BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies - ECPv5.16.1//NONSGML v1.0//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH X-WR-CALNAME:MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://cms.mit.edu X-WR-CALDESC:Events for MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H X-Robots-Tag:noindex X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/New_York BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT DTSTART:20110313T070000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST DTSTART:20111106T060000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT DTSTART:20120311T070000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST DTSTART:20121104T060000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT DTSTART:20130310T070000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST DTSTART:20131103T060000 END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20130207T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20130207T190000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20150327T134543Z LAST-MODIFIED:20161221T201206Z UID:21608-1360256400-1360263600@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:Nostalgia for a Not-So-Distant Youth: Digital Games and Affect in Urban China DESCRIPTION:Marcella Szablewicz\nYoung people born in 1980’s and 1990’s China are the focus of a great deal of scholarly attention as they are the country’s first generation of only children. They are also the first generation to come of age with the Internet\, and\, for many\, playing Internet games forms an integral part of the youth experience. This presentation will explore the affective dimensions of digital games from the perspective of urban Chinese youth. What is the significance of an e-sports event that attracts tens of thousands of twenty-somethings\, many of whom experience it as a teary-eyed “farewell to their youth”? Or a viral video created by World of Warcraft gamers that urges millions of viewers to “raise their fists in solidarity” to show support for their “spiritual homeland”? What should we make of these phenomena that demonstrate\, ever more clearly\, the ways in which games are intertwined with people’s spiritual and emotional lives? Are games the imagined utopia they are made out to be in these nostalgic accounts or might these affective attachments prove to be a form of what Lauren Berlant (2011) has called “cruel optimism\,” a relationship in which the very thing that is desired becomes an obstacle to flourishing? \nMarcella Szablewicz is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Communication and Media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Duke University. Her research focuses on youth and digital media in urban China. She is currently working on a book based on her dissertation\, provisionally entitled From Addicts to Athletes: Youth Mobilities and the Politics of Digital Gaming in Urban China. Based on ethnographic fieldwork supported by the Fulbright and National Science Foundations\, the book will examine the precarious socio-economic futures of urban Chinese youth through the lens of digital gaming culture\, while also considering how dominant discourse about digital leisure practice is shaped by larger cultural debates about patriotism and productivity\, class and the crafting of the “ideal citizen”. Her work can also be found in the Routledge volume Online Society in China and in the Chinese Journal of Communication. \nCo-sponsored by the Cool Japan Project. URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/digital-games-and-affect-in-urban-china/ 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/2013/02/200-marcella2.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20121206T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20121206T190000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20150325T183327Z LAST-MODIFIED:20161221T201012Z UID:21563-1354813200-1354820400@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:New Forms\, New Markets for Independent Film DESCRIPTION:Independent film-maker Andrew Silver will discuss emerging forms of hybrid media\, some promising new pathways for distributing films and his career as a director and producer in this colloquium\, which will include clips from his most recent film\, Second Wind. Debra Wise of MIT’s Central Square Theater will join the discussion. Andrew and Debra played husband and wife in Radio Cape Cod\, a Silver production shot in Woods Hole. Andrew Silver is a graduate of MIT and the Harvard Business School\, co-author of a chapter in the HBS anthology Breakthrough Thinking\, and a long-time member of the Council for the Arts at MIT. His films are distributed by Tesco\, the second largest global retail chain: \n\nSecond Wind\, 13 min\nOverboard\, 16 min\nDownward Facing\, 6 min URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/andrew-silver-new-forms-new-markets-independent-film/ LOCATION:MIT Building 4\, Room 231\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States CATEGORIES:Colloquium ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/andrew-silver.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20121129T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20121129T190000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20150309T173159Z LAST-MODIFIED:20150309T173238Z UID:21569-1354208400-1354215600@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:Minding the News DESCRIPTION:Sponsored by the MIT Imagination\, Computation\, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab) \nSee Part 1 of this series\, from September 6\, featuring Francis Steen. \nMark Turner\nThe Red Hen Lab is a distributed laboratory for the study of network news. In an earlier talk\, Professor Francis Steen provided a technical overview of the activities of Red Hen and surveyed the study by Francis Steen and Mark Turner of international network news coverage of the Anders Bering Brevik event in Oslo\, Norway\, in July\, 2011\, with an emphasis on the way in which network news is occupied with the assessment of culpability\, blame\, and credit. \nThis talk will discuss research on the cognitive underpinnings of network news\, with an emphasis on blended joint attention\, story-telling\, counterfactuality\, and hypotheticals. \nMark Turner is Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University. \nHe is the founding director of the Cognitive Science Network. His most recent book publications are Ten Lectures on Mind and Language and two edited volumes\, The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity\, and Meaning\, Form\, & Body\, edited with Fey Parrill and Vera Tobin. His other publications include Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science: The Way We Think about Politics\, Economics\, Law\, and Society\, The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language\, and many more. He has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study\, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation\, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences\, the National Humanities Center\, the National Endowment for the Humanities\, and the Institute of Advanced Study of Durham University. He is a fellow of the Institute for the Science of Origins\, external research professor at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study in Cognitive Neuroscience\, distinguished fellow at the New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology\, and Extraordinary Member of the Humanwissenschaftsliches Zentrum. In 1996\, the Académie française awarded him the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises. For 2011-2012\, he is a fellow of the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/minding-the-news/ 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/2012/11/538px-MarkTurnerWikipedia.