MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

Alchemists and Mad Scientists: from Faust to Dr. Strangelove
2013-01-10 19:00 - 2013-01-31 22:00 (America/New_York) | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Enrollment: Unlimited: No advance sign-up
Attendance: Participants welcome at individual sessions
Curiosity is perhaps the defining characteristic of scientists in the popular mind, but a popular belief asserts that “curiosity killed the cat.” In the popular imagination scientists challenge the boundaries of human knowledge, frequently paying a dire price for their audacity, and sometimes bringing that price down on the population around them. In this activity we will consider how science and scientists have been depicted in popular culture, starting with one manifestation of the widely celebrated Faust legend. We will trace the development in mass media of the evolution of alchemists into mad scientists, using the films “Faust,” “Metropolis,” “The Bride of Frankenstein,” and “Dr. Strangelove” as our texts. Our goal will be a deeper understanding of the history of representations of science and scientists in Western narrative media.
Advance sign-up isn’t required, but please email Stephen Brophy (stephbr@mit.edu) if you plan to attend so he can give you access to the activity’s Stellar site.
Sponsor(s): Science, Technology, and Society, Comparative Media Studies
Contact: Stephen Brophy, stephbr@mit.edu
Faust
January 10
Thu
7:00PM-10:00PM
3-133
What do you do when you have it all and it isn’t enough? Faust was the most highly respected philosopher, theologian, and physician of his time, but because he wasn’t satisfied with all that he sold his soul to the Devil. And then what happened?
Stephen Brophy – Lecturer, Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies
Metropolis
January 17
Thu
7:00PM-10:00PM
3-133
Back in the good old days, when you built a city that had sunshine and sport for the 1%, but endless drudgery for the 99% who kept it going, you needed a mad scientist to run it all. And no scientist has ever been madder than Rotwang, the genius behind Metropolis!
Nicole Labruto – PhD Student in History, Anthropology, and STS (HASTS), Stephen Brophy – Lecturer, Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies
The Bride of Frankenstein
January 24
Thu
7:00PM-10:00PM
3-133
What happens when you build a creature with parts collected from graveyards and gallows, but neglect to provide him with a companion? He becomes monstrous in his loneliness. But maybe building a companion from the same materials isn’t the best solution?
Stephen Brophy – Lecturer, Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, Marie Burks – PhD Student in History, Anthropology, and STS (HASTS)
Dr. Strangelove
January 31
Thu
7:00PM-10:00PM
3-133
Mad scientists don’t only haunt medieval castles – they also ply their wares in the most up to date War Rooms. What happens when a modern mad scientist builds a Doomsday Machine for the Pentagon? See this movie to learn how to stop worrying and love the Bomb!
Stephen Brophy – Lecturer, Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, Benjamin Wilson – PhD Student in History, Anthropology, and STS (HASTS)

Reading Programming Code as a Cultural Object
2013-01-09 16:00 - 17:00 | MIT Building 14E, Room 311, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Enrollment: Limited: First come, first served (no advance sign-up)
Prereq: None
So much around us is driven by programs and written in code, in one or several computer languages. We use algorithms to visualize data, interpret behaviors, read trends, and drive decisions. Programs and algorithms are culturally determined objects, often observable as aesthetic works or philosophical gestures. It’s time to think more about the cultural aspects of code and what goes on “under the hood” of digital manifestations. How is code written and by whom? Under what conditions? How does code circulate? Where do the creative aspects of programming lie? What do porting code and natural language translation have in common? How do we understand the obsolescence of computer languages? Let’s talk about what it means to start reading code differently, as cultural objects and statements. Let’s raise the questions that need to be raised.
Sponsor(s): Libraries, Comparative Media Studies
Contact: Patsy Baudoin, 14S-230, 617 253-4979, patsy@mit.edu

