CMS Colloquium Podcast
CMS Colloquium Series Podcast
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Podcast, Gediminas Urbonas
Download! Gediminas Urbonas is artist and educator, and co-founder (with ...
Download! Gediminas Urbonas is artist and educator, and co-founder (with Nomeda Urbonas) of Urbonas Studio - an interdisciplinary research program that advocates for the reclamation of public culture in the face of overwhelming privatization, stimulating cultural and political imagination as tools for social change. Often beginning with archival research, their methodology unfolds complex participatory works investigating the urban environment, architectural developments, and cultural and technological heritage. The Urbonases have established their international reputation for socially interactive and interdisciplinary practice exploring the conflicts and contradictions posed by the economic, social, and political conditions of countries in transition. Working in collaboration they develop models for social and artistic practice with the interest to design organizational structures that question relativity of freedom. They use art platform to render public spaces for interaction and engagement of the social groups, evoking local communities and encouraging their cultural and political imagination. Combining the tools of new and traditional media, their work frequently involves collective activities such as workshops, lectures, debates, TV programs, Internet chat-rooms and public protests that stand at the intersection of art, technology and social criticism. They are also co-founders of VILMA (Vilnius Interdisciplinary Lab for Media Art), and VOICE, a net based publication on media culture. They have exhibited internationally including the San Paulo, Berlin, Moscow, Lyon and Gwangju Biennales - and Manifesta and Documenta exhibitions - among numerous other international shows, including a solo show at the Venice Biennale and MACBA in Barcelona. Their work was awarded a number of high level grants and residency awards, including the Lithuanian National Prize (2007); a fellowship at the Montalvo Arts Center in California (2008); a Prize for the Best International Artist at the Gwangju Biennale (2006) and the Special Prize for the best national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2007). Their writings on artistic research as a form of intervention to social and political crisis was published in the books Devices for Action (2008) by MACBA Press, Barcelona and Villa Lituania (2008) by Sternberg Press. Gediminas Urbonas is Associate Professor in Visual Arts at ACT - the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology.
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Podcast, Tom Streeter: "The Internet and the Habitus of the New: What Would Pierre Bourdieu Say About Facebook?"
Download! We have come to associate the internet with narratives ...
Download! We have come to associate the internet with narratives of appealing unpredictability. We have become accustomed to scanning for the next best thing, to expecting novelty at our fingertips. We are habituated to stories of people using computers to throw established authorities into disarray: stories of surprising computer-related business start-ups, from Apple and Microsoft around 1980 through Facebook and beyond; of peculiar digital inventions taking the world by storm; of internet use by political rebels from Howard Dean to the Tea Party to the Arab Spring; of disruptive events that throw entire industries into disarray, like college students downloading music or uploading videos. The habit of throwing money at internet-related businesses in rough proportion to their air of rebelliousness persists to some degree, even if dampened by memories of the stock collapses and scandals of the early 2000s. Novelty in the digital does not surprise us; it is an expectation - at the same time that we have nearly given up on the idea of change in other in other aspects of our lives (e.g., in dysfunctional politics, our dependence on the automobile, the persistence of poverty). The Net Effect (2011) attributed this pattern in part to an American tradition of reading experiences through a romantic individualist lens. Widespread interactive computing introduced common experiences to large swathes of the population: the compulsive draw that often comes with computer use, for example, or the repeated wonder of plugging in a new gizmo that a short time ago would have been impossibly expensive or just impossible, or the cubicle dweller's secret pleasure of discovering, on a slow day at work, something striking on computer networks that is unknown to the powers that be. Romanticism provided a framework for making sense of those experiences, and thus a way to frame computing as an exploration, not a means to an end, as a means of personal expression, as an art. This presentation elaborates on the sociology of this pattern of expectant novelty, using Papacharissi's suggestion that the digital world offers a "habitus of the new," with its own distinct inducements and blindspots. Bourdieu's notion of a habitus offers a non-dualist, non-determinist way to make sense of the way digital novelty has become woven into the fabric of how we live our day to day lives. Thomas Streeter is Professor of Sociology at the University of Vermont. He has also taught for the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California, and was a Member of the School of Social Science at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet (NYU Press, 2011) is a study of the role of culture in the social construction of internet technology. His award-winning Selling the Air, a study of the cultural underpinnings of the creation of the US broadcast industry and its regulatory apparatus, was published in 1996. He edited, with Zephyr Teachout, a volume about the use of the internet in Howard Dean's run for President, called Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope, published in 2007. He has published articles and chapters in outlets ranging from the Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal to the Journal of Communication to Critical Inquiry.
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Podcast: Kelley Kreitz, "Yellow Journalism as Civic Media?: Rewiring an Experiment with Nineteenth-Century News"
The so-called "yellow journalism" of the New York Journal and ...
The so-called "yellow journalism" of the New York Journal and the New York World in the 1890s has been discredited by scholars and journalists for privileging sensational and biased stories. In its day, however, many within the news industry considered this experimental form of journalism to be a promising new direction for news writing. Both newspapers explored a reform-oriented form of news that some commentators and reformers believed could play a vital new role in advocating for the public interest. Revisiting the activist impulse behind yellow journalism provides a window on a changing media ecology in which the future of news was under debate. This moment of transition within nineteenth-century media also provides insight into the promise and potential dangers of activist media for today's civically minded experiments with news. Kelley Kreitz is a Visiting Scholar in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Her research brings together media studies, the history of journalism, cultural studies, and U.S. and Latin American literary studies. She is completing a book called Electrifying News: A Hemispheric History of Newspapers, Novels, and Media Change. Kelley has also served as a radio journalist and as the director of the Idea Lab at Root Cause, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing new solutions to social problems. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Brown University. Download!
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Podcast, Jeffrey Hamburger: "Script as Image"
Download! The first event in the Ancient and Medieval Studies ...
Download! The first event in the Ancient and Medieval Studies Seminar Series and co-sponsored by Literature, HTC, and the SHASS Dean's Office Writing, in relation to such affiliated topics as literacy, linguistics, cognition, and media studies, has a central place across and beyond the humanistic disciplines. It is time, in turn, for historians of medieval art to take a broader view of paleography, rather than view it primarily as a means of dating or localizing monuments, or, at the most literal level, deciphering illustrated texts or epigraphic inscriptions. Within the realm of visual imagery, the written word can rise to a form of representation in its own right, prior to and independent of the complex phenomena generally considered under the rubric of "text and image" -- a generalization as true of modern art as it is of the Middle Ages. In contrast to modernity, however, through much of the Middle Ages, as in Antiquity, the primary status of the spoken word and oral delivery ensured that writing, no less than picturing, was subject to suspicion. Professor Hamburger's presentation will survey some, if hardly all, of the many aspects of medieval script as a pictorial form, using examples ranging from Late Antiquity to the late Middle Ages and beyond. Jeffrey Hamburger's teaching and research focus on the art of the High and later Middle Ages. Among his areas of special interest are medieval manuscript illumination, text-image issues, the history of attitudes towards imagery and visual experience, and German vernacular religious writing of the Middle Ages, especially in the context of mysticism. Much of his scholarship has focused on the art of female monasticism. His current research includes a project that seeks to integrate digital technology into the study and presentation of liturgical manuscripts, a study of narrative imagery in late medieval German prayer books and a major international exhibition on German manuscript illumination in the age of Gutenberg. Professor Hamburger's books include The Mind's Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Medieval West and The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany. Hamburger holds both his B.A. and Ph.D. in art history from Yale University. He previously held teaching positions at Oberlin College and the University of Toronto. He has been a guest professor in Zurich, Paris, Oxford and Fribourg, Switzerland.
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Podcast, Jim Bizzocchi: "Close-Reading Media Poetics"
Download! Close reading is a classic humanities methodology for the ...
Download! Close reading is a classic humanities methodology for the analysis and understanding of texts across a variety of media. It's a rigorous discipline -- in the words of van Looy and Baetans: "The text is never trusted at face value, but is torn to pieces and reconstituted by a reader who is at the same time a demolisher and a constructor." This is a difficult task -- the practice of close reading requires that the scholar immerse herself in the experience of the text on its own terms, and at the same time maintain a critical distance in order to observe and understand the construction and the effects of the text. Bizzocchi relies on close reading for his own scholarly work and uses various strategies to reconcile the contradictory states of experience and analysis. Close reading can be used to explicate works across a variety of dimensions: thematic, cultural, historical, sociological, and others. Bizzocchi's goal is to understand the poetics -- the creative decisions -- embedded in media works. Bordwell describes poetics as "inquiry into the fundamental principles by which artifacts in any representational medium are constructed, and the effects that flow from these principles". Bizzocchi has always loved the magic of immersion in the experience of the moving image. As a scholar, he says his role is "to seek within that immersive experience the details of how the magic is created". He will present his analyses of Norman Jewison's The Thomas Crown Affair, Tom Tykwer's Run, Lola, Run, and Gerrie Villon and Alex Mayhew's Ceremony of Innocence (an interactive adaptation of The Griffin and Sabine trilogy by Nick Bantock). Jim Bizzocchi is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. His research includes work on narrative, interactive narrative, and the evolution of the moving image. He teaches classes in these areas, and is a recipient of the University Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is a practicing video artist, creating award-winning works in a genre he calls "Ambient Video". Jim is a graduate of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program (2001).