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20121115T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20121115T190000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20141121T155504Z LAST-MODIFIED:20141121T155504Z UID:21568-1352998800-1353006000@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:Cultural Production and Social Media as Capture Platforms: How the Matrix Has You DESCRIPTION:Hector Postigo\nThis presentation develops a theoretical framework (rooted in Science and Technology Studies) for understanding how\, generally\, social media’s technical feature-sets create a system of capture and conversion. Capture describes the persistent ways in which social web platforms record and fix online/offline social and technical practices. Conversion applies to the way in which technical architectures convert what is captured into value (both culturally contingent and economic). The notions of capture and conversion are developed in light of other work in the field that seeks to understand how social web platforms use technology to leverage user generated content (UGC). The framework bridges a focus on ongoing social practice within/through platforms with analysis of technology as a determinant of probable practice. Ultimately this work is part of a larger project that seeks to develop a way of critically engaging the political economy of the social web while at the same time not ignoring the subject positions of those whose lives on display make it compelling. \nHector Postigo is Associate Professor in Media Studies and Production at Temple University’s School of Media and Communication. He is the co-founder of the blog culturedigitally.org and most recently the author of The Digital Rights Movement: The Role of Technology in Subverting Digital Copyright from MIT Press and co-editor of Managing Privacy Through Accountability from Palgrave Press. His research is funded by the National Science Foundation and the European Commission. He teaches and writes about video game culture\, labor in digital networks\, and privacy and copyright on the social web. URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/hector-postigo-cultural-production-social-media-as-capture-platforms/ LOCATION:Comparative Media Studies: MIT Building E15\, Room 335\, 20 Ames St.\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States CATEGORIES:Colloquium ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/HectorPostigo2.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20121018T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20121018T190000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20150105T212038Z LAST-MODIFIED:20150105T212038Z UID:21584-1350579600-1350586800@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:Gediminas Urbonas DESCRIPTION:Gediminas Urbonas\nGediminas Urbonas is artist and educator\, and co-founder (with Nomeda Urbonas) of Urbonas Studio – an interdisciplinary research program that advocates for the reclamation of public culture in the face of overwhelming privatization\, stimulating cultural and political imagination as tools for social change. Often beginning with archival research\, their methodology unfolds complex participatory works investigating the urban environment\, architectural developments\, and cultural and technological heritage. \nThe Urbonases have established their international reputation for socially interactive and interdisciplinary practice exploring the conflicts and contradictions posed by the economic\, social\, and political conditions of countries in transition. Working in collaboration they develop models for social and artistic practice with the interest to design organizational structures that question relativity of freedom. \nThey use art platform to render public spaces for interaction and engagement of the social groups\, evoking local communities and encouraging their cultural and political imagination. Combining the tools of new and traditional media\, their work frequently involves collective activities such as workshops\, lectures\, debates\, TV programs\, Internet chat-rooms and public protests that stand at the intersection of art\, technology and social criticism. \nThey are also co-founders of VILMA (Vilnius Interdisciplinary Lab for Media Art)\, and VOICE\, a net based publication on media culture. They have exhibited internationally including the San Paulo\, Berlin\, Moscow\, Lyon and Gwangju Biennales URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/gediminas-urbonas/ LOCATION:MIT Building 4\, Room 231\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States CATEGORIES:Colloquium ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/urbonas.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20120920T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20120920T190000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20141015T173403Z LAST-MODIFIED:20150324T152024Z UID:21576-1348160400-1348167600@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:Jim Bizzocchi\, "Close-Reading Media Poetics" DESCRIPTION:Jim Bizzocchi\nClose reading is a classic humanities methodology for the analysis and understanding of texts across a variety of media. It’s a rigorous discipline — in the words of van Looy and Baetans: “The text is never trusted at face value\, but is torn to pieces and reconstituted by a reader who is at the same time a demolisher and a constructor.” This is a difficult task — the practice of close reading requires that the scholar immerse herself in the experience of the text on its own terms\, and at the same time maintain a critical distance in order to observe and understand the construction and the effects of the text. Bizzocchi relies on close reading for his own scholarly work and uses various strategies to reconcile the contradictory states of experience and analysis. \nClose reading can be used to explicate works across a variety of dimensions: thematic\, cultural\, historical\, sociological\, and others. Bizzocchi’s goal is to understand the poetics — the creative decisions — embedded in media works. Bordwell describes poetics as “inquiry into the fundamental principles by which artifacts in any representational medium are constructed\, and the effects that flow from these principles”. Bizzocchi has always loved the magic of immersion in the experience of the moving image. As a scholar\, he says his role is “to seek within that immersive experience the details of how the magic is created”. He will present his analyses of Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair\, Tom Tykwer’s Run\, Lola\, Run\, and Gerrie Villon and Alex Mayhew’s Ceremony of Innocence (an interactive adaptation of The Griffin and Sabine trilogy by Nick Bantock). \nJim Bizzocchi is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver\, British Columbia. His research includes work on narrative\, interactive narrative\, and the evolution of the moving image. He teaches classes in these areas\, and is a recipient of the University Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is a practicing video artist\, creating award-winning works in a genre he calls “Ambient Video”. Jim is a graduate of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program (2001). URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/jim-bizzocchi-close-reading-media-poetics/ 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/2012/03/asset.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20120913T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20120913T190000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20140904T181702Z LAST-MODIFIED:20140904T181702Z UID:21565-1347555600-1347562800@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:Artist-Audience Relations in the Age of Social Media DESCRIPTION:Nancy Baym\nSocial media have transformed relationships between those who create artistic work and those who enjoy it. Culture industries such as the music recording business have been left reeling as fans have gained the ability to distribute amongst themselves and artists have gained the ability to bypass traditional gatekeepers such as labels. The dominant rhetoric has been of ‘piracy\,’ yet there are other tales to tell. How does direct access to fans change what it means to be an artist? What rewards are there that weren’t before? How are relational lines between fans and friends blurred and with what consequences? What new challenges other than making a living do artists face? \nNancy Baym is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England. She is the author of Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Polity)\, Internet Inquiry (co-edited with Annette Markham\, Sage) and Tune In\, Log On: Soaps\, Fandom and Online Community (Sage). For the last two years she has been interviewing musicians about their relationships with audiences. URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/nancy-baym-artist-audience-relations/ LOCATION:MIT Building 4\, Room 231\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States CATEGORIES:Colloquium ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Baym.