MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

10 Things You Won't Like About Professional Game Development
2007-04-18 17:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | MIT Building 14E, Room 304, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Matthew Weise is an MIT/Comparative Media Studies alum who has been working since his 2004 graduation in the mobile games industry.
There will be a Q & A Session with Matt Weise after the lecture.

MIT European Short Film Festival 2007
2007-04-13 - 2007-04-15 | MIT Building 10, Room 250, 222 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
MIT’s Third 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. This year’s topics are:

New Identities/Social Realities
Transformations
Mitteleuropa/Central Europe

The festival is co-sponsored by Foreign Languages and Literatures, Comparative Media Studies, and several European cultural institutions. The films for the festival are selected by a group of humanities faculty and CMS graduate students.
All films will be shown in Room 10-250, the programs start at 7:00 pm.
Free Admission – All films with English subtitles.
We look forward to seeing you at the festival.
For further information please see the festival website or contact the festival organizer, Kurt Fendt.

Evangelicals and the Media
2007-04-05 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
American evangelicals have a long history of engagement with the media, dating back to Great Awakening of the late eighteenth century. Today evangelical groups are active in all media, from the Internet and cellular telephones to print journalism, broadcasting, film, and multi-media entertainment. In this Forum, our speakers discuss the social and political impact of the evangelical movement’s use of media technologies. Gary Schneeberger is special assistant for media relations to James Dobson, founder and chairman of the evangelical group Focus on the Family (www.family.org). Diane Winston is the Knight Chair in Media and Religion in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and author of Red-Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army. The Forum will be moderated by the Rev. Amy McCreath, MIT’s Episcopal chaplain and coordinator of the Technology and Culture Forum at MIT (web.mit.edu/tac).

"This One's Gonna Be a Slobberknocker": A Q&A with WWE's "Good Ol' J.R." Jim Ross
2007-03-22 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 370, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
“Good Ol’ J.R.” Jim Ross
Jim Ross, the longtime voice of World Wrestling Entertainment, joins CMS graduate student Sam Ford to discuss the unique blend of reality and fiction in the world of American professional wrestling. Ross will talk about how WWE’s distribution across multiple media platforms creates an interesting storytelling atmosphere, and he will share experiences from his many years in the television industry as wrestling has moved from broadcast to cable and pay-per-view and now to DVD distribution, on-demand, and the Web. See Ross’s Web site at www.jrsbarbq.com.
NOTE: This is the first of two colloquia about American professional wrestling being organized this term by Sam Ford ’07. Ford is teaching a spring class on the pro wrestling industry and is a researcher for the Convergence Culture Consortium. He is a weekly columnist for the Ohio County Times-News in Hartford, Ky., and performs in pro wrestling events on occasion. A third colloquium on April 26 with Sharon Mazer will also examine aspects of wrestling.

Old World, New World: How Communities, Culture, Connectivity, and Commerce are Changing How We Create Culture, Media, Education and Politics
2007-03-15 17:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Alan Moore
Alan Moore, CEO of engagement marketing company SMLXL and co-author of Communities Dominate Brands, believes that community-based engagement initiatives and the enabling of peer-to-peer flows of communication within organizations, and those that engage with them, will replace the traditional media orthodoxies of government, management, business, media distribution and marketing.

Girls-Games-Japan: Why it is different to be a female gamer in Japan and how we can make a change in the West.
2007-03-13 17:00 | MIT Building 14E, Room 304, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Barbara Lippe
Women’s culture has existed for centuries in Japan. Today, it extensively shapes Japan’s popular culture – even its game industry. Gender-blending, androgyny and the challenging of gender roles lie at the core of specific game genres produced by and for females in Japan. Whereas in the West most professional attempts to address a larger number of female gamers and to engage a greater female workforce in the game industry have failed, Avaloop – an independent game development studio in Austria – is about to change this profoundly. By taking the global de-disneyfication into account and employing female creative leads, its game Papermint has not only already gained a large fanbase of non-traditional gamers but even manages to blend games with the notion of bourgeois “high culture”. Papermint’s success is based on its practical realisation of Barbara’s research on Japanese gaming and girl culture, as well as the game’s wholly original artistic concept created by a diverse team.
About the Speaker
Dr. Barbara Lippe is the lead artist at the Vienna-based game development studio Avaloop Ltd, currently working on Austria's first virtual world. Barbara previously worked as a character artist at the Tokyo-based design company FuriFuri Co. Her unique characters were published in the character design encyclopedia Pictoplasma by Die Gestalten Verlag. Her art has been exhibited in London, Damascus, Budapest, Seoul, Singapore and San Francisco. She was a juror for the Golden Nica Award of the Ars Electronica Festival in 2002 and a columnist for CONSOL.AT, the leading Austrian video game magazine. Recently, she has been elected into the organising committee of the Nordic Game, the largest game developers' conference in Scandinavia. Barbara holds a Master’s degree in multimedia art and a PhD in cultural studies with a doctoral dissertation on girls, video games and Japan titled "Game Boys for Play Girls!". She hosts discussions and workshops in Austria, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and the UK. Her academic and job-related interests include virtual characters, fan cultures, user-generated content, global youth scenes, leisure behaviour and gender, as well as game scenes and markets in Asia.