[For Credit] CMS.S98: Special Subject: Comparative Media Studies Qualitative Data Analysis
2013-01-09 - 2013-01-16 | Comparative Media Studies: MIT Building E15, Room 335, 20 Ames St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Jan 9: 4-5pm
Jan 10, 14, 16: 2-5pm
Pre-register on WebSIS and attend first class.
Limited to 12 participants.
No listeners
Prereq: Permission of instructor limited to graduate students only
Level: G 3 units Standard A – F Grading Can be repeated for credit
Seminar or lecture on a topic that is not covered in the regular curriculum.
The goal of this class is to provide frameworks and hands on experience in analyzing data collected through interviews, observations and other qualitative methods. We will cover standards for analysis, strategies (such as thematic analysis, discourse analysis, critical analysis and narrative analysis), and analytic processes such as iterative coding, building matrices, and pulling out logics. The instructor will provide a data set of selections from interviews with musicians in which they discuss their understanding of the music business, but if people already have data sets they are eager to work with, they can do that too.

Contact: Becky Shepardson, bshep@mit.edu

Individual Consultations at the Writing and Communication Center
2013-01-07 - 2013-01-31 | MIT Building 12, Room 132, 60 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Enrollment: Limited: Advance sign-up required
Attendance: Repeating event, participants welcome at any session
Prereq: none
The Writing Center will continue to offer free consultation and advice on oral presentations and on any writing problem, including finding a topic, generating ideas, overcoming writer’s block, improving grammar, crafting effective sentences and paragraphs, organizing ideas, using of evidence, analyzing audiences, and writing strategically. We can help with technical writing; theses in all departments; job, graduate and med school application essays; research and teaching statements; resumes; conference talks; articles for publication; book proposals and chapters; and papers for any course. We also offer help on pronunciation.
Sponsor(s): Writing and Communication Center
Contact: Steven Strang, 12-132, 617-253-4459, smstrang@mit.edu

MIT Writers' Group
2013-01-07 - 2013-01-28 | MIT Building 12, Room 134, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Enrollment: Unlimited: Advance sign-up required
Sign-up by 01/04
Attendance: Repeating event on the 7th, 14th, and 28th, participants welcome at any session
Prereq: none
Want to write something creative but need some motivation or support? Join other writers to get advice about your own writing, to help other writers, or to get inspiration to write something to share with the group–any type of creative writing, including fiction, poetry, literary nonfiction,memoirs, personal essays, plays. Open to MIT undergraduate and graduate students, lecturers, staff and faculty.
Sponsor(s): Writing and Communication Center
Contact: Steven Strang, (617) 253-4459, smstrang@mit.edu

[For Credit] 21W.794: Graduate Technical Writing Workshop
2013-01-05 - 2013-01-17 | MIT Building 2, Room 147, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Pre-register on WebSIS and attend first class.
Listeners welcome at individual sessions (series)
Prereq: Level: G 3 units Standard A – F Grading
Draft a thesis proposal, thesis chapter, journal article, progress report, or specification, and review basics of engineering writing. Sessions cover the processes of organizing and drafting professional papers, improving writing style, and revising documents. Students determine own projects; each project increment receives instructor’s editorial suggestions.
IAP version:This course focuses on improving your ability to communicate technical information. Through a combination of lecture, assignments, and in-class writing exercises, we will cover the basics of working with sources, including summarizing & paraphrasing, synthesizing source materials, citing, quoting, and avoiding plagiarism. We will also cover how to write an abstract and a literature review.
You must attend all three meetings. No rescheduling is possible. NO LISTENERS.
Contact: Nick Altenbernd, 14E-303, x3-7894, altenb@mit.edu
Steven Strang, Pamela Siska
This section is for Mechanical Engineering students or others who need this time.
Tue Jan 15, 22, Thu Jan 24, 10am-01:00pm, 2-147
Steven Strang, Pamela Siska
This section is for Aero-Astro students, and Chemical Engineering students or others who need this time.
Tue Jan 15, 22, Thu Jan 24, 02-05:00pm, 2-147
Steven Strang, Pamela Siska
This section is for Civil-Environ Engr students, Media Studies students, and Nuclear Engineering students or others who need this time.
Thu Jan 17, Wed Jan 23, Fri Jan 25, 10am-01:00pm, 2-147
Steven Strang, Pamela Siska
This section is for Supply Chain Management students, and TPP-ESD students or others who need this time.
>Thu Jan 17, Wed Jan 23, Fri Jan 25, 02-05:00pm, 2-147

