will create geographically distinct aural immersion into a “musical” sound collage that reveals an innovative sonic and spatial patterning of the city.
For more info please contact mimi.sheller@drexel.edu, and for some ideas on “mobile mediality” as a sonic experience visit this mCenter blog.
Transfers, now entering its third year of publication, is emerging as a key
peer-reviewed platform for new research into the practices, experiences and
representations of disparate mobilities. Our newly expanded Editorial Team
invite submissions that address our central concern – to “rethink mobility” in
the widest possible terms and from a broad range of disciplinary perspectives.
Intellectually rigorous, wide ranging, and conceptually innovative, Transfers
combines the empiricism of traditional mobility history with more recent theoretical approaches in the social sciences and the humanities. We interpret ‘transfers’ in its many senses: to move, shift, transmit, transform, change, and convey.
The journal’s scholarly essays, film, book and exhibition reviews, artwork, photography and special features are devoted to the ways in which
mobilities have been enabled, shaped and mediated across time and through
technological changes. We are interested in analyses of past and present
experiences of vehicle drivers, passengers, pedestrians, migrants and
refugees; accounts of the arrival and transformation of mobilities in different
nations and locales; and investigations into the kinetic processes of global
capital, technology, chemical and biological substances, images, narratives,
sounds, and ideas.
We especially encourage contributions that ‘rethink mobility’ through a
transnational, multimodal, or transdisciplinary perspective, and those dealing
with subversive (non-hegemonic) and subaltern (non-Eurocentric) mobilities,
including a focus on the infrastructures and practices of mobility that
contribute to uneven forms of access.
Gijs Mom, Eindhoven University of Technology
Georgine Clarsen, The University of Wollongong
Nanny Kim, University of Heidelberg
Peter Merriman, University of Aberystwyth
Mimi Sheller, Drexel University, Philadelphia
Heike Weber, Technical University of Berlin
Cotten Seiler, Dickinson College, Carlisle
Posted in Call for Proposals
Tagged Automobility, Bicycling, Call for papers, Journal, Mobilities Theory, Technology, Transport
The computer we carry in our pockets is also an emerging platform for interactive screen-based art. Art In Your Pocket takes its name from a series of texts Jonah Brucker-Cohen wrote for Rhizome on art made for smartphones. This panel will assemble leading media artists working with mobile devices and discuss current trends relating to this practice.
Moderated by Jason Eppink, Assistant Curator of Digital Media at the Museum of the Moving Image. Panelists include artist, programmer, and founder of iPhone app company SOFTOFT TECHECH, Paul Slocum; Mimi Sheller, leading theorist on mobilities research and Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University; LoVid, 2011 Rhizome commissioned artists for their location-specific art app project iParade #2: Unchanged When Exhumed; and Jonathan Vingiano, Co-founder of OKFocus.
Organized by Rhizome, the New Silent Series receives major support from The Rockefeller Foundation, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the New York State Council on the Arts.
To purchase tickets please visit:
Posted in Events
Tagged Art, Augmented Reality, Mobile computing, Mobile Media, Technology, Urbanism, Virtuality
We are pleased to announce that Professor John Urry will be speaking at Drexel University’s Center for Mobilities Research and Policy on the following topic:
JOHN URRY is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of various works including After the Car (2009), Mobile Lives (2010), Climate Change and Society (2011), Societies Beyond Oil (2013). He is currently writing Offshoring (2014). He is co-editor of the journal Mobilities, with Mimi Sheller and Kevin Hannam.
This talk is free and open to the public, however due to limited space we do require registration through Event Brite, at this link:
http://johnurry.eventbrite.com/
Co-sponsored by the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy, Drexel Green, the Drexel University Sustainability Council and the Urban Sustainability Forum, Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University
For more information please contact: mimi.sheller@drexel.edu
A conversation about making games that rely on being in physical locations to advance gameplay.
Thanks to the presence of an active civic-hacking community and Azavea, a leader in applications employing geographic data, Philadelphia is a center for geo-data applications. Opportunities for games in this area are enhanced by the Apps and Maps initiative in North Philadelphia.
Panelists:
Posted in Events
Tagged Augmented Reality, Mobile Gaming, Mobile Media, Technology, Urbanism
