2018 CMS Alumni Panel
2018-11-01 17:00 (America/New_York) | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
On the heels of the day’s graduate program information session, join us for our annual colloquium featuring alumni of CMS, discussing their lives from MIT to their careers today.
Nick Seaver, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University and a 2010 graduate of Comparative Media Studies, is an anthropologist of technology, whose research focuses on the circulation, reproduction, and interpretation of sound. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine. His dissertation research examined the development of algorithmic music recommendation, and at CMS, he wrote a thesis on the history of the player piano.
Colleen Kaman is a user experience strategist at IBM Interactive Experience, skilled in storytelling, user research, learning design, and persuasive technologies. Her expertise is in developing products, services, and campaigns that help users make better decisions and accomplish tasks more effectively and efficiently.
Sean Flynn is the Program Director for the Points North Institute, a Maine-based organization supporting nonfiction storytellers through artist development initiatives and, most prominently, the Camden International Film Festival and Points North Forum. He received his master’s degree in Comparative Media Studies in 2015 and worked as a researcher at the MIT Open Documentary Lab. Sean began his filmmaking career as a producer and cinematographer working on two feature-length documentaries, both of which had their premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival and aired on national television.

Screening of Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock
2018-11-14 19:00 - 21:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
The Dakota Access Pipeline is a controversial project that would bring fracked gas from the Bakken Shale in North Dakota through South Dakota, Iowa and eventually to Illinois. The Standing Rock Nation and people all over the world oppose the project because the pipeline would run under the Missouri river, a source of drinking water for over 18 million people. There are thousands of miles of pipelines in the United States and they leak every single day. Since 2010 over 3,300 oil spills and leaks have been reported.
Tens of thousands of people gathered at Standing Rock to join the peaceful prayer actions. Filmmakers Myron Dewey, Josh Fox and James Spione spent months on the front lines documenting North Dakota’s violent response to the peaceful water protectors. These artists risked their own safety to capture images of police firing mace, pepper spray and rubber bullets at peaceful water protectors, journalists and medics at point-blank range. This film is not only shows a very brutal police repression of a peaceful protest, it is also a compilation of emotional interviews with members of the camp responding to having their civil liberties trampled on. In addition, this film is a cautionary tale, as these kinds of battles against the oil industry are becoming more prevalent in the United States and the World.
https://awakethefilm.org/

Civic Arts Series: Myron Dewey
2018-11-15 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 001 (“The Cube”), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
“Protecting the Water in Solidarity and Unity”
Myron Dewey – Illustration by Mauricio Cordero
Myron Dewey is an indigenous journalist, educator, documentary filmmaker and the developer of Digital Smoke Signals, a social networking and filmmaking initiative, emerging out of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline project of 2016-17. Using a full range of contemporary media, including drone technologies, Dewey has pioneered the blending of citizen monitoring, documentary filmmaking, and social networking in the cause of environment, social justice and indigenous people’s rights; he co-directed the 2017 award-winning documentary, Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock.
Introduction by Lisa Parks, Professor, Comparative Media Studies; Director, Global Media Technologies & Cultures Lab and recently awarded MacArthur Fellow.
Respondents
Nicholas A. Brown, Artist, Cultural Geographer, Assoc. Teaching Prof, Northeastern University
Marisa Morán Jahn, Visiting Artist, MIT Art, Culture, Technology
Recent MacArthur Fellow (2018) Lisa Parks is a media scholar whose research focuses on satellite technologies and media cultures; critical studies of media infrastructures; and media, militarization and surveillance. Parks has held visiting appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin, McGill University, University of Southern California, and the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She is committed to exploring how greater understanding of media systems can inform and assist citizens, scholars and policymakers in the US and abroad to advance campaigns for technological literacy, creative expression, social justice, and human rights.
Nicholas A. Brown is a scholar and artist based in Boston, MA and La Farge, WI. He teaches in the School of Architecture and Department of History at Northeastern University. His work examines the production of cultural landscapes and the politics of connectivity in settler colonial contexts. Recent and ongoing projects include: Kickapoo Conversations, A People’s Guide to Firsting and Lasting in Boston, Re-Collecting Black Hawk: Landscape, Memory, and Power in the American Midwest, The Vanishing Indian Repeat Photography Project, and Ni-aazhawa’am-minis Spur.
An artist, filmmaker, and creative technologist of Ecuadorian and Chinese descent, Marisa Morán Jahn’s artworks redistribute power, “exemplifying the possibilities of art as social practice” (ArtForum). Her work has been presented in a range of venues including Obama’s White House, Museum of Modern Art, ITVS/PBS, and worker centers. An awardee of Creative Capital, Sundance, and Tribeca Institute, Jahn is the founder of Studio REV, an art and social justice non-profit organization, an Assistant Professor at The New School, and a Visiting Artist at MIT Art, Culture, Technology.

The Civic Arts Series, which is part of the CMS graduate program Colloquium, features talks by four artists and activists who are making innovative uses of media to reshape the possibilities of art as a source of civic imagination, experience and advocacy. Using a variety of contemporary media technologies–film, web platforms, game engines, drones–the series presenters have opened up new pathways to artistic expression that broaden public awareness around compelling civic issues and aspirations of our time.

