Monday, 9:45am – 12:45pm: British Cultural Studies – Frederik Lesage @ FIE
Our first session was dedicated to discussing the meaning of culture, its construction, and approaches to studying it. We met up with many old friends — Raymond Williams, Louis Althusser, Stuart Hall — and although comforting to learn that I’m in on the media/cultural studies scene, I am hoping that the course resists turning into a repeat of Media Theory (Spring ’09) and starts directly connecting to British culture in general. As the session moved into a seminar discussion from the lecture, I realized that having those common theorists to reference is a necessary step in comparing two cultures from an academic approach. And hey, I’d rather have to re-familiarize myself with articles and theorists for a course than navigate completely foreign, dense text 
Ethnography – Fred encouraged us to take an ethnographic approach to our time here, and I realized that I [luckily] already have. I suppose this is the best way to articulate my approach to the semester abroad; I’ve been dutifully filling my Moleskine City File journal, taking in-the-moment perspective photos, and keeping this blog — three media that I engage with several times on a daily basis (and that have physically traveled with me through the city).
Monday, 6 – 7pm: Internship Meeting – Frederik Lesage @ FIE
We recapped the first week of our internship and decided on a new activity to participate in. Every week we will all decide on a certain event that we can attend, explore, and discuss the following week. Our first assignment: Open House London. I’ll definitely be checking that out this weekend, just need to decided which one…
Tuesday, 10am – 1pm: Networked Media Arts in London: The Maps and the Territories – Ruth Catlow @ FIE
We began with an exercise in identity construction: taking four post-its, we wrote our name and three statements about ourselves, one being a lie. How well do you know me? 1) I sang the National Anthem at the Cole Brothers Circus when it came to Staten Island; 2) I was born in a NYC cab; 3) My first name is shared with both of my grandmothers. Ok…you probably know it’s #2, but my professor has no idea who I am! The exercise made me realize how well the 7 of us have gotten to know each other over the past two weeks, since most of us knew what the others were lying about. It’s great to know we are forging such extensive relationships that will [hopefully] translate into heading back across the pond. Next, we constructed a list of the ways people are connected, ranging from material to immaterial manifestations — again, this reminded me of how connected we are becoming just from sharing this experience together. We moved into an overview of network structures, and Ruth was very interested to hear which technologies we were utilizing in our everyday lives. All of us realized just how dependent we are on technologies and networks: a sign of the hypermediated times!
Ruth also set up a blog for us to document and interact with during the semester (http://www.furtherfield.org/malmate/) and a Twitter account (http://twitter.com/malmate), both of which we will use for our first assignment. Each of us was given a media art to investigate, and I was assigned Peckham Space for the fortnight!
