MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

TV News in Transition
2006-04-06 17:00 (America/New_York) | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
No aspect of television has changed more decisively in recent years than its news programming. The proliferation of news channels, the passing of the last generation of news anchors bred in the era of the broadcast networks, the appearance of partisan outlets such as Fox News, the fragmentation of the audience, the relative indifference of the digital generation to television news programming of any sort – these powerful and perhaps disturbing changes will be among the topics discussed at this Forum. Our speakers have extensive first-hand experience of the recent history of television journalism.
Speakers
Juju Chang has worked in television news since 1991 as a producer and on-air correspondent. She is currently based in New York as a correspondent for ABC’s 20/20.
Neal Shapiro joined NBC News in 1993 after 13 years as a producer and executive at ABC News. At NBC he served as director of news operations of MSNBC where he helped to shape its cable programming and its innovative web site. He was named president of NBC News in 2001, a post he held until September, 2005.
Moderator: Stuart N. Brotman is a visiting scholar in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Previously, he was president and CEO of The Museum of Television & Radio. An attorney, Brotman is the author of several books, including Communications Law and Practice, now in its 20th printing.

Media Spectacle Call for Works: Deadline
2006-04-10
CMS is looking for films, videos, video podcasts and mobisodes produced by MIT and Wellesley students, faculty, staff and affiliates for its 2006 Media Spectacle. All formats, styles, lengths and subjects are acceptable. Works-in-progress are welcomed.
The Chris Pomiecko Prize will be awarded to the most outstanding undergraduate media submission.
To submit a work, please send title, format, brief description and running time to Gene Fierro at generoso@mit.edu or contact the CMS office at 617-253-3599.

Radhika Gajjala
2006-04-12 17:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 144, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Radhika Gajjala
Tonight’s CMS Colloquium tackles the topic of Consuming/ Producing/ Inhabiting South Asian Digital Diasporas with Radhika Gajjala, associate professor in the School of Communication Studies at Bowling Green State University and author of Cyberselves: Feminist Ethnographies of South Asian Women. Co-sponsored with the Center for Bilingual/ Bicultural Studies.

Comics: Form and Content
2006-04-13 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 237, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Jessica Abel and Matt Madden will be showing examples of their work and talking about different aspects of comics, visual narrative, and creativity in general.
Cartoonist and writer Jessica Abel’s graphic novel La Perdida was recently released by Pantheon Books. She is also working on a non- graphic novel for HarperCollins, called Carmina, and is collaborating on a graphic novel Life Sucks, to be published by First Second. She teaches at the School of Visual Arts, and is developing a comics textbook for First Second with Matt Madden.
Matt Madden (NYC 1968) lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, Jessica Abel. He is a cartoonist and illustrator who also teaches comics and drawing at the School of Visual Arts. Recent projects include 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (Penguin), a collection of his comics adaptation of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style and A Fine Mess, Madden’s anthology series. For recent news and comics, check out www.mattmadden.com.

David Milch, TV's Great Writer
2006-04-20 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
David Milch has been called television’s first artistic genius, its great writer. His powerful dramas have troubled the censors in the networks and in Congress and have explored human weakness and violence in disturbing and artful ways. One of television’s most honored writers, his credits include Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue (co-created with Steven Bochco) and the pioneering HBO series Deadwood. In this Forum, Milch will discuss his career as a writer and creator with Forum Director David Thorburn, a historian of television who knew Milch as a Yale student. The session will include clips distilled from Milch’s best work.

CMS Media Spectacle 2006
2006-04-26 19:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 123, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
THE CMS MEDIA SPECTACLE!
In honor of Chris Pomiecko, the former program administator of Comparative Media Studies.
The event showcases films/videos/video podcasts/mobisodes produced by MIT (and Wellesley) affiliates, staff, students and faculty. In a multitude of styles, subjects and duration.
The best undergraduate submission will receive the Chris Pomiecko prize.
Soda and millions of cookies will be served!
Open to: the general public
Cost: Free
Tickets: NA
Sponsor(s): Comparative Media Studies
For more information, contact:
Generoso Fierro
617 253 5038

Loyalty in Brand and Fan Cultures
2006-04-27 17:00 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Notions of Loyalty within Brand and Fan Cultures with Convergence Culture Consortium faculty advisors Ian Condry, assistant professor of Japanese cultural studies at MIT; and Robert Kozinets, associate professor of marketing at the Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto.

