MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

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

Media in Transition 6: stone and papyrus, storage and transmission
2009-04-24 - 2009-04-26 | MIT Building E51, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Media in Transition 6: stone and papyrus, storage and transmission
In his seminal essay “The Bias of Communication” Harold Innis distinguishes between time-based and space-based media.Time-based media such as stone or clay, Innis agues, can be seen as durable, while space-based media such as paper or papyrus can be understood as portable, more fragile than stone but more powerful because capable of transmission, diffusion, connections across space.
Speculating on this distinction, Innis develops an account of civilization grounded in the ways in which media forms shape trade, religion, government, economic and social structures, and the arts. Our current era of prolonged and profound transition is surely as media-driven as the historical cultures Innis describes.
His division between the durable and the portable is perhaps problematic in the age of the computer, but similar tensions define our contemporary situation. Digital communications have increased exponentially the speed with which information circulates. Moore’s Law continues to hold, and with it a doubling of memory capacity every two years; we are poised to reach transmission speeds of 100 terabits per second, or something akin to transmitting the entire printed contents of the Library of Congress in under five seconds.
Such developments are simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. They profoundly challenge efforts to maintain access to the vast printed and audio-visual inheritance of analog culture as well as efforts to understand and preserve the immense, enlarging universe of text, image and sound available in cyberspace. What are the implications of these trends for historians who seek to understand the place of media in our own culture?
What challenges confront librarians and archivists who must supervise the migration of print culture to digital formats and who must also find ways to preserve and catalogue the vast and increasing range of words and images generated by new technologies? How are shifts in distribution and circulation affecting the stories we tell, the art we produce, the social structures and policies we construct?
What are the implications of this tension between storage and transmission for education, for individual and national identities, for notions of what is public and what is private? We invite papers from scholars, journalists, media creators, teachers, writers and visual artists on these broad themes. Potential topics include:

The digital archive
The future of libraries and museums
The past and future of the book
Mobile media
Historical systems of communication
Media in the developing world
Social networks
Mapping media flows
Approaches to media history
Education and the changing media environment
New forms of storytelling and expression
Location-based entertainment
Hyperlocal media and civic engagement
New modes of circulation and distribution
The transformation of television — from broadcast to download
Cosmopolitanism backlashes against media change
Virtual worlds and digital tourism
The continuity principle: what endures or resists digital transformation?
The fate of reading

MIT European Short Film Festival 2009
2009-04-17 - 2009-04-19 | MIT Building 10, Room 250, 222 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
MIT’s European Short Film Festival — now in its 5th year — offers a unique glimpse into the most recent short-film productions from Europe, with a special focus on productions from European film schools and award-winning films from recent Festivals in Europe.

Chris Claremont: "Opening Doors, Building Worlds"
2009-04-16 17:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Chris Claremont is best known for his 17 year unbroken run on the X-Men comic series — a feat in world building that has supported many uses, from comics to movies to video games and more. Now Chris is returning to that world, with a new comics series titled X-Men Forever. This time, the rules are different. Claremont will address thoughts and considerations that go into building a world that can support years of use, and variations. How has the concept of world-building changed over time? What is the purpose of continuity? Multiplicity? How to take into account growth and risk, and play outside the rules. Questions and answers to follow.

MIT European Short Film Festival 2008
2009-04-11 - 2009-04-13 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 123, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
MIT’s 4th European Short Film Festival offers a unique glimpse into the most recent short-film productions from Europe, with a special focus on productions from European film schools and award-winning films from recent Festivals in Europe.
The MIT European Short Film Festival caters to a diverse audience drawn from many local universities and a rich mix of international communities from the larger Boston area. The festival is co-sponsored by a variety of MIT departments and European cultural institutions located in Boston.
Topics for this year’s festival include: Migration, Anxiety, Media Culture, Food (Culture), Toys and Games.
All films will be shown in Room 32-123 (Stata Center), all programs start at 7:00 pm.
Free Admission — All films with English subtitles.
The Festival is co-sponsored by:

