MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

Exit Zero: Documentary Filmmaking, Historical Memory, and Personal Voice
2010-04-08 17:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | 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.

Code and Platform in Computational Media
2010-02-25 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Nick Montfort
Computing plays an important role in some types of media, such as video games, digital art, and electronic literature. It seems evident that an understanding of programming and computing systems may help us learn more about these productions and their role in culture. But few have focused on the levels of code and platform. Adding these neglected levels to digital media studies can help to advance the field, offering insights that would not be found by focusing on the levels of experience and interface by themselves. The recent project of Critical Code Studies and two book series just started by The MIT Press, Software Studies and Platform Studies, represent a new willingness to consider digital media at these levels. With reference to mass-market and more esoteric systems and works, ranging from Atari 2600 and arcade games to Talan Memmott’s Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)], this talk will describe how looking at the code and platform levels can enhance our comparative media studies of computational works.
Nick Montfort is associate professor of digital media at MIT and has been part of dozens of academic, editorial, and literary collaborations.

Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music
2010-02-11 19:00 | MIT Building 6, Room 120, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Organized by the MIT Writers Series.

Combining music documentary and social documentary, Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music charts the meteoric rise of South Asian music in 1990’s Britain and the decades of cultural cross-pollination and political struggle that led up to that historic moment. Through a dynamic mix of live performances, candid interviews, and rare archival footage, Mutiny presents the story of a generation that grew up defining itself in an environment of racial violence while drawing strength from both British street culture and South Asian roots. The artists who emerged from this generation became some of the greatest innovators in British music, mixing the influences of their parents’ cultures with electronica, hip-hop, reggae, and punk and producing unique and powerful new sounds.
Featuring: Asian Dub Foundation, Talvin Singh, State of Bengal, Fun-Da-Mental, Anjali, DJ Ritu, Black Star Liner and many others.
Vivek Bald
Vivek Bald is a documentary filmmaker and scholar whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. His previous films include “Taxi-vala/Auto-biography” (1994) about the lives, experiences and activism of immigrant taxi drivers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in early 1990s New York City, as well as “Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music” (2003). His current work, which examines the desertion and settlement of Indian Muslim merchant sailors in U.S. port cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is the basis for a forthcoming book, Bengali Harlem and the Hidden Histories of South Asian New York, and a documentary film, “In Search of Bengali Harlem.” He is Assistant Professor of Writing and Digital Media in MIT’s Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and an affiliated faculty member in the Program in Comparative Media Studies.

Old-fashioned Futures and Re-fashionable Media
2010-02-04 17:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Joel Burges and Wayne Marshall, MIT’s Mellon Fellows in the Humanities (2009-11), will contribute to the rethinking of media studies at MIT by taking up the shared metaphor of fashion—the fashionable, the old-fashioned, the re-fashioned. Burges will talk about the turn away from the digital in contemporary cinema, particularly the case of Fantastic Mr. Fox, in an attempt to think about the uneven development of media over time. Marshall will discuss how popular but privatized platforms like Facebook and YouTube, pop culture fashion—and the negotiable refashionability of both—present crucial challenges to the study of media today.
Joel Burges works at the intersection of literary studies, critical studies, and media studies. His first book, which is in progress, is entitled The Uses of Obsolescence; it considers the fate of historical thinking in the media of late modernity, especially literature and cinema. His second book, in its very early stages, is called Fiction after TV; it considers how a major mode of imaginative processing—fiction—is altered by the introduction of TV to post-1945 mediascapes.
Wayne Marshall is an ethnomusicologist, blogger (wayneandwax.com), and DJ, specializing in the musical and cultural production of the Caribbean and the Americas, and their circulation in the wider world. Currently a Mellon Fellow at MIT, he’s writing a book on music, social media, and digital youth culture. He co-edited and contributed to Reggaeton (Duke 2009) and has published in journals such as Popular Music and Callaloo while writing for popular outlets like XLR8R, The Wire, and the Boston Phoenix.

Global Game Jam
2010-01-29 - 2010-01-31 | GAMBIT Game Lab, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
View 2010 projects.