Many Eyes: A Site for Social Data Analysis
2007-03-08 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
While visualization is traditionally viewed as an efficient way of transferring a large amount of information from a database into an individual’s head, we believe that visualizations become far more powerful when multiple people access them for collaborative sense-making. To test this hypothesis, IBM’s Visual Communication Lab recently launched Many Eyes, a website devoted to a new social style of data analysis and visualization. Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg will discuss the design goals behind the site and provide a preliminary report on the usage patterns we have seen. Viegas is a research scientist in IBM's Visual Communication Lab where her work focuses on social and collaborative aspects of data visualization. Previous projects explored e-mail archives, newsgroup conversations, chat-room interactions, and the editing history of wiki pages. Her visualization-based artwork has been exhibited in galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and Boston. Wattenberg, also a research scientist in IBM's Visual Communication Lab, focuses on information visualization and its application to collaborative computing, journalism, and art. Wattenberg’s visualization artwork has been exhibited in venues ranging from Ars Electronica to the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Converging Media: Games, Literacy and Culture Research Fair
2007-02-22 17:00 | Stata Center, 1st Floor, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
What do Yahoo!, Shakespeare, GPS, Bullet time, Spacewar and MIT have in common?
CMS!
Yahoo! … along with MTV, GSDM, Turner Broadcasting and Fidelity with the Convergence Culture Consortium respond to the demands of a new media landscape and an empowered client base;
Shakespeare … early comics, modern dance and the citizens of Berlin are among the many topics explored in the rich multi-media data bases of MetaMedia and Repertory
GPS … is one of many technologies that we us in handheld gaming applications, all part of our exploration of computer games for education in the Education Arcade
Bullet time… and other special film effects, comic book production, dj-ing, graffiti, and other media expressions come into focus in Project New Media Literacies.
Spacewar … is where computer gaming all began at MIT, and now it moves into a new generation with the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab
Join us to explore the many facets of research on cutting-edge digital games, media literacy, innovative humanities databases, and redefined corporate/consumer relations now underway in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program. Faculty, staff and students will be on hand to showcase their work and answer questions about their latest findings. Refreshments will be served.

Remixing Shakespeare
2007-02-15 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
New technologies are enabling forms of borrowing, appropriation and “remixing” of media materials in exciting, provocative ways. In this Forum, two MIT scholars who have studied and written about the remixing of Shakespeare will describe their research, show some salient audio-visual examples and discuss the implications of their work for contemporary culture. Literature Professor Peter Donaldson is director of the Shakespeare Electronic Archive which since 1992 has used computers to develop new ways of studying the text, image and film records of Shakespearean publication and production. Literature Professor Diana Henderson is the author of Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media and A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen. She is an active participant in MIT’s partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company. The forum will be moderated by Mary Fuller of the Literature Faculty.

International Blogging Breakfast
2007-02-02 19:00 | Tan Hall Lounge, 550 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Join our discussion with Chinese Students through MSN IMS. Please email team researchers Jin Liwen or Shi Song if you would like to participate.
Goal:
Our goal is to get to know new friends and learn more about each other. Also we hope to study the media communication tools and the style of conversation on MSN IMS.
See Project GoodLuck for more information

Is This On? (Learn To Be a College DJ)
2007-01-31 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.

Make Zombie Madness!
2007-01-23 18:00 | MIT Building 1, Room 246, 33 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Grab your friends, practice your growling and prepare yourself for making ZOMBIE MADNESS. Join award-winning independent filmmakers Kristina Drzaic and Neal Grigsby as they lead you through scripting, makeup, learn how to make special f/x gore and shooting your very own zombie movie. This will be a hands-on make-a-film-in-a-day class.

