mediainspiratorium app for iPhone and iPad

Bob Cotton’s mediainspiratorium is designed for students of all ages (17+) interested in the fine-arts, the media-arts, and the digital arts. It is a kind of non-linear history of innovations in the form and content relevant to our 21st century media environment. Why ’non-linear’? Because you learn best when you’re already interested in a subject, and when you follow your own interests through information and examples. Mediainspiratorium provides thousands of links between subjects and artists, so you can trace the roots, the inspirations, the influences, the schools relevant to that subject and that artist.

And so mediainspiratorium contains overview histories of art, animation, artificial intelligence, artificial life, advertising, architecture, art history, art theory, audio-visuals, augmented reality, books, cognitive psychology, conceptual art, comics, computing, cryptology, dance, data-visualisation, documentaries, e-commerce, education, environment, events and exhibition-design, fashion, fairytale, future-casting, games, graphic design, geographical information systems, hypertext and hypermedia, information-design, interface design, illustration, installation, intermedia, magazines, multi-screen, music, performance, photography, photo-montage, poetry, propaganda, radio, robotics, science, software, telecommunications, television, theatre, video, virtual reality, virtual worlds…

This is the context you need to become an informed practitioner in the arts and media industries. It’s a tool for self-learning.

Bob Cotton’s mediainspiratorium is a kind of record of my own learning over fifty years as an art student, a teacher, lecturer, freelancer, creative director, research-fellow and professor. We are all still learning, and Bob Cotton’s mediainspiratorium is a guide you can use for your own learning, discovering stuff that otherwise you might miss. Learning and design and content creation and innovation go together - they are part of the same process of observation, analysis, deduction, idea-development, product-development and creative progress. With over 50 years of discovering interesting and often inspirational stuff, maybe my Bob Cotton’s mediainspiratorium can help you discover the amazing art-design-computing-communications ecosystem. Bob Cotton’s mediainspiratorium is the back-story of modern 21st century media. Get better at what you do - this is the essential context you need to prosper in the creative industries in 2020 and beyond…

All the in-copyright images, sequences and clips featured here remain the property of their respective owners. They are used under section 10 of the UK 1998 Copyright Act - ie in the spirit of fair use, as a not for profit educational tool for students of all ages… I want to thank all those artists whose images and clips I have chosen to represent their important contributions to this back-story of our phenomenal 21st century media-space. Please contact me if you wish to withdraw or modify any items…[email protected]

Paul Harper (University lecturer) comments: "The navigation tools help you to explore different areas of the index, but part of the pleasure and, from a research point of view, richness of the experience comes from the idiosyncratic nature of the connections and some of the personal, anecdotal entries. Whilst there is a large degree of systematic organisation, there are some surprising and even eccentric links between pages. The unexpected and apparent randomness of these links seems to be one of the strengths of the mediainspiratorium as a tool - I thoroughly enjoyed the sense of wandering. "

Tips: To clear Favourites and/or History press and hold the required button for 5-seconds.

To search by Year, simply insert a numerical year (eg 1968) in the Search box and hit return.