9:00am
Chris Peterson
"User Generated Censorship: How Actor-Networks Influence Attention With Social Media"

How do you know what you know? And how do you know what you're missing? Social media have become incredibly important avenues for publishing, sharing, and making available information. However, they also provide powerful means of making certain information less available. Strategic groups of actors, coordinating around algorithmic levers, can submerge information in social media streams, collaborating to drown ideas and arguments beneath their waters, in a practice called user-generated censorship.

9:35am
Amar Boghani
"The City Expressed: Everyday Media Production and the Urban Environment"

Our increasingly mediated interactions with cities change not only how we experience them, but how we produce media about them as well. My thesis aims to explore the relationship between the urban technologies and practices of what I define as "place-based media," that is, media produced in conversation with place. In order to do this, I analyze user-generated content created about a specific urban neighborhood, Central Square, as well as research relevant historical precedents, such as street photography, in order to better understand the relationship between the city and the everyday images and texts that are produced about it.

10:10am
Sun Huan
"The Hidden Activism: Media Practices and Media Opportunity Structure in Chinese Politics of Resistance"

My thesis discusses the hidden and non-adversarial nature of resistance in authoritarian countries through perspectives of media practices and media opportunity structure. To understand the art of resistance in authoritarian countries, one has to look beyond the striking physical confrontational aspect of resistance. I approach this hidden resistance topic by examining social and cultural implications of media artifacts appropriated by movement participants and their strategic interactions with different stakeholders within the media ecosystem.

10:45am
Sonny Sidhu
"Poetics of the Videogame Setpiece"

Today's most popular videogames often contain short sequences of bombastic, tightly scripted, visually spectacular action gameplay, which, despite being generally unrepresentative of a game's 'normal' mode of gameplay, tend to be placed front-and-center in these games' marketing campaigns. As popular as they are, these setpieces (as they are called in gamers' parlance) are also often dismissed as mere eye-candy—proof of the skewed priorities of an industry that would sacrifice the substance of games (their deep gameplay) for surface qualities that enhance only their commercial appeal. Following a historical poetics approach that relates theories of media exhibitionism to the perpetual innovation economy of digital games, this thesis argues that the setpiece is a meaningful site of complex agency play within games, enabling narrative expression as well as reflexive comment about a game's own relationship to a continuously reimagined technological state of the art.

11:20am
Ayse Gursoy
"Game Worlds: A Study of Video Game Criticism"

This paper explores the relation between criticism and establishment of narrative forms and genres, focusing on the cultural situation of video games. Comparing the context of early film criticism and contemporary video game criticism, I argue that the public negotiation of meaning and value codifies a new medium as it emerges. I trace the sites of criticism, moving from newspapers and weekly periodicals in the case of film, to blogs and web publications in the case of digital games, and explore how the shifting reception of each form took hold in the different media available. I focus especially on the state of video game criticism today, locating the persuasive strengths in the ability for quick communication between writers, as well as the easy dissemination of digital games. I ground my analysis in the game criticism produced in response to the Mass Effect Trilogy (2007-2012), Dear Esther (2012), and League of Legends (2009).

11:55am
Jia Zhang
"Information Visualization as Creative Nonfiction"

Description to come.

12:25pm
Molly Sauter
"Distributed Denial of Service Actions and the Challenge of Civil Disobedience on the Internet"

This project examines the use of distributed denial of service as a tactic of activism. It addresses the tactic's position within social movement theory and practice; tool design and development; participant identity; state and corporate responses; and presents the foundations of a normative model of ethical practice. Underlying the whole of the analysis is the fundamental challenge of how and even if civil disobedience may be responsibly carried out in online environment.

1:00pm
Rogelio Lopez
"Resistance, Popular Communication, and Politics of Inclusion through Media Practice in Contemporary Immigrants' Rights Movements"

Description to come.

1:35pm
Steve Schirra
"Designing Large-Scale Game Systems for Community Engagement"

Across the country, digital media are becoming an increasingly important part of community engagement processes. In particular, games are used to get stakeholders thinking about social issues and collaborating in novel ways. In this presentation, I contextualize this phenomena with current and historical examples, and highlight critical issues in the design of serious games for community engagement.

2:10pm
Elyse Graham
"The Remaking of English Literature"

The Remaking of English Literature is a study of literary mediation. It focuses on a single, specific group of texts, and on the professional editors who shaped their contents and prepared them for consumption. All of these editors lived during fluid, uncertain, and experimental periods in their fields, when the values and practices that ordered the terrain were not well-defined. One was a stationer in England in the late sixteenth century, when the print marketplace was still coming into being. Others are scholarly editors working in the present day, when the late age of print is giving way to the digital age. The study argues that during each of these periods, material and structural changes to the culture of letters—stimulated, at least in part, by shifts in the media landscape—changed the rules of genre and aesthetic value in ways so significant that the game of literature itself had to be defined anew.

3:20pm
Katie Edgerton"
"Byte-Sized TV: Writing the Web Series

Web series are a transitional storytelling form bridging the production practices of TV and Internet video. Shorter than most television episodes and distributed on platforms like YouTube, web series both draw on and deviate from traditional TV storytelling. By comparing web series based on existing television programs with original shows created for the Internet, I will explore the different reasons that television-inspired stories are appearing online, as well as some of the genre's emerging characteristics.

3:55pm
Abe Stein
"Televisual Sports Videogames"

Many sports videogames are designed as interactive simulations of televised sports. Taking a comparative and historical approach, this thesis explores the relationship between these "televisual" sports videogames and the broadcasts they recreate, situating the two media forms in the context of a complicated North American sports media industrial complex. The project examines how dominant ideologies of hegemonic sports culture in North America are reinforced by features found in both television broadcasts and sports videogames.

Co-sponsored by Comparative Media Studies/Writing, its Graduate Program in Science Writing, and the MIT Program in Science Technology and Society.

David Carr writes the Media Equation column for the Monday Business section of the New York Times that focuses on media issues including print, digital, film, radio and television. He also works as a general assignment reporter in the Culture section of The Times covering all aspects of popular culture. Carr blogs regularly at Media Decoder.

For the past 25 years, Carr has been writing about media as it intersects with business, culture and government.

Seth Mnookin is a former baseball and political writer who now co-directs MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing.

Organized by Literature. Co-sponsored with CMS, the MIT HyperStudio for Digital Humanities, and Ancient and Medieval Studies.

Millions of documents produced around the world over more than four thousand years are now available in digital form -- Google Books alone had scanned, by March 2012, more than 20 million books in more than 400 languages. Images of manuscripts, papyri, inscriptions and other non-print sources are also appearing in increasing numbers. But if we have addressed physical access to images of textual sources, we are a long way from providing the intellectual access necessary to understand the written sources that we see. This talk explores the challenges and opportunities as we refashion our study of the past from ethnocentric monolingual conversations into a hyperlingual dialogue among civilizations, where humans work with machines and with each other to communicate and where books do, as Marvin Minksy opined decades ago, talk to each other.

Gregory Crane is Chair of the Department of Classics at Tufts University, as well as an Adjunct Professor in Tufts' Department of Computer Science. Since 1988, he has been Editor-in-Chief of the Perseus Project, a long-running digital humanities effort focused on Greek, Latin, and Arabic Classics.

The Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University's Department of the History of Science is hosting a semester-long exhibit, "GO ASK A.L.I.C.E: Turing Tests, Parlor Games, & Chatterbots", highlighted in part by this special panel discussion on November 29.

GO ASK A.L.I.C.E explores the strange afterlife of the Turing Test as it has circulated in popular, scientific, and commercial cultures. It reexamines elements of Alan Turing's own interactions with humans and machines, later imaginations of thinking machines, as well as a famous attempt to translate Turing's parlor game into a real test of artificial intelligence: the Loebner Prize.