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20120911T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20120911T190000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20170530T233059Z LAST-MODIFIED:20170601T183835Z UID:30259-1347382800-1347390000@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:George Lakoff\, "The Brain's Politics: How Campaigns Are Framed and Why" DESCRIPTION:Sponsored by the MIT Imagination\, Computation\, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab) \n\nGeorge Lakoff\nEverything we learn\, know and understand is physical — a matter of brain circuitry. This basic fact has deep implications for how politics is understood\, how campaigns are framed\, why conservatives and progressives talk past each other\, and why progressives have more problems framing messages than conservatives do — and what they can do about it. \nGeorge Lakoff is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley\, where he has taught since 1972. He previously taught at Harvard (1965-69) and the University of Michigan (1969-1972). \nHe graduated from MIT in 1962 (in Mathematics and Literature) and received his PhD in Linguistics from Indiana University in 1966. \nRead more at georgelakoff.com. URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/george-lakoff-how-campaigns-framed-why/ LOCATION:MIT Media Lab\, Bartos Theater\, 20 Ames Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States CATEGORIES:Colloquium ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/George_Lakoff.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20120906T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20120906T190000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20170530T233059Z LAST-MODIFIED:20170602T141400Z UID:30294-1346950800-1346958000@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:The News as a Social Process for Improving Society DESCRIPTION:Yves Citton\nWhat 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. \nYves 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). \nSponsored by Comparative Media Studies\, Foreign Languages and Literatures\, and MIT France URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/news-social-process-improving-society/ 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/2017/05/Yves-Citton.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20120510T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20120510T190000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20140810T155040Z LAST-MODIFIED:20140810T155129Z UID:21551-1336669200-1336676400@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:How To Wreck A Nice Speech: Hearing Things With The Vocoder\, From World War II To Hip-Hop DESCRIPTION:Dave Tompkins\nInvented by Bell Labs in 1928 to reduce bandwidth over the Trans Atlantic Cable\, the vocoder would end up guarding phone conversations from eavesdroppers during World War II. By the Vietnam War\, the “spectral decomposer” had been re-freaked as a robotic voice for musicians. How To Wreck A Nice Beach is about hearing things\, from a misunderstood technology which in itself often spoke under conditions of anonymity. This is a terminal beach-slap of the history of electronic voices: from Nazi research labs to Stalin gulags\, from World’s Fairs to Hiroshima\, from Churchill and JKF to Kubrick and Kinski\, The O.C. and Rammellzee\, artificial larynges and Auto-Tune. Vocoder compression technology is now a cell phone standard–we communicate via flawed digital replicas of ourselves every day. Imperfect to be real\, we revel in signal corruption. \nDave Tompkins’ first book\, How To Wreck A Nice Beach: The Vocoder From World War II To Hip-Hop\, is now out in paperback. Amazon named it “top pick” for Entertainment book of the year in 2010. He has presented on the vocoder in Germany\, Netherlands (Jan Van Eyck)\, New York (Eyebeam Institute)\, London\, Poland (Unsound Festival)\, and at the NSA Cryptologic Symposium held at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. Tompkins has written for Grantland\, Oxford American\, The Believer and The Wire. Tompkins is currently researching Sustained Decay bass sub-frequencies in Florida. Born in North Carolina\, he now lives in Brooklyn. \nCo-hosted with the MIT Cool Japan Project. URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/dave-tompkins-how-to-wreck-a-nice-speech/ LOCATION:MIT Media Lab\, Room 633\, 75 Amherst St.\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States CATEGORIES:Colloquium ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/gif:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Dave-Tompkins.gif END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20120426T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20120426T190000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20141202T155446Z LAST-MODIFIED:20141202T155446Z UID:21543-1335459600-1335466800@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:Designing Digital Humanities DESCRIPTION:Johanna Drucker\nWhat is the role of design in modeling digital humanities? Can we imagine new forms of argument and platforms that support interpretative work? So much of the computationally driven environment of digital work has been created by design/engineers that humanistic values and methods have not found their place in the tools and formats that provide the platform for research\, pedagogy\, access\, and use. The current challenge is to take advantage of the rich repositories and well-developed online resources and create innovative approaches to argument\, curation\, display\, editing\, and understanding that embody humanistic methods as well as humanities content. Designers have a major role to play in the collaborative envisioning of new formats and processes. Using some vivid examples and case studies\, this talk outlines some of the opportunities for exciting work ahead. \nJohanna Drucker is the inaugural Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design\, typography\, experimental poetry\, fine art\, and digital humanities. In addition\, she has a reputation as a book artist\, and her limited edition works are in special collections and libraries worldwide. Her most recent titles include SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing (Chicago\, 2009)\, and Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide (Pearson\, 2008\, 2nd edition late 2012). She is currently working on a database memoire\, ALL\, the online Museum of Writing in collaboration with University College London and King’s College\, and a letterpress project titled Stochastic Poetics. A collaboratively written work\, Digital_Humanities\, with Jeffrey Schnapp\, Todd Presner\, Peter Lunenfeld\, and Anne Burdick is forthcoming from MIT Press. URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/johanna-drucker-designing-digital-humanities/ LOCATION:MIT Building 2\, Room 105\, 182 Memorial Drive\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States CATEGORIES:Colloquium ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Johanna-Drucker_Credit-Stephanie-Gross.