PULSE: American Music and Poetry from 1950 to 1970
2007-01-22 17:00 | MIT Building 1, Room 246, 33 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
This is a two-hour single session designed to discuss the parallel relationships between the American music and poetry from the 1950s to 70s.
By the early fifties, as part of the postwar development of consumer society, a strange pulse had set in the music scene to bring about muzak or elevator music. As if to reflect this new trend, poets such as Robert Lowell and John Berryman started to write, almost on the same pulse, quasi-sonnet sequences.
In the late sixties, a more experimental type of pulse music was invented by such composers as Terry Riley and Steve Reich to be later labeled as minimalism. Again, the poetry caught up due to the efforts of John Ashbery and A. R. Ammons who wrote deliberately monotonous and distinctly open-ended sequences.
Some excerpts of poems will be read, some parts of music heard.

"Translation" in Transmediation: Exploring the Metaphor
2007-01-22 13:00 - 15:00 | MIT Building 1, Room 132, 33 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Transferring narratives from one medium to another is often either likened to the process of translation or just plainly called translation, the latter being used as a synonym to “transmediation”. During this two-hour class with Ksenia Prassolova, we will concentrate on further exploring this metaphor; by looking at the key translation techniques we will try to understand how to better tell our stories across media.

Documentary Filmmaking: A One Day Survival Guide
2007-01-11 18:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 124, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Documentary filmmaker Generoso Fierro takes you through a one time class where you will learn the basics of shooting a documentary film on mini dv, editing and getting it seen. Learn how to navigate through the murky waters of copyright issues regarding still images and music to creating a release. Learn quick editing techniques, dvd mastering and an easy festival submission process so that your work can be seen.

Paper and panel proposal deadline for fifth Media in Transition conference!
2007-01-05
The fifth Media in Transition conference, MiT5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital
age, will be held April 27-29, 2007 at MIT.
The deadline for submitting a paper or panel proposal is Jan. 5, 2007.
See the call for papers at http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit5.

CMS Online Information Session
2006-12-13 10:00
Fall 2006 CMS Information Sessions
Please contact the CMS office at cms@mit.edu or 617-253-3599 to reserve a space.
Frequently asked questions about CMS

Men Imagining a Girl Revolution
2006-11-29 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
Men Imagining a Girl Revolution with Sharon Kinsella. At various points in the twentieth century, male novelists, journalists, intellectuals, artists, editors and cultured men have become fascinated by the lives and characters of single women and their potential for prostitution and revolution. In this presentation, Foreign Languages and Literatures visiting professor Sharon Kinsella examines the media constructions of a teenage female revolt in contemporary Japan drawing from her current book project Girls as Energy: Fantasies of Social Rejuvenation.

Half-Real: A Video Game in the Hands of a Player
2006-11-28 17:00 | MIT Building 1, Room 136, 33 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
What happens when a player picks up video game, learns to play it, masters it, and leaves it? Using concepts from my book on video games, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, I will argue that video game players are neither rational solvers of abstract problems, nor daydreamers in fictional worlds, but both of these things with shifting emphasis. The unique quality of video games is to be located in their intricate interplay of rules and fictions, which I will examine across genres, from casual games to massively multiplayer games.
Jesper Juul is a video game theorist and assistant professor in video game theory and design at the Centre for Computer Game Research Copenhagen where he also earned his Ph.D. His book Half-Real on video game theory was published by MIT Press in 2005. Additionally, he works as a multi-user chat systems and casual game developer. He is currently a visiting scholar at Parsons School of Design in New York.
This lecture is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Comparative Media Studies Program and the Project New Media Literacies.

Film Screening: Quest for Home: GayBombay
2006-11-27 19:00 | MIT Building 6, Room 120, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
CMS is delighted to host a special screening of the documentary video Quest for Home: Gaybombay, by former CMS alum and colleague Parmesh Shahani. The video is an ethnographic exploration of gay life in contemporary India, and the screening will be followed by a Q&A session with Parmesh, who is visiting from Bombay.

Futures of Entertainment
2006-11-17 - 2006-11-18 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Futures of Entertainment
As advertisers look for new ways to engage audiences, content creators search for new audiences, and audiences quest for new ways to connect with culture, the nature of what counts as “entertainment” is rapidly changing. We are seeing the blurring of aesthetic and technological distinctions between media platforms, of “advertising” and “content” and of “creator” and “consumer.” Futures of Entertainment brings together key industry leaders who are shaping these new directions in our culture. The conference will consider developments such as user-generated content, transmedia storytelling, the rise of mobile media and the emergence of social networking. Speakers include: Chris Anderson (The Long Tail), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Michael Lebowitz (Big Spaceship), Paul Levitz (DC Comics), Diane Nelson (Warner Bros. Fan Relations), and Robert Tercek (Multimedia Networks). Co-sponsor: Convergence Culture Consortium.
This event is open to the public. Please register online.