Button Mash: Gender and Gaming at MIT
2010-01-14 13:00 | MIT Building N25, Room 373, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Hillary Kolos, Mia Consalvo, and Lynda Williams
Button mashing is one of many stereotypes about women who game that this session will question. This event will explore issues around gender and gaming, as well as be an opportunity for female MIT students who play digital games to come together to talk and play. The day will kick off with a panel discussion with Mia Consalvo, visiting associate professor in CMS, and other female game researchers and/or game industry professionals. Following the panel, there will be time to play and discuss games that are interesting in terms of how they portray gender (i.e., Tomb Raider, Mirror’s Edge, Fat Princess). After a dinner break (pizza will be served!), we will invite all participants to join in on a roundtable discussion of what it’s like to be a woman that games at MIT.

Board/Card Game Design - Expansions
2010-01-11 13:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 135, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Ever played a board game and thought it was missing something? That you could make it better? In this class, each group will pick an existing board game and develop an Expansion Pack that extends or modifies the rules.
The first session we will be talking about principles of game design, picking groups, and playing board games. The second will be focused on designing the expansions (with some materials provided). The final session will give groups an opportunity to complete their expansion and play-test each other’s games.

Comparative Media Insights: "Race, Rights, and Virtual Worlds: Digital Games as Spaces of Labor Migration"
2009-12-15 17:15 | MIT Building 14E, Room 310, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Lisa Nakamura
As 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.
Lisa 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.

Comparative Media Insights: "From Gamer Theory to Critical Practice"
2009-12-15 04:15 - 17:15 | MIT Building 14E, Room 310, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
McKenzie Wark
How 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.
McKenzie 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.

Comparative Media Insights: "Art of the Impossible: Utopia, Imagination, and Critical Media Practice"
2009-12-07 17:15 | MIT Building 14E, Room 310, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
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.
Stephen 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.

Comparative Media Insights: "Viva Las Vegas: a Neo-Baroque Conception of the World"
2009-12-01 17:15 | MIT Building 14N, Room 313, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Angela Ndalianis
Emerging 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.
Angela Ndalianis is currently associate professor in cinema and cultural studies at the University of Melbourne.

Comparative Media Insights: "The Googlization of Everything"
2009-11-30 17:15 | MIT Building 14N, Room 313, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Siva Vaidhyanathan
Google 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.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, cultural historian and media scholar, is currently associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia.

Futures of Entertainment 4
2009-11-20 - 2009-11-21 | MA
Convergence has moved swiftly from buzzword to industry logic. The creation of transmedia storyworlds, understanding how to appeal to migratory audiences, and the production of digital extensions for traditional materials are becoming the bread and butter of working in the media. Futures of Entertainment 4 once again brings together key industry leaders who are shaping these new directions in our culture and academic scholars immersed in the investigation the social, cultural, political, economic, and technological implications of these changes in our media landscape.

Booklife: The Private and the Public in Transmedia Storytelling and Self-Promotion
2009-11-19 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Jeff Vandermeer with Kevin Smokler.
Fictional experiments in emerging media like Twitter and Facebook are influencing traditional printed novels and stories in interesting ways, but another intriguing new narrative is also emerging: the rise of “artifacts” that, although they support a writer’s career, have their own intrinsic creative value. What are the benefits and dangers of a confusion between the private creativity and the public career elements of a writer’s life caused by new media and a proliferation of “open channels”? What protective measures must a writer take to preserve his or her “self” in this environment? In addition to the guerilla tactics implicit in storytelling through social media and other unconventional platforms, in what ways is a writer’s life now itself a story irrespective of intentional fictive storytelling? Examining these issues leads naturally to a discussion on the tension and cross-pollination between the private and public lives of writers in our transmedia age, including the strategies and tactics that best serve those who want to survive and flourish in this new environment. What are we losing in the emerging new paradigm, and what do we stand to gain?