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20120322T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20120322T190000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20150302T200855Z LAST-MODIFIED:20150302T200855Z UID:21553-1332435600-1332442800@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:Mapping the Urban Database Documentary DESCRIPTION:Jesse Shapins\nThe urban database documentary is a mode of media art practice that uses structural systems as generative processes and organizational frameworks to explore the lived experience of place. The genre emerges in the early 20th century\, and can be read as symptomatic of panoramic perception\, sensory estrangement and networked participation\, cultural utopias which respond to modernity’s underlying paradoxes. As such\, the invention of the computer did not give rise to the urban database documentary\, it only enabled new forms of its realization. The hope is to shift the conversation from a fetishization of ever-­new technological possibilities to a discussion of the underlying cultural aims/assumptions of media art practice and the specific forms through which works address modernity’s cultural tensions. \nJesse Shapins is a media theorist\, documentary artist\, and social entrepreneur whose work has been featured in The New York Times\, Metropolis\, PRAXIS and Wired\, cited in books such as The Sentient City and Networked Locality\, and been exhibited at MoMA\, Deutsches Architektur Zentrum and the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts\, among other venues. He is Co-Founder/Chief Strategy Architect of Zeega\, Co-Founder/Associate Director of metaLAB (at) Harvard\, and on the faculty of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design\, where he has invented courses such as The Mixed-Reality City and Media Archaeology of Place. URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/mapping-urban-database-dictionary/ 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/2012/03/MIgTWah8Ii4qdS-wbAq1Dl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVaiQDB_Rd1H6kmuBWtceBJ.jpeg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20120308T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20120308T190000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20170530T233059Z LAST-MODIFIED:20200325T165238Z UID:30265-1331226000-1331233200@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:The Color of Seawater Through a Picture Window DESCRIPTION:David Kelley primarily works with digital video installation and photography\, with recent projects involving performance and sculpture. His practice consistently interrogates the apparatus of photography and film to encounter narrative in the process of becoming. His latest films\, set in Newfoundland and the Brazilian Amazon\, draw on the genre of ethnography as a narrative device to rehearse the real and imagined social relations of these sites. In Newfoundland\, Kelley participated in a remote art residency founded as a socio-economic redevelopment project on Fogo island\, an outport community with a failing fishing industry. In Manaus in the Amazon\, he filmed rehearsals of an independent film about drug-fueled indigenous suicides in the colonial Teatro Amazonas. The theater was funded by the fortunes of rubber barons and also served as the location for Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. Kelley will show selections of his recent projects and related narrative and ethnographic films\, as well as rehearse a lecture/performance about architectural morphology and global tourism. \nKelley is an artist and Assistant Professor of Photography at Wellesley College. He received his MFA from University of California in Irvine and is a recent alumni of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. Kelley’s work has been shown at MassMoCA\, The Kitchen\, BAK in Utrecht\, and Bangkok Experimental Film Festival. His project with Patty Chang Flotsam Jetsam (2007) exhibited in New York at Museum of Modern Art’s 2008 New Directors New Films Festival and won the Golden Pyramid at the Cairo IMFAY Media Arts Festival. URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/color-seawater-through-picture-window/ 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/2012/03/dkelley.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20120301T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20120301T190000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20150303T190934Z LAST-MODIFIED:20150303T190934Z UID:21548-1330621200-1330628400@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:Media Culture in the Occupy Movement: from the People's Mic to GlobalRevolution.tv DESCRIPTION:Sasha Costanza-Chock\nScholars and activists have hotly debated the relationship between social media and social movement activity during the current global cycle of protest. This talk investigates media practices in the Occupy movement and develops an analytical framework of social movement media culture: the set of tools\, skills\, social practices\, and norms that movement participants deploy to create\, circulate\, curate\, and amplify movement media across all available platforms. \nMovement media cultures are shaped by their location within a broader media ecology\, and can be said to lean towards open or closed based on the diversity of spokespeople\, the role of media specialists\, formal and informal inclusion mechanisms\, messaging and framing norms\, and levels of transparency. The social movement media culture of the Occupy movement leans strongly towards open\, distributed\, and participatory processes; at the same time\, highly skilled individuals and dedicated small groups play key roles in creating\, curating\, and circulating movement media. Insight into the media culture of the Occupy movement is based on mixed qualitative and quantitative methods. Qualitative insights come from semi-structured interviews with members of Media Teams and Press Working Groups\, participant observation and visual research in multiple Occupy sites\, and participation in Occupy Hackathons. Quantitative insights are drawn from a survey of over 5\,000 Occupy participants\, a crowdsourced database of the characteristics of approximately 1200 local Occupy sites\, and a dataset of more than 13 million tweets with Occupy related hashtags. \nSasha Costanza-Chock is Assistant Professor of Civic Media in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. He is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University\, co-PI of the MIT Center for Civic Media\, and cofounder of the Occupy Research Network. URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/media-culture-occupy-movement/ LOCATION:MIT Building 2\, Room 105\, 182 Memorial Drive\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States CATEGORIES:Colloquium ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/scc-littleneck.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20120223T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20120223T190000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20141218T151418Z LAST-MODIFIED:20141218T151418Z UID:21554-1330016400-1330023600@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:Games and Journalism DESCRIPTION:Heather Chaplin\nAs a journalist covering games since 2001\, Chaplin has seen a lot of changes in the industry and among game academics. In this talk she will give an overview of the most important and interesting trends\, including emerging thinking on ideas about game literacies and the acceptance of games as facilitators of transformative experiences. This will include ideas about play as a crucial part of human development and a potentially subversive act\, and the rise of systems thinking. Chaplin is not a games evangelist\, so the talk will cast a skeptical eye on the current trend of games as an answer for all that ails society. She will also talk about my experiences in general as a journalist during the rise of the Internet\, and share my thinking on the journalism program she is developing at The New School. \nHeather Chaplin is an assistant professor of journalism at The New School and author of the book\, Smartbomb: The Quest for Art Entertainment and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution. Her work has appeared in The New York Times\, The Los Angeles Times\, GQ\, Details\, and Salon. She was a regular contributor for All Things Considered\, covering videogames. She has been interviewed for and cited in on the topic of games for publications such as The New Yorker\, The Atlantic Monthly\, The New York Times Magazine\, Businessweek\, and The Believer and has appeared on shows such as Talk of the Nation\, and CBS Sunday Morning. URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/heather-chaplin-games-and-journalism/ 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/2012/02/heatherchaplin.