Podcasts about mit open documentary lab

From Dust is a 24-minute VR Opera by composer Michel van der Aa that is premiering this week at the Rotterdam Immersive Tech Week, and I had a chance to get a sneak peak at the end of my trip covering IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam. The emotional core of From Dust is the top-notch composition from van der Aa and brilliant musical performance by Sjaella. It was a really powerful and moving immersive journey that seamlessly integrated my GenAI prompts creating a personalized experience. I can highly recommend checking it out to see where immersive music experiences are headed here in the future. The throughput of this piece is only 3-4 people per hour, and so it may be hard to be able to see it once they start touring it around Europe to different musical festivals. van der Aa told me that this is the lease commercial project that he's had a chance to ever work on, and acknowledges that this is a piece of subsidized art. There have been a lot of broader discussions happening within the XR industry about the sustainability of these types of location-based experiences, and the need for creators to understand some of the more pragmatic financial constraints for exhibition taking into consideration earlier in the production process. I'm in the process of finishing up the public report from the Think Tank at Venice Immersive this year on this very issue, and the MIT Open Documentary Lab is also actively starting to study these types of distribution questions as well at the R&D Summit at IDFA DocLab this year. But at the same time, it's also great to see artists who are able to get this type of work funded who are willing to push the virtual reality medium to the limits of creative expression despite some of the financial impracticalities of exhibition. Especially as it may drive the adaptation of this type of work into a format like the Apple Vision Pro or PCVR where it can be within a form factor that is a lot more scalable, even if there are compromises on fidelity or on the GenAI elements using the open source LLM of Flux that can not be distributed Steam due to Valve's restrictions on AI integrations within games. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ig9VqdLW9X0 I had a chance to catch up with van der Aa last week in order to get more context on his journey and process on creating the piece, as well as get some elaboration on the degree on some of the branching mechanics. There are some questions that they ask during the onboarding process that categorize the user's Big Five Personality characteristics, and then they are creating some invisible branching of my experience that was completely imperceptible to me. van der Aa told me that about 75% of the musical experience is the same for everyone, but that there are some explicit and implicit branching that is happening musically, but also a bit more visually as they are integrating my GenAI prompts in 4-5 different places throughout the experience. It's certainly an innovative and ambitious piece that has some GenAI parallels to Tulpamancer from Venice 2023, but one that shows the potential of combining musical composition with these types of immersive adventures that are able to tell a much richer story when combined. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality

Sarah Wolozin is the director of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, and I had a chance to catch up with her at the IDFA DocLab 2022 in order to record her journey from being a storytelling to working at MIT's Open DocLab. Here's the mission statement of the Open DocLab: “Drawing on MIT's legacy of media innovation and its deep commitment to open and accessible information, the MIT Open Documentary Lab brings storytellers, technologists, and scholars together to explore new documentary forms with a particular focus on collaborative and interactive storytelling.” I was able to capture some of the history of MIT's Open DocLab in my three previous conversations with it's founder William Uricchio (#855, #1042, & #1160), and Wolozin mentioned the inaugural New Arts of Documentary, one-day summit on March 20, 2012 as being a key turning point for her after seeing the energy and excitement from the community of creators exploring new documentary forms.

