We have introduced a couple of last minute changes in the Program. Please check the last version in the Program page.
- On Monday 23 all the activities will be in the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Campus de la Comunicació) (see Maps)
- On Tuesday 24 the activities between 09.00 and 18.00 will be in the Mediatic Building (see Maps). At 19.30 we have a second round of activities at CCCB (Downtown)
- On Wednesday 25 the activities between 09.00 and 18.00 will be in the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Campus de la Comunicació) (see Maps). At 19.00 we have a second round of activities at CCCB (Downtown)

Lunch will be at 13.00 at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Campus de la Comunicació) (Buffet at -1 Floor) (see Maps)

You’ll have Wifi access in the buildings. Please check the passwords because they may change from one institution to another.

Registration opens on Monday at 09.00. Activities start at 10.00 (Inauguration).

Welcome to Barcelona! Welcome to the McLuhan Galaxy!

The abstract submission is now closed. You could login into the platform to check if your abstract was succesfully submitted (http://www.mcluhangalaxy.net/ocs).

The Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, the Faculty of Communication of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) are organizing the International Conference McLuhan Galaxy. Understanding Media, today, in Barcelona on May 23-25, 2011. The aim is to bring together researchers, scholars and McLuhan Fellows to reflect on different aspects of McLuhan’s contribution. The conference in Barcelona will be networked to a series of conferences that are going to take place in Toronto, Berlin and Rome in other dates, to celebrate the 100 Anniversary of McLuhan.

This is an excellent opportunity not only to review McLuhan’s  thought but also to update them in relation to contemporary questions centred in the digital forms of production, co-production and consumption of intelligence, memory, self, identity, desire, body, art, design, collaboration and technology in the society of knowledge. The possibility of re-reading the immense contribution of this author under a new light can be useful to help society of knowledge deal with the global and local scales of the processes favoured by Internet.

The McLuhan Galaxy Conference invites the submission of extended abstracts related to the conference theme (800 words ca / 2 pages). Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to submit full papers between 5.000 and 6.000 words. Each submitted abstract will be fully refereed and undergo a double-blind review process. Accepted abstracts of registered authors will be invited to be corrected and reorganized as full papers in order to be published in the proceedings (only accepted abstracts will be invited to submit a full paper that will be published in conference’s proceedings).

Deadline for extended abstracts submissions: January 10th, 2011 January 17th, 2011.

The extended abstracts/full papers must be in english.

The guidelines for the full paper submission will be released soon.
To submit an extended abstract you have to follow the instructions at the end of the page.

Authors are encouraged to submit previously unpublished contributes to the topics that are being addressed by the conference. Both theoretical and applied papers are of interest. The topics are:

SUBMISSION

To start the process of submission you have to:

1) Register in the system
2) Submit your extended abstract in our Call for Papers platform.

Go to the registering / submission platform: click here

If you have any problem opening the platform, copy and paste the following link:

http://www.digitalrumors.net/mcluhangalaxybcn11/ocs/index.php/Mcgalaxy/ocs/schedConf/cfp

or contact us via mail at: mcluhangalaxy@uoc.edu

Derrick de Kerkhove (University of Toronto – UOC/IN3)

Ursula Heise is the Director of the Program in Modern Thought & Literature; Professor of English; Ph.D. English, Stanford University, 1993; M.A., Romance Philology, University of Cologne/Germany, 1987 M.A., English, UC Santa Barbara, 1985. She specialized in contemporary American and European literature and literary theory; her major fields of interest are theories of modernization, postmodernization and globalization, ecology and ecocriticism, literature and science, narrative theory, science fiction, and media theory. Her publications include articles on contemporary authors from the US, Latin America and Western Europe. She is the author of a book on the postmodern novel, Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press,1997) and, more recently, a book on environmentalism, ecocriticism, and globalization, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008). She is currently working on two book projects. Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur [After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture] is forthcoming from the German publisher Suhrkamp in Spring 2010. The Avantgarde and the Forms of Nature, currently in progress, deals with the role of biological form in works of the European, Latin American and North American avantgardes of the twentieth century.

Robert K. Logan (University of Toronto – sLab/OCAD)

Round Table participants

Go to the website

Josep M. Casasús,

Manuel Castells,

Matteo Ciastellardi,

Derrick de Kerckhove,

Javier Díaz Noci,

Jose Fernandez Cavia,

Juan Carlos Insúa Sigeroff,

Cristina Miranda de Almeida,

Miquel Rodrigo Alsina,

Carlos Scolari,

Imma Tubella.

