Martijn de Waal

In June 2010, the new issue of OPEN was launched at the Berlin Biennial. “Privacy” is the main theme, and the focus is “not so much on deploring the loss of privacy but on taking the present situation of ‘post-privacy’ for what it is and trying to gain insight into what is on the horizon [...]

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What, where and when On August 16-17 2010 The Mobile City and Virtueel Platform organized ‘Designing the Hybrid City’. This event explored the role of digital technologies in urban design. It took place in the Dutch Culture Centre in Shanghai. Our event was part of a cluster of events called Adaptation: Designing the Future City that took [...]

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I am one of the organizers of the Mediafonds@Sandberg Masterclass that couples new media designers with traditional media directors to experiment with innovative ways of storytelling. For the 2010 edition we are focussing on ‘Datavisualization’, and Database Culture in a more general way and what this might mean for the documentary format. The Program consists [...]

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Press Now invited me again to host a Masterclass Digital Media and Journalism at the Caucasus Institute in Yerevan, Armenia. Goal of the workshop: to share with CI students and staff knowledge and visions on developments in New Media and Journalism. The workshop will address three important themes. • Distribution and context of journalistic ‘content’ [...]

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At the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) The Mobile City (an organization I co-founded with Michiel de Lange) organized a number of events between November 5th and 12th 2009, including a keynote, workshop and exhibition with the American artist, architect and researcher Mark Shepard. The events are part of the ‘Connectivity’ theme of the IABR [...]

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Mark Shepard, curator of the Toward the Sentient City Exhibition held at the Architectural League in New York invited me to write a ‘reponse’ to the exhibition. Here is the full text: —- At certain points in the history of architecture and urban planning, the internal debate on how to apply new technologies surpasses the [...]

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It is a great honor for me to spend a few months (March – until the end of June 2009) as a ‘visiting scholar’ at MITs Comparative Media Studies and the Center for Future Civic Media. During my stay in Cambridge I would like to spend my time on the following projects: • First, I [...]

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Sitfo@Sandberg is a yearly Masterclass in which traditional media makers (film, drama, documentary) are coupled with new media designers to experiment with new media formats. The Masterclass starts of with a large public seminar (this year we had a.o. Bruce Sterling and Julian Bleecker as speakers). In the following 3 months, participants follow a series [...]

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As part of my current research project into New Media, Urban Culture and the Public Sphere I have published two articles in which I – somewhat playfully – investigate some concepts to theorize the experience of the current day media metropolis. The term Myspace urbanism refers both to social networking sites, as to the idea [...]

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After years of research, The Chinese Dream – a society under construction edited by Neville Mars and Adrian Hornsby is finally published! In the summer of 2004 I took part in a field trip with the research team of the DCF, and that resulted in a chapter titled Too much joy and Pleasure in this [...]

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The Dutch NGO Press Now asked me to set up a two day masterclass on New Media and Journalism for the students and staff at the Caucasus Media Institute in Yerevan, Armenia. The goal was to introduce the students of the journalism program with the most important themes in journalism and new media, and to [...]

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The Mobile City is a conference on Urban Culture, Locative and Mobile Media. I am co-organizing this conference with Michiel de Lange and the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam. Keynote speakers are Stephen Graham, Tim Cresswell, Christian Nold and Malcolm McCullough. The conference brings together academics, urban professionals and media designers to answer the question: [...]

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For the second Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism in Shenzhen and Hong Kong I worked together with Dutch graphic Designers Leon & Loes on a project called ‘Greetings from Pendrecht – The City as Interface’ The exhibit is the result of a research project on the process of ‘space-making’ in the Rotterdam Neighborhood Pendrecht. Virtual [...]

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For Open #13 The rise of the Informal Media I wrote a contribution about some of the cultural implications of web 2.0. I am mainly interested in processes of ‘validation’ – in a networked media culture, who or what decides what is important? Are the hierarchic authority structures of the cultural elite being replaced by [...]

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In the summer of 2007 I visited Tokyo and did a short photo research project on urban typologies. I was particularly interested in the contrasts between the contained atrium spaces of new developments like Roppongi Hills and Shiodome on the one hand and the still vey contingent feel of Tokyo’s street – or better: crossings [...]

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Together with Femke Wolting, who is a director at Submarine, I was invited to curate and host a session on Virtual Worlds, for the HotSpot network of mediaprofessionals working at or with Public Broadcasting in The Netherlands. We invited three very interesting speakers: Tim Guest, the author of Second Lives; Chris Carella, who works as [...]

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I was invited by the editorial team of the 3rd International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam to write a contribution to the catalogue of the Visionary Power Exhibition, published by NAI Publishers. In particular, I was asked to write an essay in the format of a glossary that would bring the main themes and insights of the [...]

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In february 2007 Het Spinhuis published De Nieuwe Reporter – Jaarboek 2007, a review of the discussions we hosted on De Nieuwe Reporter, a professional weblog on journalism and technology that I have set up with Theo van Stegeren en Frank van Vree. This book features a number of analytic chapters in which we explain [...]

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Hot Spot is an informal network of staff members and free lancers connected to Dutch Public Broadcasting. The goal of this network is to exchange ideas, get inspiration and stay up to date with the latest developments in the media landscape. Hot Spot regularly organizes get togethers based on a particular theme. The project was [...]

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Together with V2 and the International Institute for Asian Studies I organized a symposium on media culture in China. Whereas many discussions on media in China focus on censorship, we wanted to address developments in new media from the other side: what can be and is done in China? What new possibilities do digital media [...]

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De Nieuwe Reporter is a professional group weblog on journalism, technology, and the public sphere. I started this weblog in mid 2006 together with Frank van Vree and Theo van Stegeren, two colleagues at the department of Mediastudies at the University of Amsterdam. Since then it has grown into one of the top journalism blogs [...]

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For the French filmmagazine Tausend Augen I wrote this article on the representation of the Chinese city in the cinema of the directors of the so-called 6th generation. In the past decade, China, a country of farmers, has become a nation dominated by megacities. Rural villages have turned into regional city centres. Where once farmers [...]

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In the spring of 2004, TimeZone8 published this book on Factory 798, an artist enclave in an old Bauhaus-industrial complex near Beijings 4th ringroad. I contributed an article about the symbolic status of the Chinese Cities and its art districts. Not long after the revolution of 1949, partyleader Mao and then mayor of Beijing Peng [...]

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In the fall of 2003, Chris Bajema and I travelled along the big cities of china’s east coast, reporting weekly for the Dutch Daily NPR-program De Ochtenden, and daily on our weblog. We made radio documentaries about free speech and talk radio in Hong Kong, migrants in Shenzhen, Chinese style tourism in Xiamen, we visited [...]

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In this edited volume on the impact of the digitalization of the medialandscape, I wrote an article about the media use, production of meaning and construction of identity by young Moroccans who are growing up in Holland. Their identity, I suggest, is not a question of either-or (to be either Dutch or Moroccan), but a [...]

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In the yearly review of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation I wrote a chapter on utopian planning in Arizona. I compared two geographically close but ideologically very different interpretations of utopian city building. The first is Arcosanti, set up decades ago by the Italian architect Paolo Soleri. An old student of Frank Lloyd Wright [...]

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In the spring of 2002 Podium published my travelogue Amerika: toets 1 voor het paradijs. (English translation: America: Dial P for Paradise). This book describes the year that I was working in Silicon Valley as a journalist covering the Dotcomboom of these days for the Dutch media. During the year I make a small number [...]

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