New Forms, New Markets for Independent Film
2012-12-06 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Independent film-maker Andrew Silver will discuss emerging forms of hybrid media, some promising new pathways for distributing films and his career as a director and producer in this colloquium, which will include clips from his most recent film, Second Wind. Debra Wise of MIT’s Central Square Theater will join the discussion. Andrew and Debra played husband and wife in Radio Cape Cod, a Silver production shot in Woods Hole. Andrew Silver is a graduate of MIT and the Harvard Business School, co-author of a chapter in the HBS anthology Breakthrough Thinking, and a long-time member of the Council for the Arts at MIT. His films are distributed by Tesco, the second largest global retail chain:

Second Wind, 13 min
Overboard, 16 min
Downward Facing, 6 min

GO ASK A.L.I.C.E: A Panel Discussion
2012-11-29 17:30 | Harvard University Science Center, Room 469, 1 Oxford St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
The Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University’s Department of the History of Science is hosting a semester-long exhibit, “GO ASK A.L.I.C.E: Turing Tests, Parlor Games, & Chatterbots”, highlighted in part by this special panel discussion on November 29.
GO ASK A.L.I.C.E explores the strange afterlife of the Turing Test as it has circulated in popular, scientific, and commercial cultures. It reexamines elements of Alan Turing‘s own interactions with humans and machines, later imaginations of thinking machines, as well as a famous attempt to translate Turing’s parlor game into a real test of artificial intelligence: the Loebner Prize.

Minding the News
2012-11-29 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Sponsored by the MIT Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab)
See Part 1 of this series, from September 6, featuring Francis Steen.
Mark Turner
The Red Hen Lab is a distributed laboratory for the study of network news. In an earlier talk, Professor Francis Steen provided a technical overview of the activities of Red Hen and surveyed the study by Francis Steen and Mark Turner of international network news coverage of the Anders Bering Brevik event in Oslo, Norway, in July, 2011, with an emphasis on the way in which network news is occupied with the assessment of culpability, blame, and credit.
This talk will discuss research on the cognitive underpinnings of network news, with an emphasis on blended joint attention, story-telling, counterfactuality, and hypotheticals.
Mark Turner is Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University.
He is the founding director of the Cognitive Science Network. His most recent book publications are Ten Lectures on Mind and Language and two edited volumes, The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity, and Meaning, Form, & Body, edited with Fey Parrill and Vera Tobin. His other publications include Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science: The Way We Think about Politics, Economics, Law, and Society, The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language, and many more. He has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Advanced Study of Durham University. He is a fellow of the Institute for the Science of Origins, external research professor at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study in Cognitive Neuroscience, distinguished fellow at the New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology, and Extraordinary Member of the Humanwissenschaftsliches Zentrum. In 1996, the Académie française awarded him the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises. For 2011-2012, he is a fellow of the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Cultural Production and Social Media as Capture Platforms: How the Matrix Has You
2012-11-15 17:00 - 19:00 | Comparative Media Studies: MIT Building E15, Room 335, 20 Ames St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Hector Postigo
This presentation develops a theoretical framework (rooted in Science and Technology Studies) for understanding how, generally, social media’s technical feature-sets create a system of capture and conversion. Capture describes the persistent ways in which social web platforms record and fix online/offline social and technical practices. Conversion applies to the way in which technical architectures convert what is captured into value (both culturally contingent and economic). The notions of capture and conversion are developed in light of other work in the field that seeks to understand how social web platforms use technology to leverage user generated content (UGC). The framework bridges a focus on ongoing social practice within/through platforms with analysis of technology as a determinant of probable practice. Ultimately this work is part of a larger project that seeks to develop a way of critically engaging the political economy of the social web while at the same time not ignoring the subject positions of those whose lives on display make it compelling.
Hector Postigo is Associate Professor in Media Studies and Production at Temple University’s School of Media and Communication. He is the co-founder of the blog culturedigitally.org and most recently the author of The Digital Rights Movement: The Role of Technology in Subverting Digital Copyright from MIT Press and co-editor of Managing Privacy Through Accountability from Palgrave Press. His research is funded by the National Science Foundation and the European Commission. He teaches and writes about video game culture, labor in digital networks, and privacy and copyright on the social web.

