POPULARITY
Interview with Dr. Neil Gershenfeld, and several of his students about the future of design. Dr. Gershenfeld is a professor and Director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms where he is researching many incredible things, such as cell-by-cell development, nanotechnology, and community self-sufficiency, among other things. He is also the Chairman of the Fab Foundation, which has done incredible work to change lives around the world through innovation and education.
Grey Mirror: MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative on Technology, Society, and Ethics
Ethan Zuckerman, the director for MIT's Center for Civic Media. We chat about his skepticism of crypto social networks and the historical co-evolution of information and governance. Support me on Patreon! www.patreon.com/rhyslindmark Support me with ETH on StakeTree! www.staketree.com/rhyslindmark Thanks to KeepKey for sponsoring the show! www.keepkey.com/ Thanks to Collin Brown, Mike Goldin, John Desmond, Paras Chopra, Andrew Cochrane, Sandra Ro, Harry Lindmark, Jonny Dubowsky, Sam Jonas, Malcolm Ocean, Colin Wielga, Joe Urgo, Josh Nussbaum, John Lindmark, Garry Tan, Jacob Zax, Doug King, Katie Powell, Mark Moore, Jonathan Isaac, Coury Ditch, Ref Lindmark, Mike Pratt, Jim Rutt, Jeff Snyder, Ryan X Charles, Chris Edmonds, Brayton Williams, Brian Crain, David Ernst, Ali Shanti, Patrick Walker, Ryan Martens, Kenji Williams, Craig Burel, Scott Levi, Matt Daley, Peter Rodgers, Keith Klundt, Alan Curtis, Kenzie Jacobs, and James Waugh for supporting me on Patreon! Thanks to Storecoin, Griff Green, Radar Relay, district0x, Niel de la Rouviere, Brady McKenna, and some anonymous others for supporting me on StakeTree!
Everyone is familiar with MIT and the university's reputation as a serious force in the world of science, tech, and research, but how many are aware of MIT's legacy in the arts? Did you know that MIT's founder had envisioned incorporating the arts from the very beginning?In this episode we speak with Leila Kinney and Evan Ziporyn of MIT's Center for Art, Science, and Technology (CAST) about MIT's culture of creativity and exploration, the institution's mission to humanize science and tech, and the exciting projects that have emerged from CAST, like Tomás Saraceno's Arachnid Orchestra.-About Leila Kinney-Leila W. Kinney is the Executive Director of Arts Initiatives and of the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST), working with Associate Provost Philip S. Khoury, the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P), the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), the Creative Arts Council, the Council for the Arts at MIT, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, and the MIT Museum, to advance the arts at MIT in the areas of strategic planning, cross-school collaborations, communications and resource development.Kinney is an art historian with experience in both SA+P, where she was on the faculty in the History, Theory and Criticism section of the Department of Architecture (HTC) and SHASS, where she taught in the Program in Women’s Studies and in Comparative Media Studies. She specializes in modern art, with an emphasis on media in transition, arts institutions and artists’ engagement with mass culture. She is a member of the Executive Committee of a2ru (Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities) and of the Advisory Committees of the Catalyst Collaborative at MIT, the MIT List Visual Arts Center and the MIT Museum.-About Evan Ziporyn-Evan Ziporyn makes music at the crossroads between genres and cultures, and between East and West. He studied at the Eastman School of Music, Yale University, and UC Berkeley with Joseph Schwantner, Martin Bresnick, and Gerard Grisey. He first traveled to Bali in 1981, studying with Madé Lebah, Colin McPhee’s 1930s musical informant. He returned on a Fulbright in 1987.Earlier that year, he performed a clarinet solo at the First Bang on a Can Marathon in New York. His involvement with Bang on a Can continued for twenty five years. In 1992, he co-founded the Bang on a Can All-stars (Musical America’s 2005 Ensemble of the Year), with whom he toured the globe and premiered over one hundred commissioned works, collaborating with Nik Bartsch, Iva Bittova, Don Byron, Ornette Coleman, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Thurston Moore, Terry Riley, and Tan Dun. He co-produced their seminal 1996 recording of Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports,” as well as their most recent CD, “Big Beautiful Dark & Scary” (2012).Ziporyn joined the MIT faculty in 1990, founding Gamelan Galak Tika in 1993, and beginning a series of groundbreaking compositions for gamelan & Western instruments. These include three evening-length works, 2001’s “ShadowBang,” 2004’s “Oedipus Rex” (Robert Woodruff, director), and 2009’s “A House in Bali,” an opera which joins Western singers with Balinese traditional performers, and the Bang on a Can All-stars with a full gamelan. It received its world premiere in Bali that summer and its New York premiere at BAM Next Wave in October 2010.As a clarinetist, Ziporyn recorded the definitive version of Steve Reich’s multi-clarinet “New York Counterpoint” in 1996, sharing in that ensemble’s Grammy in 1998. In 2001, his solo clarinet CD, “This is Not A Clarinet,” made Top Ten lists across the country. His compositions have been commissioned by Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road, Kronos Quartet, American Composers Orchestra, Maya Beiser, So Percussion, Wu Man, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, with whom he recorded his most recent CD, “Big Grenadilla/Mumbai” (2012). His honors include awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council (2011); The Herb Alpert Foundation (2011); USA Artists Walker Fellowship (2007); MIT’s Gyorgy Kepes Prize (2006); the American Academy of Arts and Letters Goddard Lieberson Fellowship (2004); as well as commissions from Meet the Composer/Commissioning Music USA and the Rockefeller MAP Fund. Recordings of his works have been been released on Cantaloupe, Sony Classical, New Albion, New World, Koch, Naxos, Innova, and CRI.He is Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music at MIT. He also serves as Head of Music and Theater Arts, and in 2012 was appointed inaugural Director of MIT’s Center for Art Science & Technology. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, with Christine Southworth, and has two children, Leonardo (19) and Ava (12).-About MIT CAST-The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) creates new opportunities for art, science and technology to thrive as interrelated, mutually informing modes of exploration, knowledge and discovery. CAST’s multidisciplinary platform presents performing and visual arts programs, supports research projects for artists working with science and engineering labs, and sponsors symposia, classes, workshops, design studios, lectures and publications. The Center is funded in part by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Whose Century Is It?: Ideas, trends & twists shaping the world in the 21st century
Aiming to help everyone make almost anything, Fab Labs have opened around the world, and Fab Cities are taking the movement big-scale. Featuring Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT's Center of Bits and Atoms, talking about the movement he started, and a visit to Kochi, formerly Cochin, a former ancient Indian trading port turned aspiring Internet of Things hub, and the first state or region to sign on to the Fab Cities movement.
NEIL GERSHENFELD (https://www.edge.org/memberbio/neil_gershenfeld) is a Physicist and the Director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms. He is the author of FAB. The Conversation: https://www.edge.org/conversation/neil_gershenfeld-digital-reality
Using the tools of online textual annotation -- the platform Rap Genius, its spinoff site Poetry Genius, or MIT's own Annotation Studio -- readers can collaborate on annotating or interpreting a work, make their annotations public, and respond to interpretations by others. We will be joined by creators, facilitators, and users of these sites to discuss how online annotation is changing practices of reading, enriching practices of teaching and learning, and making newly public a previously private encounter with the written word. Speakers: Wyn Kelley is a senior lecturer in Literature. She has worked for many years with the MIT's digital humanities lab, HyperStudio, and is the author of Melville's City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York (1996) among other works. Kurt Fendt is Director of HyperStudio, MIT's Center for Digital Humanities. HyperStudio explores the potential of new media technologies for the enhancement of research and education. Jeremy Dean, AKA Lucky_Desperado, is the "Education Czar" at Rap Genius, an online database of song lyrics (and poetry on the spinoff site Poetry Genius) that users can annotate freely. Moderator: Noel Jackson is a Professor of Literature at MIT and author of Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (2008).
Ethan Zuckerman is the Director of MIT's Center for Civic Media, a former fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center, and co-founder of Global Voices, a hub of international news written by bloggers. We spoke about the need for global awareness, the relationship between information and empathy, and the challenge homophily presents to thinking about the public good (homophily is the fancy way of saying "birds of a feather flock together"). This conversation takes us through the the media's power to set the public agenda, three current media paradigms, and Ethan's suggestion for a new, forth paradigm based on the serendipitous discovery of information about the broader world. And that's just where our conversation begins. Connections? Here's one: Jenny Lee's conversation focused heavily on local media and its power to address local components of national and global problems. Ethan approaches the same issue from the opposite direction, looking first at global awareness and its positive local implications. Jenny also mentioned the problem of excess information and her reliance on social networking as a filter, an issue that Ethan responds to (and remedies?) with his serendipity paradigm. Lawrence Torcello's discussion of liberalism and comprehensive doctrines will be on your mind as Ethan shares a story about a series of conversations he had with a college roommate. Unsurprisingly, Micah and I conclude the episode by getting caught (again) in the traffic jam of conversation, fundamentalism, and the difference between rationality and reason. Artwork by Eleanor Davis.
James P. Vary is Professor of Physics and Past Director of the International Institute of Theoretical and Applied Physics (IITAP) at Iowa State University (ISU). He graduated from Boston College (B.S., 1965, Magna Cum Laude), and Yale University (M.S. ,1966 and Ph.D., 1970). He spent two postdoctoral years at MIT's Center for Theoretical Physics and three years at Brookhaven National Laboratory as Assistant then Associate Physicist. In 1975, he joined the faculty at Iowa State University and has fostered the development of a 10-member high-energy nuclear theory group. Professor Vary's research activities span strong interaction physics from ab-initio nuclear structure theory to include fundamental tests of nature's symmetries and to nuclear applications of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). Computational physics is another major area of emphasis. His lecture was given on November 18, 2011.
Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at MIT's Center for Digital Business and author of "Enterprise 2.0."