The Aesthetics of Pervasive Media

Abstract

This work emerges from a knowledge exchange partnership between the Pervasive Media Studio Bristol UK  and the University of the West of England’s Digital Cultures Research Centre (DCRC). It offers conceptual techniques, descriptive vocabularies and pragmatic design tools for the emergent field of ‘pervasive media’. Languages and vocabularies emerge from, and situate fields of, research and development, binding together communities of practice. This presentation concerns the development of a shared vocabulary for ‘Pervasive Media’ that has formed a central question in an ongoing Knowledge Transfer Fellowship (KTF).  The KTF at the DCRC was set up in response to a perceived need to research definitions and new models of value creation in digital media businesses. The ‘Pervasive Media’ slogan promises the ‘right media in the right place at the right time’ delivered to phone screens, headphones, projections large and small in a burgeoning variety of interactive genres. For CBS advertising they are simply ‘outdoor media’, an extension of billboards offering the potential to intensify advertising’s command of our engagement in the terminal competition of the digital attention economy. What other models of value network could Pervasive Media support? This paper is based on work undertaken in a Knowledge Transfer Fellowship based at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol in which we have been working with digital start-ups to analyse the ways in which value, economies and media ecosystems interact. Using a number of recent examples of Pervasive Media practice the presentation will offer an analysis of the value produced by the media ecosystems which they inhabit and co create.