Futures of Entertainment 6
2012-11-09 - 2012-11-10 | MIT Building E51, Wong Auditorium, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Futures of Entertainment is an annual event exploring the current state and future of media properties, brands, and audiences. This year’s event, Nov. 9-10 at MIT, will look at how media producers and audiences are relating to one another in new ways in a spreadable media landscape.
Register at the FOE website.

New Media in West Africa
2012-11-08 19:00 - 21:00 | MIT Building E25, Room 111, 45 Carleton Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
(Note time.)
This forum launches the Futures of Entertainment 6 conference at MIT. Despite many infrastructural and economic hurdles, entertainment media industries are burgeoning in West Africa. Today, the Nigerian cinema market–“Nollywood”–is the second largest in the world in terms of the annual volume of films distributed behind only the Indian film industry. And an era of digital distribution has empowered content created in Lagos, or Accra, to spread across geographic and cultural boundaries. New commercial models for distribution as well as international diasporic networks have driven the circulation of this material. But so has rampant piracy and the unofficial online circulation of this content. What innovations are emerging from West Africa? How has Nigerian cinema in particular influenced local television and film markets in other countries across West Africa, and across the continent? What does the increasing visibility of West African popular culture mean for this region–especially as content crosses various cultural contexts, within and outside the region? And what challenges does West Africa face in continuing to develop its entertainment industries?

Derrick N. Ashong leads the band Soulfège, a group that produces an eclectic blend of hip-hop, reggae, funk, world beat and West African highlife music and has been featured in such major media as MTV Africa and NPR. Also known as DNA, which is the name of his blog, Ashong hosted Oprah Radio’s The Derrick Ashong Experience and Al-Jazeera English’s social media TV show The Stream.
Fadzi Makanda is a business development manager in the New York office for iROKO Partners, a distributor of African—and particularly Nollywood—entertainment. Makanda leads the development and execution of U.S. advertising sales strategies for the company.
Colin M. Maclay is the managing director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. Both as co-founder of Harvard’s International Technologies Group and at Berkman, Maclay’s research pairs hands-on multi-stakeholder collaborations with the generation of data that reveal trends, challenges and opportunities for the integration of communications technologies in developing communities.
Ralph Simon is founder of the Mobilium Advisory Group, which studies innovation in mobile usage in such countries as Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and South Africa. He has served as an executive at Capitol Records, Blue Note Records, and EMI Music, and he co-founded the Zomba Group with Clive Calder of South Africa. Simon earned the title “Father of the Ring Tone” when he created the first ring tone company in 1997.

Digitizing the Culture of Print: The Digital Public Library of America and Other Urgent Projects
2012-11-01 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
The role of the library in the digital age is one of the compelling questions of our era. How are libraries coping with the promise and perils of our impending digital future? What urgent initiatives are underway to assure universal access to our print inheritance and to the digital communication forms of the future? How is the very idea of the library changing? These and related questions will engage our distinguished panelists, who represent both research and public libraries and two of whom serve on the steering committee for the Digital Public Library of America.
Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard, Director of the Harvard University Library and one of America’s most distinguished historians. He serves on the steering committee of the Digital Public Library of America and has been a trustees of the New York Public Library since 1995. In a recent essay in the New York Review of Books, Darnton defended a NYPL plan to liquidate some branches in the system while renovating the main Fifth Avenue branch. The essay sparked a number of responses. In November of last year, Darnton provided a status report on the DPLA. Darnton is the author of many influential books including The Case for Books, Past, Present, and Future and The Great Cat Massacre.
Susan Flannery is director of libraries for the City of Cambridge and past president of the Massachusetts Library Association.

