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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20140206T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20140206T190000
DTSTAMP:20260514T022100
CREATED:20140108T211213Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20201206T214336Z
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SUMMARY:Vicki Mayer: "Where 'Home' Is: Film Production Economies and the Privatization of Space"
DESCRIPTION:Vicki Mayer\nVicki Mayer is Professor of Communication at Tulane University. She has published widely on media production and producers. She is Editor of the journal Television & New Media\, and she directs the digital humanities projects MediaNOLA and New Orleans Historical. \nThis talk will give an overview of her current research into the impacts of regional policies for film production on ordinary people’s understandings of time\, space and place. This is a talk less about the economic impacts of the policies than on the social and subjective experiences of people who live in cities driven by media production economies. In particular\, she will highlight the impacts of location-based film production on the ways residents in New Orleans\, Louisiana\, move through public space. Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005\, the state has sponsored aggressive incentives policies that have transformed the region into the third largest film economy in the United States. Using GIS mapping software and personal photography\, Mayer explores the ways this publicly financed economy privatizes public space by making the local into locations\, by commodifying local culture\, and by increasing the stratification of wealth in the post-Katrina landscape. These images provide a textured look at the way political economies can be visualized not only geographically but also as part of the ordinary experience of everyday life in a city still and always posited as “recovering.” At the end of this talk\, she presents an alternative way of mediating spatial experiences and histories through a digital humanities project that she has directed since 2008.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/vicki-mayer-film-production-economies/
LOCATION:MIT Media Lab\, Room 633\, 75 Amherst St.\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Comparative Media Insights
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Vicki-Mayer.jpeg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20140204T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20140204T190000
DTSTAMP:20260514T022100
CREATED:20140107T210808Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20160817T182447Z
UID:7702-1391533200-1391540400@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Jason Mittell: “Strategies of Storytelling in Transmedia Television”
DESCRIPTION:As television series have become more complex in their narrative strategies\, television itself has expanded its storytelling scope across screens and platforms\, complicating notions of medium-specificity at the very same time that television seems to have a more distinct narrative form. This presentation explores how television narratives have expanded and been complicated through transmedia extensions\, including video games\, novelizations\, websites\, online video\, and alternate reality games. Through specific analyses of transmedia strategies for Lost\, Breaking Bad\, and The Simpsons\, the lecture considers how transmedia storytelling grapples with issues of canonicity and audience segmentation\, how transmedia reframes viewer expectations for the core television serial\, and what transmedia possibilities might look like going forward. \nJason Mittell is Professor of American Studies and Film & Media Culture at Middlebury College. His books include Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (Routledge\, 2004)\, Television and American Culture (Oxford University Press\, 2009)\, How to Watch Television (co-edited with Ethan Thompson\, NYU Press\, 2013)\, and Complex Television: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (forthcoming from New York University Press\, online at MediaCommons Press). He maintains the blog Just TV.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/jason-mittell-storytelling-in-transmedia-television/
LOCATION:MIT Media Lab\, Room 633\, 75 Amherst St.\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Comparative Media Insights
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Jason-Mittell.jpeg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20140130T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20140130T190000
DTSTAMP:20260514T022100
CREATED:20140116T140302Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210615T131342Z
UID:7829-1391101200-1391108400@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Michael Curtin: “The Burdens of Official Aspiration: National Policy in the Age of Global Media”
DESCRIPTION:Michael Curtin\nSince the 1990s\, market liberalization and new technologies have accelerated the transnational flow of media imagery\, much to the delight of Western conglomerates that have expanded their operations and exports around the globe. This has\, of course\, raised anxieties in countries that find themselves ever more vulnerable to a flood of foreign movies and television programming. Yet Hollywood is no longer the only major exporter of audiovisual media\, having been joined by thriving competitors\, such as Mumbai\, Lagos\, and Miami. Animated by the commercial logic of “media capital\,” these cities are now challenging prior geographies of creativity and cultural influence\, fostering tensions about the relative roles that cities and states play in local\, regional\, and global cultural economies. \nAs these transnational media capitals have prospered\, some states have fought back with policies aimed at controlling imports and fostering the creative capacity of national media institutions. This remarkable turn in media policy over the past decade is largely premised on official suppositions that popular media have become elements of political and cultural leadership both at home and abroad. Yet the question remains: Can such policies produce truly popular cultural products or will they forever bear the burdens of official aspiration? This presentation explores the implications of national