MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

Media in Transition 7: "Unstable Platforms: The Promise and Peril of Transition"
2011-05-13 - 2011-05-15 | MA
Call for Papers (PDF)
Has the digital age confirmed and exponentially increased the cultural instability and creative destruction that are often said to define advanced capitalism? Does living in a digital age mean we may live and die in what the novelist Thomas Pynchon has called “a ceaseless spectacle of transition? The nearly limitless range of design options and communication choices available now and in the future is both exhilarating and challenging, inciting innovation and creativity but also false starts, incompatible systems, planned obsolescence.
For this seventh Media in Transition conference we want to focus directly on our core topic – the experience of transition. Our first conference in 1999 considered this subject, of course. But that was before Facebook, iPhones, BitTorrent, IPTV and many other changes. More…

Race and Representation after 9/11
2011-05-11 16:00 (America/New_York) | 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.

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.

13th Annual Media Spectacle
2011-04-25 18:00 - 21:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
(See call for entries)

An honored tradition returns this Spring when CMS presents the thirteenth annual Media Spectacle. The event, founded by late CMS program administrator Chris Pomiecko, celebrates his love for filmmaking by showcasing the finest video projects created by MIT students, staff and faculty.
Historically, the event has received submissions of every genre from experimental to documentary to narrative works created on every conceivable platform and device. Prizes include the Chris Pomiecko Award for Best Undergraduate Entry, as well as awards for Best Non-undergraduate Entry, Animation, Experimental, Narrative, Nonfiction, and Audience Favorite. The event is judged by esteemed members of the CMS community, including Cathy Pomiecko, Chris’s sister.

(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.

A Conversation with Sherry Turkle
2011-04-12 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 66, Room 110, 25 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Sherry Turkle
The eminent MIT professor, author most recently of Alone, Together, discusses her darkening view of our digitizing world, her sense of the culture of MIT and its students, and her own career with Communications Forum Director David Thorburn, a longtime colleague.
Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.
David Thorburn is Professor of Literature at MIT and director of the Communications Forum.
Co-sponsor: Technology and Culture Forum at MIT.

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).

Online News: Public Sphere or Echo Chamber?
2011-02-24 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
The digital age has been heralded but also pilloried for its impact on journalism. As newspapers continue their mutation into digital formats and as news and information are available from a seeming infinity of websites, what do we actually know about the dynamics of news-consumption online? What does the public do with online news? How influential are traditional news outlets in framing the news we get online?
Pablo Boczkowski
Pablo Boczkowski is a Professor of Communications Studies at Northwestern Univeresity where he leads a research program that studies the transition from print to digital media. He is the author of Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers (2004) and News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance (2010).

Joshua Benton
Joshua Benton is the founding director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University — an effort to help the news business make the radical changes required by the Internet age. Before that, he was an investigative reporter, columnist, foreign correspondent and rock critic for two newspapers, The Dallas Morning News and The Toledo Blade.

Jason Spingarn-Koff
Moderator: Jason Spingarn-Koff, a 2010-11 Knight Journalism Fellow at MIT, is a documentary filmmaker specializing in the intersection of science, technology, and society. His feature documentary Life 2.0, about a group of people whose lives are transformed by the virtual world “Second Life,” premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and will be featured on Oprah Winfrey’s documentary film club in 2011. He served as producer of NOVA’s The Great Robot Race, and the development producer for PBS’s Emmy-winning Rx for Survival, as well as documentaries for Frontline and Time magazine. He is a graduate of Brown University and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

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).