Online Information Session
2012-11-01 14:00 - 16:00, 2012-10-04 08:00 - 10:00 | cms.mit.edu

On-Campus Information Session
2012-10-25 09:30 - 16:30, 2012-09-20 09:00 - 16:30 | Comparative Media Studies: MIT Building E15, Room 335, 20 Ames St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States

Gediminas Urbonas
2012-10-18 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Gediminas Urbonas
Gediminas Urbonas is artist and educator, and co-founder (with Nomeda Urbonas) of Urbonas Studio – an interdisciplinary research program that advocates for the reclamation of public culture in the face of overwhelming privatization, stimulating cultural and political imagination as tools for social change. Often beginning with archival research, their methodology unfolds complex participatory works investigating the urban environment, architectural developments, and cultural and technological heritage.
The Urbonases have established their international reputation for socially interactive and interdisciplinary practice exploring the conflicts and contradictions posed by the economic, social, and political conditions of countries in transition. Working in collaboration they develop models for social and artistic practice with the interest to design organizational structures that question relativity of freedom.
They use art platform to render public spaces for interaction and engagement of the social groups, evoking local communities and encouraging their cultural and political imagination. Combining the tools of new and traditional media, their work frequently involves collective activities such as workshops, lectures, debates, TV programs, Internet chat-rooms and public protests that stand at the intersection of art, technology and social criticism.
They are also co-founders of VILMA (Vilnius Interdisciplinary Lab for Media Art), and VOICE, a net based publication on media culture. They have exhibited internationally including the San Paulo, Berlin, Moscow, Lyon and Gwangju Biennales

Script as Image
2012-09-27 17:15 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
The first event in the Ancient and Medieval Studies Seminar Series and co-sponsored by Literature, HTC, and the SHASS Dean’s Office.
Jeffrey Hamburger
Writing, in relation to such affiliated topics as literacy, linguistics, cognition, and media studies, has a central place across and beyond the humanistic disciplines. It is time, in turn, for historians of medieval art to take a broader view of paleography, rather than view it primarily as a means of dating or localizing monuments, or, at the most literal level, deciphering illustrated texts or epigraphic inscriptions.
Within the realm of visual imagery, the written word can rise to a form of representation in its own right, prior to and independent of the complex phenomena generally considered under the rubric of “text and image”—a generalization as true of modern art as it is of the Middle Ages. In contrast to modernity, however, through much of the Middle Ages, as in Antiquity, the primary status of the spoken word and oral delivery ensured that writing, no less than picturing, was subject to suspicion.
Professor Hamburger’s presentation will survey some, if hardly all, of the many aspects of medieval script as a pictorial form, using examples ranging from Late Antiquity to the late Middle Ages and beyond.
Jeffrey Hamburger’s teaching and research focus on the art of the High and later Middle Ages. Among his areas of special interest are medieval manuscript illumination, text-image issues, the history of attitudes towards imagery and visual experience, and German vernacular religious writing of the Middle Ages, especially in the context of mysticism. Much of his scholarship has focused on the art of female monasticism. His current research includes a project that seeks to integrate digital technology into the study and presentation of liturgical manuscripts, a study of narrative imagery in late medieval German prayer books and a major international exhibition on German manuscript illumination in the age of Gutenberg.
Professor Hamburger’s books include The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Medieval West and The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany.
Hamburger holds both his B.A. and Ph.D. in art history from Yale University. He previously held teaching positions at Oberlin College and the University of Toronto. He has been a guest professor in Zurich, Paris, Oxford and Fribourg, Switzerland.