The Foreign Languages and Literatures Section (MIT)
The Comparative Media Studies Program (MIT)
The Goethe-Institute, Boston

The Festival is presented in conjunction with Dr. Kurt Fendt’s course “20th/21st Century German Literature – Grenzgänge” (21F.416)
For further information please visit http://web.mit.edu/shortfilm/ or contact the Festival Team: <mitshortfilm@mit.edu>

Authorship, Appropriation, and the Fluid Text: Versions of the Law
2009-03-19 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
A fluid text is any work that exists in multiple versions. What are the ethics and legality in the creation, sharing, and ownership of textual versions? What are the boundaries of textual appropriation? How does technology abet appropriation; how might it assist in the useful designation of boundaries? Is the law keeping up?
Hofstra University professor John Bryant explores the larger applications of the notion of fluid text to culture, and in particular identity formation in a multicultural democracy. Wendy Seltzer is a Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and is a visiting professor at American University. She founded and leads the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, helping Internet users to understand their rights in response to cease-and-desist threats, and to research the effects of these threats on free expression.

Gendering Robots: Posthuman Sexism in Japan
2009-03-05 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Jennifer Roberston
In humans, gender–femininity, masculinity–is an array of performed behaviors, from dressing in certain clothes to walking and talking in certain ways. These behaviors are both socially and historically shaped, but are also contingent upon many situational influences, including individual choices. Female and male bodies alike can perform a variety of femininities and masculinities. What can human gender(ed) practices and performances tell us about how humanoid robots are gendered, and vice versa? Jennifer Roberston explores and interrogates the gendering of humanoid robots manufactured today in Japan for use in the home and workplace. She shows that Japanese roboticists assign gender to their creations based on rigid assumptions about female and male sex and gender roles. Thus, humanoid robots can productively be understood as the vanguard of a “posthuman sexism,” and are being developed in a socio-political climate of reactionary conservatism.
Co-Sponsored by Cool Japan and Foreign Languages and Literature.

Politics and Popular Culture
2009-02-26 17:00 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Robert Putnam has suggested that the political consciousness and civic engagement of the post- World War II generation may have taken shape in bowling alleys and other spaces where community members gathered. Might the political consciousness of the new generation be taking shape in and around popular culture? Are we seeing a blurring of the roles of citizen and consumer? Is this fusion between entertainment and news a good or a bad thing? What links exist between our cultural and our political preferences? How are activists and political leaders utilizing metaphors from popular culture as resources to mobilize their supporters? Is it possible that aspects of our popular culture may generate utopian visions that fuel political change? These and other questions will be explored by panelists Johanna Blakley, deputy director of the Norman Lear Center at USC; David Carr, media and culture writer for the New York Times; and Stephen Duncombe, associate professor at NYU and author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. Henry Jenkins will moderate.

Curveship: Interactive Fiction + Interactive Narration
2009-02-20 12:00 | GAMBIT Game Lab, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Interactive fiction (often called "IF") is a venerable, well-defined category of computer programs that includes the canonical Adventure and Zork as well as some work by established literary authors and recent independent developers. These programs are often correctly referred to as games, but they can also be rich forms of text-based computer simulation, dialog systems, and examples of literary art.
Unlike many other new media forms, interactive fiction computationally simulates a world underlying the textual exchange between computer and user. Theorists of narrative have long distinguished between the level of underlying content or story (which can usefully be seen as corresponding to the simulated world in interactive fiction) and that of expression or discourse (corresponding to the textual exchange between computer and user).
While IF development systems have offered a great deal of power and flexibility to author/programmers, they have not systematically distinguished between the telling and what is told. Developers have not been able to use separate modules to control the content and expression levels independently, so there has been no easy, general way to control narrative style and create variation in the narrative discourse.
Nick Montfort will discuss a new interactive fiction system, called Curveship, which draws on narrative theory and computational linguistics to allow the transformation of the narrating.
Nick Montfort is Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Program in Writing & Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nick is on leave Spring 2009. More information at http://nickm.com