Yves Citton: "The Humanities' Choice: Knowledge Economy or Culture of Interpretation?"
2011-02-11 14:00 - 15:30 | MIT Building E40, Room 496, 1 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
This presentation delivers a first-person anthropological report on a dive to the seafloor in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s three-person submersible, Alvin. Meditating on the sounds rather that the sights of the dive, Helmreich explores multiple meanings of immersion: as a descent into liquid, an absorption in activity, and the all-encompassing entry of an anthropologist into a cultural medium. Tuning in to the rhythms of Alvin as a submarine cyborg, he shows how interior and exterior soundscapes create a sense of immersion, and he argues that torquing media theory to include water as a medium can make explicit the technical structures and social practices of sounding, hearing, and listening that support senses — scientific, everyday, and anthropological — of embodied sonic presence.
Stefan Helmreich is an anthropologist who studies life scientists, from those who engage in the computer modeling of living things (Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World, University of California Press, 1998) to those who work in deep-sea environments (Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, University of California Press, 2009). He is particularly interested in the limits of “life” as an analytical category for contemporary biology.

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).

Public Communications in Slow-Moving Crises
2010-11-18 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Governments, corporations, and communities plan for sudden crises: the White House drafts strong responsive rhetoric for the next terrorist attack; Toyota runs reassuring national TV spots within hours of a product recall; and 32 Massachusetts towns successfully publicize water distribution sites following a water main rupture.
However, like the housing collapse or the recent Gulf oil spill, some crises are complex, difficult to warn of, and don’t cleanly fit traditional media frames. They are slow moving, and the media still struggles to rhetorically or technologically cover these simmering, rather than boiling, dramas.
With government regulators weak, corporations still focused on the bottom line, and communities adapting to structural change, this Communications Forum asks: What new media tools and strategies can be used to help everyone better prepare for the unique communications challenges of slow-moving crises?
Andrea Pitzer is editor of Nieman Storyboard, a project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University that looks at how storytelling works in every medium. Storyboard’s mission is to feature the best examples of visual, audio and multimedia narrative reporting.
An investigative reporter for ProPublica, Abrahm Lustgarten’s recent work has focused on oil and gas industry practices. He is a former staff writer and contributor for Fortune, and has written for Salon, Esquire, the Washington Post and the New York Times since receiving his master’s in journalism from Columbia University in 2003. He is the author of the book China’s Great Train: Beijing’s Drive West and the Campaign to Remake Tibet, a project that was funded in part by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Rosalind Williams is a historian who uses imaginative literature as a source of evidence and insight into the history of technology. She has taught at MIT since 1982 and currently serves as the Dibner Professor for the History of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society. She has also served as head of the STS Program and Dean for Undergraduate Education and Student Affairs at the Institute, as well as president of the Society for the History of Technology. She has written three books as well as essays and articles about the emergence of a predominantly human-built world and its implications for human life. Her forthcoming book extends this theme to examine consciousness of the condition of “human empire” as expressed in the writings of Jules Verne, William Morris, and Robert Louis Stevenson in the late l9th century.
Moderated by Tom Levenson, who is Head and of the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies as well as Director of its graduate program. Professor Levenson is the winner of Walter P. Kistler Science Documentary Film Award, Peabody Award (shared), New York Chapter Emmy, and the AAAS/Westinghouse award. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe, Discover, The Sciences, and he is winner of the 2005 National Academies Communications Award for Origins.
Co-sponsor: The MIT Center for Future Civic Media.

Civic Media and the Law
2010-11-04 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
What do citizens need to know when they publicly address legally challenging or dangerous topics? Journalists have always had the privilege, protected by statute, of not having to reveal their sources. But as more investigative journalism is conducted by so-called amateurs and posted on blogs or websites such as Wikileaks, what are the legal dangers for publishing secrets in the crowdsourced era? We convene an engaging group law scholars to help outline the legal challenges ahead, suggest policies that might help to protect citizens, and describe what steps every civic media practitioner should take to protect themselves and their users.
Micah Sifry is a co-founder and editor of the Personal Democracy Forum.
Daniel Schuman is the policy counsel at the Sunlight Foundation, where he helps develop policies that further Sunlight’s mission of catalyzing greater government openness and transparency.
Co-sponsor: The MIT Center for Future Civic Media