A Purple Blurb event about narrative generation and MEXICA, GRIOT, and Curveship.

Three creators of poetic and imaginative systems speak about computational creativity, narrative generation, and the way systems for this sort of work are culturally generated.

Rafael Pérez y Pérez is creator of the plot-focused MEXICA system for the generation of stories and is Profesor/Investigador Titular C in the Departamento de Tecnologías de la Información at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Cuajimalpa, México D. F. Fox Harrell is creator of GRIOT and the Alloy algorithm, which generates literary and multimedia texts based on conceptual structures. Harrell is associate professor of digital media at MIT in CMS/WHS, a principal investigator at CSAIL, and head of the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory. Nick Montfort developed Curveship, an interactive fiction and text generation systems that allows for parametrically controlled narrative variation. Montfort is associate professor of digital media at MIT in CMS/WHS and head of the Trope Tank.

Purple Blurb is a series of presentations for digital writing, with its thanks given to Angus N. Macdonald Fund and MIT Writing and Humanistic Studies.

Join the MIT Game Lab and our keynote speaker, visionary game developer Peter Molyneux, on September 21st for a one-day symposium:

Games in Everyday Life and Why That Matters to You

What can finance, health care, philanthropy, and education learn from cutting-edge games and game theory? The new MIT Game Lab (http://gamelab.mit.edu) has some answers for you. Join us September 21st!

Register here! http://mitgamelabsymposium2012.eventbrite.com

1. Panels By — and For — Industry and Researchers

Our panels will feature leading industry professionals and games researchers on:
* Applied Game Research: Players, Design, and Technology
* Games for Learning
* Meaningful R&D Partnerships
* Positive Game Lab Impact

This is your chance to meet leaders like new media scholar Henry Jenkins, MIT Game Lab executive director Philip Tan, and MIT neuroscientist Sebatian Seung, whose artificial intelligence work is an inspiration for how game-like tools can have real-world impact.

2. Then, work with the MIT Game Lab

This gathering also marks the launch of the MIT Game Lab, the new international home of game scholars, creators, and technologists, all working to solve the tough challenges people like you to bring to the table.

The symposium is open to the public. But we especially welcome those who think games have a role to play in advancing their academic, non-profit, and corporate missions but don’t yet know how. To that end, your participation in this symposium can be a step toward working with the MIT Game Lab long-term.

3. Register

Slots are going fast, but discounted attendance is still available for $150 — which includes breakfast, lunch, and a ticket to the evening reception. Students may register at a special $75 dollar rate with the code “COLLABMIT”.

Register today, and see you on the 21st!

http://mitgamelabsymposium2012.eventbrite.com

From the exhibit description...

People can't get enough of stories--we're always seeking to re-experience them, in different forms and versions. Myths have been transformed and rehashed between religion, folklore, and popular narrative. It's typical to see the play, read the book, watch the film, and now, play the game. Each medium will appropriate a story based on what each medium can do best. This exhibit focuses on literary adaptations to the new medium of the videogame, ones that come from classical theatre texts (by Sophocles and William Shakespeare) as well as novels (by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Douglas Adams).

The games showcased in this exhibit demonstrate that there is a wide variety of approaches one can follow in adapting literary works into games.

The participatory nature of the medium cues a transformation of the original story, exploring its different alternatives. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (a text game, or interactive fiction) is an example of how the player becomes the protagonist, engages in the story, maybe changing the events, maybe experiencing a different version of the story. Another approach to adaptation is focusing on world building rather than the events. Avon (also an interactive fiction) invites the player to explore a land inhabited by Shakespeare's characters, who create the challenges that the player must face. The Great Gatsby (a tongue-in-cheek Flash game) intersects the world of F. Scott Fitzgerald's story with the conventions of platformer games such as Super Mario Bros., marking the transition between levels with short cutscenes based on the novel. Another option is adapting the themes, so that the actions of the player rehearse and explore these essential themes, while the original characters, events, and setting may not be present at all. The mechanics of Yet One Word are based on the themes of Oedipus at Colonus.

The exhibit showcases these four games alongside the books they are based on; editions of these book are also available near the exhibit in the Humanities Library's browsery.

Videogames are performance activities, like theatre, sports, rituals or dance. The presentation will draw comparisons and contrasts with theatre to understand how videogames can incorporate narratives as part of the performance: games give cues to the player, who has to figure out the script of the story. How can these cues contribute to the narrative of the game? Focusing on the design of the space, and how it provides opportunities for action, provides some of the answers. The novel concept of indexical storytelling describes a series of strategies that use environmental design to help the player form the narrative script of a game. The game gives indications to the player to interpret, carry out, or even react against. These strategies help understand how videogames tell stories, create narrative opportunities, and open up new avenues for innovation.

Clara Fernández-Vara is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. She is particularly interested in applying methods from textual analysis and performance studies to the study of video games and cross-media artifacts. Her work concentrates on adventure games, as well as the integration of stories in simulated environments through game play. Her goal as a researcher is to bridge disciplines – humanities and sciences, theory and practice – in order to find ways to innovate and open new ground in video games studies and design.

Clara holds a Ph.D. in Digital Media from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She earned a BA in English Studies by the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and was awarded a fellowship from La Caixa Foundation to pursue a Masters in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Clara has presented her work at various international academic conferences, such as DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association), Foundations of Digital Games and Future Play. She has also been a speaker at the Game Developer's Conference, one of the main video game industry gatherings worldwide. She teaches courses on videogame theory and game writing at MIT, and has worked on two experimental adventure games as part of her research, Rosemary (2009), Symon (2010) and Stranded in Singapore (2011).

Visualizing games and gameplay reveals both startling complexity...and stunning simplicity. This talk discusses many applications of information visualization to games: for theory, historical research, design, development, and creative art practice. Considering examples from across decades of video games (from blockbusters to art house experiments) reveals that most games are already information visualizations of a few particular kinds, and can be further transformed in ways that reveal the original through new eyes, suggesting new forms of play.

Jeremy Douglass is a researcher in games and playable media, electronic literature, and the art and science of data mining and information visualization. He is active in the Software Studies and Critical Code Studies research communities, which study software society and the cultural meaning of computer source code. Douglass is a founding member of Playpower, a MacArthur/HASTAC funded digital media and learning initiative to use ultra-affordable 8-bit game systems as a global education platform, and a participant in an NSF grant exploring creative user behavior in virtual worlds. His recording room for gameplay research includes systems spanning over three decades. The Atari 2600 has wood veneer; the PS3 does not.

The rise of e-sports signals a development in computer gaming well worth paying attention to. Not only are we witnessing the emergence and refinement of elite play in formalized competitive environments, but the growth of an industry around it -- complete with team owners, league organizers, broadcasters, and corporate sponsors. Based on extensive qualitative research, this talk will explore the nature of professional computer game play as embodied, technical, and social practice. It will then situate these player performances within a broader context of various institutional actors that are also shaping how high-end competition is developing. In particular, it will look at issues around the ownership of e-sports playing fields, and the status of player action within them.

T.L. Taylor is Associate Professor in the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen. She has been working in the field of internet and multi-user studies for over fifteen years and has published on topics such as play and experience in online worlds, values in design, intellectual property, co-creative practices, game software modification, avatars and online embodiment, gender and gaming, pervasive gaming, and e-sports. As a qualitative sociologist, her research looks at the socio-cultural aspects of network life and play. Her book Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (MIT Press, 2006) presented an ethnographic study of a popular massively multiplayer online game and her new book, Raising the Stakes: E-sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming (MIT Press, forthcoming March 2012) will be the first published scholarly monograph looking extensively at the rising phenomenon of high-end competitive computer game play. She is also a co-author (along with Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi, and Celia Pearce) on the soon to be published Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method (Princeton University Press, forthcoming summer 2012). Her website (including copies of many of her articles) can be found at tltaylor.com.