cultural policy within the broader context of media globalization\, providing a framework for understanding the logics of media capital and the challenges confronting national governments. It furthermore compares media industries around the world\, reflecting more generally on future prospects for creativity and cultural diversity in popular film and television. \nMichael Curtin is the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Professor of Global Studies in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California\, Santa Barbara. He is also Director and co-founder of the Media Industries Project at the Carsey-Wolf Center. His books include Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV and Reorienting Global Communication: Indian and Chinese Media Beyond Borders. Curtin is currently at work on Media Capital: The Cultural Geography of Globalization and is co-editor of the Chinese Journal of Communication and the International Screen Industries book series of the British Film Institute.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/michael-curtin-national-policy-age-of-global-media/
LOCATION:MIT Media Lab\, Room 633\, 75 Amherst St.\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Comparative Media Insights
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Michael-Curtin.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20140128T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20140128T170000
DTSTAMP:20260514T022100
CREATED:20140107T152819Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20160822T153801Z
UID:7687-1390928400-1390928400@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Aswin Punathambekar: “Media\, Sociability\, and Political Potentials in Contemporary India”
DESCRIPTION:To suggest that there is a strong relationship between participatory culture and civic/political engagement would not come as news to anyone in India. In fact\, the past decade has been marked by a number of astonishing instances of participation surrounding entertainment media intersecting with and reshaping a wider political field. Academic discussions of these events have been focused on the question: what constitutes meaningful participation? Not surprisingly\, these discussions have focused on the explicitly political dimensions of these moments of participation. Instead of this narrow emphasis on political effects\, Aswin Punathambekar draws on a range of cases across India\, China\, and the Middle East to ask: what happens when such phases of participation fade away? What are the cultural and political implications of a zone of participation that lasts a few weeks or months at best? Tracing shifts in media industry logics as well as audience participation facilitated by mobile media technologies\, this presentation foregrounds the sociable and everyday dimensions of media use. Punathambekar argues that it is only when we comprehend how participatory culture and everyday life are braided together that we can meaningfully pose questions about how media can be politically productive. \nAswin Punathambekar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. He is the author of From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry (NYU Press\, 2013)\, and co-editor of Global Bollywood (NYU Press\, 2008) and Television at Large in South Asia (Routledge\, 2012). He has also published articles in various anthologies and journals including Media\, Culture and Society\, International Journal of Cultural Studies\, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies\, and Popular Communication: International Journal of Media and Culture. He is currently working on two books. The first is a historical account of the development of the Indian television industry. The second\, provisionally titled Mobile Publics: Media\, Participation and Political Culture in Digital South Asia\, examines how convergence between television and mobile media technologies is reconfiguring the meanings and performance of citizenship.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/aswin-punathambekar-media-sociability-politcal-potentials-in-india/
LOCATION:MIT Media Lab\, Room 633\, 75 Amherst St.\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Comparative Media Insights
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/aswin_punathambekar.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20140127T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20140127T190000
DTSTAMP:20260514T022100
CREATED:20140121T192828Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20140121T192828Z
UID:7876-1390842000-1390849200@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Mary Flanagan\, "Humanist Inquiry Through Critical Play: Designing and Enacting our Enduring Questions"
DESCRIPTION:Mary Flanagan\nIn this talk\, Dr. Mary Flanagan reveals how games can be sources of deep human inquiry and introspection. Flanagan presents the interesting things scholars might discover by looking at games and why games can be useful tools for inquiry through a variety of methodological lenses. She will also share recent research on creating games that improve biases and stereotypes. \nAs a scholar interested in how human values are in play across technologies and systems\, Flanagan has written more than 20 critical essays and chapters on games\, empathy\, gender and digital representation\, art and technology\, and responsible design. Her three books in English include Critical Play (2009) with MIT Press. Flanagan founded the Tiltfactor game research laboratory in 2003\, where researchers study and make social games\, urban games\, and software in a rigorous theory/practice environment. Flanagan’s work has been supported by grants and commissions including The British Arts Council\, the National Endowment for the Humanities\, the ACLS\, and the National Science Foundation. Flanagan is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/mary-flanagan-humanist-inquiry-critical-play-designing-enacting-enduring-questions/
LOCATION:MIT Media Lab\, Room 633\, 75 Amherst St.\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Comparative Media Insights
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Mary-Flanagan.jpg
ORGANIZER;CN="MIT%20Comparative%20Media%20Studies%2FWriting":MAILTO:cmsw@mit.edu
