Stijn Bannier

I graduated in 2005 as Bachelor for the courses Dutch, History and ICT/ Informatics at the teacher's department of the Leuven University College (BE). Subsequently I graduated cum laude as Master of Arts in New Media and Digital Culture at Utrecht University.

During my studies, I did an internship at Veronica Medialab, where research was carried out into the music industry combined with Web 2.0 and 3.0 concepts. In my Master’s thesis I wrote a theoretical and philosophical reflection on transcendental musical experiences in a digital context. With this thesis "The gamer as a hybrid performer”, I won the Dutch Music Thesis Prize 2008. The same year, I joined IBBT-SMIT, VUB as a junior researcher. SMIT, Studies on Media, Information and Telecommunication, is a research centre, founded in 1990 at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and part of IBBT, the Interdisciplinary Institute for Broadband Technology. SMIT specialises in social scientific research on media and ICT, with an emphasis on innovation, policy and socio-economic questions.

Currently, I am working on several e-culture research projects, varying from digital libraries and music video games to cultural profiling and multi-touch interfaces. My main research interest is digital music culture, video games, virtual worlds and hybrid spaces of new media.