The Language of Civic Life: Past to Present
2018-11-29 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Roderick Hart, University of Texas at Austin and the founding director of the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life
When everyday citizens interact about politics today, they often do so (1) anonymously and (2) in digital space, which results in a kind of aggressive chaos. But what happens when people identify themselves to one another in place-based communities as they do, for example, when writing letters to the editor of their local newspaper? How does that change public discussion?
This talk by Roderick Hart operationalizes the concept of “civic hope” and reports the results of a long-term study of 10,000 letters to the editor written between 1948 and the present in twelve small American cities. Hart’s argument is that the vitality of a democracy lies not in its strengths but in its weaknesses and in the willingness of its people to address those weaknesses without surcease. If democracies were not shot-through with unstable premises and unsteady compacts, its citizens would remain quiet, removed from one another. Disagreements – endless, raucous disagreements – draw them in, or at least enough of them to sustain civic hope.
Roderick Hart is the Allan Shivers Centennial Chair in Communication at the University of Texas at Austin and the founding director of the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life. He is the author of twelve books, the most recent of which is Political Tone: How Leaders Talk and Why. He is also the author of DICTION 7.0, a computer program designed to analyze language patterns. Dr. Hart has been inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Teachers at the University of Texas and has also been designated Professor of the Year for the State of Texas from the Carnegie/C.A.S.E. Foundation.

Civic Arts Series, “Bringing the War Home”: Visual Aftermaths and Domestic Disturbances in the Era of Modern Warfare
2019-02-20 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 270, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Caren Kaplan, Professor of American Studies at the University of California, Davis
At the close of the First Gulf War, feminist architectural historian Beatriz Colomina wrote that “war today speaks about the difficulty of establishing the limits of domestic space.” That conflict of 1990-91 is most often cited as the first to pull the waging of war fully into the digital age and therefore into a blurring of boundaries of all kinds. Yet, most modern wars have introduced technological innovations that transform social relations and modes of communication and representation. In this paper Caren Kaplan focuses on a period that includes the Vietnam War (1955-1975) and extends into the “War on Terror” through a consideration of Martha Rosler’s photo collage series “House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home” (1967-2004). The technique of collage reinforces the artist’s emphatic effort to bring together seemingly incommensurable elements—images of exquisite domestic interiors, glamorous consumer commodities, and landscapes and bodies damaged by warfare. Literally bringing wars waged by the United States throughout this long durée into the hyper commodified environment of fashion layouts and magazine advertisement, Rosler demonstrates the impossibility of limiting domestic space, an impossibility that challenges representation across genres and practices—televisual, photographic, cinematic, social media, analogue, digital, etc. Such disturbances of “here” and “there,” “now” and “then,” resonate as powerful “aftermaths” of wars visible and invisible, always already underway.
Caren Kaplan is Professor of American Studies at the UC Davis. Her research draws on cultural geography, landscape art, and military history to explore the ways in which undeclared as well as declared wars produce representational practices of atmospheric politics. Recent publications include Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above (Duke 2018) and Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Duke 2017).

“The Good Stuff”: The Intersections of Work, Leisure, and Relational Bonding on Tumblr and Patreon
2019-02-27 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 270, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Nicholas-Brie Guarriello
Although the Pokémon GO phenomenon of 2016 has waned, the economies of internet fame and content production remains robust. Drawing from their dissertation, Nick-Brie will discuss the forms of relational work and bonding that occur on YouTube and Twitter as well as Tumblr and Patreon, the latter two will be the focus of the talk. Drawing from two years of Internet ethnographic and participant observational work, Nick-Brie will be discussing the political economies and labor demands of micro-celebrity and Influencer culture across social media platforms regarding the Pokémon GO community. This talk suggests that the unpaid, affective labor done on Tumblr serves as a stepping stone to build relationships with one’s audience and fans before garnering support for additional, sustained income. From there, this talk argues that relational bonding work on Patreon is sustained through the various creator-patron interactions and rewards-based system to foster a system of compensation through crowdfunding, yet precarious work under global neoliberal gig economies.
[Accessibility: For those who are low hearing, access copies can be distributed prior to the talk. It is requested that they are given back afterwards. Since this presentation relies heavily on artwork, pictures, and some video, alt-text and alt-audio for those with low or no vision can be made available, if requested. Please contact nbguarr@mit.edu with any other accessibility questions.]
Nicholas-Brie (Nick-Brie) Guarriello joins CMS/W from the University of Minnesota where they are a 4th year Ph.D. Candidate. Their work focuses on audience and fans, Internet celebrity, and digital economies across social media platforms. Currently, their dissertation, titled “A Heart So True?: Relational Labor and Gig Economies in the Pokémon GO Fandom”, specifically focuses on the growth of creative workers within various forms of gig economies on social media platforms. They look at the inter-relations between YouTube and Twitter as well as Tumblr and Patreon to theorize what forms of work and labor are now the norm on specific platforms. Since the Pokémon fandom is understudied, they are trying to also think about the potential access gaps or colonial hauntings where some folks are sponsored by industries and partnered with social media platforms whereas others are continually exploited for their labor. Nick-Brie is also a competitive Pokémon Trading Card Game player and you can usually catch them at your local league or a regionals!