Identity-as-Place: Fictive Ethnicities in Online Games & Virtual Worlds
2009-02-05 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Celia Pearce
This talk, with Celia Pearce, Asst. Professor of Digital Media at Georgia Tech and Director and the Emergent Game Group and Experimental Game Lab, explores the connection of identity to virtual place, referencing in particular anthropology, humanist and socio-geography and Internet studies to look at the construction and performance of “fictive ethnicity” tied to a specific, though virtual and fictional, locality. To illustrate, Pearce will use the example of the Uru Diaspora, a game community from the defunct massively multiplayer game Uru: Ages Beyond Myst (based on the Myst series), which immigrated into other games and virtual worlds, adopting the collective fictive ethnicity of “Uru Refugees”, and referring to Uru as their “homeland”.

Is This On? (Learn To Be a College DJ)
2009-01-28 18:00 | MIT Building 50, Room 030, 142 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Checking levels, making a segue, cueing vinyl (vinyl-what’s that?).
Get to know your campus radio station (WMBR) as DJ Generoso teaches you various skills of doing a radio show. Then, learn some history of WMBR (the first punk rock radio show in the USA), have a tour of the station and obtain membership information.
Freshly baked cookies and milk will be provided because Andy would’ve wanted it that way.

19th Annual Salute to Dr. Seuss
2009-01-26 19:00 - 21:00 | MIT Building 6, Room 120, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Gather around, boys and girls of all ages, for a celebration of the sublime and wacky world of Doctor Seuss. You will hear Prof. Henry Jenkins read from his works and talk about Seuss’s relationship to Modern Art and popular culture. We will also screen his remarkable live action feature film, 5000 Fingers of Dr. T. An MIT Tradition marches forward. No need to enroll! All are welcome.

A short, practical course on Focus Group Research in Academic and Corporate Settings: The Whys and Hows
2009-01-19 14:00 - 16:00 | MIT Building 26, Room 142, 60 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Instructor: Cheryl K. Olson, Sc.D., who is co-director of the Center for Mental Health and Media at MGH, and splits her time between academic research and real-world consulting. She’ll use her own focus group studies with teens and parents about video games as teaching examples.
Content includes:

When and why to consider focus groups (qualitative studies) in academic or corporate research.
Using focus groups for media research.
Planning your research (from research questions to human subjects paperwork).
Designing a focus group protocol (questions and procedures).
Budgets and practical concerns.
Recruiting participants.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 -- Jason and Generoso Fav Episodes
2009-01-18 19:00 | MIT Building 6, Room 120, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Comparative Media Studies’ Jason Begy and Generoso Fierro will be showing their favorite episodes and clips of Mystery Science Theater 3000. The Sunday session is FREE.

Experience Design Workshop: Taught by Razorfish
2009-01-12 - 2009-01-14 | MIT Building 1, Room 134, 33 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Nadya Direkova MIT Alum, Senior Information Architect, Razorfish; Generoso Fierro
Buying e-tickets, downloading a song, chatting with friends on Facebook… you live through digital experiences every day. We invite you to learn how these experiences can be designed so that you can easily find and do what you want. Whether you are an engineer or designer, this course will challenge you to start work by studying users – not technology – first. We’ll talk about user personas, their moment-by-moment decisions and their full lifecycle relationship with your design. In the first part of the course, we’ll present classic design practices, digital trends and analyze experiences that work well and those that don’t. In the second part, you will create a design document for a website of digital campaign. The class will end with a design competition.

Designing Serious Video Games for Autism Research and Therapy
2009-01-11 13:00 | GAMBIT Game Lab, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Matthew Belmonte
Why use video games to do science? Well, if you’ve ever participated in a psychology experiment, you probably don’t remember it as being particularly entertaining! This is bad for all concerned, the scientist isn’t going to get good data unless the subject is engaged with the task. My research group is answering this challenge by embedding experiments in a video game which we use to study autism. I’ll discuss the player-centred, event-driven design philosophy behind the game, talk about how neuroscientists and game designers work interactively to make the game relevant to people with autism spectrum conditions, and describe our goals for making the game a platform not only to measure autistic cognitive skills, but also to facilitate autistic cognitive skills by removing barriers to their expression.

