Digital material launch
So, the book is launched! Buy it, borrow it, or download it. My contribution can be read separately here (it's a short version of one of my PhD chapers).
The launch celebration day was great, though I embarrassingly 'miskissed' the dean when presenting the first copy to him… I know for sure now that I have no talent for bunny work, but anyway, the Utrecht New Media Maffia created a map - and put itself pontifically on it 
I really liked the morning sessions where former students talked about their various internships and professional careers - we should do this more often, since this not only shows a generational history of the New Media and Digital Culture program, it also creates a feeling of community among present students and teachers.
In the afternoon program New Media coordinator Joost Raessens gave a quick overview of ten years new media studies in Utrecht, how it started with three elderly musketeers and developed into the nice messy bunch of interdisciplinary and non-disciplinary eccentrics we are are now. My dear collegue Mirko Tobias Schäfer - in suit & sneakers, cool! - explained what we meant by digital materialism.
After that, we had two representatives of the contributors to the book. David Nieborg, former collegue who is now appointed in Amsterdam, addressed the uneasy mixture of military culture and popular culture in war games, and Eggo Muller demonstrated how fruitful a comparative-historical approach to new media and participatory culture can be, by demonstrating the 60s interface of the user-supported television program Aktenzeichen XY (a.k.a. Opsoring verzocht, and America's Most Wanted.) See here the first episode of Aktenzeichen XY (1967), with an elaborate explanation of the inscription apparatus involved.
Geert Lovink and Florian Cramer did the critical assesment work we asked them for, though of course in an unexpected way. Geert stated that we, as New Media Studies, were too close, not to say married to film and televison studies, and that it was time for a divorce (since this situation more or less confines us into a representation and visual-culture discourse - at least, that is what I could make of it). Florian suggested this situation was more a matter of genealogy, and that we were the grown-up child of film and television parents which can now may be stand on its own legs. Funny family metaphors, yet, I really disagree. I would say as far as we have a relationship with film and television studies we are rather promiscuous; and as offspring we are more illegal bastards than obedient kids extending the family tradition. I don't have the impression of any institutional or paradigm constraints by sharing the house with film, television, theater and gender studies. On the contrary, we benefit and borrow from notions such as active audiences, framing and montage, discursive formations and dispositif, situated knowledges and performativity, embodiednes and apparatus, public sphere and politics, representation and semiosis et cetera. This enables us to flesh out the medium specificities of digitality, network cultures and social-cultural machineries.
Florian made some clever comments on our - indeed, historically rather weak - argument for the current need for a materialist perspective on new media and digitality. However, when he played the ontology card (by distinguishing between the Scylla of ontology materialism and the Charybdis of cultural materialism) Jos de Mul intervened unimitable and quite appropriate with a short exposure of the adventures of ontology since Kant's framing turn, the linguistic turn and the contemporary mediatic turn. Florian gave in and remarked that it must be his German trauma (probably too much Fundamental Ontologie)…
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On this day we want to reflect on what we have achieved in the last ten years and how we have developed into a full-fledged and indispensable field of study. The day will be kicked off with a series of presentations of former student who will tell us about their professional careers after their study. In the afternoon our book Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology will be launched (AUP, eds. M. van den Boomen, S. Lammes, A.-S. Lehmann, J. Raessens and M.T. Schäfer). The first copy of the book will be presented to Prof. Wiljan van den Akker (Dean of the Faculty of Humanities). Lectures will be held by 