Games are increasingly seen as a way to address human needs, from the intimate work of maintaining social relationships to the pragmatic benefits of games for learning, health, and social change. If we hope to design games that address these needs, we must understand how people create meaning with, through, and around games. How do specific game design decisions impact the way players think, feel, and behave? What kinds of imaginative and social affordances can games provide players? And what kinds of problems are most appropriate to solve with games in the first place? This talk explores the complex interaction between game design, user experience, and real-world problems through the lens of game-based research projects on discrimination, smoking, and history.

Jessica Hammer is a Mellon Interdisciplinary Graduate Research Fellow at Columbia University, a founding member of the Teachers College EGGPLANT game research laboratory and a member of the Creativity Research Group. She is the lead designer and researcher for the Advance game project, on which she is writing her dissertation. Her larger research interests include stories, games, communities, gender, creativity and learning. She also developed the game design course sequence for the Communications, Computing and Technology program at Teachers College Columbia University. Before joining the department, Jessica worked as a writer, consultant and game designer with an emphasis on serious games and social software. She has taught at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, consulted for both academic and business clients, and worked at noted New York game company Gamelab. She received a masters degree in interactive telecommunications from NYU and her BA in computer science from Harvard University. In her free time, she runs an experimental storytelling group in New York City.

In the last few years a new trend of designing video games intended to fulfill a serious purpose through impacting the players in real life contexts has emerged. These games claim to raise awareness about social and political issues such as inequity, injustice, poverty, racism, sexism, exploitation, and oppression. Their intent is to reach a specific purpose beyond pure entertainment. But what are the specific attributes of purposeful games and how can they be researched? Which game design challenges arise and how are they addressed? How do players make meaning of their game play experiences in general? And what is the future of purposeful games research?

In this talk three perspectives of Mitgutsch's recent research on purposeful games are outlined: To begin, insights from a recent study on meaningful experiences in players’ lives are examined and the research method of playographies is discussed. In the second part, a research-based game design project on subversive game design and recursive learning is presented and the background of the game Afterland is highlighted. Finally, the narrative of serious games and the design of purposeful games are discussed. On this basis, recent research results will be explored and future challenges for game design and purposeful games research will be outlined.

Dr. Konstantin Mitgutsch is a post-doctoral researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab and a Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna. In 2010 he was a Max Kade Fellow at the Education Arcade at the Program of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. He worked at the University of Vienna for several years and published books in the field of game studies and education. Since 2007 he organizes and chairs the annual Vienna Games Conference FROG and is on the expert council of the Pan European Game Information (PEGI).

In the Cold War years, there was a tremendous surge in right-wing broadcasting in America. Hendershot explains how radio and TV extremists feigned a "balanced" presentation of their ideas in the 1950s; in the 60s, those same broadcasters switched to an overtly right-wing line. Ultraconservative broadcasting was eventually shut down by the IRS, citizen activists, and the FCC. The Fairness Doctrine was the most powerful tool used against the extremists, and, thus, right-wing broadcasting was reborn when Reagan suspended the doctrine in 1987, enabling the rise of Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News shortly thereafter. Hendershot's work thus provides useful context for understanding not only the history of the conservative movement but also the contemporary landscape.

Heather Hendershot's research centers on regulation, censorship, FCC policy, and conservative media and political movements. She is the editor of Nickelodeon Nation: The History, Politics and Economics of America's Only TV Channel for Kids and the author of Saturday Morning Censors: Television Regulation before the V-Chip, Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture, and What's Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest. She is also editor of Cinema Journal, the official publication of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

In her transmedia project, Designing Culture, Anne Balsamo investigates the way in which culture influences the process of technological innovation. Drawing on her experiences working as part of collaborative research-design teams that combine art/science/design/engineering, she will describe her new research on public interactives and the infrastructures of public intimacy.

Anne Balsamo's work focuses on the relationship between the culture and technology. This focus informs her practice as a scholar, researcher, new media designer and entrepreneur. She is currently a Professor of Interactive Media in the School of Cinematic Arts, and of Communication in the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. From 2004-2007, she served as the Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy.

designingculture.org

The relationship between the media industries and their audiences is in the midst of a period of profound change. A key aspect of this transition is that traditional exposure-based conceptualizations of the audience are being challenged by conceptualizations that rely primarily on social media data and that are oriented around constructs such as appreciation, engagement, and emotional involvement. This presentation presents ongoing research that examines the institutional factors that are enabling and inhibiting this transition in the television industry, as well as the implications of this transition for audience representation and cultural production.

Philip Napoli is Professor and the Area Chair in the Communication and Media Management area of Fordham University's Schools of Business. His research focuses on media institutions and media policy.

"To have great poets, there must be great audiences too." (Walt Whitman)

This paper outlines recent developments in the field of cultural and media studies, including an account of changes in the economy, culture and technology, and consequent initiatives in educational provision for the creative industries. It goes on to outline the case for a new approach to the media and culture, based on evolutionary and complexity studies, in which the comparative media environment is recast in terms of 'micro-productivity' (user-created content) and 'social learning' (networked knowledge).

John Hartley is an educator, author, researcher and commentator on the history and cultural impact of television, journalism, popular media and creative industries.

A "newsgame" is a videogame that does journalism. Drawing from five years of commercial development and academic research on this new approach, this talk summarizes the principles of newsgames and then offers two related but conflicting perspectives on its role in the future of newsmaking, framed by general thoughts on the challenges of designing and understanding contemporary media.

Ian Bogost, Professor of Digital Media at Georgia Tech, is a designer, philosopher, critic, and researcher who focuses on computational media—videogames in particular. He is also an author and an entrepreneur. He is also a Founding Partner at Persuasive Games and a Board Member at Open Texture (an educational publisher).

Communications Forum and the Program in Science, Technology, and Society present a lunch-time talk with MIT Press author and Information Policy book series editor Sandra Braman (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee)

Those responsible for technical design of the Internet have found they must think through a number of social policy issues along the way, from those we might expect (privacy, property rights, and security) to those that may be more surprising (environmental problems, ensuring access in rural areas, and the socio-cultural impact of network use). In doing so they make and analyze policy, develop formal decision-making processes and governance entities, and discuss political, social, and communication theory. Positions on policy issues were framed by conceptualizations of the nature of the network, goals to be served by the network, users and uses of the network, early identification of specific legal and policy problems that needed to be addressed, and the design criteria that served as policy principles as they were developed during the early years of the design process. Based on a discourse analysis of the technical document series that records the history of Internet design decision-making as it was launched by issuance of the first DARPA contract in 1969, this presentation examines such policy fundamentals as they developed during the first decade of the network process and traces the consequences of reliance upon those frames as the network continued to develop and change over time.

Bring lunch if you'd like. Coffee and drinks served.

Please join us in welcoming the Electronic Literature Organization to MIT with an open house / open mic / open mouse featuring 5-7 minute presentations and readings by a host of electronic literature authors (perhaps including you)!

Presenters will include:

• Nick Montfort, president, Electronic Literature Organization
• Other directors and members of the ELO
• John Cayley, Brown University, Organizer of the 2010 ELO Conference

Snacks provided » Free and open to the public » Free, open, and AKIMBO."

For one of the few times in its history, the MIT campus -- and all its departments, labs, and centers -- will be fully, entirely, completely open to the public in honor of the Institute's 150th anniversary.

Comparative Media Studies will both take part in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences display in the Kresge Auditorium as well as have staff and faculty on-hand at our various CMS locations. Come visit, chat, and learn about the history and future of media at MIT.

CMS locations will include our headquarters in E15-331 (for The Education Arcade; the Mobile Experience Lab; a digital display by Amaranth Borsuk; and the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory), E15-344 (for the Center for Future Civic Media), NE25 (for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab), and 16-635 (for HyperStudio).

Visit the official MIT150 site for full details.

(See call for entries)

An honored tradition returns this Spring when CMS presents the thirteenth annual Media Spectacle. The event, founded by late CMS program administrator Chris Pomiecko, celebrates his love for filmmaking by showcasing the finest video projects created by MIT students, staff and faculty.

Historically, the event has received submissions of every genre from experimental to documentary to narrative works created on every conceivable platform and device. Prizes include the Chris Pomiecko Award for Best Undergraduate Entry, as well as awards for Best Non-undergraduate Entry, Animation, Experimental, Narrative, Nonfiction, and Audience Favorite. The event is judged by esteemed members of the CMS community, including Cathy Pomiecko, Chris's sister.

In the second of a four-part seminar series on South Asian diasporic cultural politics, our speakers focus upon contemporary issues in South Asian popular culture, with a particular focus on youth cultures and cultural translation. Topics include the comic series Spiderman in India, the US Muslim punk movement -- known as 'Taqwacore' -- and online communities, and the cultural and spatial politics of the desi club scene in London.

The Cultural Politics of the South Asian Diaspora is a series of four seminars initiated by Anamik Saha, visiting scholar in the Program in Comparative Media Studies (CMS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and hosted by CMS. It assembles a transatlantic network of scholars from the US and Europe researching the expressive cultures of the South Asian diaspora.

Entry is free. Please email Anamik Saha (asaha@mit.edu) to RSVP.

About ths speakers:

Shilpa Davé, an assistant professor of American studies, holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Michigan. She has published in the fields of Asian American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Literature and Popular Culture on topics ranging from teaching Asian American Studies to "No Life Without Wife: Masculinity and Modern Arranged Meetings for Indian Americans" to "Apu's Brown Voice: Cultural Inflection and South Asian Accents" and Model Minorities and the Spelling Bee. Davé is the co-editor of "East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture" (2005). Her current book project is entitled Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Film and TV (under contract to University of Illinois Press).

Dhiraj Murthy is an assistant professor of Sociology at Bowdoin College. His current research explores social networking cyberinfrastructure and virtual organizations. His work on social networking technologies in virtual breeding grounds is funded by the National Science Foundation, Office of CyberInfrastructure. Murthy also has a book on Twitter under contract with Polity Press. He founded and currently directs the Social Network Innovation Lab, an interdisciplinary research group investigating social networks and virtual organizations.

Helen Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics. Her dissertation is on diaspora, space and the London 'desi' urban Asian music scene. Her research interests are in 'race', ethnicity, particularly with a focus on popular culture'.

GAMBIT will hold another "Complete Game-Completion Marathon" for Haiti, where players from the MIT and the greater Boston community play favorite video games from start to finish, raising funds for charity in honor of their efforts. This year GAMBIT has added a new donor partner, ACCION International, itself a great organization along with last year's partner charity Partners in Health.

Donations to either group will be put towards furthering Haiti's reconstruction efforts.

More info on participating will be available at cgcmarathon.org.

Entry is free. Please email Anamik Saha (asaha@mit.edu) to RSVP.

In this first of a four-part seminar series on South Asian diasporic cultural politics, Rajini Srikanth and Vijay Prashad discuss two South Asian popular cultural responses to 9-11 and 'the war on terror': M.I.A.'s 'Born Free' music video, and the Bollywood film 'My Name is Khan'.

The Cultural Politics of the South Asian Diaspora is a series of four seminars organized by Anamik Saha, a visiting scholar in the Program in Comparative Media Studies (CMS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology and hosted by CMS. It assembles a transatlantic network of scholars from the US and Europe researching the expressive cultures of the South Asian diaspora.

Rajini Srikanth teaches in the English department, Honors Program, and Asian American Studies at UMass Boston. She is author of the award winning book The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America (2004) and the forthcoming book Constructing the Enemy: Empathy/Antipathy in U.S. Literature and Law.

Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College. He is the author of eleven books including The Karma of Brown Folk (2002) and Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting (2002). His most recent book, The Darker Nations, won the Muzaffar Ahmad Book Award for 2009.

The seventh annual European Short Film Festival (ESFF) will take place on April 1st, 2nd and 3rd, 2011. With more films than ever, ESFF 2011 offers a unique glimpse into the most recent short film productions from Europe, with a special focus on productions from European film schools and award-winning films from recent festivals.  For this year’s festival, the jury reviewed over 300 submissions from 30 countries, resulting in a program that is more varied and exciting than ever.

Screenings: 
- Friday, April 1: 7:00pm, Room 32-123 (Kirsch Auditorium)
- Saturday, April 2: 3:00pm, Room 10-250 (under the MIT dome)
- Saturday, April 2: 7:00pm, Room 10-250
- Sunday, April 3: 7:00pm, Room 10-250

What we are now accustomed to call the "knowledge economy" may be the Humanities' worst enemy as well as their best friend. This presentation will attempt to focus the Humanities on a certain definition of the interpretive activity: while machines can "read" data, only human subjectivities can "interpret" them. This typically human activity of interpretation requires specific conditions (a suspended time, a protected space, a certain indifference to objective truth, an indirect mode of enunciation), which are often at odds with the demands of the capitalist knowledge economy (obsessed with communication, information, accuracy, speed, short-term profit). It is the future of Mankind, which is at stake in the future of the Humanities, insofar as they represent a continuous effort to promote an open culture of interpretation against the increasing pressure of the knowledge economy.

Yves Citton is a professor of French Literature of the 18th Century at the Université de Grenoble-3. He taught for 12 years in the department of French and Italian of the University of Pittsburgh, PA, and has been invited Professor at NYU, Harvard and Sciences Po. He recently published Zazirocratie. Très curieuse introduction à la biopolitique et à la critique de la croissance (Ed. Amsterdam, 2011), L'Avenir des Humanités. économie de la connaissance ou cultures de l'interprétation? (La Découverte, 2010), Mythocratie. Storytelling et imaginaire de gauche (Ed. Amsterdam, 2010), Lire, interpréter, actualiser. Pourquoi les études littéraires? (Ed. Amsterdam, 2007) and L'Envers de la liberté. L'invention d'un imaginaire spinoziste dans la France des Lumières (Ed. Amsterdam, 2006).

Sponsored by Comparative Media Studies, Foreign Languages and Literatures, and MIT France

Featuring a panel of Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel, editors of The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran's Future, a collection of essays about the movements behind Iran's mass protests.

From Publishers Weekly: "Hashemi and Postel offer a rich, consistently engaging anthology that makes an important effort to provide 'an intellectual and political roadmap' to understanding Iran's tumultuous 2009 presidential election...the facts, analysis, shading, and nuance these pieces provide will allow the reader to better understand whatever direction Iran may take in the future."

Co-sponsored by the MIT Center for International Studies and Comparative Media Studies.

Featuring a panel of Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel, editors of The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran's Future, a collection of essays about the movements behind Iran's mass protests.

From Publishers Weekly: "Hashemi and Postel offer a rich, consistently engaging anthology that makes an important effort to provide 'an intellectual and political roadmap' to understanding Iran's tumultuous 2009 presidential election...the facts, analysis, shading, and nuance these pieces provide will allow the reader to better understand whatever direction Iran may take in the future."

Co-sponsored by the MIT Center for International Studies and Comparative Media Studies.

Featuring a panel of Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel, editors of The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran's Future, a collection of essays about the movements behind Iran's mass protests.