We begin to talk about the story between MIT's Open Doc Lab and our guests' book Collective Wisdom with Kat's experiences working for the National Film Board of Canada and how this provided a precious chance for her to dig into collective wisdom. William Uricchio brings in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT and two major characteristics of its cross-media study: remarkable community and applying humanity to work. Then we talk about the diversity of co-creation, and our guests' definitions of some key terms, including the difference between co-creation and collaboration. Looking at the deep roots of these practices from long before the modern notion of single-authorship, Kat & William's book lifts up alternatives for dealing with today's “wicked problems.” It also dispels the concept of a fixed narrative for an open one, making way for participatory culture. Through examples like MIT Co-Creation Studio's Worlding initiative, AI, and Art/Science experimentation, we talk about decentralized decision-making, the ownership/authorship of co-creation, and re-think existing models of co-creation between arts and science. Finally, our guests are careful not to present co-creation as a panacea, and that accompanying strategies are necessary to make it productive.Katerina Cizek is an Emmy-winning documentary director working across many media platforms: digital media, broadcasting (radio and television), print, and live presentations/installations. Her work has documented the Digital Revolution and has itself become part of the movement. As a filmmaker-in-residence, she has helped redefine the National Film Board of Canada as one of the world's leading digital content hubs for a community-based and globally recognized documentary.William Uricchio revisits the histories of old media when they were new; explores interactive and participatory documentary; writes about the past and future of television; thinks about algorithms and archives; and researches narrative in immersive and interactive settings. He is Professor of Comparative Media Studies, founder and Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, and Principal Investigator of the Co-Creation Studio. He was also Professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and has held visiting professorships at the Freie Universität Berlin, Stockholm University, the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Lichtenberg-Kolleg), China University of Science and Technology, and in Denmark where he was DREAM professor. He has received Guggenheim, Humboldt, and Fulbright fellowships, the Berlin Prize, and the Mercator Prize. His publications include Reframing Culture; We Europeans? Media, Representations, Identities; Die Anfänge des deutschen Fernsehens; Media Cultures; Many More Lives of the Batman; Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media Within Communities, across Disciplines and with Algorithms, and hundreds of essays and book chapters, including a visual "white paper" on the documentary impulse (momentsofinnovation.mit.edu). He is currently leading a two-year research initiative on augmentation and public spaces with partners in Montreal and Amsterdam.A full transcript of this episode will be available soon!Here are some of the references from this episode, for those who want to dig a little deeper:Collective WisdomNational Film Board of Canada - HighriseGeorge StoneyColin mentioned “Bear 42,” but meant Bear 71 (and apologizes for failing memory). Here's a short article on that film and the newer VR version of the original screen-based film.Henry on Archive of Our OwnJ.R.R. Tolkien on SubcreationWaves of Buffalo and other MIT Co-Creation Studio Worlding projectsISeeChange collective climate change studyStephanie Dinkins, AI artistGina Czarnicki Artwork - HeirloomGoogle Smart City Experiment in TorontoGoncharov: The Fake Martin Scorsese Film the Internet Brought to LifeCheck out our previous episode with Mike MonelloShare your thoughts via Twitter with Henry, Colin and the How Do You Like It So Far? account! You can also email us at howdoyoulikeitsofarpodcast@gmail.com.Music:“In Time” by Dylan Emmett and “Spaceship” by Lesion X.––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––In Time (Instrumental) by Dylan Emmet  https://soundcloud.com/dylanemmetSpaceship by Lesion X https://soundcloud.com/lesionxbeatsCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/in-time-instrumentalFree Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/lesion-x-spaceshipMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/AzYoVrMLa1Q––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