Humanities in the Digital Age
2010-10-20 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 141, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Alison Byerly
Steven Pinker
What is happening to the intellectual field called the humanities? Powerful political and corporate forces are encouraging, even demanding science and math-based curricula to prepare for a globalized and technological world; the astronomical rise in the cost of higher education has resulted in a drumbeat of complaints, some which question the value of the traditional liberal arts and humanities. And of course, and far more complexly, the emerging storage and communications systems of the digital age are transforming all fields of knowledge and all knowledge industries.
How has and how will the humanities cope with these challenges? How have digital tools and systems already begun to transform humanistic education? How may they do so in the future? More broadly, is there a significant role for the humanities in our digital future? Our panelists will explore these and related questions in what is expected to be the first in a continuing series on this subject.
Alison Byerly is provost and executive vice president and professor of English at Middlebury College.
Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and previously taught at MIT. He is the author of many essays and books including The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature and How the Mind Works.

NGO2.0: When Social Action Meets Social Media
2010-10-14 17:00 - 19:00 | 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.

Online Migration of Newspapers
2010-10-07 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
The fate of newspapers is an ongoing subject for the Forum. This conversation explores the migration of newspapers to the internet and what that means for traditional concepts of journalism. Amid the emergence of citizens’ media and the blogosphere, newspapers are adapting to a changing mediascape in which print readership is in steady decline. David Carr, culture reporter and media columnist for the New York Times, and Dan Kennedy, professor of journalism at Northeastern University and author of the Media Nation blog, explore these developments with Forum Director David Thorburn.
Among their topics: the best and the worst examples of news on the net, online-only news sites, hyperlocal news and collaborative journalism, business models for online newspapers, and the impact of social media on journalism.

Francisco Ricardo, "The Aesthetics of Projective Spatiality: New Media as Critical Objects"
2010-09-30 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
One theme in the contemporary use of space involves the shift from production modeled around a physical, centralized “locus” to new virtual, extended and multi-axial modes of “projective” organization. We see this in new sculpture, new architecture, and, in electronic art, an expressive embrace of geographic dispersal. Although new materials, methods, and media have been central to modernist optimism, many of their resulting physical and actual constructions have been dismissed, discredited, misunderstood, or attacked. Using physical and virtual examples, Ricardo examines the strange tension between unanimous acceptance of new media and materials and the frequent rejection of new forms and structures they have made possible.
Francisco Ricardo is media and contemporary art theorist. A Research Associate at the University Professors Program and co-director of the Digital Video Research Archive at Boston University, he also teaches digital media theory at the Rhode Island School of Design. His research examines historical, conceptual, and computational intersections between contemporary art and architecture, on one hand,and new media art and literature, on the other. Recent publications include Cyberculture and New Media (Rodopi, 2009) and Literary Art in Digital Performance (Continuum, 2009).

The Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab: Phantasmal Media
2010-09-23 17:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Professor Fox Harrell’s research group — the Imagination, Computation, and Expression (ICE) Lab — builds computational systems for expressing imaginative stories and concepts — “phantasmal media” systems.
In particular, his research uses artificial intelligence/cognitive science-based techniques to understanding the human imagination to invent and better understand new forms of computational narrative, identity, games, and related types of expressive digital media. In this talk, he will discuss his recent works and collaborations including the “Living Liberia Fabric,” an AI-based interactive video documentary produced in affiliation with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia to memorialize 14 years of civil war, “Generative Visual Renku,” an AI-based form of generative animation, and several other projects.
Harrell received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for his project “Computing for Advanced Identity Representation.” He is currently completing a book, Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression, for the MIT Press. Harrell is Associate Professor of Digital Media at MIT in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, Comparative Media Studies, and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).