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20120208T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20120208T190000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20141121T151125Z LAST-MODIFIED:20141121T151125Z UID:21544-1328720400-1328727600@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:Contemporary Network Television News Reporting About Latinos: Successes\, Failures\, and a Range of Proposals to Correct Its Limitations DESCRIPTION:Otto Santa Anna\nOtto Santa Anna presents findings from his forthcoming book\, Juan in a Hundred: Faces and Stories of Latinos on the Network News (Texas). In it he elaborates standard cognitive metaphor analysis (as is used for printed texts)\, blending cognitive science with humanist scholarship\, to attempt to capture the full semiotic range of televised reporting. His review of a full year of contemporary network news stories about Latinos reveals both the high production values and journalistic limitations of network reporting. This critical semiotic analysis offers an explanation about how news viewers construct partial understandings about Latinos from the news stories they watch. At the end of this talk he offers a range of recommendations\, from modest to radical\, to address these limitations. \nOtto Santa Ana\, UCLA Associate Professor\, received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from University of Pennsylvania. Santa Ana URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/otto-santa-anna-network-television-news-about-latinos/ LOCATION:MIT Media Lab\, Bartos Theater\, 20 Ames Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States CATEGORIES:Colloquium ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/image_mini.jpeg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20111208T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20111208T190000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20140813T200926Z LAST-MODIFIED:20140813T201131Z UID:21387-1323363600-1323370800@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:The Family of Man and the Politics of Attention in Cold War America DESCRIPTION:Fred Turner\nIn 1955\, the Museum of Modern Art mounted one of the most widely seen – and widely excoriated – photography exhibitions of all time\, The Family of Man. For the last forty years\, critics have decried the show as a model of the psychological and political repression of cold war America. This talk from Fred Turner challenges that view. It shows how the immersive\, multi-image aesthetics of the exhibition emerged not from the cold war\, but from the World War II fight against fascism. It then demonstrates that The Family of Man aimed to liberate the senses of visitors and especially\, to enable them to embrace racial\, sexual and cultural diversity – even as it enlisted their perceptual faculties in new modes of collective self-management. For these reasons\, the talk concludes\, the exhibition became an influential prototype of the immersive\, multi-media environments of the 1960s – and of our own multiply mediated social world today. URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/family-of-man-politics-of-attention-in-cold-war-america/ 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/2011/12/fred-turner-200-dpi-3-by-3.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20111116T173000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20111116T190000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20141210T160536Z LAST-MODIFIED:20141210T160536Z UID:21496-1321464600-1321470000@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World DESCRIPTION:Mimi Ito\nIn recent years\, otaku culture has emerged as one of Japan’s major cultural exports and as a genuinely transnational phenomenon. In this talk\, Mimi Ito\, a cultural anthropologist at UC Irvine\, discusses how this once marginalized popular culture has come to play a major role in Japan’s identity at home and abroad. In the American context\, the word otaku is best translated as “geek”—an ardent fan with highly specialized knowledge and interests. But it is associated especially with fans of specific Japan-based cultural genres\, including anime\, manga\, and video games. Most important of all is the way otaku culture represents a newly participatory fan culture in which fans not only organize around niche interests but produce and distribute their own media content. How did this once stigmatized Japanese youth culture create its own alternative markets and cultural products such as fan fiction\, comics\, costumes\, and remixes\, becoming a major international force that can challenge the dominance of commercial media? By exploring the rich variety of otaku culture from multiple perspectives\, Prof. Ito will provide fascinating insights into the present and future of cultural production and distribution in the digital age. \nHer web site is at itofisher.com/mito. \nCo-hosted with the MIT Cool Japan Research Project. URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/mimi-ito-otaku-culture/ LOCATION:MIT Media Lab\, Room 633\, 75 Amherst St.\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States CATEGORIES:Civic Media Session,Colloquium ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Mimi-Ito-USC.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20111116T173000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20111116T190000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20131114T180451Z LAST-MODIFIED:20131210T193431Z UID:6886-1321464600-1321470000@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:Mimi Ito\, "Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World" DESCRIPTION:Mimi Ito\nIn recent years\, otaku culture has emerged as one of Japan’s major cultural exports and as a genuinely transnational phenomenon. In this talk\, Mimi Ito\, a cultural anthropologist at UC Irvine\, discusses how this once marginalized popular culture has come to play a major role in Japan’s identity at home and abroad. In the American context\, the word otaku is best translated as “geek”—an ardent fan with highly specialized knowledge and interests. But it is associated especially with fans of specific Japan-based cultural genres\, including anime\, manga\, and video games. Most important of all is the way otaku culture represents a newly participatory fan culture in which fans not only organize around niche interests but produce and distribute their own media content. How did this once stigmatized Japanese youth culture create its own alternative markets and cultural products such as fan fiction\, comics\, costumes\, and remixes\, becoming a major international force that can challenge the dominance of commercial media? By exploring the rich variety of otaku culture from multiple perspectives\, Prof. Ito will provide fascinating insights into the present and future of cultural production and distribution in the digital age. \nHer web site is at itofisher.com/mito. \nCo-hosted with the MIT Cool Japan Research Project. URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/mimi-ito-fandom-unbound-otaku-culture-connected-world/ LOCATION:MIT Media Lab\, Room 633\, 75 Amherst St.\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States CATEGORIES:Civic Media Session,Colloquium ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Mimi-Ito-USC.jpg ORGANIZER;CN="MIT%20Comparative%20Media%20Studies%2FWriting":MAILTO:cmsw@mit.edu END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20111110T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20111110T190000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20131114T175602Z LAST-MODIFIED:20131114T175602Z UID:6881-1320944400-1320951600@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:Cities and the Future of Entertainment DESCRIPTION:As a prologue to the Futures of Entertainment conference\, this Forum will focus on the emergence of powerful new production cultures in such cities as Mumbai\, Shanghai\, and Rio de Janeiro. What do these developments portend for the international flow of media content? How does the nature of these cities shape the entertainment industries they are fostering? At the same time\, new means of media production and circulation now permit individuals to produce content from suburban or rural areas. How do these apparently opposed trends co-exist? What is their likely impact on audiences and on the international media landscape? \nSpeakers include Sérgio Sá Leitão\, president of RioFilme; 2005 CMS graduate Parmesh Shahani\, now at the University of Pennsylvania and of Godrej India Culture Club — and who previously worked for Mahindra & Mahindra\, one of India’s largest business conglomerates; and Ernest James Wilson III\, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California. \nThe Forum will be moderated by Mauricio Mota\, a co-founder and Chief Storytelling Officer of the Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Co. URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/cities-future-entertainment/ LOCATION:MIT Media Lab\, Bartos Theater\, 20 Ames Street\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States CATEGORIES:Colloquium,Communications Forum ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/mit-comm-forum_logo_square.