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The Oxford Brookes conference for new-media workers, at Wadham College, Oxford. Thursday 25th - Saturday 27th March, 2004 Presented by the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies and the MA in Electronic Media |
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'DUST OR MAGIC' is a conference about how people do 'good stuff' with computers: games, hypertexts, web sites, interfaces, software tools. It's for everyone who's seriously concerned about the fate of creative work and creative workers in the 'new-media' workplace. We talk about software and hardware, design, industry economics, workplace politics, psychology, each others' work, and the practicalities of making things that delight, as well as making a living.The conference starts at 9:00 am on Thursday 25th March, and ends after lunch on Saturday 27th. Done good stuff you'd like to share? Posters and demos please!There will be opportunities for a number of delegates to give 15-minute demos of work in progress, and show posters illustrating projects and ideas. Mail your proposals to Eva: eoliver@brookes.ac.uk What it costs: *2 nights accommodation at Wadham and all meals except dinner on Thursday evening please use the booking form on page 2 of this flyer (PDF 155k) Eva E. Oliver, Secretary for External Development What people said about Dust or Magic 2003'A big thank you to you for involving me. I've not found something so uplifting in ages. I just wrote to Mark Bernstein asking for his slides and found a way to sum up the feeling of the conference: 'motivated by joy, work and curiosity, with profit in its many forms as emergent rather than primary'. It was great to be part of it. I hope the sense of connection between participants can persist...'Dr Ann Light (Cognitive Science and Computing, Sussex University; editor of British Computer Society's Usability News; chair of trustees of the Fiankoma Project, Ghana) 'Attending the Dust and Magic conference was inspiring. Thank you so much for this opportunity.' Claudio Chagas (Publishing undergraduate, Oxford Brookes) 'just wanna say a massive thank you for inviting me to DorM. Even though I was only there 1 day, I thought it was a great inspiring conference with some really interesting speakers and some healthy debate about working in new media and the role of computers.' Brendan Dawes (Author of 'Drag Slide Fade'; creative director of Magnetic North, Manchester; international speaker on web technologies) 'A big thankyou for the conference and all the work which you put into it. Two and a half days of wall-to-wall presentations of extremely high quality. One of the things about going to a conference (and it's been a while), is the hope to find spark and inspiration which is personally fulfilling and can also be fed back into teaching. Well, we got it in bucketloads at Dust and Magic. A unique experience which was both moving and stimulating. Mik Parsons (Senior Lecturer, Bournemouth University) 'many, many thanks to you for organising the conference. Best time I've had in ages.' Tom Abba (PhD candidate, University of the West of England) 'it's a perfect conference . it's a 'victory'.' Chia-Jung LIU (Oxford Brookes MA in EM) 'I am so very grateful to you for inviting me to the Dust or Magic Conference. I have never attended an event marked by so much creativity and generostiy of spirit among all the pariticipants, and I think it was very much a tribute to the tone you set and the company you keep. It was a privilege to be there, and it helped recharge my batteries at a moment when resourcefulness and invention is required of all of us.' Scot Osterweil (Computer games designer; Creative Director of TERCworks, Cambridge Massachusetts) 'You are to be congratulated on organising such a delightful conference. The size was perfect, as was the venue, and the company was highly conducive to productive discussion. Dr Judith Aston (University of the West of England; leader of MA in digital media) 'Just a quick note to say a big thank you for organising the DorM conference. The more I think about it, the more refreshing and interesting the event now seems.' Christian Wach (Flowmotion, Bristol UK; creator of the 'Football's leaving home' weblog) 'Just a short note to thank you for the conference. I must admit that it has made me feel a lot more optimistic about what I'm doing and what can be done than I was feeling before.' Baldur Bjarnason (PhD candidate, University of the West of England) 'Thank you Bob for organising a great workshop.' Dr Rose Luckin (Cognitive Science and Computing, Sussex University; founder and leader of the Sussex 'IDEAS' lab) |