Games in Everyday Life and Why That Matters to You
2012-09-21 09:00 - 20:30 | Tang Center, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Join the MIT Game Lab and our keynote speaker, visionary game developer Peter Molyneux, on September 21st for a one-day symposium:
Games in Everyday Life and Why That Matters to You
What can finance, health care, philanthropy, and education learn from cutting-edge games and game theory? The new MIT Game Lab (http://gamelab.mit.edu) has some answers for you. Join us September 21st!
Register here! http://mitgamelabsymposium2012.eventbrite.com
1. Panels By — and For — Industry and Researchers
Our panels will feature leading industry professionals and games researchers on:

Applied Game Research: Players, Design, and Technology
Games for Learning
Meaningful R&D Partnerships
Positive Game Lab Impact

This is your chance to meet leaders like new media scholar Henry Jenkins, MIT Game Lab executive director Philip Tan, and MIT neuroscientist Sebatian Seung, whose artificial intelligence work is an inspiration for how game-like tools can have real-world impact.
2. Then, work with the MIT Game Lab
This gathering also marks the launch of the MIT Game Lab, the new international home of game scholars, creators, and technologists, all working to solve the tough challenges people like you to bring to the table.
The symposium is open to the public. But we especially welcome those who think games have a role to play in advancing their academic, non-profit, and corporate missions but don’t yet know how. To that end, your participation in this symposium can be a step toward working with the MIT Game Lab long-term.
3. Register
Slots are going fast, but discounted attendance is still available for $150 — which includes breakfast, lunch, and a ticket to the evening reception. Students may register at a special $75 dollar rate with the code “COLLABMIT”.
Register today, and see you on the 21st!
http://mitgamelabsymposium2012.eventbrite.com

Jim Bizzocchi, "Close-Reading Media Poetics"
2012-09-20 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Jim Bizzocchi
Close reading is a classic humanities methodology for the analysis and understanding of texts across a variety of media. It’s a rigorous discipline — in the words of van Looy and Baetans: “The text is never trusted at face value, but is torn to pieces and reconstituted by a reader who is at the same time a demolisher and a constructor.” This is a difficult task — the practice of close reading requires that the scholar immerse herself in the experience of the text on its own terms, and at the same time maintain a critical distance in order to observe and understand the construction and the effects of the text. Bizzocchi relies on close reading for his own scholarly work and uses various strategies to reconcile the contradictory states of experience and analysis.
Close reading can be used to explicate works across a variety of dimensions: thematic, cultural, historical, sociological, and others. Bizzocchi’s goal is to understand the poetics — the creative decisions — embedded in media works. Bordwell describes poetics as “inquiry into the fundamental principles by which artifacts in any representational medium are constructed, and the effects that flow from these principles”. Bizzocchi has always loved the magic of immersion in the experience of the moving image. As a scholar, he says his role is “to seek within that immersive experience the details of how the magic is created”. He will present his analyses of Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair, Tom Tykwer’s Run, Lola, Run, and Gerrie Villon and Alex Mayhew’s Ceremony of Innocence (an interactive adaptation of The Griffin and Sabine trilogy by Nick Bantock).
Jim Bizzocchi is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. His research includes work on narrative, interactive narrative, and the evolution of the moving image. He teaches classes in these areas, and is a recipient of the University Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is a practicing video artist, creating award-winning works in a genre he calls “Ambient Video”. Jim is a graduate of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program (2001).

Artist-Audience Relations in the Age of Social Media
2012-09-13 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Nancy Baym
Social media have transformed relationships between those who create artistic work and those who enjoy it. Culture industries such as the music recording business have been left reeling as fans have gained the ability to distribute amongst themselves and artists have gained the ability to bypass traditional gatekeepers such as labels. The dominant rhetoric has been of ‘piracy,’ yet there are other tales to tell. How does direct access to fans change what it means to be an artist? What rewards are there that weren’t before? How are relational lines between fans and friends blurred and with what consequences? What new challenges other than making a living do artists face?
Nancy Baym is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England. She is the author of Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Polity), Internet Inquiry (co-edited with Annette Markham, Sage) and Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom and Online Community (Sage). For the last two years she has been interviewing musicians about their relationships with audiences.

