While doing research for the then upcoming international conference hosted by the KU Leuven: Immunity and Modernity: Picturing Threat and Protection (May 2015), I picked up the book On Immunity: An Inoculation (2014). I thought that Eula Biss’ book might offer a straight forward, medical or law-based analysis that would help me to pin down or to grasp an answer to the question: just what is immunity? Continue reading
Monthly Archives: September 2015
Blogging the Narrative of Culture, Media and the Arts
The blog “Cultural Studies Leuven, Blogging Since 1425”, hosted by the staff of the Institute for Cultural Studies in Leuven, aims to share interesting publications and events, and give insight into our research and the best work of our students. The research of ICS Leuven can be placed on three, interrelated axes: ‘cultural theory and concepts’, ‘applied narrative’ and ‘media, art and technology’. Continue reading
Paul Otlet’s Mundaneum, or How to create the internet before the digital age
On August 23rd, Google celebrated the 147th birthday of Paul Otlet, one of the visionary minds whose thinking has proven crucial in the birth of the Internet. Otlet did not invent the Internet himself. Inventions are always the result of a social and collective “desire” – and I am reusing here the key word of the seminal book by Geoffrey Batchen, Burning With Desire (MIT, 1997), on the dream of photography… Continue reading
Intellectual Property Rights: good or bad for Creativity in the Digital World?
I was writing a contribution for a book for the RICHES project, which deals with challenges of heritage in the digital environment. I chose to offer some reflections on our experience with Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in the EuropeanaPhotography project (see also the nice final report!). While this project was about early photography… Continue reading