The Norsk Folkemuseum living history museum in Norway
"The Norsk Folkemuseum is Norway's largest museum of cultural history. With collections from around the country, the museum shows how people lived in Norway from 1500 to the present.
The more than 150 buildings in the Open-Air Museum represent different regions in Norway, different time periods, as well as differences between town and country, and social classes. The Gol Stave Church dating from 1200 is one of five medieval buildings at the museum. The contemporary history is presented through exhibitions and documentation projects focusing especially on children, youth and the multicultural population. Permanent indoor exhibitions include folk art, folk costumes, toys and Sami culture."
(Astrid Santa, Norsk Folkemuseum)
[Actors are located in some of the buildings to provide visitors with a sense of the life of the original inhabitants.]
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
No character can exist without the context of a game world
"The role of the character in a role-playing game has long been debated. Yet no character can exist without the context of a game world. The character always has a relationship to its surroundings; the easiest way of creating a character is often through providing a context. Even if one supposedly plays oneself in a fictional world, a character - a variation on the ordinary persona - will soon emerge. "
(Markus Montola & Jaakko Stenros)
[2] Montola, M. and J. S. (eds) (2008). Playground Worlds - Creating and Evaluating Experiences of Role-Playing Games. Finland, Ropecon ry.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Wikileaks: airing governments' and corporations' dirty laundry
"Wikileaks, with its simple 'keep the bastards honest' ethos, aims to discourage unethical behaviour by airing governments' and corporations' dirty laundry in public, putting their secrets out there in the public realm. The site won Index on Censorship's 2008 freedom of expression award because it's an invaluable resource for anonymous whistleblowers and investigative journalists.
Among Wikileaks' recent triumphs are its publication of top-secret internet censorship lists. The blacklists from Australia, Thailand, Denmark and Norway demonstrate exactly how censorship systems are abused to suppress free expression. The Thai list featured sites criticising the country's royal family and the Australian blacklist turned out to include a school canteen consultancy. Despite its child porn mandate, less than half of the Australian blacklist were linked to paedophilia. Also on the list were satanic and fetish sites, anti-abortion websites, and sites belonging to a kennel operator and a dentist. Publication highlighted the lack of transparency in the process and gave impetus to the 'No Clean Feed' campaign which opposes the Australian government's internet filter proposals."
(Emily Butselaar, guardian.co.uk)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Expanding the narrow definitions of documentary animation
"The term 'animated documentary' can still upset a truth-seeking purist. But over the last few years our understanding of what a documentary is has expanded from the narrow direct cinema/cinema vérité definition of the 1970s and the 1980s. A more inclusive definition with room for both classic documentaries like the European city symphonies of the 1920s and the personal film essays of the 1990s and the 2000s is now gaining support.
There was a close connection between animation and documentary filmmaking in Europe in the 1920s (Walter Ruttman, Hans Richter, Dziga Vertov) and in the UK in the 1930s (John Grierson, Len Lye, Norman McLaren). This close connection continued at the National Film Board of Canada after World War II and through to this day. Even Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences accepted the animated documentary as documentary proper by giving the Oscar to McLaren (Neighbours, 1952) and Saul Bass (Why Man Creates, 1968). The direct cinema/cinema vérité movements and the total dominance of TV documentaries closely based on journalism have dominated the documentary tradition since the 1960s. But postmodernist thinking combined with more individual/personal artistic filmmaking have brought the artistic elements of the European documentaries of the 1920s and 1930s back. And this scene has also opened up for the modern animated documentary.
At the NFB the filmmakers never stopped making animated documentaries, and a similar tradition has been kept alive in the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Sweden and Norway. I believe a major reason for this is the social democratic political thinking that lies behind both the ideology of the NFB and the film politics in Scandinavia. The film industry deserves state funding because the films play a vital role in our democracy."
(Gunnar Strøm, March 2005, 'How Swede It Is ...and Danish and Norwegian: Scandinavian documentary animation', p.13, fpsmagazine.com)
Fig.1 Monika Forsberg & Susie Sparrow 2006, We Believe in Happy Endings
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
InterMedia: design, communication and learning in digital environments
"InterMedia investigates the intersections between design, communication and learning in digital environments. Our approach is multidisciplinary and involves critical research, development and experiments.
The research activities are organised in three clusters: Design and Learning in Education, ICT and Learning at Work and Communication Design."
(InterMedia)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