Sarah Pink 
Professor of Social Sciences.
Department of Social Sciences 
Loughborough University
Loughborough
Leicestershire
England

For this reason the conference will be the first step of the creation of a broad active network able to trigger initiatives, share competencies and produce deliveries in the different field of the research opened by this first international symposium.

Stay tuned to gain more information soon…

The first round table will be held in the 22@ Barcelona, Innovation District, either in the Campus of Communication (UPF), or in the IN3/UOC’s Mediatic building (Metro Glories). The second and third round tables are going to take place in the CCCB. The two round tables developed in the CCCB will be open to public in general and simultaneous translation will be available.

The list of presenters in the Round Tables is:

Elisenda Ardevol

Elisenda Ardevol has academic training is in social and cultural anthropology and at present is professor lecturer at the Humanities Department at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), where she also collaborate as a professor at the Interdisciplinary PhD. Program on Information and Knowledge Society.

PhD. by the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), she carried out a doctoral dissertation about Visual Anthropology and Ethnographic cinema: The Anthropological gaze or the Anthropology of the gaze; an analysis of the audiovisual representation of cultures and an exploration in the use of the audiovisual image in Ethnographic research.

During her career, she taught courses and seminars in different Spanish universities and cultural institutions, and she also has been Visiting Scholar of the Centre for Visual Anthropology, at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Currently, she collaborates in the Master of Creative Documentary at the UAB, and participated as voting member in various Cinema Festivals and as member of the Scientific Committee in several academic conferences.

She carried out fieldwork among the gypsy community of Granada, in Afro-American communities of Los Angeles, and in the Courts of Justice of Barcelona. Currently she is doing research about the Internet, new media, online sociability and digital cultures. As other related activities, she collaborates with the Research Group of Sociojuridical Studies (Gres, UAB) and has been a researcher member in the Interdisciplinary Research Group in Virtual Communities (GIRCOM, UOC). Today, she coordinates the Research Grup in Digital Culture ‘mediaccions’, as well as she is involved in the Media Anthropology Network of EASA and Chair of the ECREA Digital Culture and Communication Section.

Matteo Ciastellardi

Senior Research Fellow. After an MA degree in philosophy at the Università Statale of Milano, he obtained a Ph.D. at the Politecnico of Milano, Department of Industrial Design and Multimedia Communication, with a thesis titled “Bottom-up management of online information”. In 2009-2010 he was in charge of the course “New languages in information science” as adjunct professor at Università Statale of Milano. He is actually Senior Research Fellow at IN3, the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute directed by Manuel Castells in the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

On one hand he has acquired a critical and philosophical framework to approach research and, on the other, he developed a pragmatic approach, inspired by communication design and by information science. These aspects have driven his research interests to be established on both these layers, and focused his attention in fields where research could be empowered by cross-methodologies of investigation.

In the past, Matteo has worked in the area of web design as project manager for various companies and as web analyst for a net-broadcast firm. In last three years he has been focusing on different approaches to the construction of knowledge in the networks, both for his Ph.D. and for a few projects outside the academic context. He obtained a grant in 2007 as a research fellow linked to REPLICA (Reti Evolute Per L’Interazione e la Comunicazione Aziendale – advanced networks for company’s interaction and communication) to promote the transmission of knowledge from academic to working environment and viceversa. In 2008, he received a second grant for a shorter research fellowship based on the project NERV (Neural Environment for Recombinant Visualization) which aims to design new kinds of visual interfaces for data management in complex environments.

He is co-founder (with Cristina Miranda de Almeida, Derrick de Kerckhove and Andrea Cruciani) of Universal Margin S.L., a company which aims to investigate and propose specific solutions to create a link between digital information and material places, objects and other aspects of everyday living.

His field of research addresses the analysis of social practices and technological systems experienced by online communities in the construction of collective and connective information. His research topics are mainly founded on the web’s information topography and on design strategies for social media to manage bottom-up information, with particular emphasis on practices and tools to share knowledge.

