Colloquia and Forums
The CMS colloquium series is intended to provide an intimate and informal exchange between a visiting speaker and CMS faculty, students, visiting scholars and friends. Each week during the term, we host a figure from academia, industry, or the art world to speak about their work and its relation to our studies. These sessions are free, open to the public, and serve as an excellent introduction to our program.
We also record these and broadcast them to the world-at-large via our Podcast. You can also download the individual files by clicking the links from each entry.
A full color, 11"x17" poster of the season's Colloquium events is available for download as well:
For more than 20 years the MIT Communications Forum has played a unique role at MIT and beyond as the host of important conversations about all aspects of communications, with special emphasis on emerging technologies. Leading academics, journalists, political figures, and corporate managers have appeared at its conferences and panels. The Forum continues its rich tradition of organizing quality public discourse as the programming division of CMS. If you'd like to receive e-mail updates, please register here.
This talk, with Celia Pearce, Asst. Professor of Digital Media at Georgia Tech and Director and the Emergent Game Group and Experimental Game Lab, explores the connection of identity to virtual place, referencing in particular anthropology, humanist and socio-geography and Internet studies to look at the construction and performance of “fictive ethnicity” tied to a specific, though virtual and fictional, locality. To illustrate, Pearce will use the example of the “Uru Diaspora,” a game community from the defunct massively multiplayer game Uru: Ages Beyond Myst (based on the Myst series), which immigrated into other games and virtual worlds, adopting the collective fictive ethnicity of “Uru Refugees,” and referring to Uru as their “homeland.”
Randy Testa, Vice-President of Education and Professional Development, Walden Media, LLC will discuss what it means to create educational content in tandem with commercially released family films, film adaptations of children's literature. He will also discuss why Walden Media as a film studio has recently moved into publishing children's literature as another platform for storytelling and content acquisition.
In humans, gender--femininity, masculinity--is an array of performed behaviors, from dressing in certain clothes to walking and talking in certain ways. These behaviors are both socially and historically shaped, but are also contingent upon many situational influences, including individual choices. Female and male bodies alike can perform a variety of femininities and masculinities. What can human gender(ed) practices and performances tell us about how humanoid robots are gendered, and vice versa? Robertson explores and interrogates the gendering of humanoid robots manufactured today in Japan for use in the home and workplace. She shows that Japanese roboticists assign gender to their creations based on rigid assumptions about female and male sex and gender roles. Thus, humanoid robots can productively be understood as the vanguard of a "posthuman sexism," and are being developed in a socio-political climate of reactionary conservatism.
Communications Forum: Race, Gender, American Politics
In the optimism of Obama's ascension many have seen this election and this new presidency as signs of a transformation in American attitudes to race and gender. Is such a positive story plausible? Do the country's demographic and voting trends support or complicate the perception that we've entered a post-racial society? Or a society in which gender bias is at best a residual, receding force? What role is played by the media, and in particular the emerging media enabled by digital and mobile technologies, in promoting and maintaining a new American narrative of race and gender. Speakers include Stephen Ansolabehere, Professor of Political Science at MIT; Callie Crossley, who appears weekly on Beat the Press, a media criticism program on Boston's public television station WGBH-TV; and Gabriel Lenz, Assistant Professor of Political Science at MIT.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Future Civic Media
A fluid text is any work that exists in multiple versions. What are the ethics and legality in the creation, sharing, and ownership of textual versions? What are the boundaries of textual appropriation? How does technology abet appropriation; how might it assist in the useful designation of boundaries? Is the law keeping up?
Hofstra University professor John Bryant explores the larger applications of the notion of fluid text to culture, and in particular identity formation in a multicultural democracy. Wendy Seltzer is a Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and is a visiting professor at American University. She founded and leads the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, helping Internet users to understand their rights in response to cease-and-desist threats, and to research the effects of these threats on free expression.
The widespread adoption of computer-based methods of digital recording technology has profoundly changed film scoring practices around the globe, not least in Hollywood. This panel will explore those changes with attention to current techniques compared to those of past generations. Our speakers, Paul Chihara of UCLA and Dan Carlin of the Berklee College of Music, are widely respected professional film scorers as well as teachers. Drawing on their own experiences in film production, they will explore the decisive changes in personnel, economics, and stylistic values at work in Hollywood today. Moderator Martin Marks of MIT will provide historical perspectives and guide the discussion with questions for the panelists concerning the music of landmark films past and present.
04.13.09 | 7-9 PM | N52 (MIT Museum)
A discussion about the inducement of pleasure, fantasy fulfillment, and the mediation of intimacy in a socially-networked gaming paradigm such as World of Warcraft (WOW), this event is co-sponsored with the MIT Museum in conjunction with the exhibition SHADA/JAHN, “Hollowed,” which includes the WOW Pod. Panelists include Jean-Baptiste Labrune, Postdoctoral Associate at the Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Lab; Raimundas Malasauskas, Curator, Artists Space (NYC); Henry Jenkins, Co-Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program; Marisa Jahn, Artist in Residence, MIT Media Lab; Steve Shada, artist collaborator; Cati Vaucelle, HCI researcher, MIT Media Lab; and Laura Knott, Curatorial Associate, MIT Museum.
Chris Claremont is best known for his 17 year unbroken run on the X-Men comic series -- a feat in world building that has supported many uses, from comics to movies to video games and more. Now Chris is returning to that world, with a new comics series titled X-Men Forever. This time, the rules are different. Mr. Claremont will address thoughts and considerations that go into building a world that can support years of use, and variations. How has the concept of world-building changed over time? What is the purpose of continuity? Multiplicity? How to take into account growth and risk, and play outside the rules. Questions and answers to follow.
This panel will explore theoretical, methodological, and practical issues surrounding the study of media circulation in an age of increasing global connectivity. “Global media” often serves as a placeholder for media outside Anglo-American academic settings, with “global” gesturing towards “Other” media ecologies. This panel brings together scholars and practitioners who wrestle with the simultaneous indispensability and inadequacy of Anglo-American paradigms - both for media practitioners and scholars - in Asian, African, and Latin American contexts. In what ways can we move away from the “national” as the pre-eminent analytic frame? How do media producers in the global south grapple with the challenges and opportunities of globalization? What role are audiences playing in shaping media circuits? In tackling these and other questions, panelists Jonathan Gray, Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University; Carolina Acosta-Alzuru, Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia; African filmmaker Abderrahamane Sissako; and CMS alum Aswin Punathambekar SM ’03, Communication Studies, University of Michigan will explore ways in which recent developments in diverse settings worldwide might inform and revitalize our understanding of how media circulates. Henry Jenkins will moderate this forum which kicks off the sixth Media in Transition conference at MIT.
Presidential elections are considered decisions on politicians’ virtues and reflections of public values. On an ongoing basis, polling data and snap punditry engorge the body politic between elections. Taken together, these judgments on leadership and partisanship – on statecraft and stagecraft – lie at the core of democracy today. Eskew explores the permanent campaign of the last ten years. What is “message discipline” in an era of atomized opinion leadership – a necessity or a fool’s errand? Are the parties inevitably devoted to different styles of communication, and is this era’s favored approach inextricably the domain of the new Administration? Can unfettered dialogue, as an expression of freedom, be a pure benefit to society, or is “Fire!” being texted in a crowded coffee house? Consistent with his conservatism, Eskew will have firm answers to some of these and other questions. Reflecting his consulting firm ViaNovo’s “new ways”, he will welcome dialogue on all.