As one of the most influential musicians in Turkish history and the first modern pop star of Turkey, Zeki Müren gained huge popularity beginning in the 1950s across all different communities in Turkey, in spite of his groundbreaking behaviors like cross-dressing, and can be seen as an LGBTQ+ trailblazer. Even now, Zeki Müren continues to have a profound influence on Turkish society and on the Turkish people. We begin discussing how he became so popular with such a wide audience, then Beyza and Jeff talk about their own experiences with Zeki Müren, and what led them to create the interactive documentary Zeki Müren Hotline. After that, we compare the pop culture background while Zeki was performing with the current Turkish pop culture environment, and also discuss how Zeki kept the balance of pushing boundaries and also being conservative, how he used some survival behaviors, and what made him a national hero. Finally, our guests Beyza and Jeff share some stories from the Zeki Müren Hotline. Beyza Boyacıoğlu is an award-winning documentarian and film editor from Istanbul, currently based in Brooklyn. Her work has been exhibited at MoMA, IDFA, Anthology Film Archives, RIDM, MoMA PS1, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Venice Biennial, Creative Time Summit, Barbican Centre, UnionDocs, Maysles Cinema, Morelia International Film Festival, !f Istanbul and many others.She created the interactive documentary Zeki Müren Hotline at the MIT Open Documentary Lab with Jeff Soyk.Jeff Soyk is an award-winning media artist with experience in storytelling, direction, UX design, UI design, front-end development, animation, and film/video. His credits include co-director and UI & UX designer on Zeki Müren Hotline (2022 Webby Award Honoree: NetArt, 2017 !f Istanbul exhibit, 2017 RIDM exhibit, 2016 IDFA DocLab nominee), co-creative director and UI & UX designer on PBS Frontline's Inheritance (2016 News & Documentary Emmy Award winner, 2016 Peabody-Facebook Award winner), and art director, UI/UX designer and architect on Hollow (2014 News & Documentary Emmy Award nominee, 2013 Peabody Award winner).A full transcript of this episode will be available soon!Here are some of the references from this episode, for those who want to dig a little deeper:Zeki Müren HotlineZeki Müren Hotline Kickstarter (w/ background info)The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular MusicTurkey as Major Television Exporter"Letter of Sorrow"MIT Open Documentary LabShare your thoughts via Twitter with Henry, Colin and the How Do You Like It So Far? account! You can also email us at howdoyoulikeitsofarpodcast@gmail.com.Music:“In Time” by Dylan Emmett and “Spaceship” by Lesion X.––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––In Time (Instrumental) by Dylan Emmet  https://soundcloud.com/dylanemmetSpaceship by Lesion X https://soundcloud.com/lesionxbeatsCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/in-time-instrumentalFree Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/lesion-x-spaceshipMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/AzYoVrMLa1Q––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

William Uricchio is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founder of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, which brings together storytellers, technologists, and scholars to experiment with new documentary.

We all do things with other people. We design things, we write things, we create things. Despite the fact that co-creation is all around us it can be easy to miss because creation gets assigned to individuals all too often. We're quick to assume that one person should get credit thereby erasing the contributions of others.The two of us have a distinct interest in co-creation because we co-create everything we do. We co-created Sonder Studio, our speaking engagements, our workshops, our design projects, and our soon-to-be-published book, Make Better Decisions. We're also interested in how humans can co-create with technology, specifically artificial intelligence, and when that is a good thing and when that might be something to avoid.To dig into these interests and questions we talked with Kat Cizek and William Uricchio whose upcoming book Collective Wisdom offers the first guide to co-creation as a concept and as a practice. Kat, William, and a lengthy list of co-authors have presented a wonderful tracing of the history of co-creation across many disciplines and societies. The book is based in interviews with 166 people and includes nearly 200 photographs that should not be missed. We hope that you all have a chance to experience their collective work.Kat is an Emmy and Peabody-winning documentarian who is the Artistic Director and Cofounder of the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. William is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where he is also Founder and Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab and Principal Investigator of the Co-Creation Studio. Their book is scheduled to be published by MIT Press on November 1st.If you enjoy our podcasts, please subscribe and leave a positive rating or comment. Sharing your positive feedback helps us reach more people and connect them with the world's great minds.Subscribe to get Artificiality delivered to your emailLearn more about Sonder StudioThanks to Jonathan Coulton for our music This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit artificiality.substack.com