Richard Rouse, "Cinematic Games"
2009-10-29 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Richard Rouse
Many people talk about “cinematic” games, but what does this really mean? Over their century of existence, films have been using a range of techniques to create specific emotional responses in their audience. Instead of simply using more cut-scenes, better script writers, or making more heavily scripted game experiences, game designers can look to film techniques as an inspiration for new techniques that accentuate what games do well. This lecture will present film clips from a number of classic movies, analyze how they work from a cinematic standpoint, and then suggest ways these techniques can be used in gameplay to create even more stimulating experiences for gamers, including examples from games that have successfully bridged the gap.
Richard Rouse III is a game designer and writer, best known for The Suffering horror games and his book Game Design: Theory & Practice. He is currently the Lead Single Player Designer on the story-driven FPS Homefront at Kaos Studios in New York City.

Political Remix Video: A Participatory Post-Modern Critique of Popular Culture
2009-10-15 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Elisa Kreisinger
Remixers are on the front lines of the battle between new media technologies and impeding copyright laws that threaten to obstruct the public discursive space for critiquing popular culture. These spaces are abundant with meticulously crafted and articulate video remixes that deconstruct social myths, challenge dominant media messages and form powerful arguments reflecting the participatory nature of both pop and remix cultures. We’ll deconstruct these videos, honor the history of female fan vidders and the influences of African-American hip-hop cultures and debate the remix’s ability to effect actual change.
Elisa Kreisinger is a video remix artist, hacktivst and writer. She co-edits the blog, PoliticalRemixVideo.com, teaches new media to Cambridge teens and is currently working on her first screenplay.

Race, Politics and American Media
2009-10-08 17:00 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
The election of an African-American president in Nov. 2008 has been hailed as a transforming event. But has Obama’s ascension transformed anything? Many people’s answer to that question changed this summer when a famous Harvard professor was arrested at his home in Cambridge. Are the harsh realities of race and class in the U.S. clearer now or murkier, following the media tsunami of Gatesgate? And has this polarizing event given greater visibility to racial minorities in the media’s coverage of politics? How are race issues and racial politics covered in our national media, and what are the implications of the demise of major city newspapers for the coverage of race and politics?
Juan Williams of NPR and Fox News will discuss these and related questions in a candid conversation with Phillip Thompson, associate professor of urban politics in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, and David Thorburn, professor of literature and director of the MIT Communications Forum.

How Not to Be Seen
2009-09-24 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Hanna Rose Shell
Hanna Rose Shell, a historian and media artist, is as Assistant Professor in the Program on Science, Technology and Society at MIT. This is a talk about camouflage framed by the question of “how not to be seen”–in film, on film, as film. In the first part, Shell introduces “how not to be seen” in terms of the aspiration for, and actualization of concealment in both filmic and natural ecologies through mixed-media practices that simultaneously incorporate and subvert the photographic media of reconnaissance. In the second part, Shell screens and discusses her film-in-progress, called Blind, about the phenomenology of camouflage. Blind as in blindness, and blind as in that actively constructed structure intended for the concealment of a hunter from her game.

Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks
2009-09-17 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Ethan Gilsdorf will discuss some of the themes of his new book, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, a blend of travelogue, pop culture analysis, and memoir as forty-year-old former D&D addict Gilsdorf crisscrosses America, the world, and other worlds–from Boston to Wisconsin, France to New Zealand, and Planet Earth to the realm of Aggramar. He asks: Who are these gamers and fantasy fans? What explains the irresistible appeal of such “escapist” adventures? How do the players balance their escapist urges with the kingdom of adulthood?
Gilsdorf will talk about the culture’s discomfort with the geek/nerd/gamer stereotype and will look at society’s ambivalent relationship with gaming and fantasy play, and the origins of that prejudice, as well as the author’s own past misgivings and final acceptance of his “geek” identity.