May Irwin's Kiss
2006-05-04 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
May Irwin’s Kiss: The Beginnings of Cinema and the Transformation of American Culture with Charles Musser, co-chair of the Film Studies Program and professor of American Studies, Film Studies and Theater Studies at Yale.

Comics: An Art Form in Transition
2006-09-14 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Comics: An Art Form in Transition with comics artist Scott McCloud. In the last 20 years, print comics have struggled toward maturity through the literate graphic novel movement. Now, that same art form is experiencing a vastly different set of growing pains on the web, raising fundamental questions about the reading experience, the functions of storytelling in society, how art forms adapt to dominant technologies and the role of space in information design. Cartoonist, teacher and author Scott McCloud explores these and other questions in a fast-moving visual presentation. Co-sponsors: MIT Media Lab and MIT Lecture Series Committee.

The Emergence of Citizens' Media
2006-09-19 17:00 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
This is the first forum in the Will Newspapers Survive? series presented by the MIT Communications Forum. The Emergence of Citizen’s Media features Alex Beam of the Boston Globe, Ellen Foley from the Wisconsin State Journal and Dan Gillmor, founder of the Center for Citizen Media.
The MIT Communications Forum hosts a summary of the event and our own Sam Ford wrote an article for the CMS page in October.

News, Information and the Wealth of Networks
2006-09-21 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
MIT Communications Forum.
News, Information and the Wealth of Networks, featuring speakers Yochai Benkler, Henry Jenkins , William Uricchio.
This is part of a series of forums that ask the question, Will Newspapers Survive? Also in the series: The Emergence of Citizens’ Media, andWhy Newspapers Matter.

Fall 2006 CMS Information Sessions
2006-09-21 22:00 | MIT Building 14N, Room 217, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Fall 2006 CMS Information Sessions
Please contact the CMS office at cms@mit.edu or 617-253-3599 to reserve a space.
Frequently asked questions about CMS

Re-Inventing Television: Podcasting and the Future of Media
2006-09-28 17:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Chris Boebel and David Tamés will discuss the production of ZigZag, MIT’s video podcast and reflect on the evolution of broadcast media and the rise of video on the web. Chris Boebel is manager of multimedia development at MIT’s Academic Media Production Services (AMPS). His films include Red Betsy (2003) and Containment (2004). David Tamés is a producer and editor for AMPS. His work includes The East Village, a web-based soap opera.

Marketing in the Age of Consumer Empowerment
2006-10-12 17:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Scott Donaton
Lost Control: Marketing in the Age of Consumer Empowerment with Scott Donaton. Digital technologies have empowered end users, and that transfer of control — from content creators and distributors to consumers — impacts all forms of communications, including marketing. Scott Donaton, associate publisher and editorial director of the Ad Age Group and author of Madison & Vine will talk about why user-empowerment is the key trend in business, and the ways marketers are adapting to it, including the rise of branded entertainment.

