Media Tech Tonic: Seminars for designers, artists, and media makers held at MassArt

This spring Media Tech Tonic brings you an all-star line-up of innovative thinkers, we hope you can join us for one or more of these talks.

Media Tech Tonic #13: High-Low Tech
Leah Buechley, Director, High-Low Tech Group, MIT Media Lab, Thursday, March 18, 2010, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. North Building, Pozen Center, MassArt.

Media Tech Tonic #14: The Hand
Frank R. Wilson, Medical Director, Peter F. Ostwald Health Program for Performing Artists at the University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco. Tuesday, March 23, 2010, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
Room 406, Kennedy Building, MassArt.

Media Tech Tonic #15: Simulation and its Discontents
Sherry Turkle, Director, MIT Initiative on Technology and Self Program in Science, Technology, and Society. Wednesday, April 14, 2010, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Room 406, Kennedy Building, MassArt.

Details on each of these Media Tech Tonic talks will be sent out in subsequent posts. If someone has forwarded this information to you, please consider visiting our web site where you can subscribe to receive Media Tech Tonic announcements via e-mail or subscribe to our RSS feed. These events are hosted by the Dynamic Media Institute (DMI) at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Media Tech Tonic #13: High-Low Tech is co-presented with the Studio for Interrelated Media (SIM). Media Tech Tonic #15: Simulation and its Discontents is the MassArt DMI Annual Lecture which is being “Cross Listed” as Media Tech Tonic #15.

Our next speaker in our Spring 2009 Speaker Series is writer and journalist Scott Kirser.

Abstract
Artists in every field who choose to use new tools, technologies, and methods of distribution almost inevitably encounter resistance from the “establishment.” Looking at the history of Hollywood (and viewing clips of movies made in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries), we’ll explore how cinematic innovators have run into this resistance, and often overcome it–transforming the movies as an art form and as a business. We’ll discuss some of the institutional and psychological reasons people often prefer to preserve the status quo rather than giving new ideas a hearing, and also discuss some of the challenges that the motion picture industry (and anyone who wants to tell stories with film/video) is grappling with today. What are the new forms and genres emerging today… what are the business models that support them… who is innovating and who is trying to hold on to the past?

Event Details:
Free and and open to the public, however, registration is required.
Location: MassArt, 621 Huntington Avenue, Boston
Room: Tower Building, Room 312 (through the Computer Arts Center, all the way at the end of the hall)
Date: Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Time: 6:30pm to 9:30pm
Directions: By car | By T | Campus map (PDF)
Parking Information: at the end of this post

Speaker Biography
Scott Kirsner is a journalist who writes about innovation, with a special focus on the ways that new technologies are changing the entertainment industry. He writes regularly for Variety and The Boston Globe, and has been a contributing writer for Fast Company, BusinessWeek, and Wired. He edits the blog CinemaTech, and is the author, most recently, of the book Fans, Friends & Followers, which explores the challenges of building an audience and supporting a creative career in the digital age. Earlier books include Inventing the Movies, a technological history of Hollywood, published in 2008, and The Future of Web Video: New Opportunities for Producers, Entrepreneurs, Media Companies and Advertisers, published in 2007. Scott’s writing has also appeared in the New York Times, The Hollywood Reporter, Salon, the San Jose Mercury News, and Newsweek, among other publications. Scott has been on panels at the Sundance Film Festival, the South by Southwest Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Los Angeles Film Festival, Silverdocs, the Harvard Business School Entertainment and Media Conference, the NAB Futures Summit, and the IFP Filmmaker Conference.

Parking and Driving Directions
Parking will be available to attendees who drive in the Ward Street lot if you enter the lot between 5:45pm and 6:45pm. If you’re driving, take a close look at a Google Map of the area, finding the Ward Street Lot can be tricky the first time.

If you’re traveling west on Huntington Avenue from Downtown, as you pass the main campus on your right, take a left at the light at the Longwood Avenue intersection, crossing over the trolley tracks. Go straight to the stop sign and turn left, then immediately turn right onto Ward Street. MassArt’s parking lot is short distance ahead on the left.

If you’re traveling east on Huntington Avenue from Bringham Circle, take a right at the light at the Longwood Avenue intersection, then a quick left and right and you’re on Ward Street. MassArt’s parking lot is short distance ahead on the left.

