MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

NGO2.0: When Social Action Meets Social Media
2010-10-14 17:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Jing Wang
Professor Wang will discuss the genesis and implementation of a civic media project that she conceptualized and launched in China in May 2009. The project, titled NGO2.0, is a social experiment that introduces Web 2.0 thinking and social media tools to the grassroots NGOs in the underdeveloped regions of China. How has new media complicated social action and civic engagement? What are the evolving stakes for social change proponents? How are change agents coping with governmental intervention in a country where social media is held suspect? Professor Wang will speculate on the emergence of a new field of inquiry — social media action research — while sharing insights and findings about her involvement in shaping an NGO 2.0 culture in China.

Amsterdam and New York: Transnational Photographic Exchange in the Era of Globalization
2011-02-09 16:30 - 18:30 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 141, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
This lecture will examine the impact of globalization on the urban imaginary in relation to a recent art exhibition, commissioned by the Dutch government in 2009, in which a group of contemporary New York artists were invited to photograph Amsterdam to mark the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery of Manhattan.
Registering a long history of transnational exchange between the two cities, the selected artists sought to produce work capable of defamiliarizing established images of Amsterdam. The claim of the exhibition was that seeing Amsterdam through the lens of New York photographers enabled new and surprising perspectives on four key aspects of the city: the street, the night, the water, and the outskirts. Interrogating this claim, the lecture will analyze individual artworks, the marketing and staging strategies of the exhibition, and — most importantly — the role that transnational exchange can play in both resisting and reinforcing dominant, globalized images of contemporary city spaces.
Christoph Lindner is Professor of Literature and Director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He is also a Research Affiliate at the University of London Institute in Paris. His recent books include Globalization, Violence, and the Visual Culture of Cities (2010), Urban Space and Cityscapes (2006), and Fictions of Commodity Culture (2003).

From Elsinore to Monkey Island: Theatre and Videogames as Performance Activities
2011-02-17 17:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Clara Fernández-Vara
What 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.
Videogames 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.
Clara 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).

How Documentary Went Digital: the Implications of Informal Filming and Skeptical Audiences
2011-03-17 16:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
John Ellis
Digital 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.
John 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).

(Face)book of the Dead
2011-04-21 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Mark Dery
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 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.

The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods
2011-04-28 16:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Professor Richard Rogers, University of Amsterdam
There 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.
Prof. 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.

Race and Representation after 9/11
2011-05-11 16:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Cynthia Young
Drawing 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.
Cynthia 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.

From Settlers to Quarriors: Breaking up the Monopoly with Modern Board Game Design
2011-09-28 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Scott Nicholson
Over 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.
Attendees 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.
Dr. 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.

Marks of Materiality in Digital Bodies
2011-09-29 17:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Hye Jean Chung
Digital 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.
Hye 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.

Federico Casalegno: "Designing Connections"
2011-10-06 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Federico Casalegno
By 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.
Federico 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.
A 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.

Revision, Culture, and the Machine: How Digital Makes Us Human
2011-10-13 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
John BryantHofstra University
In 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.
Therefore, 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.
John 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.
Bryant 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.

Marina Bers, "The Design of Digital Experiences for Positive Youth Development"
2011-11-03 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Marina Bers
This talk will focus on digital spaces to support positive youth development.
As 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.
Marina 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.
More on Dr. Bers

Cities and the Future of Entertainment
2011-11-10 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
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?
Speakers 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.
The Forum will be moderated by Mauricio Mota, a co-founder and Chief Storytelling Officer of the Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Co.

Mimi Ito, "Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World"
2011-11-16 17:30 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Mimi Ito
In 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.
Her web site is at itofisher.com/mito.
Co-hosted with the MIT Cool Japan Research Project.

Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World
2011-11-16 17:30 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States

The Family of Man and the Politics of Attention in Cold War America
2011-12-08 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Fred Turner
In 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.

Contemporary Network Television News Reporting About Latinos: Successes, Failures, and a Range of Proposals to Correct Its Limitations
2012-02-08 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Otto Santa Anna
Otto 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.
Otto Santa Ana, UCLA Associate Professor, received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from University of Pennsylvania. Santa Ana

Games and Journalism
2012-02-23 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Heather Chaplin
As 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.
Heather 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.

Media Culture in the Occupy Movement: from the People's Mic to GlobalRevolution.tv
2012-03-01 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Sasha Costanza-Chock
Scholars 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.
Movement 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.
Sasha 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.

The Color of Seawater Through a Picture Window
2012-03-08 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
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.
Kelley 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.

Mapping the Urban Database Documentary
2012-03-22 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Jesse Shapins
The 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.
Jesse 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.

Designing Digital Humanities
2012-04-26 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Johanna Drucker
What 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.
Johanna 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.

How To Wreck A Nice Speech: Hearing Things With The Vocoder, From World War II To Hip-Hop
2012-05-10 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Dave Tompkins
Invented 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.
Dave 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.
Co-hosted with the MIT Cool Japan Project.

The News as a Social Process for Improving Society
2012-09-06 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Yves Citton
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

George Lakoff, "The Brain's Politics: How Campaigns Are Framed and Why"
2012-09-11 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Sponsored by the MIT Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab)

George Lakoff
Everything 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.
George 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).
He graduated from MIT in 1962 (in Mathematics and Literature) and received his PhD in Linguistics from Indiana University in 1966.
Read more at georgelakoff.com.

Artist-Audience Relations in the Age of Social Media
2012-09-13 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Nancy Baym
Social 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?
Nancy 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.

Jim Bizzocchi, "Close-Reading Media Poetics"
2012-09-20 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Jim Bizzocchi
Close 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.
Close 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).
Jim 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).

Gediminas Urbonas
2012-10-18 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Gediminas Urbonas
Gediminas 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.
The 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.
They 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.
They 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

Cultural Production and Social Media as Capture Platforms: How the Matrix Has You
2012-11-15 17:00 - 19:00 | Comparative Media Studies: MIT Building E15, Room 335, 20 Ames St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Hector Postigo
This 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.
Hector 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.

Minding the News
2012-11-29 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Sponsored by the MIT Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab)
See Part 1 of this series, from September 6, featuring Francis Steen.
Mark Turner
The 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.
This talk will discuss research on the cognitive underpinnings of network news, with an emphasis on blended joint attention, story-telling, counterfactuality, and hypotheticals.
Mark Turner is Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University.
He 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.