GAMBIT: Videogame Company Tours
2009-01-09 - 2009-01-23 | GAMBIT Game Lab, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
GAMBIT, a collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the government of Singapore created to explore new directions for the development of games as a medium. Philip Tan, the executive director of US operations for GAMBIT will be leading tours of local video game companies to help you understand the day to day goings on of the rapidly growing video game industry.

Making Deep Games: An inspirational workshop about harnessing the power of metaphors for experience design
2009-01-08 10:00 | MIT Building N25, Room 373, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
In this workshop, attendees will learn how to become more conscious about the mechanisms of complex abstract concepts, to pin down their evasive elements, to translate them into concrete rule sets and to make them tangible via procedural metaphors. This workshop aims at demystifying complex abstract ideas such as HONOR, REGRET, LOYALTY or JUSTICE by teaching a methodology to analyse and dissect them. It is a step-by-step tutorial to foster awareness, reflection, inspiration and a systematic approach to the purposeful design of deep games.

Futures of Entertainment 3
2008-11-21 - 2008-11-22 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Futures of Entertainment 3
Futures of Entertainment is organized around a “talk-show” style model, with panelists participating in a moderated discussion. Over the last two years this produced great, thorough treatments of the subject matter, getting industry and academic speakers together but avoiding product pitches.
This year’s conference will work to bring together the themes from last year – media spreadability, audiences and value, social media, distribution – with the Consortium’s new projects as we move towards an increasingly global understanding of media convergence and content flows. Topics for this year’s panels include global distribution systems and the challenges of moving content across borders, transmedia, franchising, digital extensions and world building, comics, convergence and commerce, social media and spreadability, as well as renewed discussion about how and why to measure audience value.
Head over to the program page to see what we’ll be discussing this year.

Lev Manovich
2008-11-06 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Lev Manovich
Lev Manovich is the author of Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database, Black Box – White Cube, and The Language of New Media, which is hailed as “the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan.” He has written 90+ articles which have been reprinted over 300 times in many countries.
He is a Professor in Visual Arts Department, University of California-San Diego, a Director of the Software Studies Initiative at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CALIT2), and a Visiting Researcher at Godsmith College (London) and College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales (Sydney). He is much in demand to lecture around the world, having delivered 270+ lectures, seminars and workshops during the last 10 years.

Military Training and Compelling Experience
2008-11-03 17:00 | MIT Building E51, Room 095, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
In this lecture, Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi will talk about the various meanings of what counts as a “compelling experience” for military simulation — and how this phrase “compelling experience” can be used as a thematic marker for differentiating the present moment from cold war-era immersive simulations. Ms. Ghamari-Tabrizi is an independent scholar currently living in Altamonte Springs, Florida. She is the author of The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (Harvard University Press, 2005).
Co-sponsored by the STS Colloquium.

Comics and Social Conflict
2008-10-23 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Comics have emerged as a key means of interpreting and disseminating controversial and contested histories: Chester Brown’s Louis Riel, Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen, Joe Sacco’s Palestine, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis are just some of the works that take definitive social and political conflict as their topic. Why has historical material become so important for comics art? What unique opportunities does comics allow for critiquing and revising dominant historical narratives? These are the questions our speakers discussed, in relation to their own work and to the comics world in general.
Diana Tamblyn is writing a biography of Canadian arms trader and weapons engineer Gerald Bull; Ho Che Anderson authored King, a 3-volume biography of MLK; and Jeet Heer is a historian and a leading comics scholar.