DocHouse Conversations returns for a second series! Our host Carol Nahra will be talking to three filmmakers, the films which influenced them and more. Our guest for the next episode will be two-time Emmy and Peabody-winning documentarian Katerina Cizek. With her community-based and ground-breaking projects Highrise and Filmmaker-in-Residence at the National Film Board of Canada, Kat has received international acclaim and transformed the NFBC into a world leading digital-hub. Highrise, a multi-year and many-media documentary experiment, explores vertical living in suburbs around the globe. Its aim is to investigate urban living in the 21st century and examines how the process of documentary making can steer and take part in social change rather than just documenting it. Kat's work across various emergent digital platforms continues as artistic director and co-founder of the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. There, she published (with Uricchio et al.) the world's first field study on co-creating media called Collective Wisdom. Her earlier films and human rights documentaries supported criminal investigations, helped to change UN policies, and were also screened as evidence at an International Criminal Tribunal. Some of these films are Hampton-Prize winner Seeing is Believing: Handicams, Human Rights and the News (2002, co-directed with Peter Wintonick), In Search of the African Queen: A People Smuggling Operation (1999, co-director), and The Dead are Alive: Eyewitness in Rwanda (1995 editor, co-writer, narrator). In this episode which will be released 11th January, Carol talks with Kat about the Emmy and Peabody award winning Highrise project and how it has impacted her career. They also look at a film which she admires and is close to her heart: Wintopia. It's a moving portrait of Kat's friend and co-director of Seeing is Believing Peter Wintonick, made by his daughter Mira. For many years Peter Wintonick roamed the world, searching for Utopia, planning to make a film about his quest. When he dies in 2013 at aged 60, his mourning daughter Mira begins sorting through the 300 tapes he left behind. She decides to finish her father's film, merging it with a portrait of the man himself. In doing so she probes the painful reality that while generously giving his time to the global documentary community, Peter deprived his wife and daughter of his presence for months on end.

Emmy-award winning ⁦web documentarian Katerina Cizek and I discuss co-creation in media, human/nonhuman intelligence and media literacy as an antidote to deep fakes.EPISODE NOTES:High Rise (Out My Window) web documentary - http://highrise.nfb.ca/ MIT Open Documentary Lab - http://opendoclab.mit.edu/ Co-creation Studio at MIT - https://cocreationstudio.mit.edu/ Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media within Communities, across Disciplines and with Algorithms - https://cmsw.mit.edu/collective-wisdom-co-creating-media-within-communities-across-disciplines-and-with-algorithms/ Petroglyphs in Gobustan - Gobustan Rock Art Cultural Landscape, UNESCO, https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1076/ Detroit Narrative Agency - Allied Media Conference, https://alliedmedia.org/projects/detroit-narrative-agency Grace Lee Boggs - Rest in Power Grace Lee Boggs, American Revolutionary Film, https://americanrevolutionaryfilm.com/ Google Sidewalk Labs - https://www.sidewalklabs.com/ Jason E. Lewis - https://jasonlewis.org More on Jason E.Lewis' work in Part 6: Media Co-Creation with Non-Human Systems - https://wip.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/collective-wisdom-part-6/release/1?source=post_page--------------------------- Blackfoot philosopher Leroy Little Bear - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leroy_Little_Bear Witness: see it. film it. change it. - witness.org Open Doc Lab MIT Co creation lab every Tuesday webinars - https://www.glunis.com/XX/Unknown/545983178790726/MIT-Open-Documentary-Lab

Esau Sanchez-Diaz is a Customer Success Director at Salesforce, and he is interviewing Amelia Winger-Bearskin, a developer evangelist at Contentful. Amelia Winger-Bearskin is a member of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma Deer Clan. She has been making art with computers for decades, starting with a Commodore 64 her father brought home one day. Amelia's work often examines the relationship between tech and her native roots. One such example is in her tribe's use of Wampum, which is a sort of contract recording all the activity between two nations. A wampum is comprised of beads of different colors which signal when and between whom an event. As a wampum can span many decades, Amelia relates it to something like the blockchain. Each transaction that occurs on the blockchain is immutable, and since it cannot be tampered with, a history of the movement of data is recorded for all participants. Some of her projects, like the 3D Beadwork, are just a natural 21st century extension of traditional artisan practices. Through her work, Amelia has been able to build a large cohort with other indigenous people in tech. In order to amplify their visibility, she runs a podcast called Wampum.Codes about the projects they are building. Mentorship is an important topic for Amelia. She's worked as a professor of animation, and is helping to show the newer generation that a career in the tech industry is possible. Her job as a developer evangelist has helped her hone the necessary skills of meeting strangers and finding common bonds with them. She views her outside mentorship as opportunities to transfer the knowledge she's gained in the industry and to become a good community member. Links from this episode wampum.codes is Amelia's podcast interviewing native and indigenous people making cool things with new technologies The Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab researches and incubates alternatives to a singular authorial vision, through a constellation of media methods AISES is a national, nonprofit organization focused on substantially increasing the representation of indigenous peoples of North America in STEM studies and careers Sundance Institute is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the discovery and development of independent artists and audiences

