from flirian cramer on the Negroponte Enterprise

The European Media Lab was launched at the height
of the tech bubble but closed its doors in
January this year. Its output may disappoint the
Irish government, but it won't surprise anyone
familiar with the original MIT Media Lab.

[snip]

You left out the juicy bit:

| The institution was founded in the 1980s by Nicholas Negroponte
| as a way of relieving gullible corporations of their money. The
| haphazard and often whimsical "research" was scorned by real computer
| scientists, but succeeding in its goal of attracting attention from
| a gadget-happy mass media. Negroponte even funded his own tech porn
| publication: Wired magazine, to promote the utopian adventure.
|
| And they're still at it. This year we featured the Labs' Clocky - a
| shagpile-covered alarm clock that runs away from you.
|
| The only difference with MIT Media Lab Eire is that the taxpayer,
| rather than, private donors, were invited to sponsor the playpen.
|
| We can't improve on the Sunday Times description of the scandal,
| written by John Burns, which begins thus:
|
| "One of its biggest research projects was a sensor to read peoples
| minds. But MediaLab Europe (MLE), a project that cost the Irish
| taxpayer almost ¤40m, must have thought the Irish government was
| already telepathic. It refused to tell ministers how many people it
| employed, what they were paid, or to provide audited accounts."

This seems somewhat symptomatic for the whole so-called "new media" cyberkitsch,
and I wouldn't be too sad if these were the signs of its ultimate collapse and
vanishing. I wouldn't be surprised if in one or two decades, people will consider
"new media" retrofuturist camp, just as "cybernetics" before.

-F