Books and Libraries in the Digital Age with Robert Darnton
2008-10-16 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Robert Darnton
A pioneering scholar of the Enlightenment and of the history of the book, Robert Darnton is the director of the University Library and the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard. A former Rhodes Scholar and MacArthur Fellow, his books include The Business of the Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopedie, The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History, and The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France. He has written extensively on the impact of digital technologies on the culture of print and on the responsibilities of libraries in the computer age.
In this Forum, Darnton discusses the emergence of the discipline of the history of the book, the future of books and reading, and his own vision of the ways in which new and old media can reinforce each other, strengthening and transforming the world of learning.

Communications Forum: "The Campaign and the Media 1
2008-09-25 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
How have American news media responded to this historic presidential campaign? Is it true, as many have suggested, that the influence of newspapers and television has declined in the digital era? Have the media become more partisan and polarized? More preoccupied with polls and campaign strategy than with substantive issues? Has the coverage by traditional media been qualitatively different from that by online news sources? In this first of two forums on the campaign and the media, noted journalists Tom Rosenstiel, who directs the Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington D.C., and John Carroll, a local reporter and media critic who teaches at Boston University, will offer report cards on the current state of American political journalism.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Future Civic Media and the Technology and Culture Forum.

Playing with Stuff: The Material World in Performance
2008-09-18 17:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
John Bell
This presentation / lecture / infomercial examines the nature and implications of object performance both as a global cultural tradition and as a contemporary medium that dominates our culture. While performing objects traditionally include puppets, masks, icons, and other “things”, the more recent innovations of film, television, and the internet can also be seen as aspects of our need to play with stuff. In all cases, the central dynamic of this form involves a focus on the material world instead of humans. The talk will be accompanied by images from 20th-century avant-garde film and performance work. John Bell began his performance work with Bread and Puppet Theater, after which he earned a Ph.D. in theater history at Columbia University. He is a founding member of the award-winning Great Small Works theater company of Brooklyn, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, and Director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut. This spring he will be directing a “Living Newspaper”-style production about the politics of global healthcare with MIT students. His latest book, American Puppet Modernism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), examines particular moments of puppet, mask, and object theater in the United States over the past 150 years. He is a trombonist with the Somerville-based Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band, and organizer of the upcoming October 12th HONK! Festival Parade from Davis Square to Harvard Square.

The Myths and Politics of Media Violence Research
2008-09-11 17:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson
Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson present findings from their book, Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do (Simon & Schuster, 2008), including the complex ways in which video games may benefit or disadvantage children. They will also talk about myths and politics in media violence research, and how they influence the views of academics and mass media. Lawrence Kutner, Ph.D. and Cheryl K. Olson, Sc.D. are cofounders and co-directors (with Eugene Beresin, M.D.) of the Center for Mental Health and Media at Massachusetts General Hospital. They are both on the psychiatry faculty of Harvard Medical School. Kutner received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and trained at the Mayo Clinic. He’s a licensed psychologist and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. He wrote the “Parent & Child” column for the New York Times as well as five books on child development. Olson was principal investigator for a $1.5 million study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice on the effects of video games on young teenagers, which formed the basis for Grand Theft Childhood. She has a Doctor of Science degree in health and social behavior from the Harvard School of Public Health, and a postdoctoral certificate in pharmaceutical medicine from the University of Basel.

A Conversation with Junot Díaz
2008-09-05 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Junot Díaz
A conversation with Junot Díaz, regarding questions of genre and secondary world construction in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and the Caribbean, and the failure of realism as a narrative strategy to describe the deep history of the New World. Díaz is the Rudge (1948) and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at MIT. He is the author of Drown and The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the John Sargent First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