Data & Society kicks off our online Databites series with Sasha Costanza-Chock, whose new book, Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, re-imagines how design led by marginalized communities can become a tool to help dismantle structural inequality, advance collective liberation, and support ecological survival.In this conversation with Data & Society's Events Producer Rigoberto Lara Guzmán, Sasha shares her experience as a design researcher and a practitioner, highlights helpful Design Justice Network best practices, and explores how we might apply the principles of design justice to COVID-19 responses.This talk was recorded on Wednesday, April 29, 2020. About the Speaker and HostSasha Costanza-Chock (pronouns: they/them or she/her) is a scholar, designer, and media-maker, and currently Associate Professor of Civic Media at MIT. They are a Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, Faculty Affiliate with the MIT Open Documentary Lab, and creator of the MIT Codesign Studio(codesign.mit.edu). Their work focuses on social movements, transformative media organizing, and design justice. Sasha's new book, Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need was published by MIT Press in March 2020. Sasha is a board member of Allied Media Projects and a Steering Committee member of the Design Justice Network.Rigoberto Lara Guzmán (pronouns: they/them or he/him) is a xicanx producer, artist, and community technologist. His work attends to the interaction of humans, objects, and the lived environment to explore coded knowledge systems and emergent ecologies. He designs experiences that facilitate situated learning and is currently unsettling socio-technical worlds at Data & Society.About DatabitesData & Society's “Databites” speaker series presents timely conversations about the purpose and power of technology, bridging our interdisciplinary research with broader public conversations about the societal implications of data and automation

Indigenous Tech, Indigenous Knowledge: Wampum.codes as a model for decolonizationIn this public panel, Amelia Winger-Bearskin brings together Indigenous artists, technologists and knowledge keepers to discuss how we can take an ethical approach to tech projects. The conversation will be a part of of Wampum.codes, her Mozilla Fellowship Project at the MIT Open Documentary Lab's Co-Creation Studio. Wampum is the practice of encoding contracts and agreements into beaded patterns, which was commonly done by Winger-Bearskin’s own tribe (Seneca-Cayuga Haudenosaunee) in pre-contact times. Just like the craft that serves as its namesake, Wampum.codes is a recording of the stories, ideas, and wisdom that is collected through conversations with other native people. This panel is part of a virtualized delegation in collaboration with the Indigenous Screen Office.Panelists include Asha Veeraswamy, Dawn Borchardt, DeLesslin Roo George-Warren, Erica Tremblay, Jade Begay, Joseph Clift, Martha Winger-Bearskin, MorningStar Angeline, and Eve-Lauryn LaFountain.Apr 28, 2020 12:00 PM in