Graphical Expressions of Humanistic Interpretation in Digital Environments
2010-05-20 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Humanists have adopted visualization techniques with enthusiasm in recent years, borrowing display formats from quantitative approaches rooted in social and natural sciences. But are the standard metrics and conventions developed for analysis of empirical inquiries fundamentally at odds with tenets of traditional humanistic interpretation? How are complexity, contradiction, uncertainty, ambiguity, and other basic features of interpretative activity to be given graphical expression? Does the introduction of affect into visual displays simply shift all visualization towards idiosyncratic and subjective approaches that lack clear legibility? Or can we imagine conventions that might introduce some of the necessary qualifications and variables essential to creating graphical expressions of humanistic interpretation?
Featured speaker: Johanna Drucker is the Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA where her research focuses in modeling interpretation for electronic scholarship, digital aesthetics, and the history of visual information design. Her teaching interests include the history of the book and print culture, history of information, and critical studies in visual knowledge representation.
Moderator: Kurt Fendt is director of HyperStudio, MIT̢

ROFLCon
2010-04-30 - 2010-05-01 | MA
Sponsored in part by CMS, ROFLCon is “Two days and two nights of the most epic internet culture conference ever assembled. Informed commentators suggest that this may be the most important gathering of humanity since the fall of the tower of Babel.”
About: roflcon.org
Registration: roflcon.org/registration

12th Annual Media Spectacle
2010-04-26 18:00 - 21:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 123, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
An honored tradition returns this Spring when CMS presents the twelfth annual Media Spectacle. The event, founded by late CMS program administrator Chris Pomiecko, celebrates his love for filmmaking by showcasing the finest video projects created by MIT students, staff and faculty.
Historically, the event has received submissions of every genre from experimental to documentary to narrative works created on every conceivable platform and device. Prizes include the Chris Pomiecko Award for Best Undergraduate Entry, as well as awards for Best Non-undergraduate Entry, Animation, Experimental, Narrative, Nonfiction, and Audience Favorite. The event is judged by esteemed members of the CMS community, including Cathy Pomiecko, Chris’s sister.

CMS 10th Anniversary Symposium
2010-04-23 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
2010 marks the 10th anniversary of Comparative Media Studies at MIT.
This is ten years of groundbreaking applied humanities. Ten years of thinking across media forms, national boundaries, and historical periods. Ten years of bridging theory and practice, of working with industry leaders, artists, and policymakers…ten years of preparing students for jobs that didn’t yet exist.
So we’re hosting a day-long celebration on April 23 looking back over the history of the program, featuring alumni, current students and researchers, and even former director Henry Jenkins. We hope you can make it–and help us shape the next ten years of Comparative Media Studies.

Jenkins' Farewell
2010-04-22 17:00 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Henry Jenkins
Henry Jenkins’ 20-year presence at MIT was formative for him and profoundly valuable for MIT. A year after his departure for USC, Jenkins returns to talk with long-time colleagues about his pioneering scholarship on digital culture, his work as the founding director of Comparative Media Studies, and his experiences as a teacher and housemaster at MIT.
Moderated by William Uricchio.

Exit Zero: Documentary Filmmaking, Historical Memory, and Personal Voice
2010-04-08 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
This talk explores the making of Exit Zero, an in-progress documentary film about deindustrialization, community, class, and family in a former steel mill region in southeast Chicago. It examines questions of historical memory, the use of personal voice, and the long-standing relationship between anthropology and documentary filmmaking. The film utilizes material from multiple sources, including cinéma vérité footage shot over the course of a decade, interviews, and home movies made by steel mill area residents between the 1930s and 1980s. The talk raises broader questions about the shifting nature of anthropological engagement with media-making and documentary film in particular. Clips from the work-in-progress will be shown.
Chris Boebel is a documentary and narrative filmmaker. He is the writer/director of a number of award-winning short fiction films, the independent feature film Red Betsy, and is co-director of the documentary Containment: Life After Three Mile Island. He currently works as a producer of films about science and engineering at MIT with AMPS/MIT Libraries.
Christine Walley is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT. In conjunction with Chris Boebel, she is making Exit Zero. The film serves as a companion to an in-progress book entitled, The Struggle for Existence from the Cradle to the Grave.

