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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20091201T171500
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20091201T171500
DTSTAMP:20260521T070649
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SUMMARY:Comparative Media Insights: "Viva Las Vegas: a Neo-Baroque Conception of the World"
DESCRIPTION:Angela Ndalianis\nEmerging in the mid 20th century (when Disneyland opened its doors in 1955)\, the theme park created the ultimate in trompe l’oeil effects by extending the fictional world of Disney animation into the social sphere. In doing so\, Disney produced a networked environment that conjured wondrous spaces that both performed for the audience and which were for performing within. Over the last two decades\, Las Vegas has adopted and extended this theme park logic into the urban sphere. Travelling briefly back to the era of the movie palace\, this paper will consider contemporary Las Vegas as a neo-baroque mediascape that extends the theme park’s delight in performativity\, theatricality and sensorial engagement into the wider social realm. Drawing on Umberto Eco’s concept of ‘pansemiotics’\, it will be argued that spectacle cities like Las Vegas operate according to the logic of a giant wunderkammer — relying on an emblematic understanding of the meaning of objects and the interrelationship between them. In particular\, this paper will analyze how this city-as-monument to entertainment and leisure culture has appropriated tropes and modes of engagement taken from pre-20th Century high culture traditions of the Church and aristocracy. But whereas palaces\, theatrical spectacles\, churches\, and piazzas stood as monuments to the grandeur of their aristocratic patrons\, in our current time\, these new entertainment environments stand as monuments to corporate conglomerates and the masses who inhabit these worlds. \nAngela Ndalianis is currently associate professor in cinema and cultural studies at the University of Melbourne.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/angela-dalianis-viva-las-vegas-neobaroque-conception/
LOCATION:MIT Building 14N\, Room 313\, 160 Memorial Drive\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Comparative Media Insights
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/angela.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20091207T171500
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20091207T171500
DTSTAMP:20260521T070649
CREATED:20141113T141721Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20141113T141721Z
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SUMMARY:Comparative Media Insights: "Art of the Impossible: Utopia\, Imagination\, and Critical Media Practice"
DESCRIPTION:In an economy of informational abundance\, does the traditional truth-revealing role of critical media practice still have any political relevance? Or are there other\, perhaps more politically potent\, ways of thinking about the liberatory possibilities of media? By considering a range of examples\, from Thomas More’s 16th century Utopia to 21st century political art\, we will explore the possibilities and pitfalls of mediated utopias as a means of revitalizing the critical practice of communications. Of particular interest are impossible utopias\, “no-places” whose unrealizability is inscribed in their depiction. For it is through the encounter with their very impossibility that conditions for new critique and new imagination may be created. \nStephen Duncombe is an Associate Professor at the Gallatin School of New York University where he teaches the history and politics of media. He is the author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics of Underground Culture\, the editor of the Cultural Resistance Reader\, and co-author of The Bobbed Haired Bandit: A True Story of Crime and Celebrity in 1920’s New York. He also writes on the intersection of culture and politics for a range of scholarly and popular publications\, from the cerebral\, The Nation\, to the prurient\, Playboy. Duncombe is a life-long political activist\, co-founding a community based advocacy group in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and working as an organizer for the NYC chapter of an international direct action group. Currently\, he is a Research Associate at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York City where he co-founded and organized “The College of Tactical Culture” and is engaged in an ongoing investigation into the efficacy of political art. He is currently working on a book on the art of propaganda during the New Deal.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/stephen-duncombe-utopia-imagination-critical-media-practice/
LOCATION:MIT Building 14E\, Room 310\, 160 Memorial Drive\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Comparative Media Insights
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/duncombe.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20091215T041500
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20091215T171500
DTSTAMP:20260521T070649
CREATED:20141113T143737Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20141113T143900Z
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SUMMARY:Comparative Media Insights: "From Gamer Theory to Critical Practice"
DESCRIPTION:McKenzie Wark\nHow might the critical tradition in media studies respond to the wildly proliferating media phenomena of today? In this presentation\, Ken Wark starts with his own experience writing Gamer Theory as a ‘networked book’\, mediating between Plato\, WordPress\, and World of Warcraft. This was an experiment in which critical media approaches were made to confront the computer game as an historically specific form\, the form perhaps of our times. It was also an attempt to create online tools for a specifically critical mode of collaborative writing\, at some remove from the argumentative and consensus style of the blog and wiki respectively. A third dimension to the experiment explored the relation of the gift of writing\, of time\, of attention\, to the commodified form of the book. What can be learned from the results of this experiment? How can media studies be both in and of the emergent media forms\, and yet retain a creative and critical distance from them? It is in its difference from what it studies that media studies begins to find the intellectual resources to respond adequately to the extraordinary world of media\, in all its historical and anthropological depth and breadth. \nMcKenzie Wark is chair of Culture & Media and associate dean of Eugene Lang College\, and an associate professor of critical studies at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard UP\, 2004)\, Gamer Theory (Harvard UP\, 2007) and various other things.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/from-gamer-theory-to-critical-practice/
LOCATION:MIT Building 14E\, Room 310\, 160 Memorial Drive\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Comparative Media Insights
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/177_tofts_wark.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20091215T171500
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20091215T171500
DTSTAMP:20260521T070649
CREATED:20141113T144317Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20141113T144317Z
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SUMMARY:Comparative Media Insights: "Race\, Rights\, and Virtual Worlds: Digital Games as Spaces of Labor Migration"
DESCRIPTION:Lisa Nakamura\nAs ICT’s become available to new groups of users\, notably those from the global South\, new social formations of virtual labor\, race\, nation\, and gender are being born. And if virtual world users’ claims to citizenship and sovereignty within them are to be taken seriously\, so too must the question of “gray collar” or semi-legal virtual laborers and their social relations and cultural identity in these spaces. Just as labor migrants around the globe struggle to access a sense of belonging in alien territories\, so too do virtual laborers\, many of whom are East and South Asian\, confront hostility and xenophobia in popular gaming worlds and virtual “workshops” such as World of Warcraft and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Do these users have the right to have rights? This presentation considers the affective investments and cultural identities of these workers within the virtual worlds where they labor. \nLisa Nakamura is the Director of the Asian American Studies Program\, Professor in the Institute of Communication Research and Media Studies Program and Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois\, Urbana Champaign. She is the author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of Minnesota Press\, 2007)\, Cybertypes: Race\, Ethnicity\, and Identity on the Internet (Routledge\, 2002) and a co-editor of Race in Cyberspace (Routledge\, 2000). She has published articles in Critical Studies in Media Communication\, PMLA\, Cinema Journal\, The Women’s Review of Books\, Camera Obscura\, and the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies.   She is editing a collection with Peter Chow-White entitled Digital Race: An Anthology (Routledge\, forthcoming) and is working on a new monograph on Massively Multiplayer Online Role playing games\, the transnational racialized labor\, and avatarial capital in a “postracial” world.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/lisa-nakamura-race-rights-virtual-worlds/
LOCATION:MIT Building 14E\, Room 310\, 160 Memorial Drive\, Cambridge\, MA\, 02139\, United States
CATEGORIES:Comparative Media Insights
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://cms.mit.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/images.jpeg
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