Podcast Description “We can’t talk about what’s broken with education and coding education in the bootcamp system without zooming out to look at the larger context of our educational system. Why is it that Trump is like “Oh, I’ve got 2 trillion dollars I’ve just spent on purchasing new weapons that we’re gonna use to kill innocent people and destroy cultural heritage sites” in violation of the Geneva Conventions…but they can’t find a quarter of that to fund all the free pre-K up through higher education that they wold need for everyone would just be able to access whatever education they wanted to have, so they could maximize their potential? That’s bullshit.” Sasha Costanza-Chock (pronouns: they/them or she/her) is a researcher, activist, designer, and media-maker. They are a Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, Faculty Affiliate with the MIT Open Documentary Lab, and creator of the MIT Codesign Studio (codesign.mit.edu). Their work focuses on social movements, transformative media organizing, and design justice. Sasha’s first book, Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets: Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement was published by the MIT Press in 2014. Their new book, Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need will be published by the MIT Press in early 2020. Sasha is a board member of Allied Media Projects (alliedmedia.org) and a Steering Committee member of the Design Justice Network (designjusticenetwork.org). Transcription 00:30  Kim Crayton: Hello everyone, and welcome to today's episode of the #CauseAScene Podcast. My guest today is Sasha Costanza-Chock, and pronouns are: and she/her, they/them. Would you please introduce yourself to the audience? 00:44 Sasha Costanza-Chock: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I am a fan. My name's Sasha Costanza-Chock. I'm currently an Associate Professor of Civic Media at MIT. But I'm also on the steering committee of the Design Justice Network. So, I hope we get to talk about that a little bit today. And I'm a board member of Allied Media Projects, which is best known for producing the annual Allied Media Conference. And I am a scholar and an activist; I work in the tech space, and I'm working on trying to figure out how we can build a technology ecosystem that is more radically just and inclusive and that will challenge rather than continually reproduce oppression and help us build a world that will be ecologically survivable as well. KC: Alright, you said mouthful of that, Sasha! [Laughs] So, we're gonna start as we always start. Why is it important to cause a scene? And how are you causing a scene? 01:46 SCC: Well, we need to cause a scene; there are so many reasons we need to cause a scene right now. Today. I mean, we're having this conversation at a really dangerous moment. I mean, all moments are dangerous for the last 400 or 500 years, though. But the Banana in Chief right now is trying to ramp up to a new war. Hopefully so that—for him—I think this is about remaining in power. But it's important to cause a scene because we live in a deeply fucked up world where racism, anti-Blackness, misogyny, trans-misogyny, misogynoir, ableism, Islamophobia, settler colonialism, and other axes of historical and ongoing oppression just continue to structure so many—well, all of our lives, really—in different kinds of ways. And we need to figure out, how do we break that? How do we break those systems? How do we challenge the "matrix of domination", as Patricia Hill Collins calls it? And how do we build a more liberatory world? And frankly, we need to figure out how do we survive? How do we build a world that we can survive in instead of act as if there's unlimited ecological and human resources that can just be continually exploited? Because at this rate, you know, we're not gonna have too many more generations of humans allowed to survive on this planet. 03:19

Drawing from conceptual art, experimental music and computer science, Andrew Demirjian scrapes and remixes Internet culture to create dense rhythmic collages of sound and language. He teaches theory and production courses in emerging media in the Film and Media Department and the Integrated Media Arts MFA program at Hunter College, he is currently a Fellow at the MIT Open Documentary Lab. Claudia Hart has been active as an artist, curator and critic since 1988. Her art consists of virtual simulations of all kinds: 3d imagery integrated into photography, multi-channel animation installations, performances, and sculptures using advanced production techniques such as Rapid Prototyping, CNC routing and augmented-reality custom apps. Her works deals with issues of representation, the role of the computer in shifting contemporary values about identity and the real, and ideas about what is usually called the “natural.” Her project is to feminize the masculinist culture of technology by interjecting emotional subjectivity into the overly-determined Cartesian world of digital design.

The MIT Open Documentary Lab held it’s first official event back on Tuesday, March 20, 2012 a day-long summit called “The New Arts of Documentary.”

Co-Creation is picking up steam as a claim, aspiration, and buzz-word du jour. But what is and why does it matter? Drawing on a just-released field study, Collective Wisdom, this session addresses those questions and explore the method’s implications for just and equitable creation. It considers co-creation in the arts with communities, across disciplines and organizations, and with non-humans (both biological and AI systems), calling out precedents and best practices in a broad array of communities, including historically marginalized groups. What are the trends, opportunities, and challenges bound up in co-creation and its various deployments, and why it is increasingly urgent in our time? William Uricchio is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where he is also founder and Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab and Principal Investigator of the Co-Creation Studio. He, together with Katerina Cizek, authored Collective Wisdom — a field study on co-creation. His current research considers co-creation, documentary, and the epistemological crisis that characterizes our time.