2009 Julius Schwartz Lecture with J. Michael Straczynski
2009-05-22 19:00 - 22:00 | MIT Building 10, Room 250, 222 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
J. Michael Straczynski
The second annual Julius Schwartz Lecture brings J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of the cult science fiction hit Babylon 5. The Julius Schwartz Lecture is an annual event held to honor an individual who has made significant contributions to the culture, creativity and community of comics and popular entertainment.
The lecture is hosted by the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT and was founded to honor the memory of longtime DC Comics editor Julius “Julie” Schwartz, whose contributions to our culture include co-founding the first science fiction fanzine in 1932, the first science fiction literary agency in 1934, and the first World Science Fiction Convention in 1939. Schwartz went on to launch a career in comics that would last for well over 42 years, during which time he helped launch the Silver Age of Comics, introduced the idea of parallel universes, and had a hand in the reinvention of such characters as Batman, Superman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman and the Atom.
The event is typically structured as a short lecture presented by the honored speaker, followed by a question-and-answer discussion between the speaker and the head of the Comparative Media Studies program, media scholar Henry Jenkins III. This will be followed by an open question-and-answer session between the lecturer and the audience. The inaugural speaker for the series was New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman.

Ralph Baer, Baer Consultants
2009-05-07 17:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Ralph Baer
A long lifetime of developing electronic consumer products has taken Ralph Baer from vacuum tube through microprocessor designs. Although the technology has undergone vast changes, the underlying motivation for, and execution of, the process has not changed radically. Baer cites numerous examples of specific product designs that made it all the way through the process to a successful product and draws some conclusions from that experience that shed some light on the continuum of invention, development, and marketing novel product ideas.

NML Spring Conference - Learning in a Participatory Culture
2009-05-02 | MIT Building 6, Room 120, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Comparative Media Studies and Project New Media Literacies will host a one-day conference at MIT, Building 6-120, from 8:30 am to 5 pm on Saturday May 2, 2009. The $35.00 registration fee includes a choice of 4 out of 14 workshops, 2 presentations, and breakfast and lunch. Registration is available online at www.newmedialiteracies.org, and must be submitted by Friday 4/29.
Summary of conference: At Learning in a Participatory Culture, we will share our new web-based learning environment, the Learning Library, and host a series of conversations and workshops about the integration and implementation of the new media literacies across disciplines. Workshops include “The Complexities of Copyright: Shepard Fairey v. the AP,” “Mapping in Participatory Culture: Boundaries,” “Using Wikipedia in the Classroom,” “21st Century Assessment,” and more. Henry Jenkins’ closing remarks will address the future of NML and participatory democracy.
Panelists at this conference will include members of the NML team, educators who have been working with NML materials in the field, and educational researchers. The conference is designed to engage anyone with an interest in the future of education, especially high school teachers and afterschool coordinators. The format itself will be participatory – we hope that attendees will join the conversation, and leave the conference equipped with new ideas and strategies.

The Discipline of Political Messages in an Unruly Era
2009-04-30 17:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Tucker Eskew
Presidential elections are considered decisions on politicians’ virtues and reflections of public values. On an ongoing basis, polling data and snap punditry engorge the body politic between elections. Taken together, these judgments on leadership and partisanship — on statecraft and stagecraft — lie at the core of democracy today. Tucker Eskew explores the permanent campaign(s) of the last ten years. What is “message discipline” in an era of atomized opinion leadership — a necessity or a fool’s errand? Are the parties inevitably devoted to different styles of communication, and is this era’s favored approach inextricably the domain of the new Administration? Can unfettered dialogue, as an expression of freedom, be a pure benefit to society, or is “Fire!” being texted in a crowded coffee house? Consistent with his conservatism, Eskew will have firm answers to some of these and other questions. Reflecting his consulting firm ViaNovo’s “new ways”, he will welcome dialogue on all.

The 11th Annual CMS Media Spectacle
2009-04-29 19:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
An honored tradition returns on April 27th at 7PM when CMS presents the eleventh annual Media Spectacle. The event, founded by 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 (mobisode anyone?). Since the dawning of YouTube and other user-generated video websites, the number of submissions has increased substantially.
The event is hosted by Professor Henry Jenkins and judged by esteemed members of the CMS community as well as Cathy Pomiecko, the sister of the late CMS program administrator Chris Pomieicko. After all of this year’s selected pieces are screened, the undergraduate winner for best film will receive a cash prize and the Chris Pomiecko Trophy followed by the Claude Berry Award for the best non-undergraduate entry.