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20111103T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20111103T190000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20131114T174706Z LAST-MODIFIED:20131114T174706Z UID:6879-1320339600-1320346800@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:Marina Bers\, "The Design of Digital Experiences for Positive Youth Development" DESCRIPTION:Marina Bers\nThis talk will focus on digital spaces to support positive youth development. \nAs the design of our digital landscape is increasingly guided by commercial purposes and not by developmental concerns\, there is a sense of urgency for developing strategies and educational programs that promote positive development by taking into consideration the children’s social\, emotional\, cognitive\, physical\, civic and spiritual needs. But we should also consider the unique design features of each technology and the practices and policies that shape different interactions in the digital landscape. Although this talk will focus on new technologies\, it is inspired by an old question: “How should we live?” This talk will present an approach to help children gain the technological literacies of the 21st century while developing a sense of identity\, values and purpose. Too often youth’s experiences with technology are framed in negative terms. This talk acknowledges problems and risks\, and takes an interventionist perspective. Based on over a decade and a half of research\, this talk provides a theoretical framework for guiding the implementation of experiences that take advantage of new technologies to support learning and personal development\, as well as examples from concrete experiences. These engage children in playful learning by supporting digital content creation\, creativity\, choices of conduct\, communication\, collaboration and community building. These are the six C’s proposed by the Positive Technological Development framework. They can guide the design and the evaluation of digital experiences from early childhood to adolescence\, and offer a possible path to help children out of the playpens into the playgrounds of this technological era. \nMarina Umaschi Bers\, Ph.D.\, is an associate professor at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development and the Computer Science Department at Tufts University. She heads the interdisciplinary Developmental Technologies research group. Her research involves the design and study of innovative learning technologies to promote positive youth development. Dr. Bers received prestigious awards such as the 2005 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE)\, a five year National Science Foundation Young Investigator’s Career Award and the American Educational Research Association’s Jan Hawkins Award. Over the past decade and a half\, Dr. Bers has conceived\, designed and evaluated diverse technological tools ranging from robotics to virtual worlds in after-school programs\, museums\, hospitals\, and schools both in the U.S. and abroad. Dr. Bers has received several NSF grants and is active in publishing her research in academic journals. Her book Blocks to Robots: Learning with Technology in the Early Childhood Classroom was published in 2008 by Teacher’s College Press. Most recently\, Dr. Bers wrote The Design of Digital Experiences for Positive Youth Development: Out of the playpen into the playground\, to be published by Oxford University in early 2012. Dr. Bers is from Argentina. In 1994 she came to the U.S. and received a Master’s degree in Educational Media from Boston University and a Master of Science and Ph.D. from the MIT Media Laboratory. \nMore on Dr. Bers URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/marina-bers-design-digital-experiences-positive-youth-development/ LOCATION:MIT Media Lab\, Room 633\, 75 Amherst St.\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States CATEGORIES:Colloquium ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/gif:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/bers.gif ORGANIZER;CN="MIT%20Comparative%20Media%20Studies%2FWriting":MAILTO:cmsw@mit.edu END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20111013T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20111013T170000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20161128T201104Z LAST-MODIFIED:20161128T201104Z UID:21285-1318525200-1318525200@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:Revision\, Culture\, and the Machine: How Digital Makes Us Human DESCRIPTION:John BryantHofstra University\nIn revising their own texts\, or other people’s texts\, writers erase the past\, remodel it\, or reinvent it. They create versions of themselves\, and those versions are recorded in the textual identities they create through revision. By studying revision\, we are able to see not only how a single writer evolves but also how a culture insists upon certain evolutions\, with or without the writer’s consent. \nTherefore\, the dynamics of revision can take us to the heart of identity formation both in its expressive and repressive strains. What compels a culture to rewrite its texts? How do we track revision in order to “see” or rather “give witness to” revisionary processes? In addressing these problems\, digital scholarship can offer far more access to the fluid texts that expose the dynamics of revision and help us confront the necessity of revision in our culture. \nJohn Bryant will draw upon examples from revision studies\, adaptation\, and translation in order to highlight the elements of creativity\, appropriation\, and cultural difference that are at stake in dealing with the ethics and editing of revision. Along the way\, he will demonstrate TextLab\, the Melville Electronic Library’s revision editing tool\, and discuss the ethical as well as editorial dimensions of other imagined tools\, such as Melville Remix and How Billy [Budd] Grew. \nBryant is Professor of English at Hofstra University and received his BA. MA\, and PhD from the University of Chicago. He has written on Melville\, related writers of the nineteenth-century\, and textual scholarship. He is also editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. His recent book\, Melville Unfolding: Sexuality\, Politics\, and the Versions of Typee (Michigan 2008)\, is based on his online fluid-text edition Herman Melville’s Typee. He is currently working on a critical biography\, Herman Melville: A Half-Known Life (Wiley) and the NEH-funded Melville Electronic Library (MEL)\, an online critical archive and “We the People” project. URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/john-bryant-revision-culture-machine/ LOCATION:MIT Building 4\, Room 231\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States CATEGORIES:Colloquium ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/8588406207_d48127e5f8.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20111006T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20111006T190000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20141201T183118Z LAST-MODIFIED:20201014T125111Z UID:21284-1317920400-1317927600@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:Federico Casalegno: "Designing Connections" DESCRIPTION:Federico Casalegno\nBy providing a critical description of existing technologies and projects related to the use of information and communication technologies to enhance social connectivity\, this talk will illustrate innovative ways to design creative new media and digital interactions to foster connections between people\, information\, and places. \nFederico Casalegno\, Ph.D.