Publications: Design, Knowledge and Augmented Realities (with A. Cruciani, C. M. de Almeida, D. de Kerckhove) 2009; Le architetture liquide. Il pensiero in rete e le reti del pensiero, 2009; The space between. Designing bottom-up knowledge in an interconnected society, (with A. Cruciani, C. M. de Almeida, D. de Kerckhove), 2009; Hybrid ontologies. Design knowledge in a hyperconnected fluid society, 2008; W.Book & E.Margin (with A. Cruciani, C. M. de Almeida, D. de Kerckhove) 2008; Hybrid ontologies. Design knowledge in bottom-up processes, 2008; Tracce per l’epistemologia della cultura tecnica (extract), in M. Bertoldini, La cultura Politecnica 2, 2007; Ricerca e didattica della filosofia in rete. Il laboratorio teoretico Hermes_Net, in A. Andronico, G. Casadei, Didamatica 2007 – Informatica per la Didattica, 2007; Provocazioni della tecnica, in Filosofia della Tecnica, P. D’Alessandro e A. Potestio, 2006; Leggere tracce, scrivere idee. Il processo di interazione dal segno all’inferenza, in P. D’Alessandro, Lo stile del pensiero, 2006; La nascita della pratica ipertestuale, in P. D’Alessandro, I. Domanin, Filosofia dell’ipertesto, 2005; Linguaggi, metalinguaggi e strumenti del digitale collettivo, in P. D’Alessandro, I. Domanin, Filosofia dell’ipertesto, 2005; Il testo digitale: traduzione e mappatura del pensiero, in P. D’Alessandro, I. Domanin, Filosofia dell’ipertesto, 2005.

Robert K. Logan

Originally trained as a physicist, Robert K. Logan is a well-known media ecologist. He received a BS and PhD from MIT in 1961 and 1965. After two post-doctoral appointments at University of Illinois (1965-7) and University of Toronto (1967-8) he became a physics professor in 1968 at the University of Toronto (professor emeritus since 2005).

His best known works are The Alphabet Effect based on a paper co-authored with McLuhan, “The Sixth Language: Learning a Living in the Internet Age” and “The Extended Mind: The Emergence of Language, the Human Mind and Culture”. Robert Logan is now the Chief Scientist of the Strategic Innovation Lab at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD, Toronto).

Janine Marchessault

Director of the Visible City Project + Archive which is examining new practices of media art in a variety of urban contexts. She is also a co-investigator on the Future Cinema Lab, Faculty of Fine Arts at York University. Funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the Future Cinema Lab is a state-of-the-art digital media research facility devoted to ‘new stories for new screens.’

As Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalization, Dr. Marchessault is investigating how the information society is redefining the artist’s role and shaping urban contexts. Inherent in her work is the development of new research methods that use advanced media technologies to interpret the cultural ecologies of cities, with the ultimate goal of proposing new planning and policy strategies.

Currently, Professor Marchessault is researching the cultural and political practices of artists in urban contexts and new forms of translocal citizenship in Toronto, Havana and Helsinki. Another research focus is the culture of suburbs. She was recently awarded a SSHRC grant to develop a case study of Willowdale, Ontario, with an interdisciplinary group of artists.

Dr. Marchessault has two book projects in progress. Ecstatic Worlds: 20th Century Utopian Film Projects examines collective experiments with film and media that have been driven by aspirations for universality. Urban Mediations: Art, Ethnography and Material Culture, an interdisciplinary collection that she is co-editing, situates different historical and methodological currents in urban media studies.

Dr. Marchessault is the author of Marshall McLuhan: Cosmic Media (Sage Publications, 2005) and co-editor of Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema (University of Toronto Press, 2007); Wild Science: Reading Feminism, Medicine and the Media (Routledge, 2000); and Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women’s Cinema (University of Toronto Press, 1999). She is a founding editor of the arts journal Public Art/Ideas/ Culture and a past president of the Film Studies Association of Canada.

Cristina Miranda de Almeida

Cristina Miranda de Almeida holds a European PhD Cum Laude by Unanimity in Arts (UPV-EHU, thesis The Tree of Art. Inter-subjective and Trans-sensorial Matrix for a Non-visual Art and the Silence of the Artistic I; 4 years of FPI Research Grant), a Postdoctorate Degree as Advanced Research Associate, Planetary Collegium, University of Plymouth, U.K. (2005/06), a Master in Industrial Design (DZ-BAI), a Diploma of specialization in Territorial Planning (Fundicot, Universidad de Valencia), a Diploma of specialization in Town Planning (IBAM, Rio de Janeiro), a Degree in Art (Faculty of Fine Arts, University of the Basque Country, UPV-EHU, Vizcaya, Spain) and a Degree in Architecture (Faculty of Architecture, USU, Rio de Janeiro).