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20120130T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20120130T120000
DTSTAMP:20260514T022100
CREATED:20160818T174824Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210212T171638Z
UID:21538-1327924800-1327924800@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Professional Play and the E-sports Industry
DESCRIPTION:Photo by Bryce Vickmark\nThe rise of e-sports signals a development in computer gaming well worth paying attention to. Not only are we witnessing the emergence and refinement of elite play in formalized competitive environments\, but the growth of an industry around it — complete with team owners\, league organizers\, broadcasters\, and corporate sponsors. Based on extensive qualitative research\, this talk will explore the nature of professional computer game play as embodied\, technical\, and social practice. It will then situate these player performances within a broader context of various institutional actors that are also shaping how high-end competition is developing. In particular\, it will look at issues around the ownership of e-sports playing fields\, and the status of player action within them. \nT.L. Taylor is Associate Professor in the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen. She has been working in the field of internet and multi-user studies for over fifteen years and has published on topics such as play and experience in online worlds\, values in design\, intellectual property\, co-creative practices\, game software modification\, avatars and online embodiment\, gender and gaming\, pervasive gaming\, and e-sports. As a qualitative sociologist\, her research looks at the socio-cultural aspects of network life and play. Her book Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (MIT Press\, 2006) presented an ethnographic study of a popular massively multiplayer online game and her new book\, Raising the Stakes: E-sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming (MIT Press\, forthcoming March 2012) will be the first published scholarly monograph looking extensively at the rising phenomenon of high-end competitive computer game play. She is also a co-author (along with Tom Boellstorff\, Bonnie Nardi\, and Celia Pearce) on the soon to be published Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method (Princeton University Press\, forthcoming summer 2012). Her website (including copies of many of her articles) can be found at tltaylor.com.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/professional-play-e-sports-industry/
LOCATION:Comparative Media Studies: MIT Building E15\, Room 335\, 20 Ames St.\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Comparative Media Insights
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/TL-Taylor2.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20111220T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20111220T190000
DTSTAMP:20260514T022100
CREATED:20140905T162718Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20140905T162718Z
UID:21530-1324400400-1324407600@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Before Fox News: Right-Wing Broadcasting\, Cold War America\, and the Conservative Movement
DESCRIPTION:Heather Hendershot\nIn the Cold War years\, there was a tremendous surge in right-wing broadcasting in America. Hendershot explains how radio and TV extremists feigned a “balanced” presentation of their ideas in the 1950s; in the 60s\, those same broadcasters switched to an overtly right-wing line. Ultraconservative broadcasting was eventually shut down by the IRS\, citizen activists\, and the FCC. The Fairness Doctrine was the most powerful tool used against the extremists\, and\, thus\, right-wing broadcasting was reborn when Reagan suspended the doctrine in 1987\, enabling the rise of Rush Limbaugh\, and Fox News shortly thereafter. Hendershot’s work thus provides useful context for understanding not only the history of the conservative movement but also the contemporary landscape. \nHeather Hendershot’s research centers on regulation\, censorship\, FCC policy\, and conservative media and political movements.  She is the editor of Nickelodeon Nation: The History\, Politics and Economics of America’s Only TV Channel for Kids and the author of Saturday Morning Censors: Television Regulation before the V-Chip\, Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture\, and What’s Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest. She is also editor of Cinema Journal\, the official publication of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/heather-hendershot-before-fox-news-right-wing-broadcasting/
LOCATION:MIT Media Lab\, Room 633\, 75 Amherst St.\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Comparative Media Insights
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/hhendershot-thumb-125x156-3760.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20111219T140000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20111219T160000
DTSTAMP:20260514T022100
CREATED:20141201T184126Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20141201T184126Z
UID:21923-1324303200-1324310400@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work
DESCRIPTION:Anne Balsamo\nIn her transmedia project\, Designing Culture\, Anne Balsamo investigates the way in which culture influences the process of technological innovation. Drawing on her experiences working as part of collaborative research-design teams that combine art/science/design/engineering\, she will describe her new research on public interactives and the infrastructures of public intimacy. \nAnne Balsamo’s work focuses on the relationship between the culture and technology. This focus informs her practice as a scholar\, researcher\, new media designer and entrepreneur. She is currently a Professor of Interactive Media in the School of Cinematic Arts\, and of Communication in the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. From 2004-2007\, she served as the Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. \ndesigningculture.org
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/anne-balsamo-technological-imagination-at-work/
LOCATION:MIT Media Lab\, Room 633\, 75 Amherst St.\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Comparative Media Insights
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/balsamo.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20111213T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20111213T190000
DTSTAMP:20260514T022100
CREATED:20141121T153820Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20141121T153841Z
UID:21509-1323795600-1323802800@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Creative Industries\, Micro-productivity and Social Learning: A Cultural Science Approach to Cultural and Media Studies
DESCRIPTION:John Hartley\n“To have great poets\, there must be great audiences too.” \n–Walt Whitman \nThis paper outlines recent developments in the field of cultural and media studies\, including an account of changes in the economy\, culture and technology\, and consequent initiatives in educational provision for the creative industries. It goes on to outline the case for a new approach to the media and culture\, based on evolutionary and complexity studies\, in which the comparative media environment is recast in terms of ‘micro-productivity’ (user-created content) and ‘social learning’ (networked knowledge). \nJohn Hartley is an educator\, author\, researcher and commentator on the history and cultural impact of television\, journalism\, popular media and creative industries.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/cultural-science-approach-to-culture-and-media-studies/
LOCATION:MIT Media Lab\, Room 633\, 75 Amherst St.\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Comparative Media Insights
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/John.A.png
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20091215T171500
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20091215T171500
DTSTAMP:20260514T022100
CREATED:20141113T144317Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20141113T144317Z
UID:21334-1260897300-1260897300@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Comparative Media Insights: "Race\, Rights\, and Virtual Worlds: Digital Games as Spaces of Labor Migration"
DESCRIPTION:Lisa Nakamura\nAs ICT’s become available to new groups of users\, notably those from the global South\, new social formations of virtual labor\, race\, nation\, and gender are being born. And if virtual world users’ claims to citizenship and sovereignty within them are to be taken seriously\, so too must the question of “gray collar” or semi-legal virtual laborers and their social relations and cultural identity in these spaces. Just as labor migrants around the globe struggle to access a sense of belonging in alien territories\, so too do virtual laborers\, many of whom are East and South Asian\, confront hostility and xenophobia in popular gaming worlds and virtual “workshops” such as World of Warcraft and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Do these users have the right to have rights? This presentation considers the affective investments and cultural identities of these workers within the virtual worlds where they labor. \nLisa Nakamura is the Director of the Asian American Studies Program\, Professor in the Institute of Communication Research and Media Studies Program and Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois\, Urbana Champaign. She is the author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of Minnesota Press\, 2007)\, Cybertypes: Race\, Ethnicity\, and Identity on the Internet (Routledge\, 2002) and a co-editor of Race in Cyberspace (Routledge\, 2000). She has published articles in Critical Studies in Media Communication\, PMLA\, Cinema Journal\, The Women’s Review of Books\, Camera Obscura\, and the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies.   She is editing a collection with Peter Chow-White entitled Digital Race: An Anthology (Routledge\, forthcoming) and is working on a new monograph on Massively Multiplayer Online Role playing games\, the transnational racialized labor\, and avatarial capital in a “postracial” world.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/lisa-nakamura-race-rights-virtual-worlds/
LOCATION:MIT Building 14E\, Room 310\, 160 Memorial Drive\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Comparative Media Insights
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/images.jpeg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20091215T041500
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20091215T171500
DTSTAMP:20260514T022100
CREATED:20141113T143737Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20141113T143900Z
UID:21333-1260850500-1260897300@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Comparative Media Insights: "From Gamer Theory to Critical Practice"
DESCRIPTION:McKenzie Wark\nHow might the critical tradition in media studies respond to the wildly proliferating media phenomena of today? In this presentation\, Ken Wark starts with his own experience writing Gamer Theory as a ‘networked book’\, mediating between Plato\, WordPress\, and World of Warcraft. This was an experiment in which critical media approaches were made to confront the computer game as an historically specific form\, the form perhaps of our times. It was also an attempt to create online tools for a specifically critical mode of collaborative writing\, at some remove from the argumentative and consensus style of the blog and wiki respectively. A third dimension to the experiment explored the relation of the gift of writing\, of time\, of attention\, to the commodified form of the book. What can be learned from the results of this experiment? How can media studies be both in and of the emergent media forms\, and yet retain a creative and critical distance from them? It is in its difference from what it studies that media studies begins to find the intellectual resources to respond adequately to the extraordinary world of media\, in all its historical and anthropological depth and breadth. \nMcKenzie Wark is chair of Culture & Media and associate dean of Eugene Lang College\, and an associate professor of critical studies at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard UP\, 2004)\, Gamer Theory (Harvard UP\, 2007) and various other things.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/from-gamer-theory-to-critical-practice/
LOCATION:MIT Building 14E\, Room 310\, 160 Memorial Drive\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Comparative Media Insights