Stop Playing. Start Creating. Repeat
2006-10-17 17:00 | MIT Building 6, Room 120, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
On Tuesday October 17th, representatives from Electronic Arts will be making a presentation on the MIT campus. EA’s Head of University Relations, Colleen McCreary, will be giving an overview presentation of EA’s worldwide businesses, as well as the company’s Internship and New College Grad programs. Tom Wilson ’05 & ‘06 and Nick Hunter ’06 will discuss their experiences in EA’s internship program, the interview process, and their first few months working full time in games.
Sponsored by Electronic Arts and Comparative Media Studies at MIT. This event is open to the public.
Food will be served, and there will be swag.
Location: 6-120
When: 5pm Tuesday October 17th
Tom Wilson received his SB in Course 6 in 2005, and his MEng in 2006. While at MIT, he worked as a UROP on the Games To Teach project as a developer for the games SuperCharged! and EMK. In the summer of 2005, he worked as an engineering intern on The Godfather videogame at EA’s Redwood Shores campus. Currently, he works as an engineer on the new Simpsons game.
Nick Hunter ’06 graduated with degrees in course 14 and 21.CMS last June. At MIT he was a UROP on The Education Arcade’s Revolution project as a scripter and designer. Summer of ’05 he worked as a production intern on NFL Head Coach at EA’s Tiburon Studio in Orlando, and now works as a Feature Producer in the Sims Division at EA’s Redwood Shores campus.

New Media and Art
2006-10-26 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
This roundtable is made up of leading figures in the field of media art curators, authors, network directors, and innovative developers who will address the current issues on art in the age of digital reproduction. Speakers: Lauren Cornell, director of Rhizome.org; Jon Ippolito, media artist, curator, author; and Mark Tribe, founder of Rhizome and professor of media arts at Brown University.

Cruel 2 B Kind: Halloween Special!
2006-10-31 18:30 - 20:30 | Near Harvard Square, 18 Brattle St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
On October 31 — Halloween! — CMS will be sponsoring a free public game (and costume contest) near Harvard Square called “Cruel 2 B Kind” (cruelgame.com), from 6:30-8:30 PM.
It’s a little bit like the game “Assassins”; the twist is that you “kill” other players by using your assigned weapon, which involves saying or doing something nice to your victim… Since you don’t know who your victim *is*, however, you have to go around trying the “weapon” on everyone you encounter, whether they’re playing the game or not. For more information, visit www.cruelgame.com.
All you need to participate is a partner, a cell phone that can send and receive text messages, and a couple hours next Tuesday to meet people and have a good time!
For more information, and to register for the game, go to:
http://www.cruelgame.com/signup.

Media Evangelism in the Global South
2006-11-02 17:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
The phenomenal rise of evangelical Christianity in the global South during the past thirty years has been accompanied by the expanded use of new media, including radio and television. This presentation outlines an ongoing research project into the historical origins, systemic achievements, and interpretive implications of the American missionary radio broadcasting enterprise in Africa, Asia, and Latin America during its formative era, 1945 to 1970. Timothy Stoneman is a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at MIT.

Mimesis, Sacrifice, and Victimhood
2006-11-09 18:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Mimesis, Sacrifice, and Victimhood with Rey Chow. Chow is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University where she teaches in the departments of Comparative Literature, English, and Modern Culture and Media. Chow’s talk will be based on her latest book, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (2006, Duke UP). Co-sponsor: History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art.

CMS Information Sessions
2006-11-16 10:00

Futures of Entertainment
2006-11-17 - 2006-11-18 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Futures of Entertainment
As advertisers look for new ways to engage audiences, content creators search for new audiences, and audiences quest for new ways to connect with culture, the nature of what counts as “entertainment” is rapidly changing. We are seeing the blurring of aesthetic and technological distinctions between media platforms, of “advertising” and “content” and of “creator” and “consumer.” Futures of Entertainment brings together key industry leaders who are shaping these new directions in our culture. The conference will consider developments such as user-generated content, transmedia storytelling, the rise of mobile media and the emergence of social networking. Speakers include: Chris Anderson (The Long Tail), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Michael Lebowitz (Big Spaceship), Paul Levitz (DC Comics), Diane Nelson (Warner Bros. Fan Relations), and Robert Tercek (Multimedia Networks). Co-sponsor: Convergence Culture Consortium.
This event is open to the public. Please register online.

Film Screening: Quest for Home: GayBombay
2006-11-27 19:00 | MIT Building 6, Room 120, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
CMS is delighted to host a special screening of the documentary video Quest for Home: Gaybombay, by former CMS alum and colleague Parmesh Shahani. The video is an ethnographic exploration of gay life in contemporary India, and the screening will be followed by a Q&A session with Parmesh, who is visiting from Bombay.