External collaborator with the Research Line Digital Culture (IN3/UOC, Barcelona). She is currently teaching and researching at the Facultad de Bellas Artes, University of the Basque Country. W-Fellow in the MPCT, University of Toronto (projects Global Art, WiredBook & Electronic Margin and Point of Being). ARA (Planetary Collegium, University of Plymouth, Great Britain) and visiting researcher in Paris for a period of 3 month at the Beaux-arts l’Ècole Nationale Supérieure.

Some Publications are the book El Árbol del Arte. Matriz trans-sensorial e intersubjetiva para el arte no visual y el silencio del yo artístico (2006); The Silence of the Artistic I. Listening for bringing the Nanoscale to Human Consciousness (2007); The Electronic Dimensions of the Silence of the Artistic I in the Germinal Operations of Art Creation (2006); WiredBook & Electronic Margin (2008); The space in between. Design bottom-up knowledge in an Interconnected Society (2009); Interactive Design and Augmented Realities (2009).

The results of her individual or collective research have been presented in different international and national conferences: Montreal (2010); Vitoria-Gasteiz (2009); Orlando, USA (2009); Munich (2009); Aberdeen (2009), Singapura (2008), Valencia (2008), Bilbao (2008), Plymouth (2007-05), Montreal (2005), Istanbul (2005), Tucson (2006), Naples (2006).

Alejandro Piscitelli has been CEO of the National Educational Portal of Argentina (Educ.ar) (2003-2008), President of the National Association of Distance Education and Educational Technology of Argentina (EDUTIC) and Content Director of Competir.com. He is a consultant on Internet and digital communication. Professor of Data Processing, Informatics and Telematics at the Faculty of Social Sciences (University of Buenos Aires). He’s been professor at the Latin-American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), University of San Andrés, and several universities in Latin American and Spain. Since 1995 he’s been co-editor of the Interlink Headline News, one the firsts electronic journals in Argentina. He has published the following books: Nativos Digitales. Dieta cognitiva, arquitecturas de participación e inteligencia colectiva. Buenos Aires; Santillana, 2009; Internet. Imprenta del siglo XXI. Barcelona: Gedisa, 2005; Meta-cultura, El eclipse de los medios masivos en la era de Internet, Buenos Aires: La Crujia, 2002; Ciberculturas 2.0. En la era de las máquinas inteligentes. Buenos Aires: Paidos, 2002; La generación Nasdaq. Apogeo ¿y derrumbe? de la economía digital, Buenos Aires: Granica, 2001; Post-Televisión. Ecología de los medios en la era de Internet, Buenos Aires: Paidos, 1998; (Des)Haciendo Ciencia. Conocimiento, creencias y cultura. Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Riel, 1997. He’s also been Secretary of the Latin-American Social Sciences Council (CLACSO) and Advisor of the Ministry of Public Service of Argentina.

Bruce William Powe

Canadian writer, poet, novelist, essayist, philosopher, and teacher. Powe received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Toronto in 1981 and studied there with Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye. Ph.D (York University/ 2009) on Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye. He currently teaches English in the Department of English at York University. His courses there have included Visionary Literature: from Hildegard von Bingen and Dante to Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, and Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye: Two Canadian Theorists. He continues to teach the first year introduction to literature course.

He has been the program director or co-director of Marshall McLuhan: What if He Was Right? (1997), The Trudeau Era (1998) and Living Literacies (2002). He is currently at work founding the McLuhan Initiative for the Study of Literacies at York University, to be housed at Founders College. His novella, These Shadows Remain: A Fable, is to be published in the winter of 2011 by Guernica.

Publications: 1984: A Climate Charged (Mosaic) 1987: The Solitary Outlaw (Lester & Orpen Dennys); 1989: Noise of Time in The Glenn Gould Profile, in Collections Canada, National Library Archives; 1993: A Tremendous Canada of Light (Coach House); 1995: Outage: A Journey into Electric City (Random House); 1997: The Solitary Outlaw revised, expanded (Somerville House); 1997: A Canada of Light revised, expanded (Somerville House); 2004: The Living Literacies Print Record, editor (Coach House); 2005: The Unsaid Passing (Guernica); 2006: Towards a Canada of Light (Thomas Allen); 2007: Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and The Rose (Thomas Allen); Forthcoming 2011: “These Shadows Remain: A Fable” (Guernica).