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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20140213T170000
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SUMMARY:Miguel Sicart: "Play in the Age of Computing Machinery"
DESCRIPTION:Miguel Sicart\nWe live in the era of computation and play. Everywhere we look\, there is a computer\, translating the world around us into patterns for production of labor or consumption of entertainment. And now more than ever\, we play everywhere: our work should be playful\, as it should be our dieting\, our love life\, and even our leisure. We play as much as we can\, in this world of computers. \nIn this talk Sicart will look at the culture\, aesthetics\, and technological implications of play in the age of computers. He will propose a theory of play that includes the materiality of computation in its definition of the activity\, and will suggest that our forms of playing with machines are both forms of surrendering to the pleasures of computation\, and forms of creative resistance to the reduction of our worlds to computable events. \nMiguel Sicart is a games scholar based at the IT University of Copenhagen. For the last decade his research has focused on ethics and computer games\, from a philosophical and design theory perspective. He has two books published: The Ethics of Computer Games; and Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay (MIT Press 2009\, 2013). His current work focuses on playful design\, and will be the subject of a new book called Play Matters (MIT Press\, 2014). Miguel teaches game and play design\, and his research is now focused on toys\, materiality\, and play.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/miguel-sicart-play-age-computing-machinery/
LOCATION:MIT Media Lab\, Room 633\, 75 Amherst St.\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Miguel-Sicart.jpg
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20140220T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20140220T190000
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SUMMARY:Jonathan Sterne\, "Who Tunes Whom?: Auto-Tune\, the Earth\, and the Politics of Frequency"
DESCRIPTION:Jonathan Sterne\, McGill University\nAuto-tune is a ubiquitous vocal effect in popular music and the best-selling software plug-in in the short history of commercial digital audio software. When used with subtlety\, auto-tune fixes slight errors or variances in pitch (usually of singers); when used more drastically\, it produces a very recognizable vocal effect\, “locking” a voice to a scale\, or drastically altering it.  \nAuto-tune was developed out of reflection seismology technology\, which uses sound for locating natural resources underground and beneath the ocean floor. In this paper\, Sterne gives a cultural history of auto-tune as a form of signal processing\, drawing on patent documents\, interviews\, operational protocols\, tuning standards and competing acoustemologies. Auto-tune effects a resource management of the voice. The obvious artifice in its most extreme forms points us back to a centuries-long project to technologize human voices through standards and tuning. While journalists and music fans may argue over auto-tune’s relationship to the authenticity of the voice\, Sterne shows that it is embedded in a much broader politics of frequency. \nJonathan Sterne is a Professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University\, and for January-May 2014 a visiting researcher in social media at Microsoft Research New England.  He is author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke 2012)\, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke\, 2003); and numerous articles on media\, technologies and the politics of culture. He is also editor of The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge\, 2012).  His new projects consider instruments and instrumentalities; histories of signal processing; and the intersections of disability\, technology and perception. Visit his website at sterneworks.org.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/jonathan-sterne-auto-tune/
LOCATION:MIT Media Lab\, Room 633\, 75 Amherst St.\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Jonathan-Sterne.jpg
ORGANIZER;CN="MIT%20Comparative%20Media%20Studies%2FWriting":MAILTO:cmsw@mit.edu
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20140227T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20140227T190000
DTSTAMP:20260428T102208
CREATED:20140115T203722Z
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SUMMARY:Meredith Schweig and Rebecca Dirksen: "Taiwanese Rap and Haitian Music and Reconstruction"
DESCRIPTION:Meredith Schweig\nIn this presentation\, Meredith Schweig explores the gender politics and practices of the Taiwan rap scene. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with the island’s hip-hop community and invoking emergent scholarly discourses on East Asian and global masculinities\, she argues that rap’s identity as men’s music renders it a productive site for exploring\, unsettling\, and transforming prevailing models of Taiwanese manhood. In the context of shifting gender roles driven by dramatic social\, political\, and economic change over the course of the last three decades in Taiwan\, Schweig considers how rap has created new spaces for male sociality\, avenues for male self-empowerment\, and opportunities for the articulation of multiple masculine identities not otherwise audible in the island’s popular music.          \nSchweig is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at MIT.  Her research explores twentieth- and twenty-first-century music of East Asia\, with a particular emphasis on popular song\, narrativity\, and cultural politics in Taiwan and China.  She has received fellowships and grants from the Asian Cultural Council\, Whiting Foundation\, Fulbright-Hays\, and the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University. \n\nRebecca Dirksen\nIn Haiti from the colonial period to the present\, music has been a critical means for public dialogue when other avenues have not been possible. Mizik angaje\, literally\, “engaged music\,” a genre-crossing expressive form featuring pointed lyrical commentary on political and social issues\, has accompanied key moments in Haitian history\, from the Haitian Revolution to the downfall of the Duvalier regime and subsequent rise of Aristide to power. Increasingly in recent years\, mizik angaje has been re-imagined to reflect current realities: any understanding of this musical phenomenon must now go beyondexamining how ordinary Haitian citizens use musical dialogue to critique infrastructural weaknesses and abuses of authority to demonstrating how a growing number of social groups employ music as an explicit and fundamental tool for strengthening their local communities. Independent of state or NGO support\, these groups are tackling non-musical neighborhood concerns by promoting social programs that simultaneously entertain music-making and community service. This leads us to ask\, what happens when Haitian musicians implicate themselves in the processes of development? \nRebecca Dirksen\, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology\, completed her PhD in ethnomusicology at UCLA in 2012. Her primary research concerns music and grassroots development in Haiti before and after the 2010 earthquake. Concurrent projects revolve around creative responses to crisis and disaster\, intangible cultural heritage protection\, cultural policy\, and Haitian classical music. \nThis event is co-sponsored with MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures and the Cool Japan Project.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/meredith-schweig-rebecca-dirkson/
LOCATION:MIT Media Lab\, Room 633\, 75 Amherst St.\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Meredith-Schweig.jpg
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