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Video, George Lakoff: "The Brain's Politics: How Campaigns Are Framed and Why"
A liveblog of this event has been made available via ...
A liveblog of this event has been made available via Lian Chikako Chang, a master's student at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. It was sponsored by the MIT Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab) and the MIT Communications Forum. About the Talk: Everything we learn, know and understand is physical -- a matter of brain circuitry. This basic fact has deep implications for how politics is understood, how campaigns are framed, why conservatives and progressives talk past each other, and why progressives have more problems framing messages than conservatives do -- and what they can do about it. George Lakoff is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. He previously taught at Harvard (1965-69) and the University of Michigan (1969-1972). He graduated from MIT in 1962 (in Mathematics and Literature) and received his PhD in Linguistics from Indiana University in 1966. Download the video! (411MB)
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Podcast, Nancy Baym: "Artist-Audience Relations in the Age of Social Media"
Social media have transformed relationships between those who create artistic ...
Social media have transformed relationships between those who create artistic work and those who enjoy it. Culture industries such as the music recording business have been left reeling as fans have gained the ability to distribute amongst themselves and artists have gained the ability to bypass traditional gatekeepers such as labels. The dominant rhetoric has been of 'piracy,' yet there are other tales to tell. How does direct access to fans change what it means to be an artist? What rewards are there that weren't before? How are relational lines between fans and friends blurred and with what consequences? What new challenges other than making a living do artists face? Nancy Baym is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England. She is the author of Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Polity), Internet Inquiry (co-edited with Annette Markham, Sage) and Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom and Online Community (Sage). For the last two years she has been interviewing musicians about their relationships with audiences. Download!
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Podcast, George Lakoff: "The Brain's Politics: How Campaigns Are Framed and Why"
Download! Everything we learn, know and understand is physical -- ...
Download! Everything we learn, know and understand is physical -- a matter of brain circuitry. This basic fact has deep implications for how politics is understood, how campaigns are framed, why conservatives and progressives talk past each other, and why progressives have more problems framing messages than conservatives do -- and what they can do about it. George Lakoff is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. He previously taught at Harvard (1965-69) and the University of Michigan (1969-1972). He graduated from MIT in 1962 (in Mathematics and Literature) and received his PhD in Linguistics from Indiana University in 1966. Read more at georgelakoff.com.
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Video, Communications Forum: "Electronic Literature and Future Books"
Mainstream and avant-garde poets and fiction writers have been exploring ...
Mainstream and avant-garde poets and fiction writers have been exploring the literary potential of the computer for decades, creating work that goes far beyond today's e-books. The creators of electronic literature have developed new interface methods, new techniques for collaboration, and new ways of linking language, computing, and other media elements. How has electronic literature influenced other media, including the Web and the book? What are the implications of having literary projects in the digital sphere alongside other forms of communication and art? Katherine Hayles is professor in the literature program at Duke University. Her books include Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (2008) and My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005). Rita Raley is associate professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara where she directs Transcriptions, a research and pedagogic initiative on literature and the culture of information. Her most recent publications include the co-edited Electronic Literature Collection, volume 2. Download! (though be warned: 389 MB)
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Podcast, Johanna Drucker: "Designing Digital Humanities"
What is the role of design in modeling digital humanities? ...
What is the role of design in modeling digital humanities? Can we imagine new forms of argument and platforms that support interpretative work? So much of the computationally driven environment of digital work has been created by design/engineers that humanistic values and methods have not found their place in the tools and formats that provide the platform for research, pedagogy, access, and use. The current challenge is to take advantage of the rich repositories and well-developed online resources and create innovative approaches to argument, curation, display, editing, and understanding that embody humanistic methods as well as humanities content. Designers have a major role to play in the collaborative envisioning of new formats and processes. Using some vivid examples and case studies, this talk outlines some of the opportunities for exciting work ahead. Johanna Drucker is the inaugural Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. In addition, she has a reputation as a book artist, and her limited edition works are in special collections and libraries worldwide. Her most recent titles include SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing (Chicago, 2009), and Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide (Pearson, 2008, 2nd edition late 2012). She is currently working on a database memoire, ALL, the online Museum of Writing in collaboration with University College London and King's College, and a letterpress project titled Stochastic Poetics. A collaboratively written work, Digital_Humanities, with Jeffrey Schapp, Todd Presner, Peter Lunenfeld, and Anne Burdick is forthcoming from MIT Press. Download!