A great mystery of academia is that design and storytelling are kept so unnaturally apart, taught in distantly separated university departments – that is if storytelling as an art form is even addressed at all. Storytelling and design are more than related, they are intertwined and complementary, reinforcing one another. This will be a storytelling workshop for designers who want to know how to tell stories to support design. Participants will learn to tell stories, apply storytelling to their design practice, and become reacquainted with the precious art that informs storytelling more than any other - the art of listening.

Download Handout (PDF)
 

Presenter

Kevin Brooks is a Researcher and Experience Designer for Motorola and a professional oral storyteller. At Motorola Kevin researches and designs new user interface technologies and expresses these technologies as connected user-centered experiences using a variety of media. As a writer and performing oral storyteller, Kevin tells personal tales from his urban childhood of the 60´s through to his present day parenthood. His stories for adults and family audiences resonate with humor and poignancy, and he has been a featured performer at many storytelling festivals, conferences and other venues. In 2006 he released a CD of his stories entitled Kiss of Summer. Kevin received his Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab, where his area of research was computational narrative and interactive cinema. Kevin has also studied engineering, computer science, creative writing and film production as an undergraduate, receiving a BS in Communications from Drexel University and an MA in Documentary Film from Stanford University. Kevin has several published papers and has given numerous workshops on storytelling and interactive story design for designers, engineers and storytellers alike. He is currently co-authoring a book entitled Storytelling for User Experience Design, anticipated end of 2009.

Event Details:

Free and and open to the public, however, registration is required.
Location: MassArt, 621 Huntington Avenue, Boston
Room: Tower Building, Room 312 (through the Computer Arts Center, all the way at the end of the hall)
Date: Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Time: 6:30pm to 9:30pm
Directions: By car | By T | Campus map (PDF)

Additional Parking and Driving Directions

Parking will be available to attendees who drive in the Ward Street lot if you enter the lot between 5:45pm and 6:45pm. If you’re driving, take a close look at a Google Map of the area, finding the Ward Street Lot can be tricky the first time.

If you’re traveling west on Huntington Avenue from Downtown, as you pass the main campus on your right, take a left at the light at the Longwood Avenue intersection, crossing over the trolley tracks. Go straight to the stop sign and turn left, then immediately turn right onto Ward Street. MassArt’s parking lot is short distance ahead on the left.

If you’re traveling east on Huntington Avenue from Bringham Circle, take a right at the light at the Longwood Avenue intersection, then a quick left and right and you’re on Ward Street. MassArt’s parking lot is short distance ahead on the left.

A presentation and Q&A with Joseph Paradiso who will talk about his work on sensor networks and how they can augment and mediate human experience, interaction, and perception. Joe Paradiso is Director of the Responsive Environments Group at the MIT Media Laboratory and also co-directs the Things That Think Consortium exploring the extreme fringe of embedded computation, communication, and sensing.

Location: MassArt, 621 Huntington Avenue, Boston
Room: Alumni Room, 11th Floor Tower Building
Date: Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Time: 6:30pm to 8:30pm
Directions: By car | By T | Campus map (PDF)
Access: Free and open to the public
RSVP: Please REGISTER if you plan to attend using our contact form, we need to have an idea of how many people to expect
Note: If you’re driving, take a look at the additional driving directions at the end of this post.

Abstract

We are witnessing the dawn of a ubiquitous networked sensor infrastructure, leveraged by the increasingly low cost of microelectronics, sensors, and wireless technologies. As these now independent application-silo systems begin to converge through common standards, the world becomes covered by a seamless electronic “nervous system,” that extends across things, places, and people. One of the biggest challenges facing researchers is how to appropriately interface humans with this wealth of real-time information. Immediate applications of such an augmented awareness are readily evident in areas like supply chain and logistics management, urban optimization (e.g., transportation and energy), factory & plant operation, etc. Taking a broad perspective, however, this transition is profound - one’s interface into this environment can be envisioned as an extension of human perception, augmenting our five senses well beyond the canonical “here and now” and redefining the meaning of presence. 

One way to connect people to such information is through online virtual world browsers, where sensed phenomena and features manifest as metaphoric constructs and animations, and where a user can easily shift the scale, location, and granularity of represented data. Similarly, a user in virtual space can “appear” through devices and actuators in the real world.  We term the translation of sensed phenomena into the virtual space and the manifestation of virtual phenomena into the real world “Cross Reality,” where sensor/actuator networks tunnel information across the real/virtual divide. Going beyond Cross Reality is “Scalable Virtuality,” where the manifestation of virtual phenomena in the real world becomes a function of available and appropriate information portals, and the representation of real-world data in virtual space is dependent on dynamic privacy settings and local context.  