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/177_tofts_wark.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20091207T171500
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20091207T171500
DTSTAMP:20260514T022100
CREATED:20141113T141721Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20141113T141721Z
UID:21332-1260206100-1260206100@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Comparative Media Insights: "Art of the Impossible: Utopia\, Imagination\, and Critical Media Practice"
DESCRIPTION:In an economy of informational abundance\, does the traditional truth-revealing role of critical media practice still have any political relevance? Or are there other\, perhaps more politically potent\, ways of thinking about the liberatory possibilities of media? By considering a range of examples\, from Thomas More’s 16th century Utopia to 21st century political art\, we will explore the possibilities and pitfalls of mediated utopias as a means of revitalizing the critical practice of communications. Of particular interest are impossible utopias\, “no-places” whose unrealizability is inscribed in their depiction. For it is through the encounter with their very impossibility that conditions for new critique and new imagination may be created. \nStephen Duncombe is an Associate Professor at the Gallatin School of New York University where he teaches the history and politics of media. He is the author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics of Underground Culture\, the editor of the Cultural Resistance Reader\, and co-author of The Bobbed Haired Bandit: A True Story of Crime and Celebrity in 1920’s New York. He also writes on the intersection of culture and politics for a range of scholarly and popular publications\, from the cerebral\, The Nation\, to the prurient\, Playboy. Duncombe is a life-long political activist\, co-founding a community based advocacy group in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and working as an organizer for the NYC chapter of an international direct action group. Currently\, he is a Research Associate at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York City where he co-founded and organized “The College of Tactical Culture” and is engaged in an ongoing investigation into the efficacy of political art. He is currently working on a book on the art of propaganda during the New Deal.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/stephen-duncombe-utopia-imagination-critical-media-practice/
LOCATION:MIT Building 14E\, Room 310\, 160 Memorial Drive\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Comparative Media Insights
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/duncombe.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20091201T171500
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20091201T171500
DTSTAMP:20260514T022100
CREATED:20141113T160703Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20141113T160703Z
UID:21330-1259687700-1259687700@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Comparative Media Insights: "Viva Las Vegas: a Neo-Baroque Conception of the World"
DESCRIPTION:Angela Ndalianis\nEmerging in the mid 20th century (when Disneyland opened its doors in 1955)\, the theme park created the ultimate in trompe l’oeil effects by extending the fictional world of Disney animation into the social sphere. In doing so\, Disney produced a networked environment that conjured wondrous spaces that both performed for the audience and which were for performing within. Over the last two decades\, Las Vegas has adopted and extended this theme park logic into the urban sphere. Travelling briefly back to the era of the movie palace\, this paper will consider contemporary Las Vegas as a neo-baroque mediascape that extends the theme park’s delight in performativity\, theatricality and sensorial engagement into the wider social realm. Drawing on Umberto Eco’s concept of ‘pansemiotics’\, it will be argued that spectacle cities like Las Vegas operate according to the logic of a giant wunderkammer — relying on an emblematic understanding of the meaning of objects and the interrelationship between them. In particular\, this paper will analyze how this city-as-monument to entertainment and leisure culture has appropriated tropes and modes of engagement taken from pre-20th Century high culture traditions of the Church and aristocracy. But whereas palaces\, theatrical spectacles\, churches\, and piazzas stood as monuments to the grandeur of their aristocratic patrons\, in our current time\, these new entertainment environments stand as monuments to corporate conglomerates and the masses who inhabit these worlds. \nAngela Ndalianis is currently associate professor in cinema and cultural studies at the University of Melbourne.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/angela-dalianis-viva-las-vegas-neobaroque-conception/
LOCATION:MIT Building 14N\, Room 313\, 160 Memorial Drive\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Comparative Media Insights
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/angela.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20091130T171500
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20091130T171500
DTSTAMP:20260514T022100
CREATED:20141113T145018Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20141113T145018Z
UID:21329-1259601300-1259601300@cms.mit.edu
SUMMARY:Comparative Media Insights: "The Googlization of Everything"
DESCRIPTION:Siva Vaidhyanathan\nGoogle seems omniscient\, omnipotent\, and omnipresent. It also claims to be benevolent. It’s no surprise that we hold the company to almost deific levels of awe and respect. But what are we really gaining and losing by inviting Google to be the lens through which we view the world? This talk will describe Siva Vaidhyanathan’s own apostasy and suggest ways we might live better with Google once we see it as a mere company rather than as a force for good and enlightenment in the world. \nSiva Vaidhyanathan\, cultural historian and media scholar\, is currently associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/siva-vaidhyanathan-googlization-of-everything/
LOCATION:MIT Building 14N\, Room 313\, 160 Memorial Drive\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Comparative Media Insights
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Siva_250.jpg
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