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

George Lakoff
Everything we learn, know and understand is physical — a matter of brain circuitry. This basic fact has deep implications for how politics is understood, how campaigns are framed, why conservatives and progressives talk past each other, and why progressives have more problems framing messages than conservatives do — and what they can do about it.
George Lakoff is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. He previously taught at Harvard (1965-69) and the University of Michigan (1969-1972).
He graduated from MIT in 1962 (in Mathematics and Literature) and received his PhD in Linguistics from Indiana University in 1966.
Read more at georgelakoff.com.

Games by the Book: An Exhibit
2012-09-07 - 2012-10-08 | Hayden Memorial Library, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Curated by Clara Fernández-Vara & Nick Montfort. From the exhibit description…

People can’t get enough of stories–we’re always seeking to re-experience them, in different forms and versions. Myths have been transformed and rehashed between religion, folklore, and popular narrative. It’s typical to see the play, read the book, watch the film, and now, play the game. Each medium will appropriate a story based on what each medium can do best. This exhibit focuses on literary adaptations to the new medium of the videogame, ones that come from classical theatre texts (by Sophocles and William Shakespeare) as well as novels (by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Douglas Adams).
The games showcased in this exhibit demonstrate that there is a wide variety of approaches one can follow in adapting literary works into games.
The participatory nature of the medium cues a transformation of the original story, exploring its different alternatives. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (a text game, or interactive fiction) is an example of how the player becomes the protagonist, engages in the story, maybe changing the events, maybe experiencing a different version of the story. Another approach to adaptation is focusing on world building rather than the events. Avon (also an interactive fiction) invites the player to explore a land inhabited by Shakespeare’s characters, who create the challenges that the player must face. The Great Gatsby (a tongue-in-cheek Flash game) intersects the world of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story with the conventions of platformer games such as Super Mario Bros., marking the transition between levels with short cutscenes based on the novel. Another option is adapting the themes, so that the actions of the player rehearse and explore these essential themes, while the original characters, events, and setting may not be present at all. The mechanics of Yet One Word are based on the themes of Oedipus at Colonus.
The exhibit showcases these four games alongside the books they are based on; editions of these book are also available near the exhibit in the Humanities Library’s browsery.

The News as a Social Process for Improving Society
2012-09-06 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Yves Citton
What we are now accustomed to call the “knowledge economy” may be the Humanities’ worst enemy as well as their best friend. This presentation will attempt to focus the Humanities on a certain definition of the interpretive activity: while machines can “read” data, only human subjectivities can “interpret” them. This typically human activity of interpretation requires specific conditions (a suspended time, a protected space, a certain indifference to objective truth, an indirect mode of enunciation), which are often at odds with the demands of the capitalist knowledge economy (obsessed with communication, information, accuracy, speed, short-term profit). It is the future of Mankind, which is at stake in the future of the Humanities, insofar as they represent a continuous effort to promote an open culture of interpretation against the increasing pressure of the knowledge economy.
Yves Citton is a professor of French Literature of the 18th Century at the Université de Grenoble-3. He taught for 12 years in the department of French and Italian of the University of Pittsburgh, PA, and has been invited Professor at NYU, Harvard and Sciences Po. He recently published Zazirocratie. Très curieuse introduction à la biopolitique et à la critique de la croissance (Ed. Amsterdam, 2011), L’Avenir des Humanités. économie de la connaissance ou cultures de l’interprétation? (La Découverte, 2010), Mythocratie. Storytelling et imaginaire de gauche (Ed. Amsterdam, 2010), Lire, interpréter, actualiser. Pourquoi les études littéraires? (Ed. Amsterdam, 2007) and L’Envers de la liberté. L’invention d’un imaginaire spinoziste dans la France des Lumières (Ed. Amsterdam, 2006).
Sponsored by Comparative Media Studies, Foreign Languages and Literatures, and MIT France

