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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220203T170000
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SUMMARY:Samantha N. Sheppard\, “Changing the Subject: Lynn Nottage’s By the Way\, Meet Vera Stark and the Making of Black Women’s Film History”
DESCRIPTION:This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLynn Nottage’s 2011 satirical play By the Way\, Meet Vera Stark stages the life and legacy of the fictional Vera Stark\, a Black maid and struggling actress during Hollywood’s golden age. Nottage\, a two-time Pulitzer prize-winning playwright and screenwriter\, was inspired in part by the career of African American actress\, singer\, and dancer Theresa Harris. A play about Black women’s cinematic representation and social erasure\, Nottage’s fabrication of film history extends beyond the staged plot to also include a digital archive documenting Vera’s celebrity and career. In this talk\, Samantha N. Sheppard examines how Nottage’s play and paratexts produce a speculative fiction and archive about Black women’s media histories\, staging what she calls a phantom cinema—an amalgam of real and imagined film histories that haunt\, trouble\, and work with and against cinema histories to creatively illuminate archival gaps in visual culture and the public imagination. \n\n\n\n\nSamantha N. Sheppard is an associate professor of cinema and media studies in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. She is the author of Sporting Blackness: Race\, Embodiment\, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen (University of California Press\, 2020) and co-editor of From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry (University Press of Mississippi\, 2016) and Sporting Realities: Critical Readings on the Sports Documentary (University of Nebraska Press\, 2020). She has published on film and media in academic and popular venues such as Film Quarterly\, The Atlantic\, Flash Art International\, and Los Angeles Review of Books. She was named a 2021 Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/samantha-n-sheppard-making-black-womens-film-history/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220210T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220210T183000
DTSTAMP:20260423T195758
CREATED:20220126T194555Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20220128T160358Z
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SUMMARY:Eric Freedman\, “Non-Binary Binaries and Unreal MetaHumans”
DESCRIPTION:This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nVideo game engines have promoted a new cultural economy for software production and have provided a common architecture for digital content creation across what were once distinct media verticals—film\, television\, video games and other immersive and interactive media forms that can leverage real-time 3D visualization. Game engines are the building blocks for efficient real-time visualization\, and they signal quite forcefully the colonizing influence of programming. Video game engines are powering our visual futures\, and engine developers that include Unity Technologies and Epic Games are rapidly iterating their products to tackle new markets\, where data and visuality continue to converge. This analysis\, which draws from software studies and studies of visual culture\, examines a tool that is fairly new to the Epic Games arsenal—the in-development MetaHuman Creator that is part of Epic’s proprietary Unreal Engine. The MetaHuman Creator is a cloud-streamed application that draws from a library of real scans of people and allows 3D content developers to quickly create unique photorealistic fully-rigged digital humans. MetaHuman creation is a fluid of process\, and the speedy transformation of character rigs and other non-binary attributes highlights the potential queerness or openness of data. Yet the ongoing push toward (hyper)realism in commercial media has birthed a visual economy which is supported by an industrial apparatus that privileges mastery over the tools of production\, and where bodies and politics are often cleaved in the design process. Epic’s multiethnic\, multiracial\, transgender MetaHuman Creator is a design tool and not a narrative engine. Its transitions are simple and seamless\, and the traces of non-binary and non-white identities are simply part of a larger color palette. These tools represent a way of seeing and knowing the world\, and the representations they produce are part of hermetically-sealed and privately-held encoding processes that include a company’s original data\, its application programming\, its proprietary build environment and its interface. This analysis poses two interrelated questions. Are the MetaHuman Creator and similar simplified building tools democratizing the field of digital content creation? Are they fostering more diverse representations and narratives\, and supporting the free play of identity in playable media? \n\n\n\n\nEric Freedman is Professor and Dean of the School of Media Arts at Columbia College Chicago. He is the author most recently of The Persistence of Code in Game Engine Culture (2020)\, as well as Transient Images: Personal Media in Public Frameworks (2011). He serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Creative Media Research and the advisory board of the Communication and Media Studies Research Network.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/eric-freedman-non-binary-binaries-and-unreal-metahumans/
LOCATION:Streamed live on Zoom
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220217T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220217T183000
DTSTAMP:20260423T195758
CREATED:20220119T162500Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20220124T210209Z
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SUMMARY:Jorge Caraballo\, “How to Use Audio Storytelling to Cultivate a Community and Keep it Engaged”
DESCRIPTION:This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPodcasts are in a golden age and are being used to effectively communicate new ideas\, tell compelling stories\, and build highly participative communities. This presentation will explore the power of audio storytelling to connect individuals in engaged networks of collaboration. Jorge Caraballo (’22 Harvard Nieman Fellow) will draw from experience as the former Growth Editor at Radio Ambulante –Latin America’s most popular documentary podcast– and will highlight different ways in which storytelling can be the starting point of new collective identities. \n\n\n\n\nJorge Caraballo is a journalist and a 2022 Harvard Nieman fellow. Before that\, he worked for four years as the Growth Editor at Radio Ambulante –the most popular documentary podcast in Spanish\, and the only one in that language distributed by NPR. There he led online and offline engagement initiatives to grow the community around the podcast. He holds a master’s degree in Media Innovation at Northeastern University. He’s a Fulbright Scholar and a Google News Initiative Fellow.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/jorge-caraballo-audio-storytelling-cultivate-community-keep-it-engaged/
LOCATION:Streamed live on Zoom
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20220224T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20220224T183000
DTSTAMP:20260423T195758
CREATED:20220127T132722Z
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SUMMARY:Hillary Chute\, "Maus Now: Spiegelman’s Graphic Novel and the Present Tense"
DESCRIPTION:This event is virtual and will be streamed live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038) and recorded. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIn this talk\, Hillary Chute considers the contemporary relevance of Art Spiegelman’s classic graphic novel\, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale\, in an overview linked to her forthcoming book Maus Now: Selected Writing (a collection to be published by Pantheon in 2022). Maus was first published serially beginning in 1980\, and came out in two book volumes in 1986 and 1991; today\, she argues\, it’s timeless for many different reasons\, including stark political ones. She highlights what Spiegelman’s comics narrative\, which is about history\, reveals about the form’s capacity both to register the continuousness of history and also to function in today’s context as a text of resistance to fascism. \n\n\n\n\nHillary Chute is Distinguished Professor of English and Art + Design at Northeastern University. She is the author or editor of six books\, including Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere (Harper\, 2017)\, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness\, Comics\, and Documentary Form (Harvard UP\, 2016)\, Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists (U of Chicago P)\, and Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (Columbia UP\, 2010). She has written for venues including Artforum\, Bookforum\, the Village Voice\, and the New York Review of Books. She is a comics and graphic novels columnist for the New York Times Book Review.
URL:https://cms.mit.edu/event/hillary-chute-maus-now-spiegelmans-graphic-novel-and-the-present-tense/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
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