The 10th Annual CMS Media Spectacle
2008-04-28 19:00 - 22:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
An honored tradition returns on April 28th at 7PM when CMS presents the tenth annual Media Spectacle. The event, founded by Chris Pomiecko, celebrates his love for filmmaking by showcasing the finest video projects created by MIT students, staff and faculty.
Historically, the event has received submissions of every genre from experimental to documentary to narrative works created on every conceivable platform and device (mobisode anyone?). Since the dawning of YouTube and other user-generated video websites, the number of submissions has increased substantially. This endeavor has also been aided by Campus Movie Fest, a corporate-sponsored organization which invades universities internationally to teach students how to make films and supply them with the equipment to do so, all free of charge. That effort, combined with the fine video courses offered here at MIT through course 4, will certainly provide a wide array of choices to select from this year.
The event is hosted by Professor Henry Jenkins and judged by esteemed members of the CMS community as well as Cathy Pomiecko, the sister of the late CMS program administrator Chris Pomieicko. After all of this year’s selected pieces are screened, the undergraduate winner for best film will receive a cash prize and the Chris Pomiecko Trophy followed by the Michaelangelo Antonioni Award for the best non-undergraduate entry.
Submissions will be accepted until April 10th in any format (DVD preferred) with a maximum running time of 30 minutes. We also ask if you could indicate your MIT affiliation when entering. All entries may be sent to Generoso Fierro, MIT, NE25-385, 77 Masssachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139. Please direct all questions to generoso [at] mit [dot] edu.

Theatrical Science: Automata, Exhibition, and Claude Shannon's Epic Theater of Science
2008-04-28 16:00 - 18:00 | MIT Building E51, Room 095, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan
In the mid-1950s at Bell Labs, America’s wealthiest and most influential industrial research center, mathematician Claude Shannon began theorizing, writing about, and building automata. Initially conceived as laboratory playthings and thought experiments, these devices emerged as minor celebrities in 1950s science and popular culture. In this lecture, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan (Northwestern University, MIT Visiting Scholar) situates these artifacts within postwar exhibition and publicity practices at Bell Labs, which regularly re-constructed specialized research as sensual theaters for scientific play and the popular imagination. Tracing these artifacts’ migration from the laboratory to postwar television and popular press, and borrowing from the work of Bertolt Brecht, Geoghegan develops a concept of theatrical science that bridges research methods in the history of science and media studies.
Co-presented with the Program in Science, Technology and Society.

Slightly More Than Expected from a Band of Novelists: On How and Why a Group of Writers Called Wu Ming Set to Disrupt Italian (nay, European) Literature and Popular Culture (and then Came to Boston to Brag About It)
2008-04-02 17:15 - 18:00 | MA, United States
Wu Ming 1 is a founding member and representative of the Wu Ming Foundation, a collective of writers from Italy. Most members of the collective were deeply involved in the Luther Blissett Project, an international experiment in culture jamming, radical pranksterism and guerrilla mythology that ran from 1994 to 1999. During that time, a group of LBP activists wrote a controversial novel titled Q, which was published to much acclaim in 1999. In January 2000 the authors of Q founded the Wu Ming Foundation, which takes its name from a Chinese word meaning either “anonymous” or “five names” depending on how the first syllable is pronounced. The name is meant both as a tribute to dissidents (“Wu Ming” is a common byline among Chinese citizens demanding democracy and freedom of speech) and as a refusal of the celebrity-making machine which turns authors into stars.
Wu Ming’s works include 54, a novel with dozens of characters (including Cary Grant and Marshall Tito) set in 1954; the screenplay for Guido Chiesa’s movie Radio Alice (2004); and numerous “solo” novels, including Wu Ming 1’s New Thing (2004). They have also collaborated with musicians, actors, comic authors, playwrights, film-makers, graphic artists and academics in a plethora of multimedia and transmedia projects.
The group’s most recent novel, Manituana, was published in Italy in March of 2007. It is the first episode of an 18th-century pan-Atlantic trilogy which will keep them writing at least until 2012. Manituana reached as high as #4 in the Italian bestseller charts, and translation rights have been purchased by French and Spanish publishers. Manituana is also at the center of a complex transmedia project which is briefly described at http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/giap/giapdigest36.htm. All of their books are freely downloadable from their website, http://www.wumingfoundation.com.
Event open only to the MIT Community.
Funded (in part) by a Director’s Grant from the Council for the Arts at MIT.
