Plenary 1: Culture Industries
Plenary 1: Culture Industries by Massachusetts Institute of Technology
May 17, 2019•1 hr 35 min
MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Featuring a wide assortment of interviews and event archives, the MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing podcast features the best of our field's critical analysis, collaborative research, and design -- all across a variety of media arts, forms, and practices.
You can learn more about us, including info about our faculty and academic programs and how to join us in person for events, at cmsw.mit.edu.
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Episodes
Haidee Wasson, "Do-it Yourself Cinema: Portable Film Projectors as Media History"
Hosted with MIT Arts, Culture, and Technology and The Boston Cinema/Media Seminar. Introduction by Lisa Parks, Professor, CMS/W Haidee Wasson’s talk will explore the long and vibrant place of portable film devices in the history of small media, repositioning the ‘movie theatre’ as the singular or even central figuration of film presentation and viewing. From its earliest days, film was – in a sense – born portable. Yet, our attention to and affection for the movie theater has obscured our view t...
Apr 18, 2019•1 hr 14 min
Civic Arts Series: Lauren Boyle, “Thumbs Type and Swipe”
Introduction by Amy Rosenblum Martín, Independent Curator and Educator, Guggenheim DIS (est. 2010) is a New York-based collective composed of Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso, and David Toro. Its cultural interventions are manifest across a range of media and platforms, from site-specific museum and gallery exhibitions to ongoing online projects. In 2018 the collective transitioned platforms from an online magazine, dismagazine.com, to a video streaming edutainment platform, dis.art, narr...
Apr 11, 2019•1 hr 22 min
The Battle of Algiers as Ghost Archive - Specters of a Muslim International
The Battle of Algiers, a 1966 film that poetically captures Algerian resistance to French colonial occupation, is widely considered one of the greatest films of all time, having influenced leftist and anti-colonial struggles from the Palestine Liberation Organization, to the Black Panther Party and the Irish Republican Army amongst others. But the film is more relevant and urgent than ever in the current “War on Terror” – having been screened by the Pentagon in 2003 and taught in Army war colleg...
Apr 04, 2019•1 hr 20 min
An Evening with Comedienne Cameron Esposito
Comedienne Cameron Esposito delights audiences with a short comedy set followed by Q&A about Rape Jokes, her standup comedy special about sexual assault from a survivor’s perspective. Cameron Esposito is a nationally headlining comic who has garnered glowing praise from The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Variety, and The Guardian. She’s also a sexual assault survivor. In 2018, Esposito released Rape Jokes, a standup comedy special about sexual assault from a survivor’s perspective. Esposito jo...
Apr 03, 2019•53 min
Gaming the Iron Curtain: Computer Games in Communist Czechoslovakia as Entertainment and Activism
Based on the recent book Gaming the Iron Curtain, this lecture will outline the idiosyncratic and surprising ways in which computer hobbyists in Cold War era Czechoslovakia challenged the power of the oppressive political regime and harnessed early microcomputer technology for both entertainment and activism. In the 1970s and 1980s, Czechoslovak authorities treated computer and information technologies as an industrial resource rather than a social or cultural phenomenon. While dismissing the im...
Mar 20, 2019•1 hr 23 min
Social Media Entertainment
In a little over a decade, competing social media platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, and their Chinese counterparts, have formed the base for the emergence of a new creative industry: social media entertainment. Social media entertainment creators have harnessed these platforms to generate significantly different content, separate from the century-long model of intellectual property control in the entertainment industries. This new screen ecology is driven ...
Mar 15, 2019•1 hr 40 min
Dispatches from The Golden Age of Audio
Podcasting has given rise to new voices and new, highly personal ways to tell stories. But as the medium expands, it struggles to create gold standards for building shows that will be popular and financially sustainable. Cynthia Graber, co-host and co-creator of Gastropod, about the science and history of food, joins Al Letson, host of the investigative reporting show Reveal and creator of Errthang, his own personal “mixtape of delight,” to dive into the secrets of successful podcasting and what...
Mar 05, 2019•1 hr 45 min
“The Good Stuff”: The Intersections of Work, Leisure, and Relational Bonding on Tumblr and Patreon
Although the Pokémon GO phenomenon of 2016 has waned, the economies of internet fame and content production remains robust. Drawing from their dissertation, Nick-Brie will discuss the forms of relational work and bonding that occur on YouTube and Twitter as well as Tumblr and Patreon, the latter two will be the focus of the talk. Drawing from two years of Internet ethnographic and participant observational work, Nick-Brie will be discussing the political economies and labor demands of micro-cele...
Feb 28, 2019•1 hr 15 min
Caren Kaplan: "Bringing the War Home"
At the close of the First Gulf War, feminist architectural historian Beatriz Colomina wrote that “war today speaks about the difficulty of establishing the limits of domestic space.” That conflict of 1990-91 is most often cited as the first to pull the waging of war fully into the digital age and therefore into a blurring of boundaries of all kinds. Yet, most modern wars have introduced technological innovations that transform social relations and modes of communication and representation. In th...
Feb 21, 2019•1 hr 35 min
The Language of Civic Life: Past to Present
When everyday citizens interact about politics today, they often do so (1) anonymously and (2) in digital space, which results in a kind of aggressive chaos. But what happens when people identify themselves to one another in place-based communities as they do, for example, when writing letters to the editor of their local newspaper? How does that change public discussion? This talk by Roderick Hart operationalizes the concept of “civic hope” and reports the results of a long-term study of 10,000...
Nov 28, 2018•1 hr 24 min
Civic Arts Series: Myron Dewey, "Protecting the Water in Solidarity and Unity"
Myron Dewey is an indigenous journalist, educator, documentary filmmaker and the developer of Digital Smoke Signals, a social networking and filmmaking initiative, emerging out of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline project of 2016-17. Using a full range of contemporary media, including drone technologies, Dewey has pioneered the blending of citizen monitoring, documentary filmmaking, and social networking in the cause of environment, social justice an...
Nov 19, 2018•1 hr 37 min
The Consequences of America’s Miracle Machine
In the 20th century, America led the world in scientific and technological innovation, with federally funded basic research leading to breakthroughs ranging from the Internet to the Human Genome Project, with many positive impacts on society. More recently, possibilities ranging from autonomous weapons to eugenic application of genetic editing tools have made it clear that the rate of discoveries has outpaced our ability to predict their moral and ethical consequences. How the scientific communi...
Nov 13, 2018•1 hr 47 min
Brian Michael Bendis - The 2018 Julius Schwartz Lecture at MIT
[Video and photos available at https://cmswm.it/bendis-mit] MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing is thrilled to welcome award-winning comics creator Brian Michael Bendis, a New York Times bestseller and one of the most successful writers working in mainstream comics, for the 2018 Julius Schwartz lecture, in conversation with fellow comics writer Marjorie Liu. For the last eighteen years, Brian’s books have consistently sat on the top of the nationwide comic and graphic novel sales charts. Now w...
Nov 11, 2018•1 hr 47 min
2018 CMS Alumni Panel: Nick Seaver, Colleen Kaman, and Sean Flynn
On the heels of the day’s graduate program information session, join us for our annual colloquium featuring alumni of CMS, discussing their lives from MIT to their careers today. Nick Seaver, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University and a 2010 graduate of Comparative Media Studies, is an anthropologist of technology, whose research focuses on the circulation, reproduction, and interpretation of sound. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine. His dissertation res...
Oct 31, 2018•1 hr 31 min
#MoreThanCode: Practitioner-led Research to Reimagine Technology for Social Justice
Our society is in the midst of an extremely urgent conversation about the benefits and harms of digital technology, across all spheres of life. Unfortunately, this conversation too often fails to include the voices of technology practitioners whose work is already focused on social justice, the common good, and/or the public interest. This talk by Sasha Costanza-Chock explores key findings and recommendations from #MoreThanCode (morethancode.cc), a recently-released field scan based on more than...
Oct 26, 2018•1 hr 21 min
Civic Arts Series: Marisa Morán Jahn
Marisa Morán Jahn is a multi-media artist, writer, educator and activist, whose colorful, often humorous uses of personae and media create imaginative pathways to civic awareness of urgent public issues. Working collaboratively, her projects include a classic American road trip, CareForce One, in a 50-year-old station wagon, advocating issues concerning care workers that became a PBS film series; and Bibliobandido, a story-telling initiative for Honduran children featuring a masked bandit who de...
Oct 19, 2018•1 hr 33 min
What’s So Funny About Oppressive Regimes?
== An MIT Communications Forum == As a senior producer on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah, Sara Taksler has spent her career taking comedic pot shots at politicians. When she met Dr. Bassem Youssef, an Egyptian satirist who uses comedy to criticize Middle Eastern politics, Taksler witnessed first-hand how laughter thrives, even in terrifying circumstances. Tickling Giants, Taksler’s documentary about Youssef, is a hilarious story about finding comedy in unexpected places. Taksler...
Oct 18, 2018•1 hr 49 min
How To Fight A Nazi
An MIT Communications Forum Christian Picciolini was 14 when he became a Neo-Nazi skinhead. He denounced eight years later and dedicated himself to helping others disengage from extremist groups. Picciolini has done peace advocacy work for more than a decade and in 2018, he founded the Free Radicals Project, a nonprofit dedicated to transitioning former extremists. He has conducted more than 200 interventions with white supremacists, as well as with ISIS members and other types of violent extrem...
Oct 10, 2018•1 hr 51 min
Civic Arts Series - Daniel Bacchieri
Daniel Bacchieri is an award-winning Brazilian journalist, documentary film maker and collaborative web developer/curator, whose visually inspiring StreetMusicMap platform has been widely praised for its curation of street performers from across the globe. Combining a documentarian vision with a trans-cultural appreciation of the public art of vernacular musicians, the StreetMusicMap collaborators are exploring the creative possibilities of collective story-telling through performance. The Stree...