Who's coming to Dust or Magic 2004?A maximum of 85 people will be here, including: - Dr Theodor Holm (Ted) Nelson - one of computerdom's most influential, indeed legendary, figures. Without his vision there might never have been a World Wide Web (albeit the Web is a sad shadow of the 'docuverse' he envisaged). He coined the word 'hypertext' in 1963 and has worked, written and agitated ever since for systems that respect and empower the user's intelligence with tools limited not by the dead weight of 'real-world metaphors', but only by the constraints of the 'universal machine' itself: systems where 'all data was stored once, there were no deletions, and all information was accessible by a link from anywhere else.' Living Internet Ted has worked to realise this vision in a long succession of specially-created research posts in the US, Japan, and now England. Ted has just been made a Fellow of the Oxford Internet Institute and this will be one of his first speaking engagements in his new position. http://ted.hyperland.com/ and http://www.xanadu.net - Aleen Stein - co-founder of the legendary Voyager Company (which produced an extraordinary wealth of landmark multimedia works through the late 1980s and early 1990s) and founder of Organa - publisher, among other things, of Alan Snow's 'P.A.W.S' and Dada Média's 'Le Livre de Lulu'. http://www.organa.com - Alan Snow - the children's writer/illustrator/animator/programmer who (with Digital Funk Productions) built the first fully functioning dog-simulator - PAWS - in 1993, and a raft of ridiculous and delightful digital 'hors d'oevres' of various sorts, as he explored the the latest bits of software and computer kit to come his way. At the moment he is working on a children's gothic novel called 'Here Be Monsters', which is part of a much larger multi-year project that at one point included a massively ambitious and funny, but never published, 3D 'pie-em-up' game set in Victorian Trowbridge. Parts of this may be shown. - William Donelson - a founder-member of the MIT's legendary 'Architecture Machine Group' in the late 1970s, where projects included the famous Aspen Movie Map and (Donelson's own particular project) the Spatial Data Management System (SDMS) - a system very similar to the one subsequently used on the Starship Enterprise. - Sue Thomas - writer, novelist, and Artistic Director of trAce, the remarkable Nottingham-based worldwide writing community which 'connects writers and readers around the world in real and virtual space. ... where writers meet to experiment, create new work, and expand the potential of the global literary community'. Unlike many arts-based internet phenomena trAce is the focus a huge, steadily-growing and very active community of people from all walks of life, united by a passion for writing and a tolerance of technology. This is where the concept of Flash poetry started. Sue's latest book, 'Hello World: Travels in Virtuality' should be available by the time of Dust or Magic. http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/suethomas - Mark Schlichting - the creator of the immensely successful 'Living Books' series of children's CD-ROMs that were published by Broderbund through the 1990s, and featured some of the most delightful interactive animations ever done in that now-neglected medium. Despite their huge popularity, the Living Books fell victim to the 'CD-ROM Slump' of 1996. Mark now heads the Noodleworks children's software consultancy in San Francisco, and is writing a major book about children and computers. http://www.noodleworks.com - Tim Wright - is currently writer in residence at trAce. Before that he and Rob Bevan created a number of famous and very cleverly-done things including XPT, the ridiculous internet-based present-giving service, and Online Caroline. At trAce, he is creating a non-existent home-town for himself (with help from trAce members) and toying with the idea of 'a faux online fridge who people can 'talk' to, or maybe it simply sits on the Web talking to itself'. http://www.xpt.co.uk/timwright/ - Frode Hegland - is an information environment designer, is developing web-based techniques that build on the principles developed by Ted Nelson, and by Douglas Engelbart (whose “Augment” system presaged modern desktop systems in the 1960s but had far wider ambitions). Indeed, Frode was an associate of Engelbart’s Bootstrap Institute 1999-2001, creating the acclaimed Doug Engelbart Audio Glossary (see http://www.bootstrap.org ). He will speak about this involvement and demonstrate his own contribution to the field: Cynapse (see http://www.cynapse.org ). - The Brookes Electronic Media postgraduates. These are the people for whom the conference was created: 15 very talented people from all over the world and many different backgrounds, but all at the beginning of careers which they want to spend exclusively doing 'good stuff'. http://emedia.brookes.ac.uk/students.html Dust or Magic in Bologna, Los Angeles, Maryland and New Jersey. |
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Organised by Bob Hughes, author of: 'Dust or Magic: Secrets of Successful Multimedia Design' (Addison-Wesley, 2000) 'An idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it.' – Matsuo Basho, 1644-1694 |
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