The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Oral Tradition and Digital Technologies
2010-04-01 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
Is our emerging digital culture partly a return to practices and ways of thinking that were central to human societies before the advent of the printing press? This question has been posed with increasing force in recent years by anthropologists, folklorists, historians and literary scholars, among them Thomas Pettitt, who has contributed significantly to elaborating and communicating the version of this question named in the title of today’s forum.
The concept of a “Gutenberg Parenthesis” — formulated by Prof. L. O. Sauerberg of the University of Southern Denmark — offers a means of identifying and understanding the period, varying between societies and subcultures, during which the mediation of texts through time and across space was dominated by powerful permutations of letters, print, pages and books. Our current transitional experience toward a post-print media world dominated by digital technology and the internet can be usefully juxtaposed with that of the period — Shakespeare’s — when England was making the transition into the parenthesis from a world of scribal transmission and oral performance.
MIT professors Peter Donaldson and James Paradis will join Pettitt in a discussion of the value of historical perspectives on our technologizing human present.

Government Transparency and Collaborative Journalism
2010-03-18 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Stata Center, Room 155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
In December, the Obama administration directed federal agencies and departments to implement “principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration,” including deadlines for providing government information online. At the same time, citizens and journalists are developing new technologies to manage and analyze the exponential increase in data about our civic lives available from governmental and other sources. What new ways of gathering and presenting information are evolving from this nexus of government openness and digital connectedness? Our speakers Linda Fantin, director of public insight journalism at Minnesota Public Radio and Ellen Miller, executive director of the Washington-based Sunlight Foundation, will explore this and related questions. Chris Csikszentmihalyi, director of MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media, moderates the discussion.
Co-Sponsor: MIT Center for Future Civic Media.

CMS Town Hall Forum
2010-03-11 17:00 - 19:00 | GAMBIT Game Lab, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Limited to CMS faculty, students, and invitees, this is CMS’s semesterly forum to discuss candidly the successes, challenges, and direction of the program.

Robots and Media: Science Fiction, Anime, Transmedia, and Technology
2010-03-03 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Ian Condry
Ian Condry, Associate Director of MIT Comparative Media Studies and Associate Professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures, will discuss the prevalence of giant robots in anime (Japanese animated films and TV shows). From the sixties to the present, robot or “mecha” anime has evolved in ways that reflect changing business models and maturing audiences, as can be seen in titles like Astro Boy, Gundam, Macross, and Evangelion. How can we better understand the emergence of anime as a global media phenomenon through the example of robot anime? What does this suggest about our transmedia future?

Cynthia Breazeal, Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab and founder/director of the Lab’s Personal Robots Group, will discuss how science fiction has influenced the development of real robotic systems, both in research laboratories and corporations all over the world. She will explore of how science fiction has shaped ideas of the relationship and role of robots in human society, how the existence of such robots is feeding back into science fiction narratives, and how we might experience transmedia properties in the future using robotic technologies.

MIT/Harvard Cool Japan Project presents "Summer Wars"
2010-03-01 19:00 | MIT Building 26, Room 100, Access Via 60 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
The New England premiere of the anime feature film “Summer Wars” (2009, Director Mamoru HOSODA, Madhouse / Kadokawa). The director and producer of the film, both based in Japan, will be present at the screening and will participate in a Q&A/discussion after the film.
The film explores the drama of high school romance, hackers in virtual worlds, the complexities of extended families, and the potentials of our hyper-connected present. Suitable for all ages but aimed at teens and adults, the film is a wonderful example of recent anime virtuosity by Japan’s hottest young director. Director Hosoda’s previous film, “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” (2006), won many prizes including the Japan Academy Award for Best Animated Film.
35mm print, Japanese voices, English subtitles. Free and open to the public.

Complete Game-Completion Marathon for Haiti
2010-02-26 - 2010-02-28 | GAMBIT Game Lab, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
February 26-28th, GAMBIT will be hosting the 2010 Complete Game-Completion Marathon to raise money for relief efforts in Haiti. Teams of players will gather at our MIT lab to attempt to complete a game in one sitting. Participants will independently seek sponsorship on a dollar/hour basis with all proceeds going directly to relief efforts in Haiti through Partners in Health, and with support from the MIT Public Service Center. The labs will be open 24 hours a day through the weekend to accommodate the teams, with snacks and refreshments available for the players.