\, is the Director of the MIT Mobile Experience Lab and Associate Director of the MIT Design Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 2008\, he is the director of the Green Home Alliance between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Italy. He is adjunct full professor at IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca\, Italy. \nA social scientist with an interest in the impact of networked digital technologies in human behavior and society\, Casalegno both teaches and leads advanced research at MIT\, and design interactive media to foster connections between people\, information and physical places using cutting-edge information technology. URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/designing-connections-federico-casalegno/ LOCATION:MIT Building 4\, Room 231\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States CATEGORIES:Colloquium ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/federico_casalegno1.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20110929T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20110929T170000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20150302T201702Z LAST-MODIFIED:20150302T201750Z UID:21386-1317315600-1317315600@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:Marks of Materiality in Digital Bodies DESCRIPTION:Hye Jean Chung\nDigital technology is increasingly utilized in film production to achieve the technical and imaginative compositing of live-action and computer-generated imagery. Hye Jean Chung’s talk will explore how digital effects are not only used to mediate the real but to replace or enhance human capabilities via cyborgian hybrids. When bodies become digitized into pixelated formats\, does this effectively incarnate physicality in ways unforeseen? How do nationalist desires and transnational aspirations intersect in computer-generated bodies of imaginary entities? What is lost when a digital aesthetics that accentuates seamlessness\, transcendence and transmutation translates into a naïve political rhetoric that elides the material practices of labor in film production pipelines? Even though computer-generated characters are often described as de-materialized because they are simulated images of digital bodies and virtual camera movements\, they can also be regarded as material incarnations of visual and sonic traces that link them to corporeal bodies and territorial concerns. This talk will examine how layered traces of national bodies become re-animated and re-corporealized along the film production pipeline through the multiple bodies of actors\, voice actors\, stunt actors\, movement coordinators\, body doubles\, and animators. \nHye Jean Chung is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Media Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology\, where she is working on a book project that analyzes the globally dispersed and digitally networked workforce of film production pipelines\, and its relation to the fictional spaces\, computer-generated imagery and digital aesthetics of contemporary cinema. She received her Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies from the University of California\, Santa Barbara. Her primary research interests include transnational cinema\, cross-border mobility\, production studies\, digital visual effects and animation\, and East Asian cinema. Her work has been published in journals such as Spectator and Contemporaneity\, and in the anthology Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (Routledge\, 2009)\, edited by Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker. Other essays will soon appear in forthcoming issues of Cinema Journal and The Velvet Light Trap. She has recently co-edited and contributed to a themed issue of Media Fields Journal on the intersection of media\, labor\, and mobility. In addition to her scholarly endeavors\, Chung has worked as a journalist\, and published translations of literary works from Korean into English and vice versa. URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/hye-jean-chung-marks-of-materiality-in-digital-bodies/ 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/2015/03/Hye-Jean-Chung.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20110928T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20110928T170000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20141216T141348Z LAST-MODIFIED:20200924T164842Z UID:21282-1317229200-1317229200@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:From Settlers to Quarriors: Breaking up the Monopoly with Modern Board Game Design DESCRIPTION:Scott Nicholson\nOver the last 15 years\, there has been an explosion of innovation in board game styles and mechanisms. The Settlers of Catan was the game that crossed the ocean from Germany to the U.S. in the late 1990’s and kicked off this new era in board gaming. These modern board games\, or Eurogames\, are more engaging experiences and based less on luck than the typical roll-and-move board game design prevalent in the 20th century. \nAttendees will learn about a variety of game mechanisms through discussions of exemplar games and see how these games relate. Many of these mechanisms are appropriate for digital games as well as tabletop games\, so attendees will improve their toolkit of mechanisms for their own design work. \nDr. Scott Nicholson is a visiting scholar with MIT Comparative Media Studies for the 2011-2012 academic year\, working with the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab and The Education Arcade. He is an associate professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University\, where he has focused on games in libraries and game design as a pedagogical tool. He was the host of Board Games with Scott from 2005-2010 and is the designer of Tulipmania 1637\, a board game published in 2009. In addition\, he is the author of Everyone Plays at the Library: Creating Great Gaming Experiences for All Ages\, published in 2010 by Information Today. URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/scott-nicholson-modern-board-game-design/ LOCATION:MIT Building 4\, Room 231\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States CATEGORIES:Colloquium ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/scottnicholson.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20110511T160000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20110511T160000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20161013T143400Z LAST-MODIFIED:20161013T143912Z UID:21369-1305129600-1305129600@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:Race and Representation after 9/11 DESCRIPTION:Cynthia Young\nDrawing on recent U.S. television series “The Unit” and “Sleeper Cells\,” Cynthia Young examines recent shifts in media representations of African American men\, arguing that in the context of the “war on terror\,” the image of the criminal and anti-social young black male has mutated into the image of the black patriot\, at war against a new enemy of the nation\, the Muslim terrorist. Exploring the figure of the black soldier\, her work asks the questions: What kind of popular culture is made in the context of war? How do notions of civil rights shift in a post-Civil Rights era? And when and how are such notions mobilized in service to violent and racist conceptions of Iraqis\, Arabs\, and other Muslims? In his commentary\, Visiting Scholar Anamik Saha will draw upon his research on popular cultural representations of South Asians and Muslims in Britain during the same period. \nCynthia Young is an Associate Professor of English and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College where she teaches courses on literature and popular culture. She received her B.A. from Columbia University and her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. Her book on U.S. Third World Leftists\, Soul Power\, was published by Duke University Press in 2006. She is currently working on a project that considers race\, specifically blackness\, after the September 11 attacks. Interrogating popular culture and political organizing sites\, this project considers how the Civil Rights legacy has been hijacked by Conservatives supporting an anti-immigrant\, pro-war and often white supremacist agenda. URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/race-representation-after-9-11/ LOCATION:MIT Building 2\, Room 105\, 182 Memorial Drive\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States CATEGORIES:Colloquium ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/cahillulrichyoung.