Joseph Paradiso’s talk will overview recent work in embedded sensing by him and his students in the Responsive Environments Group at the MIT Media Lab that address this broad theme. The technical areas that he will touch on include high-bandwidth, wireless multimodal sensor clusters, massively distributed, ultra-low-power” featherweight” sensor nodes, parasitic energy scavenging and dynamic power management techniques.  The impact of these technologies will be illustrated through several application examples involving cross-reality, affect-driven media queires, controllers for interactive media, active RFID for logistics management, biomotion capture, smart objects, human-computer interfaces and instrumented social interaction.

Biography

Joseph Paradiso is the Sony Career Development Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Laboratory, where he directs the Responsive Environments group, which explores how sensor networks augment and mediate human experience, interaction and perception, and co-directs the Things That Think Consortium, a group of industry sponsors and Media Lab researchers who explore the extreme fringe of embedded computation, communication, and sensing.  After receiving a BS in Electrical Engineering and Physics summa cum laude from Tufts University in 1977, Paradiso became a K.T. Compton fellow at the Lab for Nuclear Science at MIT, receiving his PhD in physics there in 1981 for research conducted at CERN in Geneva.  After two years developing precision drift chambers at the Lab for High Energy Physics at ETH in Zurich, he joined the Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, MA in 1984, where his research encompassed spacecraft control systems, image processing algorithms, underwater sonar, and precision alignment sensors for large high-energy physics detectors. He joined the Media Lab in 1994, where his current research interests include embedded sensing systems and sensor networks, wearable and body sensor networks, energy harvesting and power management for embedded sensors, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, localization systems, passive and RFID sensor architectures, human-computer interfaces, and interactive media. His honors include the 2000 Discover Magazine Award for Technological Innovation, and he has authored 200 articles and technical reports on topics ranging from computer music to power scavenging.

Additional Parking and Driving Directions

Parking will be available to attendees who drive in the Ward Street lot if you enter the lot between 5:45pm and 6:45pm. If you’re driving, take a close look at a Google Map of the area, finding the Ward Street Lot can be tricky the first time.

If you’re traveling west on Huntington Avenue from Downtown, as you pass the main campus on your right, take a left at the light at the Longwood Avenue intersection, crossing over the trolley tracks. Go straight to the stop sign and turn left, then immediately turn right onto Ward Street. MassArt’s parking lot is short distance ahead on the left.

If you’re traveling east on Huntington Avenue from Bringham Circle, take a right at the light at the Longwood Avenue intersection, then a quick left and right and you’re on Ward Street. MassArt’s parking lot is short distance ahead on the left.

For our next meeting, Mike Golembewski will discuss the potential of technology as a powerful tool for artists and designers.  Too often the use of creative technologies becomes centered around the use of commercial software and hardware packages designed for workflow efficiency, rather than for free exploration.  Mike will discuss how emerging technologies can become tools for the expression of high concept and real emotion, rather than just tools for creative production.

He will present some contemporary projects that he feels makes excellent use of technology as an expressive medium, and use this presentation to begin an open discussion of the roles that technology might play in creative practice.  Mike will be showing work from artists, scientists, and researchers at Yale, Goldsmiths University, Imperial College, the Royal College of Art, Troika UK, and his own scanner photography project.

Mike Golembewski is a practicing artist and interaction designer and currently visiting faculty with the Dynamic Media Institute at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.  His work explores the ways in which artists use emerging technologies, and has been widely published and exhibited internationally.

Join us for this very exciting meeting. We would appreciate an RSVP using our contact form so we have an idea on how many people to expect, but RSVP is not required.

Location: Alumni Room, 11th Floor Tower Building, Massaschusetts College of Art & Design (driving directions | T directions | campus map PDF)

Date: Wednesday, September 24th. Please note that this month we’re meeting on the fourth Wednesday instead of the third Wednesday.

Time: 6:30pm to 8:30pm or so

Note to drivers: parking will be available to attendees who drive in the Ward Street lot if you enter the lot between 5:45pm and 6:45pm.

If you’re traveling west on Huntington Avenue, as you pass the main campus on your right, take a left at the light onto Longwood Avenue, crossing over the trolley tracks. Go straight to the stop sign and turn left, then immediately turn right onto Ward Street. MassArt’s parking lot is short distance ahead on the left.

If you’re traveling east on Huntington Avenue, right at the light onto Longwood Avenue, then a quick left and right and you’re on Ward Street. MassArt’s parking lot is short distance ahead on the left.