CMS Information Sessions
2006-11-16 10:00

Mimesis, Sacrifice, and Victimhood
2006-11-09 18:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Mimesis, Sacrifice, and Victimhood with Rey Chow. Chow is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University where she teaches in the departments of Comparative Literature, English, and Modern Culture and Media. Chow’s talk will be based on her latest book, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (2006, Duke UP). Co-sponsor: History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art.

Media Evangelism in the Global South
2006-11-02 17:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
The phenomenal rise of evangelical Christianity in the global South during the past thirty years has been accompanied by the expanded use of new media, including radio and television. This presentation outlines an ongoing research project into the historical origins, systemic achievements, and interpretive implications of the American missionary radio broadcasting enterprise in Africa, Asia, and Latin America during its formative era, 1945 to 1970. Timothy Stoneman is a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at MIT.

Cruel 2 B Kind: Halloween Special!
2006-10-31 18:30 - 20:30 | Near Harvard Square, 18 Brattle St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
On October 31 — Halloween! — CMS will be sponsoring a free public game (and costume contest) near Harvard Square called “Cruel 2 B Kind” (cruelgame.com), from 6:30-8:30 PM.
It’s a little bit like the game “Assassins”; the twist is that you “kill” other players by using your assigned weapon, which involves saying or doing something nice to your victim… Since you don’t know who your victim *is*, however, you have to go around trying the “weapon” on everyone you encounter, whether they’re playing the game or not. For more information, visit www.cruelgame.com.
All you need to participate is a partner, a cell phone that can send and receive text messages, and a couple hours next Tuesday to meet people and have a good time!
For more information, and to register for the game, go to:
http://www.cruelgame.com/signup.

New Media and Art
2006-10-26 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
This roundtable is made up of leading figures in the field of media art curators, authors, network directors, and innovative developers who will address the current issues on art in the age of digital reproduction. Speakers: Lauren Cornell, director of Rhizome.org; Jon Ippolito, media artist, curator, author; and Mark Tribe, founder of Rhizome and professor of media arts at Brown University.

Stop Playing. Start Creating. Repeat
2006-10-17 17:00 | MIT Building 6, Room 120, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
On Tuesday October 17th, representatives from Electronic Arts will be making a presentation on the MIT campus. EA’s Head of University Relations, Colleen McCreary, will be giving an overview presentation of EA’s worldwide businesses, as well as the company’s Internship and New College Grad programs. Tom Wilson ’05 & ‘06 and Nick Hunter ’06 will discuss their experiences in EA’s internship program, the interview process, and their first few months working full time in games.
Sponsored by Electronic Arts and Comparative Media Studies at MIT. This event is open to the public.
Food will be served, and there will be swag.
Location: 6-120
When: 5pm Tuesday October 17th
Tom Wilson received his SB in Course 6 in 2005, and his MEng in 2006. While at MIT, he worked as a UROP on the Games To Teach project as a developer for the games SuperCharged! and EMK. In the summer of 2005, he worked as an engineering intern on The Godfather videogame at EA’s Redwood Shores campus. Currently, he works as an engineer on the new Simpsons game.
Nick Hunter ’06 graduated with degrees in course 14 and 21.CMS last June. At MIT he was a UROP on The Education Arcade’s Revolution project as a scripter and designer. Summer of ’05 he worked as a production intern on NFL Head Coach at EA’s Tiburon Studio in Orlando, and now works as a Feature Producer in the Sims Division at EA’s Redwood Shores campus.

Marketing in the Age of Consumer Empowerment
2006-10-12 17:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Scott Donaton
Lost Control: Marketing in the Age of Consumer Empowerment with Scott Donaton. Digital technologies have empowered end users, and that transfer of control — from content creators and distributors to consumers — impacts all forms of communications, including marketing. Scott Donaton, associate publisher and editorial director of the Ad Age Group and author of Madison & Vine will talk about why user-empowerment is the key trend in business, and the ways marketers are adapting to it, including the rise of branded entertainment.

Re-Inventing Television: Podcasting and the Future of Media
2006-09-28 17:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Chris Boebel and David Tamés will discuss the production of ZigZag, MIT’s video podcast and reflect on the evolution of broadcast media and the rise of video on the web. Chris Boebel is manager of multimedia development at MIT’s Academic Media Production Services (AMPS). His films include Red Betsy (2003) and Containment (2004). David Tamés is a producer and editor for AMPS. His work includes The East Village, a web-based soap opera.

Fall 2006 CMS Information Sessions
2006-09-21 22:00 | MIT Building 14N, Room 217, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
