Bricolab

The person

• I live in Tokyo and online, collect questionable qualifications and advertising tissues and have worked as a toilet cleaner, university lecturer, bookseller, teacher, gardener and in a host of other wonder professions.

• Previous research has engaged with Matt Hills' and Henry Jenkins' work on participatory culture, fan culture and cult media in a study which introduces the notion of the internet Anti-Fan; in the diverse and fascinating adult uses of children's culture; and the lineage of surrealist and situationist utopian discourse in the new media, technology and videogame press.

• Current work centres around the use of constructionist and open source culture endeavors to create and learn through collaboration; the exploration of fansub and scanlation communities, especially insofar as their addition of 'liner notes'; and the impact of the long tail on the communications industries.

• I am interested in, far from exclusively, and in no particularly order:

• creative commons freeing up the remix culture
• collaboration especially as it relates to the formation of communities of practice and collaborative authorship
• p2p how the top-down model is done for
• open source culture you are, in reading this, taking part
• The long tail how smart businesses are adapting to the new media climate and information sharing
• media audience research Who/we/see/do
• web studies Click/click
• constructionist learning Do/think
• The DIY ethic Bodge it, bash it out, pass it on
• Participatory culture The audience is dead. Long live the participant.
• open source Information wants to be FREE
• Fansub Grab, sub, give
• Scanlation Found in translation
• Psychogeography Meandering through ambience storms in the megopolis
• situationism Under the paving stones, the beach
• apple Computers for people like pretty things but don't like spyware
• identity Who/me?
• applied linguistics Language vigorously applied, as in sun tan lotion
• Japaneseおれはおばかです
• stop motion Click and move
• Umezu Kazuo Children. Scissors. Ouch- Japan's finest horror manga-ka
• Suehiro Maruo Deco monstrosities
• Aya Takano Pop girls in bubble space
• Shunga Naughty comics from ancient Japan
• Ukiyo-e The floating world
• collage Cut, paste, comment
• mobile technologies Connect, transform
• Foucault The Kojak of philosophy
• Deleuze Virtually here
• Brickmation Lego+Stop motion= Brickmation
• Children's culture and adults uses of it
• ludology Play theory
• Anti-essentialism Dissolving borders
• Ubiquitous computing - Your computer wants letting out of its box
• Mind maps - So do your thoughts
• Ubiquitous media - Death to the old flesh
• Invisible literatures - J G Ballard's notion of the world of unacknowledged literatures
• Invisible media - overlooked, pervasive media subconsciously deemed unnoteworthy
• Everyday Life - From Henri Lefebvre to De Certeau and beyond
• Culture hacking - Splice, dice and serve
• Free culture - wrestling culture back from the megacorps
• Flash mobs - From screen to scene

The project

Bricolab is an amalgamated word. It is also my latest web project, and can be visited by clickety clicking here!

The word Bricolab is even more compacted than the foodstuffs in Elvis's colon. If we explode it, in the manner of a naughty terrorist, or a UN smart bomb, we find the following words come running for cover:

• Bricolage - Grab, slap together, marvel at the new combination.
• Brick - Click, clunk, the lego revolution.
• Collaboration - Open source being. Forging connections. Wikiworld.
• Laboratory - Experimentation in the playground of identity.

Contributions to date

• Pocket packet - A project I am currently developing from its initial impetus on wikipedia. Check out the future of the phenomenon over at Pocket-Packet.org
• Constructionist learning - Fleshed out article a little and expanded links
• Seymour Papert - MIT Arch-Constructionist (the pretty, oversized pic of Seymour is mine)
• Advertising tissues - Tokyo's favourite meme spreader (Version 2- V1 ruthlessly deleted for less than sombre treatment of subject matter)
• Brickmation - lego meets stop motion online
• Minifigures - Lego's block headed, jaundiced chappies
• Minor contributions to stop motion
• Children's culture - Started a very brief article
• Applied linguistics - Dropped in a mention of Critical Applied Linguistics
• Anti-fan - Managed to sneak my own term into the wikipedia, based on previous Masters research