Goldsmiths - University of London

The Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre is interdisciplinary and not only studies media spaces but also designs them to better understand their future potential. Media spaces are in a process of rapid transformation. If we want to understand the profound implication of these changes for public life and social relations, the key questions are empirical: where are the boundaries drawn between media and non-mediated spaces today? What are the economic, political, social and technological determinants of this? And what are the ways in which we engage with these media and media spaces?

The Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre is composed of five individual projects. Project One, Spaces of News considers the spaces of news gathering and the dispersal of news sources in the age of blogging and camera phones. Project Two, Metadata In The Age of Ubiquitous Data investigates the properties of new metadata in software to both enable and block various forms of connectivity. Project Three, The Mediatised View is a design project which explores the potential of new media to transform our vision of the city through an interactive installation in the London Eye.  Project Four, Europe in Motion asks how the ability of migrants to be simultaneously in Europe and at home through media is transforming the European public sphere. And Project Five, Tracking the Moving Image tracks the movement of the screen out from the cinema and the living room and consequent changes in engagement with it as part of everyday urban life.

All projects overlap and interconnect through concerns such as:

• The significance of new media economies and cultures in relation to broader economic, social and cultural transformations.
• The processes of greater media fragmentation and individualisation, in terms of both production and consumption - what we term the dispersal of the screen.
• The shift in media cultures and politics from the paradigm of imagined community to the significance of networked connectivity.
• Issues of power and control, freedom and diversity over ways of seeing, ways of telling and ways of thinking.
• What all this means for the public sphere and public culture – through local, national and transnational spaces.

By bringing together the true diversity of approaches and projects under the rubric of space and the portal in monthly meetings and annual symposia, the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre will generate creative intellectual dialogue across the disciplines and spark unforeseeable new ideas, projects, and possibilities.