From Publishers Weekly: "Hashemi and Postel offer a rich, consistently engaging anthology that makes an important effort to provide 'an intellectual and political roadmap' to understanding Iran's tumultuous 2009 presidential election...the facts, analysis, shading, and nuance these pieces provide will allow the reader to better understand whatever direction Iran may take in the future."

Co-sponsored by the MIT Center for International Studies and Comparative Media Studies.

The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab will be a host site in the Boston/Cambridge area for the 3rd Annual Global Game Jam, from January 28 through 30, 2010. Other sites around the world will run game jams with similar rules and limitations, with one unique constraint at each site. This site will be creating games of all kinds: digital games for Windows, Mac OS X, and the web; and non-digital games of all types including board, card, and dice games.

Find out more at the official Gambit Game Lab site...

Expect the unexpected when you play some of the newest video games to come from the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab in the MIT Museum's new display. In media ranging from original sketches to playable games, the newest display in Sampling MIT, an exhibition showcasing some of the latest research at MIT, will feature the work of The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab.

Students and researchers involved with GAMBIT will be at the MIT Museum explaining MIT's video gaming history, and will help you try out some of GAMBIT's latest and greatest games.

View the full program of events at the MIT Museum.

Enjoy the MIT Museum as it stays open late the second Friday of every month. Wander the galleries and enjoy themed activities. This month, join members of the MIT faculty for book presentations and discussions.

• 5:30 PM - Penny Chisholm - author of the children's book Living Sunlight: How Plants Bring the Earth to Life, and Professor of Environmental Studies.
• 6:45 PM - Nick Montfort - author of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, and Assistant Professor of Digital Media

Light refreshments served. Free admission.

Sponsored in part by CMS, ROFLCon is "Two days and two nights of the most epic internet culture conference ever assembled. Informed commentators suggest that this may be the most important gathering of humanity since the fall of the tower of Babel."

About: roflcon.org

Registration: roflcon.org/registration

An honored tradition returns this Spring when CMS presents the twelfth annual Media Spectacle. The event, founded by late CMS program administrator Chris Pomiecko, celebrates his love for filmmaking by showcasing the finest video projects created by MIT students, staff and faculty.

Historically, the event has received submissions of every genre from experimental to documentary to narrative works created on every conceivable platform and device. Prizes include the Chris Pomiecko Award for Best Undergraduate Entry, as well as awards for Best Non-undergraduate Entry, Animation, Experimental, Narrative, Nonfiction, and Audience Favorite. The event is judged by esteemed members of the CMS community, including Cathy Pomiecko, Chris's sister.

2010 marks the 10th anniversary of Comparative Media Studies at MIT.

This is ten years of groundbreaking applied humanities. Ten years of thinking across media forms, national boundaries, and historical periods. Ten years of bridging theory and practice, of working with industry leaders, artists, and policymakers...ten years of preparing students for jobs that didn't yet exist.

So we're hosting a day-long celebration on April 23 looking back over the history of the program, featuring alumni, current students and researchers, and even former director Henry Jenkins. We hope you can make it--and help us shape the next ten years of Comparative Media Studies.

The New England premiere of the anime feature film "Summer Wars" (2009, Director Mamoru HOSODA, Madhouse / Kadokawa). The director and producer of the film, both based in Japan, will be present at the screening and will participate in a Q&A/discussion after the film.

The film explores the drama of high school romance, hackers in virtual worlds, the complexities of extended families, and the potentials of our hyper-connected present. Suitable for all ages but aimed at teens and adults, the film is a wonderful example of recent anime virtuosity by Japan's hottest young director. Director Hosoda's previous film, "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" (2006), won many prizes including the Japan Academy Award for Best Animated Film.

35mm print, Japanese voices, English subtitles. Free and open to the public.

February 26-28th, GAMBIT will be hosting the 2010 Complete Game-Completion Marathon to raise money for relief efforts in Haiti. Teams of players will gather at our MIT lab to attempt to complete a game in one sitting. Participants will independently seek sponsorship on a dollar/hour basis with all proceeds going directly to relief efforts in Haiti through Partners in Health, and with support from the MIT Public Service Center. The labs will be open 24 hours a day through the weekend to accommodate the teams, with snacks and refreshments available for the players.

As ICT's become available to new groups of users, notably those from the global South, new social formations of virtual labor, race, nation, and gender are being born. And if virtual world users' claims to citizenship and sovereignty within them are to be taken seriously, so too must the question of "gray collar" or semi-legal virtual laborers and their social relations and cultural identity in these spaces. Just as labor migrants around the globe struggle to access a sense of belonging in alien territories, so too do virtual laborers, many of whom are East and South Asian, confront hostility and xenophobia in popular gaming worlds and virtual "workshops" such as World of Warcraft and Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Do these users have the right to have rights? This presentation considers the affective investments and cultural identities of these workers within the virtual worlds where they labor.

Lisa Nakamura is the Director of the Asian American Studies Program, Professor in the Institute of Communication Research and Media Studies Program and Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. She is the author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, 2002) and a co-editor of Race in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000). She has published articles in Critical Studies in Media Communication, PMLA, Cinema Journal, The Women's Review of Books, Camera Obscura, and the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. She is editing a collection with Peter Chow-White entitled Digital Race: An Anthology (Routledge, forthcoming) and is working on a new monograph on Massively Multiplayer Online Role playing games, the transnational racialized labor, and avatarial capital in a "postracial" world.

How might the critical tradition in media studies respond to the wildly proliferating media phenomena of today? In this presentation, Ken Wark starts with his own experience writing Gamer Theory as a 'networked book', mediating between Plato, Wordpress, and World of Warcraft. This was an experiment in which critical media approaches were made to confront the computer game as an historically specific form, the form perhaps of our times. It was also an attempt to create online tools for a specifically critical mode of collaborative writing, at some remove from the argumentative and consensus style of the blog and wiki respectively. A third dimension to the experiment explored the relation of the gift of writing, of time, of attention, to the commodified form of the book. What can be learned from the results of this experiment? How can media studies be both in and of the emergent media forms, and yet retain a creative and critical distance from them? It is in its difference from what it studies that media studies begins to find the intellectual resources to respond adequately to the extraordinary world of media, in all its historical and anthropological depth and breadth.

McKenzie Wark is chair of Culture & Media and associate dean of Eugene Lang College, and an associate professor of critical studies at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard UP, 2004), Gamer Theory (Harvard UP, 2007) and various other things.

In an economy of informational abundance, does the traditional truth-revealing role of critical media practice still have any political relevance? Or are there other, perhaps more politically potent, ways of thinking about the liberatory possibilities of media? By considering a range of examples, from Thomas More's 16th century Utopia to 21st century political art, we will explore the possibilities and pitfalls of mediated utopias as a means of revitalizing the critical practice of communications. Of particular interest are impossible utopias, "no-places" whose unrealizability is inscribed in their depiction. For it is through the encounter with their very impossibility that conditions for new critique and new imagination may be created.

Stephen Duncombe is an Associate Professor at the Gallatin School of New York University where he teaches the history and politics of media. He is the author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics of Underground Culture, the editor of the Cultural Resistance Reader, and co-author of The Bobbed Haired Bandit: A True Story of Crime and Celebrity in 1920's New York. He also writes on the intersection of culture and politics for a range of scholarly and popular publications, from the cerebral, The Nation, to the prurient, Playboy. Duncombe is a life-long political activist, co-founding a community based advocacy group in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and working as an organizer for the NYC chapter of an international direct action group. Currently, he is a Research Associate at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York City where he co-founded and organized "The College of Tactical Culture" and is engaged in an ongoing investigation into the efficacy of political art. He is currently working on a book on the art of propaganda during the New Deal.

Emerging in the mid 20th century (when Disneyland opened its doors in 1955), the theme park created the ultimate in trompe l'oeil effects by extending the fictional world of Disney animation into the social sphere. In doing so, Disney produced a networked environment that conjured wondrous spaces that both performed for the audience and which were for performing within. Over the last two decades, Las Vegas has adopted and extended this theme park logic into the urban sphere. Travelling briefly back to the era of the movie palace, this paper will consider contemporary Las Vegas as a neo-baroque mediascape that extends the theme park's delight in performativity, theatricality and sensorial engagement into the wider social realm. Drawing on Umberto Eco's concept of 'pansemiotics', it will be argued that spectacle cities like Las Vegas operate according to the logic of a giant wunderkammer -- relying on an emblematic understanding of the meaning of objects and the interrelationship between them. In particular, this paper will analyse how this city-as-monument to entertainment and leisure culture has appropriated tropes and modes of engagement taken from pre-20th Century high culture traditions of the Church and aristocracy. But whereas palaces, theatrical spectacles, churches, and piazzas stood as monuments to the grandeur of their aristocratic patrons, in our current time, these new entertainment environments stand as monuments to corporate conglomerates and the masses who inhabit these worlds.

Angela Ndalianis is currently associate professor in cinema and cultural studies at the University of Melbourne.

Google seems omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. It also claims to be benevolent. It's no surprise that we hold the company to almost deific levels of awe and respect. But what are we really gaining and losing by inviting Google to be the lens through which we view the world? This talk will describe Siva Vaidhyanathan's own apostasy and suggest ways we might live better with Google once we see it as a mere company rather than as a force for good and enlightenment in the world.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, cultural historian and media scholar, is currently associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia.

The second annual Julius Schwartz Lecture brings J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of the cult science fiction hit Babylon 5. The Julius Schwartz Lecture is an annual event held to honor an individual who has made significant contributions to the culture, creativity and community of comics and popular entertainment.

The lecture is hosted by the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT and was founded to honor the memory of longtime DC Comics editor Julius "Julie" Schwartz, whose contributions to our culture include co-founding the first science fiction fanzine in 1932, the first science fiction literary agency in 1934, and the first World Science Fiction Convention in 1939. Schwartz went on to launch a career in comics that would last for well over 42 years, during which time he helped launch the Silver Age of Comics, introduced the idea of parallel universes, and had a hand in the reinvention of such characters as Batman, Superman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman and the Atom.

The event is typically structured as a short lecture presented by the honored speaker, followed by a question-and-answer discussion between the speaker and the head of the Comparative Media Studies program, media scholar Henry Jenkins III. This will be followed by an open question-and-answer session between the lecturer and the audience. The inaugural speaker for the series was New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman.

The talk will describe systems developed at the Universidad Complutense deMadrid that focus on generating text that satisfies specific restrictions on form. The WASP (Wishful Automatic Spanish Poet) poetry generator produces text that satisfies metrical restrictions. The ProtoPropp fairy tale generator produces plot outlines that satisfy restrictions on their narrative structures derived from Vladimir Propp's morphology of the fairy tale. A general framework for developing form-aware text generator will be presented, and some of the current applications of these solutions will be described.

Gervas, leading European researcher in creative text generation, works as associate professor (profesor titular de universidad) at the Departamento de Ingenieria del Software e Inteligencia Artificial, Facultad de Informatica, Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He is the director of the NIL research group and also of the Instituto de Tecnologia del Conocimiento.

Gervas' research is on processing natural language input, generating natural language output, building resources for related tasks, and generating stories. In the area of creative text generation, he has done work on automatically generating metaphors, formal poetry, and short films.

An honored tradition returns on April 27th at 7PM when CMS presents the eleventh annual Media Spectacle. The event, founded by Chris Pomiecko, celebrates his love for filmmaking by showcasing the finest video projects created by MIT students, staff and faculty.

Historically, the event has received submissions of every genre from experimental to documentary to narrative works created on every conceivable platform and device (mobisode anyone?). Since the dawning of YouTube and other user-generated video websites, the number of submissions has increased substantially. The event is hosted by Professor Henry Jenkins and judged by esteemed members of the CMS community as well as Cathy Pomiecko, the sister of the late CMS program administrator Chris Pomieicko. After all of this year's selected pieces are screened, the undergraduate winner for best film will receive a cash prize and the Chris Pomiecko Trophy followed by the Claude Berry Award for the best non-undergraduate entry.

Interactive fiction (often called "IF") is a venerable, well-defined category of computer programs that includes the canonical Adventure and Zork as well as some work by established literary authors and recent independent developers. These programs are often correctly referred to as games, but they can also be rich forms of text-based computer simulation, dialog systems, and examples of literary art.

Unlike many other new media forms, interactive fiction computationally simulates a world underlying the textual exchange between computer and user. Theorists of narrative have long distinguished between the level of underlying content or story (which can usefully be seen as corresponding to the simulated world in interactive fiction) and that of expression or discourse (corresponding to the textual exchange between computer and user).

While IF development systems have offered a great deal of power and flexibility to author/programmers, they have not systematically distinguished between the telling and what is told. Developers have not been able to use separate modules to control the content and expression levels independently, so there has been no easy, general way to control narrative style and create variation in the narrative discourse.

Nick Montfort will discuss a new interactive fiction system, called Curveship, which draws on narrative theory and computational linguistics to allow the transformation of the narrating.

Nick Montfort is Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Program in Writing & Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nick is on leave Spring 2009. More information at http://nickm.com

An honored tradition returns on April 28th at 7PM when CMS presents the tenth annual Media Spectacle. The event, founded by Chris Pomiecko, celebrates his love for filmmaking by showcasing the finest video projects created by MIT students, staff and faculty.

Historically, the event has received submissions of every genre from experimental to documentary to narrative works created on every conceivable platform and device (mobisode anyone?). Since the dawning of YouTube and other user-generated video websites, the number of submissions has increased substantially. This endeavor has also been aided by Campus Movie Fest, a corporate-sponsored organization which invades universities internationally to teach students how to make films and supply them with the equipment to do so, all free of charge. That effort, combined with the fine video courses offered here at MIT through course 4, will certainly provide a wide array of choices to select from this year.

The event is hosted by Professor Henry Jenkins and judged by esteemed members of the CMS community as well as Cathy Pomiecko, the sister of the late CMS program administrator Chris Pomieicko. After all of this year's selected pieces are screened, the undergraduate winner for best film will receive a cash prize and the Chris Pomiecko Trophy followed by the Michaelangelo Antonioni Award for the best non-undergraduate entry.

Submissions will be accepted until April 10th in any format (DVD preferred) with a maximum running time of 30 minutes. We also ask if you could indicate your MIT affiliation when entering. All entries may be sent to Generoso Fierro, MIT, NE25-385, 77 Masssachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139. Please direct all questions to generoso [at] mit [dot] edu.

In the mid-1950s at Bell Labs, America's wealthiest and most influential industrial research center, mathematician Claude Shannon began theorizing, writing about, and building automata. Initially conceived as laboratory playthings and thought experiments, these devices emerged as minor celebrities in 1950s science and popular culture. In this lecture, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan (Northwestern University, MIT Visiting Scholar) situates these artifacts within postwar exhibition and publicity practices at Bell Labs, which regularly re-constructed specialized research as sensual theaters for scientific play and the popular imagination. Tracing these artifacts' migration from the laboratory to postwar television and popular press, and borrowing from the work of Bertolt Brecht, Geoghegan develops a concept of theatrical science that bridges research methods in the history of science and media studies.

Co-presented with the Program in Science, Technology and Society.

MIT's 4th European Short Film Festival offers a unique glimpse into the most recent short-film productions from Europe, with a special focus on productions from European film schools and award-winning films from recent Festivals in Europe.

The MIT European Short Film Festival caters to a diverse audience drawn from many local universities and a rich mix of international communities from the larger Boston area. The festival is co-sponsored by a variety of MIT departments and European cultural institutions located in Boston.

Topics for this year's festival include: Migration, Anxiety, Media Culture, Food (Culture), Toys and Games.

All films will be shown in Room 32-123 (Stata Center), all programs start at 7:00 pm.

Free Admission – All films with English subtitles.

The Festival is co-sponsored by:

• The Foreign Languages and Literatures Section (MIT)
• The Comparative Media Studies Program (MIT)
• The Goethe-Institute, Boston

The Festival is presented in conjunction with Dr. Kurt Fendt's course "20th/21st Century German Literature - Grenzgänge" (21F.416)

For further information please visit http://web.mit.edu/shortfilm/ or contact the Festival Team: <mitshortfilmmit.edu>

Wu Ming 1 is a founding member and representative of the Wu Ming Foundation, a collective of writers from Italy. Most members of the collective were deeply involved in the Luther Blissett Project, an international experiment in culture jamming, radical pranksterism and guerrilla mythology that ran from 1994 to 1999. During that time, a group of LBP activists wrote a controversial novel titled Q, which was published to much acclaim in 1999. In January 2000 the authors of Q founded the Wu Ming Foundation, which takes its name from a Chinese word meaning either "anonymous" or "five names" depending on how the first syllable is pronounced. The name is meant both as a tribute to dissidents ("Wu Ming" is a common byline among Chinese citizens demanding democracy and freedom of speech) and as a refusal of the celebrity-making machine which turns authors into stars.

Wu Ming's works include 54, a novel with dozens of characters (including Cary Grant and Marshall Tito) set in 1954; the screenplay for Guido Chiesa's movie Radio Alice (2004); and numerous "solo" novels, including Wu Ming 1's New Thing (2004). They have also collaborated with musicians, actors, comic authors, playwrights, film-makers, graphic artists and academics in a plethora of multimedia and transmedia projects.

The group's most recent novel, Manituana, was published in Italy in March of 2007. It is the first episode of an 18th-century pan-Atlantic trilogy which will keep them writing at least until 2012. Manituana reached as high as #4 in the Italian bestseller charts, and translation rights have been purchased by French and Spanish publishers. Manituana is also at the center of a complex transmedia project which is briefly described at http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/giap/giapdigest36.htm. All of their books are freely downloadable from their website, http://www.wumingfoundation.com.

Event open only to the MIT Community.

Funded (in part) by a Director's Grant from the Council for the Arts at MIT.

The CMS Class of 2008 will be giving their thesis presentations on Friday, March 21, 2008 from 11AM to 6PM in room 35-225. The event is open to the public; CMS students, faculty, associates and friends of the program are all warmly welcomed to attend.

10:30-11:00 AM
Coffee and Pastries

11:00-11:45 AM
Information Visualization for the People
Michael Danziger
An analysis of the field of information visualization focusing on the theoretical and methodological challenges associated with conceptualizing and designing visualization as a mass medium.

11:45 AM - 12:30 PM
New Potentials for 'DIY' Music Making: Social Networks, Old and New, and the Ongoing Struggles to Reshape the Music Industry
Evan Wendel
An historical and comparative exploration of "independent" music scenes and their associated social networks during both the post-punk period of the late-1970s and early 1980s, as well as the current music climate which is increasingly defined by online networks. The larger contention is that the potentials for ÒindependentÓ musicians to maintain viability, and even achieve success, outside of a terrain traditionally structured by the mainstream recording industry are greater today than ever before, especially when informed by an understanding of the successes and shortcomings of past practices.

12:30-1:15 PM
Targeting Digital Youth in Web 2.0 China
Liwen Jin
A recent Netpop survey reports that Chinese Internet users are much more likely to use user-generated content to make purchasing decisions than Americans (58% to 19%). They also are much more likely to participate in forum discussions and blogs. Web 2.0 technologies originate in the United States. But why does this East Asian society embrace more of the web 2.0 activities than its Western counterpart? This thesis will examine this question from societal, cultural and psychological perspectives in order to discuss new marketing strategies to target the young and dynamic population in China's cyber communities.

1:15-2:00 PM
Lunch

2:00-2:45 PM
Underground Tunnels, Neon Signs, and Asian-American Identity: The Many Dimensions of Visual Chinatown
Debora Lui
What is Chinatown? Is it an imaginary construct, a real location, or a community? Is it an ethnic enclave only available to insiders, or a fabricated environment designed specifically for tourists? This thesis attempts to reconcile the multiple ways in which Chinatowns in the U.S. are conceived, understood, and used by both insiders and outsiders of the community.

2:45-3:30 PM
Public Interest in the Broadband Age: Media Policy for the Network Society
Stephen Schultze
What does "public interest" media policy mean in the broadband age? Using a three-pronged set of methods consisting of historical survey, contemporary case study, and immediate policy recommendations, this thesis seeks to distill a unified theory of the public interest in media policy.

3:30-3:45 PM
Coffee Break

3:45-4:30 PM
The Modular, Mechanical and Wacky World of Slapstick: Sound/Image Relationships in the Looney Tunes
Andres Lombana
A comparative and multimedia analysis of the sound/image relationships developed by the Warner Brothers animation studio in its Looney Tunes series. This thesis focuses on two theatrical animated cartoons: "Porky in Wackyland" (1938) and "Dough for the Do-Do" (1948).

4:30-5:15 PM
Tactical Cities: Negotiating Violence in Karachi
Huma Yusuf
This thesis uses the theories of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau to examine how everyday practices help the residents of Karachi, Pakistan, negotiate the violence that is endemic to their city. In this construction, remembering, blogging, and navigating heavily trafficked roads become 'tactics' that create 'representational spaces' symbolically free of violence.

5:15-6:00 PM
Reception

Please visit http://cms.mit.edu/people for individual profiles of the Class of 2008. PDF copies of the theses will eventually be available at http://cms.mit.edu/research/theses.php.

Katie Jacobs is co-showrunner of the hit FBC series House, M.D., nominated for two consecutive seasons for the Emmy Award for Best Drama Series. Among the show's many awards have been a Peabody Award and a Humanitas Prize. Previously, Jacobs served as co-showrunner on the critically-acclaimed ABC series Gideon's Crossing, starring Andre Braugher, as well as the futuristic CBS legal drama Century City, and she produced the Emmy-nominated telefilm A Father for Charlie, starring Louis Gossett, Jr. Jacobs made her directorial debut this past season on House, helming the episodes "Half-Wit" with guest star Dave Matthews as well as the season finale, "Human Error". Before turning her focus to television, Jacobs produced several films, including Alan J. Pakula's thriller Consenting Adults and the Carl Reiner comedy Fatal Instinct. Jacobs is a product of the graduate film school at NYU.

Event open only to the MIT Community.

In honor of Chris Pomiecko, the former program administrator of Comparative Media Studies.

The event showcases films, videos, video podcasts, and mobisodes produced by MIT (and Wellesley) affiliates, staff, students and faculty. In a multitude of styls, subjects and duration.

At the end of the evening the best undergraduate submission will receive the Chris Pomiecko prize.

Free and open to the general public!

PUNCH AND PIE!

For more information, contact:
Generoso Fierro
617 53 5038
generoso AT mit DOT edu

COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES/GAMBIT (Singapore Games Alliance) Lecture Series for Spring 2007

APRIL 18th at 5PM

14E-304

"10 Things You Won't Like About Professional Game Development"

Matthew Weise is an MIT/Comparative Media Studies alumn who has been working since his 2004 graduation in the mobile gaindustry.

There will be a Q & A Session with Matt Weise after the lecture.

