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CMS News Archives
 The eminent MIT professor, author most recently of Alone, Together, discusses her darkening view of our digitizing world, her sense of the culture of MIT and its students, and her own career with Communications Forum Director David Thorburn, a longtime colleague.
Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.
David Thorburn is Professor of Literature at MIT and director of the Communications Forum.
Co-sponsor: Technology and Culture Forum at MIT
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 In the Age of Always Connect, are we witnessing a plague of oversharing? If so, are social networks its vectors of transmission? Does this much-discussed phenomenon mark the Death of Shame, perhaps even a return to pre-modern notions of public and private? What does it mean to live in a historical moment when the faces in our high-school yearbooks materialize, without warning, in our Facebook lives, Walking Dead eager to rekindle friendships we thought we'd buried long ago? In his illustrated lecture, "(Face)Book of the Dead," cultural critic and media theorist Mark Dery, author of seminal essays on online subcultures, culture jamming, and Afrofuturism, will address these and other questions, from the posthuman psychology of disembodied friendship to our growing unwillingness to untether ourselves from our social networks or the media drip, even for an instant. What does it say about us, as a society, if we're unable to be alone and unplugged without being bored or lonely? Is this, at root, a fear of the emptiness in our heads? Should we preserve some small space in our lives for solitude -- a Walden of the mind, away from the Matrix?
Mark Dery (www.markdery.com) is a cultural critic. He is best known for his writings on the politics of popular culture in publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Cabinet, Bookforum, Rolling Stone, Elle, and Wired; on websites such as True/Slant and Thought Catalog; and in books such as The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. Dery's latest book is an anthology of his recent writings, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Essays on American Empire, Digital Culture, Posthuman Porn, and Lady Gaga's Lesbian Phallus, published in Brazil by Editora Sulina. Dery is widely associated with "culture jamming," the guerrilla media criticism movement he popularized through his 1993 essay "Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs," and "Afrofuturism," a term he coined in his 1994 essay "Black to the Future" (included in the anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, which he edited). He has been a professor of journalism at New York University, a Chancellor's Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine, and a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome. He is at work on a biography of the artist Edward Gorey for Little, Brown.
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Amaranth Borsuk discusses her poetic practice as a multi-media writer and artist, reading selections from recent work and showing images and performance footage from current projects. What is a poetics of materiality and how does it play out across print and digital media? What does a focus on the material of language do to our constructions of authorship? Borsuk will read from Between Page and Screen, a digital pop-up book of poems, Tonal Saw, a chapbook constructed from a religious tract, and Excess Exhibit, a flip-book of conjoined poems that mutate from constraint into rapturous abundance. She will also show digital work in progress and read selections from her recently completed manuscript Handiwork, whose poems explore the relationship between torture and writing, trauma and creativity through a combination of Oulipo constraint and surreal lyricism.
A poet and scholar, Amaranth Borsuk's work focuses on textual materiality--from the surface of the page to the surface of language. She is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Media Studies and Writing and Humanistic Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she works on and teaches digital poetry. She has a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, where she co-founded The Loudest Voice cross-genre reading series and the Gold Line Press chapbook series. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in print and online. Poems have recently appeared in Colorado Review, Columbia Poetry Review, FIELD, Eleven Eleven, and Denver Quarterly, among other journals. She is the author of a chapbook-length poem, Tonal Saw (The Song Cave, 2010), and Excess Exhibit (ZG Press, forthcoming), a book of conjoined poems written collaboratively with poet and performance artist Kate Durbin, which includes drawings by Zach Kleyn. She has also collaboratively translated and transverted the work of Oulipo poet Paul Braffort together with Gabriela Jauregui and crafted an augmented-reality chapbook, Between Page and Screen, together with Brad Bouse. Recent collaborative work can be found in Black Warrior Review, Caketrain, New American Writing, and Action, Yes!. In addition to writing and studying poetry, Amaranth is also a letterpress printer and book artist whose fascination with printed matter informs her work on digital media.
Continue reading "Podcast: "Between Page and Screen: Digital, Visual, and Material Poetics"" »
The eminent MIT professor, author most recently of Alone, Together, discusses her darkening view of our digitizing world, her sense of the culture of MIT and its students, and her own career with Communications Forum Director David Thorburn, a longtime colleague.
Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.
David Thorburn is Professor of Literature at MIT and director of the Communications Forum.
Co-sponsor: Technology and Culture Forum at MIT
Download!
Continue reading "Podcast: Communications Forum: "A Conversation with Sherry Turkle"" »
 CMS professor Fox Harrell, along with colleagues from the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, have released a key report examining how the arts, sciences, and technology can overcome decades of diverging interests and practices.
The report follows a September 2010 workshop of fifty-five "artists, engineers, computer scientists, and practitioners who straddle disciplinary boundaries" and "suggests opportunities for advances in the creative innovation economy and education institutions".
A resolution Harrell, et al., come to -- in the face of peer evaluations that tend to put researchers back in prescribed box -- is to incorporate or combine review systems from various disciplines:
[W]e are not always sole determiners of our research and creative practice destinations. Often new enablers are outside peer review groups. In order to communicate with many of these groups, evaluation is key providing the institutional justification for commitment of resources. Hence, we must simultaneously work to expand the intellectual grounding for interdisciplinary forms of evaluation, at the same time as we remain open to engaging in evaluation methods that may be outside the purview of our respective disciplines.
Read the report's executive summary (PDF): "Strategies for Arts + Science + Technology Research"
Local ABC affiliate NewsChannel5 stopped by yesterday to interview The Education Arcade's Scot Osterweil about his team's successful launch of "VANISHED!", an online mystery game that brings middle school science students together to work through an environmental disaster.
Conducted in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution, "VANISHED!" has signed up more than 3,000 users just two days after it went live:
"No scientist got to be a scientist by memorizing flash cards," said Scot Osterweil, one of the website's designers at MIT.
"In the first day, we had kids posting saying 'this is really cool, this is like being a detective,' which is exactly what we wanted to see," said Osterweil.
VIDEO: NewsChannel5.com -- "MIT Challenges Students To Crack Code"
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