Civic Arts Series: Opeyemi Olukemi
2019-03-06 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 4, Room 270, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Introduction by Sarah Wolozin, Director, MIT Open Doc Lab
Opeyemi Olukemi is Executive Producer of POV Spark—the innovation arm of the iconic independent nonfiction film program POV—and Vice President of American Documentary’s Interactive unit. Throughout her career as an interactive producer, funder and public programmer, Opeyemi has created spaces and pipelines for interdisciplinary artists, communities, and creative teams to experiment with and create meaningful innovative content. She is a fierce advocate of technological equity, eliminating bias from social innovation and is deeply invested in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Before joining POV, Opeyemi was the Senior Director of Interactive Programs for Tribeca Film Institute, produced for ScrollMotion and has served as an assistant professor of Integrated Media at Brooklyn College’s Barry R. Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema. Opeyemi has served on numerous festival juries and has mentored through the IDFA’s Doc Academy, New Museum’s NEW INC and Oculus’ VR for Good. She is a proud Rockwood (Ford Foundation) JustFilms Fellow.
Respondent: Marisa Morán Jahn, Visiting Artist and Lecturer, ACT

Stuart Cunningham and David Craig: "Social Media Entertainment"
2019-03-13 17:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 270, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
In a little over a decade, competing social media platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, and their Chinese counterparts, have formed the base for the emergence of a new creative industry: social media entertainment. Social media entertainment creators have harnessed these platforms to generate significantly different content, separate from the century-long model of intellectual property control in the entertainment industries. This new screen ecology is driven by intrinsically interactive viewer- and audience-centricity. Combined, these factors inform a qualitatively different globalization dynamic that has scaled with great velocity, posing new challenges for established screen industries, screen regulatory regimes, as well as media scholars. Social Media Entertainment: The New Industry at the Intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley maps the platforms and affordances, content innovation and creative labor, monetization and management, new forms of media globalization, and critical cultural concerns raised by this nascent media industry. Media scholars Stuart Cunningham and David Craig propose challenging, revisionist accounts of the political economy of digital media, the precarious status of creative labor and of media management, and the possibilities of progressive cultural politics in commercializing environments, while offering a new take on media globalization debates.
About Stuart Cunningham and David Craig
Stuart Cunningham is Distinguished Professor of Media and Communications, Queensland University of Technology. He has authored over a dozen academic titles including Media Economics (Terry Flew, Adam Swift), Screen Distribution and the New King Kongs of the Online World (Jon Silver), Hidden innovation: Policy, industry and the creative sector.
David Craig is a Clinical Associate Professor at USC Annenberg’s School for Communication and Journalism and a Fellow at the Peabody Media Center. Craig is also a veteran media producer and executive nominated for multiple Emmy Awards and responsible for over 30 critically-acclaimed films, TV programs, and stage productions.

Machine Visions
2019-03-19 18:00 - 20:30 | MIT Building 10, Room 150, MA, 02139, United States
Machine Visions is a grad student-run event series focused on developing cross-department connections around topics related to computer vision at MIT. We are interested in workshopping questions and gathering resources around collaboration between the general public, artists/humanists, research scientists, and other technologists.
The event series starts with a workshare/workshop on March 19, 6:00 to 8:30 pm in building E15, dinner provided. We want to start building a resource repo for a Collaboration Starter Kit around machine vision projects. The aim is to build a strong base of questions, resources, and conversation starters towards an on-site installation at the Media in Transition conference in May. Our first workshare/workshop will provide an opportunity to meet and collaborate with students and affiliates from departments across campus, including Comparative Media Studies, Art Culture and Technology, and the Media Lab.
The exact topic will be flexible depending on interest, but we are coming to the table with an emphasis on artistic applications, environmental impact, ethics, surveillance, and accessibility. We aim for participants to walk away with ideas about how to collaborate with others outside their discipline to explore these topics in their own work.
If you have related projects/ideas you would be willing to discuss/workshop at any of these events, are interested in collaborating on a computer vision installation, or are generally interested in conversation around these topics—and can make it to the first meeting—please let us know.
RSVP to machinevisions-contact@mit.edu