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 research examined the development of algorithmic music recommendation, and at CMS, he wrote a thesis on the history of the player piano. Colleen Kaman is a user experience strategist at IBM Interactive Experience, skilled in storytelling, user research, learning design, and persuasive technologies. Her expertise is in developing products, services, and campaigns that help users make better decisions and accomplish tasks more effectively and efficiently. Sean Flynn is the Program Director for the Points North Institute, a Maine-based organization supporting nonfiction storytellers through artist development initiatives and, most prominently, the Camden International Film Festival and Points North Forum. He received his master’s degree in Comparative Media Studies in 2015 and worked as a researcher at the MIT Open Documentary Lab. Sean began his filmmaking career as a producer and cinematographer working on two feature-length documentaries, both of which had their premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival and aired on national television.

NEW MIKE KANE CAST - iTunes|Android|Spotify In this special episode, I got the privilege of talking with Sam Ford, Director of Cultural Intelligence at Simon & Schuster. Sam's range of expertise is incredible, and includes a few shared passions: Intellectual life, Kentucky, and, of course, professional wrestling. Sam shares his small-town roots and early love of the USWA out of Memphis, and shows how he has combined that love of pro wrestling with a deep knowledge of comparative media to become an expert who remains a fan! If you've ever turned on a TV set, this episode will inform and entertain you! (From samford.wordpress.com) Sam Ford is Director of Cultural Intelligence for Simon & Schuster, a CBS company. In addition, he is leading various initiatives of the Future of Work in Kentucky with the MIT Open Documentary Lab, the University of Southern California Annenberg School’s Civic Paths team, and other partners, and is a member of the Kentucky team taking part in the MIT Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program (REAP), the first U.S. region to ever be accepted to the program. As a Knight News Innovation Fellow with Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, he is co-leading the Community Stories Lab with Dr. Andrea Wenzel–work which received the inaugural Research Prize for Professional Relevance from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) in 2018. Sam also serves as a research affiliate with MIT’s Program in Comparative Media Studies/Writing and as an instructor in Western Kentucky University’s Popular Culture Studies Program. He is also co-founder of the Artisanal Economies Project. With Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green, Sam co-authored the 2013 NYU Press book Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, which was released in paperback in Spring 2018. The book has also been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, Italian, Swedish, and Polish. It was named one of Strategy+Business’ 2013 Best Business Books and voted as a “Top 10 Best Marketing Book You Read This Summer” by the readers of Advertising Age. He is also co-editor, with Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington, of the 2011 book The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era as well. He frequently publishes academic work on media fandom, transmedia storytelling, professional wrestling, soap operas, the marketing and communications world, and a range of other subjects.  In 2015, Sam launched and ran the Center for Innovation & Engagement at Univision’s Fusion Media Group (as FMG’s VP, Innovation & Engagement), which he ran through the end of 2016. In that role, he helped manage relationships with a range of academic, industry, nonprofit organizations, and other key communities that are focused on innovation and experimentation in storytelling or new ways of building deeper relationships with key audiences and communities. He also collaborated with teams throughout the portfolio company to foster, build, and scale new approaches to storytelling and audience engagement. The Center was the subject of a Harvard Nieman Lab feature, and projects the Center played a key role in designing were honored with a Shorty Social Good Award and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. Before joining Univision/Fusion Media Group, Sam worked for strategic communications and marketing firm Peppercomm from 2007-2015, where he was named both 2014 Digital Communicator of the Year and a 2014 Social Media MVP by PR News, as well as 2011 Social Media Innovator of the Year by Bulldog Reporter. During that time, Sam served as both a member of the Board of Directors