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20110428T160000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20110428T160000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20170530T233059Z LAST-MODIFIED:20200323T125845Z UID:30276-1304006400-1304006400@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods DESCRIPTION:Professor Richard Rogers\, University of Amsterdam\nThere is an ontological distinction between the natively digital and the digitized\, that is\, the objects\, content\, devices and environments that are “born” in the new medium\, as opposed to those that have “migrated” to it. Should the current methods of study change\, however slightly or wholesale\, given the focus on objects and content of the medium? The research program put forward here thereby engages with “virtual methods” that import standard methods from the social sciences and the humanities. That is\, the distinction between the natively digital and the digitized also could apply to current research methods. What kind of Internet research may be performed with methods that have been digitized (such as online surveys and directories) vis-á-vis those that are natively digital (such as recommendation systems and folksonomy)? Second\, he will propose propose that Internet research may be put to new uses\, given an emphasis on natively digital methods as opposed to the digitized. Rogers will strive to shift the attention from the opportunities afforded by transforming ink into bits\, and instead inquire into how research with the Internet may move beyond the study of online culture only. How to capture and analyze hyperlinks\, tags\, search engine results\, archived Websites\, and other digital objects? How may one learn from how online devices (e.g.\, engines and recommendation systems) make use of the objects\, and how may such uses be repurposed for social and cultural research? Ultimately\, he proposes a research practice that grounds claims about cultural change and societal conditions in online dynamics\, introducing the term “online groundedness.” The overall aim is to rework method for Internet research\, developing a novel strand of study\, digital methods. \nProf. Dr. Richard Rogers holds the Chair and is full University Professor in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He is Director of Govcom.org\, the group responsible for the Issue Crawler and other info-political tools\, and the Digital Methods Initiative\, reworking method for Internet research. Among other works\, Rogers is author of Information Politics on the Web (MIT Press\, 2004)\, awarded the 2005 best book of the year by the American Society of Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T). His forthcoming book\, Digital Methods\, is also with MIT Press. URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/end-virtual-digital-methods/ LOCATION:MIT Building 2\, Room 105\, 182 Memorial Drive\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States CATEGORIES:Colloquium ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Richard-Rogers.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20110421T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20110421T190000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20140730T162005Z LAST-MODIFIED:20150720T124111Z UID:21367-1303405200-1303412400@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:(Face)book of the Dead DESCRIPTION:Mark Dery\nIn 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? \nMark Dery 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. URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/facebook-of-the-dead/ LOCATION:MIT Building 2\, Room 105\, 182 Memorial Drive\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States CATEGORIES:Colloquium ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Mark-Dery.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20110317T160000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20110317T160000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20150112T195420Z LAST-MODIFIED:20150112T195420Z UID:21364-1300377600-1300377600@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:How Documentary Went Digital: the Implications of Informal Filming and Skeptical Audiences DESCRIPTION:John Ellis\nDigital filming has transformed documentary\, offering new potentials to filmmakers and at the same time transforming audience attitudes. Filmmakers have been able to work more informally with their subjects\, giving rise to the fusion format of reality TV as well as changing the nature of documentaries themselves. From the audience perspective\, affordable digital platforms mean that almost everyone knows what it is like to film and be filmed. The result is a transformation of the documentary genre\, where films are now seen as documents of interactions rather than expositions of fact. Ellis explores this new phase in documentary\, using methods derived from Goffman as well as an intimate understanding of the technologies of filming. \nJohn Ellis is Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway University of London\, and this semester’s visiting scholar at the Annenberg Institute\, University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Visible Fictions (1982)\, Seeing Things (2000) and TV FAQ (2007) and the co-author of Language and Materialism (1977). His Documentary: Witness and Self-Revelation will appear in 2012\, and is based in part on his 19 years as an independent producer for British TV\, making documentaries about cinema and the arts\, the politics of media\, and the food industry. He served on the editorial board of Screen magazine (1975-1985)\, was the vice-chair of the film producers’ association PACT (1988-1994)\, and now chairs the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC). URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/john-ellis-how-documentary-went-digital/ LOCATION:MIT Building 2\, Room 105\, 182 Memorial Drive\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States CATEGORIES:Colloquium ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/john-ellis.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20110217T170000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20110217T170000 DTSTAMP:20260409T220121 CREATED:20141215T203019Z LAST-MODIFIED:20141215T203223Z UID:21362-1297962000-1297962000@cms.mit.edu SUMMARY:From Elsinore to Monkey Island: Theatre and Videogames as Performance Activities DESCRIPTION:Clara Fernández-Vara\nWhat do Shakespeare and videogames have in common? Clara Fernández-Vara\, a Comparative Media Studies alumna\, explains her journey from researching Shakespeare in performance to studying and developing videogames. Applying concepts from theatre in performance illuminates the relationship between the player and the game\, as well as between game and narrative. \nVideogames are not theatre\, but the comparison gives way to productive questions: What is the dramatic text of the game? How does this text shape the actions of the player? Who are the performers? Who is the audience? These questions will be addressed in the context of adventure games\, a story-driven genre where the player solves puzzles that are integrated in the fictional world of the game. \nClara Fernández-Vara is a post-doctoral researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab\, where she teaches courses on videogame theory and game writing\, as well as develop games with teams of students. Clara is a graduate from the Comparative Media Studies program\, and holds a PhD in Digital Media from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research concentrates on adventure games\, game playing as a performance activity\, and the integration of stories in simulated environments. She has released two experimental adventure games\, Rosemary (2009) and Symon (2010). URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/clara-fernandez-vara-theatre-and-videogames-as-performance/ LOCATION:MIT Building 2\, Room 105\, 182 Memorial Drive\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States CATEGORIES:Colloquium ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/fernandez-vara.jpg END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR