NMC Campus Observer

MiT5 Conference: Watch from NMC Campus

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Apr 18, 2007 10:54am

On April 27-30, you are invited to join us here on NMC Campus in the Gonick Amphitheater for live videos from the Media in Transition 5 Conference. Thanks to support from our MIT colleagues, we are able to bring the videos of the plenary sessions into Second Life.

See below for an agenda of the sessions and times when you can catch these sessions. Join us at the Gonick Amphitheater on NMC Campus (113,100,26) or use the map url. If you have never been to NMC Campus in Second Life, you will first need to join one of our groups. For more information about this event, contact in Second Life Rikaru Eberlain.

The theme for the Media in Transitions 5 conference is described:

Our understanding of the technical and social processes by which culture is made and reproduced is being challenged and enlarged by digital technologies. An emerging generation of media producers is sampling and remixing existing materials as core ingredients in their own work. Readers are actively reshaping media content as they personalize it for their own use or customize it for the needs of grassroots and online communities. Of course, the idea that artists build on earlier traditions or that new texts speak to and about earlier texts is scarcely a new idea. This fifth Media in Transition conference aims to generate a conversation that compares historical forms of cultural expression with contemporary media practices.

The plenary sessions that will be live streamed include:

Media in Transition 5 - Plenary Session 1: Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures
Friday, April 27, 2007 9:30am-1:00pm PDT
Lewis Hyde, Kenyon College; Thomas Pettitt, University of Southern Denmark ; S. Craig Watkins, University of Texas
Moderator: David Thorburn, MIT

Digital visionaries such as Yochai Benkler have described the emergence of a new networked culture in which participants with differing intentions and professional credentials co-exist and cooperate in a complex media ecology. Are we witnessing the appearance of a new or revitalized folk culture? Are there older traditions and practices from print culture or oral societies that resemble these emerging digital practices? What sort of amateur or grassroots creativity have been studied or documented by literary scholars, anthropologists, and students of folklore? How were creativity and collaboration understood in earlier cultures? Are there lessons or cautions for digital culture in the near or distant past?
URL: http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit5/subs/MiT5_plenary1.html

Media in Transition 5 - Plenary Session 2: Collaboration and Collective Intelligence
Friday, April 27, 2007 2:45pm-4:15pm PDT
Mimi Ito, Annenberg Center for Communication; Cory Ondrejka, Linden Lab; Trebor Scholz, SUNY Buffalo
Moderator: Thomas Malone, MIT
“Collective Intelligence” and “the wisdom of crowds” have become central buzz phrases in recent discussions of networked culture. But what do they really mean? What do we know about the new forms of collaboration that is emerging as people work together across geographic distances online? Are we working, learning, socializing, creating, consuming, and playing in new ways as a result of the emergence of our participation in online communities? What have we learned over the past decade that may help us to design more powerful communities in the real world? What lessons can we carry from our Second Lives into our First?
URL: http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit5/subs/MiT5_plenary2.html

Media in Transition 5 - Plenary Session 3: Copyright, Fair Use and the Cultural Commons
Saturday, April 28, 2007 12:15pm-1:45pm PDT
Hal Abelson, MIT; Pat Aufderheide, American University; Wendy Gordon, Boston University ; Gordon Quinn, Kartemquin Films
Moderator: William Uricchio, MIT
How has the American tradition of intellectual property law understood the relationship between originality and tradition? What rights do artists and educators have to draw inspiration from or comment on existing works in existing media? What habits, beliefs, legal and policy decisions threaten the emergence of a more participatory culture? What have people done, and what can we do to protect the Fair Use rights of artists, educators, and amateurs so that explore the opportunities created by new media and a networked society?
URL: http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit5/subs/MiT5_plenary3.html

Media in Transition 5 - Plenary Session 4: Learning through Remixing
Saturday, April 28, 2007 4:30pm-6:30pm PDT
Juan Devis, KCET/PBS Los Angeles; Renee Hobbs, Temple University ; Alice Robison, MIT; Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, Mixed Magic Theater
Moderator: Henry Jenkins, MIT
Historically, engineers learned by taking machines apart and putting them back together again. Can young people also learn how culture works by sampling and remixing the materials of their culture? Might this ability to appropriate and transform valued cultural materials be recognized as an important new kind of cultural competency, what some people are calling the new media literacies? How might we meaningfully incorporate this fascination with mash-ups into our pedagogical practices and what values should we place on the kinds of new content which young people produce by working on and working over existing cultural materials? In this program, we will showcase a range of contemporary projects that embrace a hands-on approach to contemporary and classical media materials as a means of getting young people to think critically about their own roles as future media producers and consumers.
URL: http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit5/subs/MiT5_plenary4.html

Media in Transition 5 - Plenary Session 5: Reproduction, Mimicry, Critique and Distribution Systems in Visual Art
Sunday, April 29, 2007 7:45am-9:15am PDT
Tony Cokes, Brown University; Andres Laracuente, artist; Michael Mittelman, ASPECT;
Moderator: Bill Arning, List Visual Arts Center, MIT
Today, artists working in new media, including video, web projects and music confront contested and conceptually confusing terrain in which reproduction can be as perfect as the artist desires and endless copies theoretically possible. Yet many find the lack of clarity stimulating and a compelling space in which to break new ground. Why are so many artists today mimicking new forms of visual culture and their distribution systems — even at the risk of confusion with their popular sources? How are artists debating the value of tightly controlling distribution of media art versus allowing its wider reproduction? What are the tradeoffs artists make between creating artificial scarcity to increase a work’s unique value and increasing its visibility through broader reproduction? How are the needs of those who teach and write on video going to be met in the face of hyper-commodification?
URL: http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit5/subs/MiT5_plenary5.html

Media in Transition 5 - Plenary Session 5: Summary Perspectives
Sunday, April 29, 2007 9:30am-11:00am PDT
Suzanne de Castell, Simon Fraser University; Fred Turner, Stanford; Siva Vaidhyanathan, NYU; Jose van Dijck, University of Amsterdam
Moderator: Nick Montfort, University of Pennsylvania
What have we learned? What have we accomplished? Where do we go from here?
URL: http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit5/subs/MiT5_plenary6.html

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