Oct 04, 2018•1 hr 27 min
Collective Intelligence
CAST Visiting Artist Agnieszka Kurant joins Stefan Helmreich, professor of Anthropology; Caroline Jones, professor of History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art; and Adam Haar Horowitz, master’s student and research assistant in the Fluid Interfaces Group, to discuss the idea of collective intelligence in relation to emerging technology, artistic inquiry, and social and cultural movements. Kurant will reflect on outsourcing her artworks to human and non-human collective intelligence a...
Sep 28, 2018•1 hr 43 min
Thomas Allen Harris: “Collective Wisdom” Keynote
Thomas Allen Harris is a critically acclaimed, interdisciplinary artist who explores conceptions of family, identity, environmentalism, and spirituality in a participatory practice. Graduate of Harvard College with a degree in Biology and the Whitney Independent Study Program, member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and published writer/curator, Harris lectures widely on the use of media as a tool for social change with a keen recognition for its potential to organize social ...
Sep 19, 2018•2 hr 4 min
Civic Arts Series: Erik Loyer
== Co-hosted with the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology == Erik Loyer‘s award-winning work explores new blends of game dynamics, poetic expression and interactive visual storytelling. From his best-selling Strange Rain story-playing iPad/iPhone app, to his visually stunning digital fiction The Lair of the Marrow Monkey (powered by Shockwave software animation), and his interactive explorations of post-Katrina racial politics in Blue Velvet, Loyer’s interactive artistic hybridizations o...
Sep 13, 2018•1 hr 32 min
Imperial Arrangements: South African Apartheid and the Force of Photography
This talk by Kimberly Juanita Brown considers the prominence of graphic photographic images during the decades of apartheid in South Africa. Specifically, she is interested in an archive of indifference that permeates the era and orchestrates the viewer’s relationship to black subjectivity. For the talk she focuses on US news media coverage of apartheid in the last year of its existence, and the images that anchored viewers’ interpretation of the event. Kimberly Juanita Brown is Martin Luther Ki...
May 11, 2018•1 hr 20 min
Bunk and the History of Hoaxes with Kevin Young
Before fake news dominated headlines, Kevin Young was tracking down its roots. The author of 13 books of poetry and prose, poetry editor for The New Yorker and director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Young has spent the past six years tracing the history of news-worthy fraudulence all the way back to the 18th century. Young’s latest book Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News chronicles the racially prej...
Apr 30, 2018•1 hr 33 min
Between Participation and Control: A Long History of CCTV
Closed-circuit television (CCTV) has become synonymous with surveillance society and the widespread use of media technologies for contemporary regimes of power and control. Considered from the perspective of television’s long history, however, closed-circuit systems are multifaceted, and include, but are not limited to sorting and surveillance. During the media’s experimental phase in the 1920s and 1930s, closed-circuit systems were an essential feature of its public display, shaping its identit...
Apr 27, 2018•1 hr 14 min
Republican Resistance in the Age of Trump
Stuart Stevens believes Republicans are in a “GOP apocalypse,” and he’s urging Republicans to resist. Stevens is a Republican political consultant who’s worked on presidential campaigns for Bob Dole and George W. Bush, served as the lead strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, and helped elect more governors and US Senators than any other GOP consultant working today. He’s also an outspoken critic of Donald Trump, starting from the earliest days of Trump’s candidacy. Jennifer Na...
Apr 17, 2018•1 hr 52 min
The City Talks: Storytelling at the New York Times's Metro Desk
As attention spans shrink and the representation of factual information is under scrutiny by the public, news organizations need clear, engaging storytelling that reaches readers where they are. In this talk, Emily Rueb, a reporter for The New York Times, shares insights gained in bursting boundaries of traditional storytelling for The New York Times’s Metro desk. Weaving video, audio, illustrations and text across multiple platforms, she chronicled aspects of New York’s complex but rarely seen ...
Apr 13, 2018•52 min
When To Start Freaking Out - Audience Engagement On Social Media During Disease Outbreaks
== Aashka Dave: "When to Start Freaking Out: Audience Engagement on Social Media During Disease Outbreaks" == How do perceptions of risk contribute to sensationalized social media spectacles, and how might social media practices further such a practice? This thesis will explore sensationalism and gatekeeping through an examination of how news and public health organizations used social media during the most recent Ebola and Zika outbreaks.
Apr 09, 2018•35 min
The Motives Of Narrative And Style In Food Text Creation On Social Media
== Vicky Zeamer: "Internet Killed the Michelin Star: The Motives of Narrative and Style in Food Text Creation on Social Media" == Food porn has become mainstream content on social media sites and digital streaming sites. With this comes a change in status—from expert to everyone. As a result, the role of authority figures, in particular chefs, has changed. This thesis illustrates the convergences and divergences in the creation and consumption of food texts today.
Apr 09, 2018•43 min
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