MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies
Studying Media and Making Media
Let's talk about what it means to start reading code differently, as cultural objects and statements. Let's raise the questions that need to be raised.
Submissions accepted on a rolling basis until Friday, March 1, 2013.
A talk on the fighting game community, its spiritual and physical roots in the arcade, common practices, and how issues of ethnicity and gender collide.
Games scholar Miguel Sicart of the IT University of Copenhagen looks at the culture, aesthetics, and technological implications of play in the age of computers.
McGill's Jonathan Sterne gives a cultural history of auto-tune as a form of signal processing, drawing on patent documents, interviews, operational protocols, tuning standards and competing acoustemologies.
Kate Crawford is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research (Social Media Collective) and a Visiting Professor at the MIT Center for Civic Media. She is currently working on a new book.
Theresa Rojas examines the prolific, heavily tattooed Kat Von D, who offers an aesthetic that challenges tattoo culture and notions of the “monstrous body”.
The argument that culture empties out as it becomes ever more pivotal in the creative economy has, George Yúdice thinks, been borne out.
Hiromu Nagahara explores Japan's first “mass media revolution”, in the 1920s and '30s, when technology expanded the number of media product consumers.
Sarah Zaidan is a game designer, artist and researcher whose work explores how video games and comic books can engage in a dialogue with identity, gender and civic awareness.
André Brock, scholar of Black cyberculture, offers that Twitter's feature set and ubiquity map closely onto Black discursive identity.
As part of MIT’s Day of Action/Day of Engagement, come share poems from cultures beyond the US.
Nancy Baym: "By the time musicians and industry figures realized they could use the internet to reach audiences directly, those audiences had already established their presences and social norms online, putting them in unprecedented positions of power."
Professor Ian Condry explores contemporary Japanese music, with a comparison of diverse examples, such as female Japanese rappers, underground techno festivals, the virtual idol Hatsune Miku, and the pop idol group AKB48.
Assistant Professor Paloma Duong on "how revisiting our assumptions about digital media and cultural agency, both in Cuba and in the broader hemispheric context, can speak to the dreams and demands of constituencies that operate between, beneath, and beyond the pressures of global markets and the nation-state."