How To Wreck A Nice Speech: Hearing Things With The Vocoder, From World War II To Hip-Hop
2012-05-10 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Dave Tompkins
Invented by Bell Labs in 1928 to reduce bandwidth over the Trans Atlantic Cable, the vocoder would end up guarding phone conversations from eavesdroppers during World War II. By the Vietnam War, the “spectral decomposer” had been re-freaked as a robotic voice for musicians. How To Wreck A Nice Beach is about hearing things, from a misunderstood technology which in itself often spoke under conditions of anonymity. This is a terminal beach-slap of the history of electronic voices: from Nazi research labs to Stalin gulags, from World’s Fairs to Hiroshima, from Churchill and JKF to Kubrick and Kinski, The O.C. and Rammellzee, artificial larynges and Auto-Tune. Vocoder compression technology is now a cell phone standard–we communicate via flawed digital replicas of ourselves every day. Imperfect to be real, we revel in signal corruption.
Dave Tompkins’ first book, How To Wreck A Nice Beach: The Vocoder From World War II To Hip-Hop, is now out in paperback. Amazon named it “top pick” for Entertainment book of the year in 2010. He has presented on the vocoder in Germany, Netherlands (Jan Van Eyck), New York (Eyebeam Institute), London, Poland (Unsound Festival), and at the NSA Cryptologic Symposium held at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. Tompkins has written for Grantland, Oxford American, The Believer and The Wire. Tompkins is currently researching Sustained Decay bass sub-frequencies in Florida. Born in North Carolina, he now lives in Brooklyn.
Co-hosted with the MIT Cool Japan Project.

Electronic Literature and Future Books
2012-05-04 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Mainstream and avant-garde poets and fiction writers have been exploring the literary potential of the computer for decades, creating work that goes far beyond today’s e-books. The creators of electronic literature have developed new interface methods, new techniques for collaboration, and new ways of linking language, computing, and other media elements. How has electronic literature influenced other media, including the Web and the book? What are the implications of having literary projects in the digital sphere alongside other forms of communication and art?
Katherine Hayles is professor in the literature program at Duke University. Her books include Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (2008) and My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005).
Rita Raley is associate professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara where she directs Transcriptions, an online publication covering digital humanities. Her most recent publications include the co-edited Electronic Literature Collection, volume 2.

ROFLCon 2012
2012-05-04 - 2012-05-05 | 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

14th Annual CMS Media Spectacle
2012-04-30 18:00 - 20:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
The CMS Media Spectacle, 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.

Designing Digital Humanities
2012-04-26 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Johanna Drucker
What is the role of design in modeling digital humanities? Can we imagine new forms of argument and platforms that support interpretative work? So much of the computationally driven environment of digital work has been created by design/engineers that humanistic values and methods have not found their place in the tools and formats that provide the platform for research, pedagogy, access, and use. The current challenge is to take advantage of the rich repositories and well-developed online resources and create innovative approaches to argument, curation, display, editing, and understanding that embody humanistic methods as well as humanities content. Designers have a major role to play in the collaborative envisioning of new formats and processes. Using some vivid examples and case studies, this talk outlines some of the opportunities for exciting work ahead.
Johanna Drucker is the inaugural Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. In addition, she has a reputation as a book artist, and her limited edition works are in special collections and libraries worldwide. Her most recent titles include SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing (Chicago, 2009), and Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide (Pearson, 2008, 2nd edition late 2012). She is currently working on a database memoire, ALL, the online Museum of Writing in collaboration with University College London and King’s College, and a letterpress project titled Stochastic Poetics. A collaboratively written work, Digital_Humanities, with Jeffrey Schnapp, Todd Presner, Peter Lunenfeld, and Anne Burdick is forthcoming from MIT Press.