Civic Arts Series, "Gaming the Iron Curtain: Computer Games in Communist Czechoslovakia as Entertainment and Activism"
2019-03-20 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 4, Room 270, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Jaroslav Švelch, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Bergen
Based on the recent book Gaming the Iron Curtain, this lecture will outline the idiosyncratic and surprising ways in which computer hobbyists in Cold War era Czechoslovakia challenged the power of the oppressive political regime and harnessed early microcomputer technology for both entertainment and activism. In the 1970s and 1980s, Czechoslovak authorities treated computer and information technologies as an industrial resource rather than a social or cultural phenomenon. While dismissing the importance of home computing and digital entertainment, they sponsored paramilitary computer clubs whose ostensible goal was to train expert cadres for the army and the centrally planned economy. But these clubs soon became a largely apolitical, interconnected enthusiast network, where two forms of tactical resistance could be identified. First, the clubs offered an alternative spaces of communal hobby activity, partially independent of the oppression experienced at work or at school. The club members’ ambitious DIY projects often substituted for the deficiencies of the state-controlled computer industry. Hobbyists not only built joysticks and programmed games, but also introduced new standards for data storage and ran large-scale bottom-up education programs. Second, especially in the late 1980s, local authors started making games that were openly subversive. Several anti-regime text adventure games were made in 1988 and 1989, including The Adventures of Indiana Jones on Wenceslas Square, January 16, 1989, which pitted the iconic Western hero against riot police during an anti-regime demonstration. These games rank among the world’s earliest examples of activist computer games.
About Jaroslav Švelch
Jaroslav Švelch is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bergen and assistant professor at Charles University, Prague. He is the author of the monograph Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games (MIT Press, 2018). He has published research on history and theory of computer games, on humor in games and social media, and on the Grammar Nazi phenomenon. His work has been published in journals including New Media & Society, International Journal of Communication, or Game Studies, and in anthologies published by Oxford University Press, Bloomsbury and others. He is currently researching history, theory, and reception of monsters in games.

The Battle of Algiers as Ghost Archive: Specters of a Muslim International
2019-04-03 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 4, Room 270, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
The Battle of Algiers, a 1966 film that poetically captures Algerian resistance to French colonial occupation, is widely considered one of the greatest films of all time, having influenced leftist and anti-colonial struggles from the Palestine Liberation Organization, to the Black Panther Party and the Irish Republican Army amongst others. But the film is more relevant and urgent than ever in the current “War on Terror” – having been screened by the Pentagon in 2003 and taught in Army war colleges as a blueprint for U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine. This talk will examine the film as a “ghost archive” of competing narratives, a battleground over the meaning and memory of decolonization and Western power, and a site for challenging the current imperial consensus. As the “War on Terror” expands and the threat of the Muslim looms, the films’ afterlives reveal it to be more than an artifact of the past but rather a prophetic testament to the present and a cautionary tale of an imperial future, as perpetual war has been declared on permanent unrest.
Co-Sponsored by Global Studies & Languages’ French Program.
About Sohail Daulatzai
Sohail Daulatzai, author and founder of Razor Step
Sohail Daulatzai’s is the founder of Razor Step, an L.A. based media lab. His work includes scholarship, essay, short film/video/installation and the curatorial. He is the author and co/editor of several books, including of Fifty Years of “The Battle of Algiers”: Past as Prologue; Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America; With Stones in Our Hands: Writings on Muslims, Racism and Empire; Return of the Mecca: The Art of Islam and Hip-Hop; and Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas’s Illmatic. He is the curator of the celebrated exhibit Return of the Mecca: The Art of Islam and Hip-Hop and Histories Absolved: Revolutionary Cuban Poster Art and the Muslim International. His video/installation work includes short film essay pieces with Yasiin Bey, a ciné-geography with Zack de la Rocha, as well as an installation piece entitled cas·bah /ˈkazˌbä/noun, 1. A place of confinement for the natives, yet reclaimed. He wrote liner notes for the Sony Legacy Recordings Release of the 20th Anniversary Deluxe Box Set of Rage Against the Machine’s self titled debut album, the liner notes for the DVD release of Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme, the centerpiece in the museum catalog Movement: Hip-Hop in L.A., 1980’s – Now, as well as an essay in iconic photographer Jamel Shabazz’s retrospective Pieces of a Man. His other writings have appeared in Artbound, The Nation, Counterpunch, Al Jazeera, Souls, and Wax Poetics, amongst others. He teaches in Film and Media Studies, African American Studies, and Global Middle East Studies at the University of California, Irvine. More of his work can be found at openedveins.com.

Civic Arts Series: “Thumbs Type and Swipe” featuring DIS's Lauren Boyle
2019-04-10 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 4, Room 270, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Lauren Boyle – Illustration by Mauricio Cordero
Introduction by Amy Rosenblum Martín, Independent Curator and Educator, Guggenheim

DIS (est. 2010) is a New York-based collective composed of Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso, and David Toro. Its cultural interventions are manifest across a range of media and platforms, from site-specific museum and gallery exhibitions to ongoing online projects.
In 2018 the collective transitioned platforms from an online magazine, dismagazine.com, to a video streaming edutainment platform, dis.art, narrowing in on the future of education and entertainment.
DIS Magazine (2010-2017); DISimages (2013), DISown (2014), Curators of the 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, The Present in Drag (2016); DIS.art (2018–); Exhibited and organized shows at the de Young Museum, San Francisco; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg; Baltimore Museum of Art; and Project Native Informant, London. DIS has also been included in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Museum of Modern Art, and the New Museum all in New York; and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; ICA Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, among others.
The material presented by DIS today is the result of a change in attitude towards the present and aims to meet the demands of contemporary social, political, and economic complexity at eye level.

Introducer Amy Rosenblum Martín is a bilingual (English/Spanish) curator of contemporary art, committed to equity and community engagement. Formerly a staff curator at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (when it was MAM) and The Bronx Museum, she has also organized exhibitions, written and/or lectured independently for la Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, MoMA, The Metropolitan, MACBA in Barcelona, the Reina Sofía, and Kunsthaus Bregenz as well as the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum. Her 20 years of interdepartmental museum work include 10 years at the Guggenheim. Rosenblum Martín’s expertise is in Latin America, focusing on transhistorical connections among Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Caracas, Havana, Miami, and New York.
She has worked with Janine Antoni, Lothar Baumgarten, Guy Ben-Ner, Janet Cardiff, Eloísa Cartonera, Consuelo Castañeda, Lygia Clark, Willie Cole, Jeannette Ehlers, Teresita Fernández, Naomi Fisher, Marlon Griffith, Lucio Fontana, Dara Friedman, Luis Gispert, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Adler Guerrier, Ann Hamilton, Quisqueya Henríquez, Leslie Hewitt, Nadia Huggins, Deborah Jack, Seydou Keita, Gyula Kosice, Matthieu Laurette, Miguel Luciano, Gordon Matta-Clark, Ana Mendieta, Antoni Miralda, Marisa Morán Jahn, Glexis Novoa, Hélio Oiticica, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Manuel Piña, Miguel Angel Ríos, Bert Rodriguez, Marco Roso, Nancy Rubins, George Sánchez-Calderón, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Tomás Saraceno, Karin Schneider, Regina Silveira, Lorna Simpson, Valeska Soares, Javier Tellez, Joaquín Torres García, and Fred Wilson, among many other remarkable artists.

Civic Arts Series, "Do-it Yourself Cinema: Portable Film Projectors as Media History"
2019-04-17 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 4, Room 270, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Haidee WassonIllustration by Mauricio Cordero
Hosted with MIT Arts, Culture, and Technology and The Boston Cinema/Media Seminar.
Introduction by Lisa Parks, Professor, CMS/W
Haidee Wasson’s talk will explore the long and vibrant place of portable film devices in the history of small media, repositioning the ‘movie theatre’ as the singular or even central figuration of film presentation and viewing. From its earliest days, film was – in a sense – born portable. Yet, our attention to and affection for the movie theater has obscured our view to the parallel and paradigmatic development of a far more numerous and arguably more significant development: the international, post-war proliferation of portable projectors. These small devices were used widely and for a sizable range of purposes: political, industrial, artistic, cultural. They fundamentally changed the conditions in which films could be seen — and ultimately imagined — as complex projected, often interactive and highly applied, forms. Drawn from a book-length study, this paper will highlight the productivity of “portability” as a concept and practice for opening up our understanding of film history as media history, identifying key insights that expand our understanding of what cinema has long been, a highly iterative media form.
Haidee Wasson is Professor of Film and Media in the School of Cinema, Concordia University, Montreal. She is author or editor of four books, including the award-winning Museum Movies, Inventing Film Studies (with Lee Grieveson) Useful Cinema (with Charles Acland) and Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex (with Lee Grieveson). She is the founder of Fieldnotes, an oral history project on the history of film and media studies, and the recent recipient of the Distinguished Service Award, Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Her current research investigates the design and expansive use of film projectors by industrial, military and government sectors, exploring the transformation of cinema from an entertainment machine into a highly diversified display and performance device.

POSTPONED: “No Yankee Rule for Us”: Annexation Rumors and the Interwar Circum-Caribbean Black Press
2019-05-01 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 4, Room 270, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
We hope to reschedule this event for the 2019/2020 academic year.

Reena N. GoldthreeAssistant Professor of African American StudiesPrinceton University
In the aftermath of World War I, rumors that the United States was planning to annex the islands of the British West Indies swept across the Caribbean, sparking panics in Trinidad, Jamaica, Barbados, Grenada, and elsewhere. Annexation rumors were transmitted by sailors and migrants as well as by the cosmopolitan circum-Caribbean black press, which reprinted stories from throughout the Americas. In this talk, Reena N. Goldthree, Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, examines how Caribbean newspapers–published in the islands and in the diaspora–both facilitated the spread of annexation rumors and provided a crucial platform for West Indians to challenge U.S. imperial expansion.

Media in Transition 10: A Reprise – Democracy and Digital Media
2019-05-17 - 2019-05-18 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Save the date! An official call for papers will be distributed in early September 2018.
In 1998, MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program held the first Media in Transition (MiT) conference and inaugurated a related book series. Research from that first MiT conference appeared in Democracy and New Media, Jenkins & Thorburn, eds., (MIT Press, 2003). Now, twenty years later, we are organizing the 10th iteration of the event. Much has changed over these two decades, but the theme “democracy and digital media” is as urgent as ever. Twenty years ago there was no Facebook, Twitter, or Netflix. iPhones and Samsung Galaxies had not yet hit the shelves. And Siri and Alexa were still in development. Since 1998, media have undergone major transition. We have witnessed a shift from Napster to Spotify, from Web 1.0 to 2.0, from console games to Twitch TV, and beyond. We have experienced the rise of social media, civic media, algorithmic cultures, and have seen ever greater concentration of media ownership. The events of 9/11 catalyzed intensified state surveillance and privatized security using various media technologies. Undergirding these shifts have been major transformations in global media infrastructure, the platformization of the Internet, and the ubiquity of themobile phone.
In the US, we also have seen changes in the news ecosystem with the likes of ProPublica and community engagement journalism. At the same time, public trust in media has dropped from 55% in 1998 to 32% in 2016, according to Pew. For better and worse, a growth of interest in media ritual and a decline in the more familiar transmission paradigm is underway. Given such changes concepts of participation, trust, and democracy are increasingly fraught, essential, and powerfully repositioned. How will our news media look and sound in the next decade? What can we learn from news media of the past? What can international perspectives reveal about the variability and fluidity of media landscapes?
We are interested in how these issues play out across media, whether as represented in television series and films, or enacted in rule set and player interactions in games, or enabled in community media, social media, and talk radio. We welcome research that considers these issues in public media and commercial media, with individual users and collective stakeholders, across media infrastructures and media texts, and embedded in various historical eras or cultural settings.

Christopher Weaver, “Amplius Ludo, Beyond the Horizon”
2019-09-12 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Christopher Weaver
While the appeal of games may be universal and satisfy our innate desire to play, the powerful dynamics that govern our behavior within games is even more interesting than the play itself. Can we broaden our understanding of play mechanisms by applying the subliminal mechanics of play beyond games? Join Christopher Weaver, Founder of Bethesda Softworks, who teaches engineering and computational media respectively at MIT and Wesleyan, as he explores these important issues in a lecture entitled “Amplius Ludo, Beyond the Horizon”. Prof. Weaver will discuss how games work and why they are such potent tools in areas as disparate as military simulation, childhood education, and medicine.
Christopher Weaver is Research Scientist and Lecturer, MIT Comparative Media Studies, Visiting Scientist and Lecturer, MIT Microphotonics Center and Distinguished Professor of Computational Media at Wesleyan University.
Weaver received his SM from MIT and was the initial Daltry Scholar at Wesleyan University, where he earned dual Masters Degrees in Japanese and Computer Science and a CAS Doctoral Degree in Japanese and Physics. The former Director of Technology Forecasting for ABC and Chief Engineer to the Subcommittee on Communications for the US Congress, Weaver founded Bethesda Softworks, and developed a physics-based, realtime sports engine used to create the original John Madden Football for Electronic Arts. Bethesda is well known for The Elder Scrolls role-playing series of which Skyrim was the latest major installment. An adviser to both government and industry, Weaver holds patents in interactive media, security, and telecommunications engineering.

Ian Condry, “Sound, Learning and Democracy: The Curvature of Social Space-Time through Japanese Music, from Underground Techno to Pop Idols”
2019-09-19 17:00 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Professor Ian Condry, cultural anthropologist in MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing
The talk will explore contemporary Japanese music, with a comparison of diverse examples, such as female Japanese rappers, underground techno festivals, the virtual idol Hatsune Miku, and the pop idol group AKB48. How can music help us understand the curvature of social space-time? What does this mean for our understanding of society, culture, and media?
Ian Condry is a cultural anthropologist in the department of Comparative Media Studies/Writing at MIT, where he has taught since 2002. He is the author of two books, Hip-Hop Japan and The Soul of Anime, both of which have been translated into Japanese. He organizes the MIT/Harvard Cool Japan research project and a new initiative called Dissolve Music,which brings together musicians, sound artists, technologists and educators to use audio experiences to dissolve the structures of inequality.

Nick Montfort, “Poet/Programmers, Artist/Programmers, and Scholar/Programmers: What and Who Are They?”
2019-09-26 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Nick Montfort, Professor of Digital Media at MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Computer programming is a general-purpose way of using computation. It can be instrumental (oriented toward a predefined end, as with the development of well-specified apps and Web services) or exploratory (used for artistic work and intellectual inquiry). Professor Nick Monfort’s emphasis in this talk, as in his own work, is on exploratory programming, that type of programming which can be used as part of a creative or scholarly methodology. He will say a bit about his own work but will use much of the discussion to survey how many other poet/programmers, artist/programmers, and scholar/programmers are creating radical new work and uncovering new insights.
Nick Montfort is Professor of Digital Media at Comparative Media Studies/Writing. He develops computational poetry and art and has participated in dozens of literary and academic collaborations. Recent books include The Future and Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities (MIT Press) and several books of computational poetry: Hard West Turn, The Truelist, #!, the collaboration 2×6, and Autopia. He has worked to contribute to platform studies, critical code studies, and electronic literature.

Helen Elaine Lee: "Pomegranate"
2019-10-03 17:00 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Professor Helen Elaine Lee
At this week’s colloquium, Helen Elaine Lee reads from the manuscript of her novel, Pomegranate, about a recovering addict who is getting out of prison and trying to stay clean, regain custody of her children, and choose life. Professor Lee, who teaches writing in Comparative Media Studies/Writing, is also Director of MIT’s Program in Women’s & Gender Studies. She is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. Her first novel, The Serpent’s Gift, was published by Atheneum and her second novel, Water Marked, was published by Scribner. Her short story “Blood Knot” appeared in the spring 2017 issue of Ploughshares and the story “Lesser Crimes” appeared in the Winter 2016 issue of Callaloo. She recently finished The Unlocked Room, a novel about a group of people who are incarcerated in two neighboring U.S. prisons and the woman who comes to teach them poetry as she searches for her lost brother.

Design and Semantics of Form and Movement
2019-10-09 - 2019-10-11 | Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States

Anushka Shah, “How Entertainment Can Help Fix the System”
2019-10-10 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Anushka Shah, founder of Civic Studios and the Civic Entertainment project at the Center for Civic Media, MIT Media Lab.
Around the world, citizens are saying the system is broken. If it’s education and schools one day, it’s healthcare the next. Our trust in politics and public institutions is falling globally, and our confidence in the ability to solve problems around us is teetering.
Can entertainment and pop culture be a way out? Can films, television shows, and digital content become spaces to teach us how to fix our systems? Can we create influential media that changes how we talk about identity, social justice, public institutions, and citizen power?
In this talk, Anushka Shah, founder of the production house Civic Studios and the Civic Entertainment project at the MIT Media Lab, explores how entertainment can provide alternate narratives of citizen participation.
Shah’s Civic Entertainment project explores the intersection of civic participation with film, television, radio, theatre and digital entertainment. The project focuses on researching the media effects of fiction towards thought and behavior change, explores how methods of social change available to citizens can be best represented in entertainment media, and investigates the representation of protest and activism in current popular culture.
Her production firm Civic Studios focuses on creating such civic entertainment content for Indian audiences. The aim of the content is to empower audiences by addressing the lack of trust in public institutions, knowledge of government and democratic systems, and increasing self-efficacy to participate in change as a citizen.
Originally from Mumbai, India, Anushka divides her time between Mumbai, Boston, and Chicago. She has a background in applied statistics and digital text analysis, and has also previously worked with non-profits and political parties in India.

Vivek Bald, “If I Could Reach the Border...”
2019-10-17 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Vivek Bald, filmmaker and Associate Professor of Writing and Digital Media
Vivek Bald, Associate Professor of Writing and Digital Media, will read from a new essay that uses a teenage encounter with police and the justice system to explore questions of immigrant acceptability, racialization, and the South Asians American embrace of model minority status. He will also provide an update on his documentary film, In Search of Bengali Harlem, recently funded by the PBS-affiliated Center for Asian American Media, and currently being edited by Comparative Media Studies master’s alum, Beyza Boyacioglu. Between the essay and film, Bald will reflect on South Asian American experiences of multi-racial identity and histories of cross-racial community-making.
Bald is a scholar, writer, and documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. He is the author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013), and co-editor, with Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, and Manu Vimalassery of The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013).

William Uricchio, “Why Co-Create? And Why Now? Reports from A Field Study”
2019-10-24 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
William Uricchio, Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab
Co-Creation is picking up steam as a claim, aspiration, and buzz-word du jour. But what is and why does it matter? Drawing on a just-released field study, Collective Wisdom, this session will address those questions and explore the method’s implications for just and equitable creation. It will consider co-creation in the arts with communities, across disciplines and organizations, and with non-humans (both biological and AI systems), calling out precedents and best practices in a broad array of communities, including historically marginalized groups. What are the trends, opportunities, and challenges bound up in co-creation and its various deployments, and why it is increasingly urgent in our time?
William Uricchio is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where he is also founder and Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab and Principal Investigator of the Co-Creation Studio. He, together with Katerina Cizek, authored Collective Wisdom — a field study on co-creation. His current research considers co-creation, documentary, and the epistemological crisis that characterizes our time.

Lucy Suchman, “Artificial Intelligence & Modern Warfare”
2019-11-07 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Lucy Suchman, Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University
In June of 2018, following a campaign initiated by activist employees within the company, Google announced its intention not to renew a US Defense Department contract for Project Maven, an initiative to automate the identification of military targets based on drone video footage. Defendants of the program argued that that it would increase the efficiency and effectiveness of US drone operations, not least by enabling more accurate recognition of those who are the program’s legitimate targets and, by implication, sparing the lives of noncombatants. But this promise begs a more fundamental question: What relations of reciprocal familiarity does recognition presuppose? And in the absence of those relations, what schemas of categorization inform our readings of the Other? The focus of a growing body of scholarship, this question haunts not only US military operations but an expanding array of technologies of social sorting. Understood as apparatuses of recognition (Barad 2007: 171), Project Maven and the US program of targeted killing are implicated in perpetuating the very architectures of enmity that they take as their necessitating conditions. Taking any apparatus for the identification of those who comprise legitimate targets for the use of violent force as problematic, this talk joins a growing body of scholarship on the technopolitical logics that underpin an increasingly violent landscape of institutions, infrastructures and actions, promising protection to some but arguably contributing to our collective insecurity. Lucy Suchman’s concern is with the asymmetric distributions of sociotechnologies of (in)security, their deadly and injurious effects, and the legal, ethical, and moral questions that haunt their operations. She closes with some thoughts on how we might interrupt the workings of these apparatuses, in the service of wider movements for social justice.
Lucy Suchman is a Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, in the United Kingdom.