MIT's Third European Short Film Festival offers a unique glimpse into the most recent short-film productions from Europe, with a special focus on productions from European film schools and award-winning films from recent Festivals in Europe. This year's topics are:

• New Identities/Social Realities
• Transformations
• Mitteleuropa/Central Europe

The festival is co-sponsored by Foreign Languages and Literatures, Comparative Media Studies, and several European cultural institutions. The films for the festival are selected by a group of humanities faculty and CMS graduate students.

All films will be shown in Room 10-250, the programs start at 7:00 pm.

Free Admission – All films with English subtitles.

We look forward to seeing you at the festival.

For further information please see the festival website or contact the festival organizer, Kurt Fendt

Join our discussion with Chinese Students through MSN IMS. Please email team researchers Jin Liwen or Shi Song if you would like to participate.

Goal:
Our goal is to get to known new friends and learn more about each other. Also we hope to study the media communication tools and the style of conversation on MSN IMS.

See Project GoodLuck for more information

The fifth Media in Transition conference, MiT5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age, will be held April 27-29, 2007 at MIT.

The deadline for submitting a paper or panel proposal is Jan. 5, 2007.

See the call for papers at http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit5.

On October 31 -- Halloween! -- CMS will be sponsoring a free public game (and costume contest) near Harvard Square called "Cruel 2 B Kind" (cruelgame.com), from 6:30-8:30 PM.

It's a little bit like the game "Assassins"; the twist is that you "kill" other players by using your assigned weapon, which involves saying or doing something nice to your victim... Since you don't know who your victim *is*, however, you have to go around trying the "weapon" on everyone you encounter, whether they're playing the game or not. For more information, visit www.cruelgame.com.

All you need to participate is a partner, a cell phone that can send and receive text messages, and a couple hours next Tuesday to meet people and have a good time!

For more information, and to register for the game, go to: http://www.cruelgame.com/signup.

On Tuesday October 17th, representatives from Electronic Arts will be making a presentation on the MIT campus. EA’s Head of University Relations, Colleen McCreary, will be giving an overview presentation of EA’s worldwide businesses, as well as the company’s Internship and New College Grad programs. Tom Wilson ’05 & ‘06 and Nick Hunter ’06 will discuss their experiences in EA’s internship program, the interview process, and their first few months working full time in games.

Sponsered by Electronic Arts and Comparative Media Studies at MIT. This event is open to the public.

Food will be served, and there will be swag.
Location: 6-120
When: 5pm Tuesday October 17th

Tom Wilson received his SB in Course 6 in 2005, and his MEng in 2006. While at MIT, he worked as a UROP on the Games To Teach project as a developer for the games SuperCharged! and EMK. In the summer of 2005, he worked as an engineering intern on The Godfather videogame at EA’s Redwood Shores campus. Currently, he works as an engineer on the new Simpsons game.

Nick Hunter ’06 graduated with degrees in course 14 and 21.CMS last June. At MIT he was a UROP on The Education Arcade’s Revolution project as a scripter and designer. Summer of ’05 he worked as a production intern on NFL Head Coach at EA’s Tiburon Studio in Orlando, and now works as a Feature Producer in the Sims Division at EA’s Redwood Shores campus.

In honor of Chris Pomiecko, the former progam administator of Comparative Media Studies.

The event showcases films/videos/video podcasts/ mobisodes produced by MIT (and Wellesley) affiliates, staff, students and faculty. In a multitude of styles, subjects and duration.

The best undergraduate submission will receive the Chris Pomiecko prize.

Soda and millions of cookies will be served!

Open to: the general public

Cost: Free

Tickets: NA

Sponsor(s): Comparative Media Studies

For more information, contact:
Generoso Fierro
617 253 5038
generoso@mit.edu

CMS MEDIA SPECTACLE FILM LINEUP

Title	Artist	Length
Untitled Cartoon Mash Up	J. Chia	2: 00
Expectations	Nikki Pfarr	2:30
Clear or Yellow	Mika Tomczak	2:00
My Name is Five	Connie Yeh	5:00
Aninon	Rajesh Kottamasu	6:50
Fatalite	Tilke Judd	3:00
The Big Lie That Solves Everything	Geoff Long	8:00
Afternoon of a Girl	Louise Giam	4:00
Fear	Chalin Tulyathan	1:15
Digits	Nestor Lara/Sean Torres	3:35
Passage	Rajesh Kottamasu	5:30
Of Passion and Poultry	Marissa Vogt	4:15
A Piece of Cake	Team Falling Axe Anna Wexler	3:00
Five Finger Clyde	Gabriel Blue Cira	7:00
Remixed	Tilke Judd	5:00
Finding Noplace	Katherine Klesch	2:00
5th Year Senior	Jonathan Santiago	5:00
Handmade	Rajesh Kottamasu	6:50
Premature Midlife Crisis	Connie Yeh
The Trash People of Muquattan Hills	Nadeem Mazen	6:00
Screening Process	Geoff Long	7:00
My Dream Interview	Jameel Khalfan	5:00
CFIDs Short Movie	Sarah Sinnett	2:15
Instability	John Glowa	2:30
ADHD	Jennifer Chia	8:00

Presentations are open to the general public as well as the entire CMS community.

Time	Schedule
9:30 AM-10	Coffee
10:00-10:40	Ilya Vedrashko Advertising in Computer Game Environments
10:40-11:20	James Nadeau High/Low: The Television Workshop and Early Video Art in Boston
11:20-11:35	Coffee
11:35-12:15	Vanessa Bertozzi Unschooling and Participatory Media
12:15-12:55	Ravi Purushotmai Popular Education
12:55-1:40	Lunch
1:40-2:20	Alicia "Kestrell" Verlager Decloaking Disability: Images of Disability and Technology in Science Fiction
2:20-3:00	Lisa Bidlingmeyer Image, Identity and Anxiety and the (Tele-)Visual Spy Girl
3:00-3:15	Coffee
3:15-3:55	Dan Bersak Ethics in Photojournaism: Past, Present and Future
3:55-4:35	Amulya Gopalakrishnan Web of Words: Poetry, Fandom and Globality
4:35-4:50	Coffee
4:50-5:30	Orit Kuritsky Transformational Tales: American Makeover Shows and the Practices of Their Consumption
5:30 PM	Reception

Jessica Abel and Matt Madden will be showing examples of their work and talking about different aspects of comics, visual narrative, and creativity in general.

Cartoonist and writer Jessica Abel's graphic novel La Perdida was recently released by Pantheon Books. She is also working on a non- graphic novel for HarperCollins, called Carmina, and is collaborating on a graphic novel Life Sucks, to be published by First Second. She teaches at the School of Visual Arts, and is developing a comics textbook for First Second with Matt Madden.

Matt Madden (NYC 1968) lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, Jessica Abel. He is a cartoonist and illustrator who also teaches comics and drawing at the School of Visual Arts. Recent projects include 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (Penguin), a collection of his comics adaptation of Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style and A Fine Mess, Madden's anthology series. For recent news and comics, check out www.mattmadden.com.

CMS is looking for films, videos, video podcasts and mobisodes produced by MIT and Wellesley students, faculty, staff and affiliates for its 2006 Media Spectacle. All formats, styles, lengths and subjects are acceptable. Works-in-progress are welcomed.

The Chris Pomiecko Prize will be awarded to the most outstanding undergraduate media submission.

To submit a work, please send title, format, brief description and running time to Gene Fierro at generoso@mit.edu or contact the CMS office at 617-253-3599.

Lecture/Booksigning by Cory Doctorow (http://www.craphound.com) activist, writer, public speaker, blogger and European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) (http://www.eff.org/) a nonprofit group working to protect digital rights.

His story, "Craphound" was published in the March 1998 issue of Science Fiction Age and he has since sold dozens of stories.