Half-Real: A Video Game in the Hands of a Player
2006-11-28 17:00 | MIT Building 1, Room 136, 33 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
What happens when a player picks up video game, learns to play it, masters it, and leaves it? Using concepts from my book on video games, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, I will argue that video game players are neither rational solvers of abstract problems, nor daydreamers in fictional worlds, but both of these things with shifting emphasis. The unique quality of video games is to be located in their intricate interplay of rules and fictions, which I will examine across genres, from casual games to massively multiplayer games.
Jesper Juul is a video game theorist and assistant professor in video game theory and design at the Centre for Computer Game Research Copenhagen where he also earned his Ph.D. His book Half-Real on video game theory was published by MIT Press in 2005. Additionally, he works as a multi-user chat systems and casual game developer. He is currently a visiting scholar at Parsons School of Design in New York.
This lecture is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Comparative Media Studies Program and the Project New Media Literacies.

Men Imagining a Girl Revolution
2006-11-29 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
Men Imagining a Girl Revolution with Sharon Kinsella. At various points in the twentieth century, male novelists, journalists, intellectuals, artists, editors and cultured men have become fascinated by the lives and characters of single women and their potential for prostitution and revolution. In this presentation, Foreign Languages and Literatures visiting professor Sharon Kinsella examines the media constructions of a teenage female revolt in contemporary Japan drawing from her current book project Girls as Energy: Fantasies of Social Rejuvenation.

CMS Online Information Session
2006-12-13 10:00

Paper and panel proposal deadline for fifth Media in Transition conference!
2007-01-05
The fifth Media in Transition conference, MiT5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital
age, will be held April 27-29, 2007 at MIT.
The deadline for submitting a paper or panel proposal is Jan. 5, 2007.
See the call for papers at http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit5.

Documentary Filmmaking: A One Day Survival Guide
2007-01-11 18:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 124, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Documentary filmmaker Generoso Fierro takes you through a one time class where you will learn the basics of shooting a documentary film on mini dv, editing and getting it seen. Learn how to navigate through the murky waters of copyright issues regarding still images and music to creating a release. Learn quick editing techniques, dvd mastering and an easy festival submission process so that your work can be seen.

"Translation" in Transmediation: Exploring the Metaphor
2007-01-22 13:00 - 15:00 | MIT Building 1, Room 132, 33 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Transferring narratives from one medium to another is often either likened to the process of translation or just plainly called translation, the latter being used as a synonym to “transmediation”. During this two-hour class with Ksenia Prassolova, we will concentrate on further exploring this metaphor; by looking at the key translation techniques we will try to understand how to better tell our stories across media.

PULSE: American Music and Poetry from 1950 to 1970
2007-01-22 17:00 | MIT Building 1, Room 246, 33 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
This is a two-hour single session designed to discuss the parallel relationships between the American music and poetry from the 1950s to 70s.
By the early fifties, as part of the postwar development of consumer society, a strange pulse had set in the music scene to bring about muzak or elevator music. As if to reflect this new trend, poets such as Robert Lowell and John Berryman started to write, almost on the same pulse, quasi-sonnet sequences.
In the late sixties, a more experimental type of pulse music was invented by such composers as Terry Riley and Steve Reich to be later labeled as minimalism. Again, the poetry caught up due to the efforts of John Ashbery and A. R. Ammons who wrote deliberately monotonous and distinctly open-ended sequences.
Some excerpts of poems will be read, some parts of music heard.

Make Zombie Madness!
2007-01-23 18:00 | MIT Building 1, Room 246, 33 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Grab your friends, practice your growling and prepare yourself for making ZOMBIE MADNESS. Join award-winning independent filmmakers Kristina Drzaic and Neal Grigsby as they lead you through scripting, makeup, learn how to make special f/x gore and shooting your very own zombie movie. This will be a hands-on make-a-film-in-a-day class.