2019 Comparative Media Studies Graduate Admissions Information Session
2019-11-14 14:00 - 16:00 | MIT Building E51, Room 095, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA
Please RSVP. Meet faculty and research managers, learn about the program, and ask questions. The event is twofold: there will be a presentation and Q&A from 2-4pm. In addition, attendees are invited to attend that day’s Colloquium, which will feature CMS/W Head Eric Klopfer presenting on a set of “Participatory Simulations”: mobile collaborative systems-based games.
Those who can’t attend in person are welcome to follow the live stream on our YouTube channel (no registration required): https://www.youtube.com/c/MITComparativeMediaStudiesWriting.

Eric Klopfer, “Design Based Research on Participatory Simulations”
2019-11-14 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Professor Eric Klopfer
An important part of the work done at the The Education Arcade is based on a process of Design Based Research (DBR). In DBR, we design products that are meant to fill real classroom needs and then iteratively test and refine them. Eric Klopfer and The Education Arcade are currently working on a set of “Participatory Simulations”: mobile collaborative systems-based games.
During this talk, attendees will have a chance to play a couple of these games and participate in a design discussion with one of the games that is currently in progress.
Professor Klopfer, currently Head of Comparative Media Studies/Writing, is Director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade at MIT. He is also a co-faculty director for MIT’s J-WEL World Education Lab.

Paloma Duong, “Portable Postsocialisms [postsocialismos de bolsillo]”
2019-11-21 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Paloma Duong, Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies
How do Cuban culture and media register the defining aspects of its transformation at the turn of the 21st century: the expansion of transnational capitalist markets, the proliferation of digital media, and the simultaneous reorganization of its official state ideology and its social imaginaries? This talk will explore competing narratives about Cuba’s postsocialist moment across a range of cultural and media practices—from music to memes—inviting us to consider whether we can continue to frame Cuba as a regional exception. We will also examine how revisiting our assumptions about digital media and cultural agency, both in Cuba and in the broader hemispheric context, can speak to the dreams and demands of constituencies that operate between, beneath, and beyond the pressures of global markets and the nation-state.
Paloma Duong is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies at MIT. At the intersection of cultural studies, media theory, and political philosophy, Paloma researches and teaches modern and contemporary Latin American culture. She works with social texts and emergent media cultures that speak to the exercise of cultural agencies and the formation of political subjectivity. She is currently writing Portable Postsocialisms: Culture and Media in 21st century Cuba, a book-length study of Cuba’s changing mediascape and an inquiry on the postsocialist condition and its contexts. Her articles have been published in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Art Margins, and Cuban Counterpoints: Public Scholarship about a Changing Cuba.

T.L. Taylor, “Play as Transformative Work”
2019-12-05 17:00 | MIT Building E15, Room 318 (Common Area), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
T.L. Taylor, Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT
Professor of Comparative Media Studies T.L. Taylor will explore the ways game live streamers are transforming their otherwise private play into public entertainment. She will focus on this new form of creative labor and offer a challenge to current models of IP and fandom, suggesting the work of professional live streamers is not easily captured by non-commercial frameworks nor simple work/play dichotomies.
T.L. Taylor is Professor of Comparative Media Studies and co-founder and Director of Research for AnyKey, an organization dedicated to supporting and developing fair and inclusive esports. She is a qualitative sociologist who has focused on internet and game studies for over two decades. Dr. Taylor’s research explores the interrelations between culture and technology in online leisure environments. Her book Raising the Stakes: E-Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming (MIT Press, 2012) chronicles the rise of esports and professional computer gaming. Her book about game live streaming – Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming (Princeton University Press) – is now out and is the first of its kind to chronicle this emerging media space.

Imagining Prototypes: Writing about Design
2020-01-09 13:00 - 15:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 169, Access Via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Nora Jackson, Karen Pepper
Enrollment: Limited: Advance sign-up required
Sign-up by 01/03
Limited to 10 participants
Attendance: Participants must attend all sessions
An activity-based writing workshop for anyone who builds anything at MIT and beyond, or who dreams of doing so. The workshop will introduce techniques in writing for designers who rely on written or oral communication to generate interest in a design idea or prototype.
Thursday 1/9 from 1-3 pm: discussion of a pre-circulated reading packet with design writing samples; come to the workshop with an object/prototype in mind that you will write about by Mon 1/13
Monday 1/13 from 1-3 pm: workshop participants present and peer review their design write-ups

Contact: norajack@mit.edu and kpepper@mit.edu
Sponsor(s): Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication, Comparative Media Studies/Writing, Comparative Media Studies
Contact: Nora Jackson, norajack@mit.edu

Session 1

Jan/09
Thu
01:00PM-03:00PM
56-169

discussion of a pre-circulated reading packet with design writing samples; come to the workshop with an object/prototype in mind that you will write about by Mon 1/13
Nora Jackson, Karen Pepper

Session 2

Jan/13
Mon
01:00PM-03:00PM
56-169

workshop participants present and peer review their design write-ups
Nora Jackson, Karen Pepper

DJ History and Technology
2020-01-10 14:00 - 16:00 | MIT Building E15, Room 335, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