of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association and as co-chair of their Ethics Committee. From 2005-2008, Sam was co-founder and later research manager of the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium. He also acted as co-organizer of the MIT Futures of Entertainment conference series from 2006-2012. Sam has been a contributor to Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Inc. He has also written for Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, BusinessWeek, Advertising Age, The Huffington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, Harvard’s Nieman Lab, Knowledge@Wharton, Columbia Journalism Review, Poynter, Tribeca, Portfolio, Chief Marketer, CMO.com, PRWeek, PR News, The Public Relations Strategist, Communication World, O’Dwyer PR, Firm Voice, PropertyCasualty360, Global HR News, TABB Forum, SLAM! Sports, and various other publications. He began his career as a reporter and columnist for various Kentucky newspapers and, in 2006, won a Kentucky Press Association award for Best Feature. Sam has appeared in documentaries Soap Life, Who Shot the Daytime Soap?, and VICE’s Lil Bub and Friendz and has been quoted in/on, or had his work cited by, a wide range of publications/shows, including The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Financial Times, The Los Angeles Times, Mashable, CNN, APM Marketplace, BBC World Service, PRI’s TheWorld, CNBC, The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Quartz, Fortune, Forbes, Investor’s Business Daily, CIO, Hollywood Reporter, Les Inrocks, Asahi Shimbun, Nikkei, DePers, Harvard’s Nieman Lab, American Press Institute, Knowledge@Wharton, The Washington Times, HLN, Venture Beat, AdWeek, MediaShift, ESPN: The Magazine, Télérama, Mental Floss, Boing Boing, Slashdot, Buzzfeed, Metro, Reader’s Digest, CableFAX, Soap Opera Weekly, The San Jose Mercury-News, and MIT Slice of Life…and most proudly as trivia on Jeopardy! and NPR’s Ask Me Another, as well as The New York Times crossword. In addition to being a featured speaker at South by Southwest on several occasions, Sam has spoken or moderated at a wide range of in-person and virtual events, including National Association of Television Programming Executives (NATPE), Social Media Week NYC, Future of Storytelling, Front End of Innovation, Back End of Innovation, Media Insights & Engagement Conference, Planning-ness, Annual Insurance Executives Conference, Media Days Munich, NeoTVLab in Argentina, Cartagena Inspira in Colombia, Consumer Culture Theory conference, Console-ing Passions, Flow, and Social Media for Utilities, as well as events for MIT, the University of Southern California, Brown University, UC-Berkeley, Northeastern University, Aberystwyth University in Wales, Western Kentucky University, ESOMAR, the Public Relations Society of America, CTAM, the Advertising Research Foundation, the Association of Cable Communicators, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, PR News, CableFAX, the Popular Culture Association, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the Association for Corporate Growth, the Luxury Marketing Council, the American Association of University Presses, the Association of Management Consulting Firms, the International Association of Business Communicators, the Association of National Advertisers, MarketingProfs, the Kentucky Press Association, the Kentucky Travel Industry Association, the Corporate Communication Leaders Forum, Donate Life America, Social Media Today, and a range of other forums. Sam received his Master’s degree from MIT’s Program in Comparative Media Studies/Writing and a Bachelor’s degree from Western Kentucky University as part of the Honors Program, where he majored in news/editorial journalism, communication studies, mass communication, and English, with a minor in film studies. Currently, he serves as a member of the inaugural MIT Graduate Alumni Council. He is also past chair of WKU’s Department of Communication Advisory Council and a member of  WKU’s Popular Culture Studies Program Curriculum Committee and the WKU Department of Communication Ad Hoc Curriculum Committee. Previously, he served as a member of WKU’s Young Alumni Council and WKU’s Advertising+Public Relations Professional Advisory Committee. Sam is also on the editorial board of USC’s Case Studies in Strategic Communication, the Organization for Transformative Works’ Transformative Works and Cultures, and Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal. He lives between New York City and Bowling Green, Ky., with wife Amanda and daughters Emma and Harper.

Hear from four alums of the graduate program in Comparative Media Studies as they discuss their experience at MIT and what their careers have looked like in the fields a CMS degree prepared them for. Panelists include: Matthew Weise, ’04, a game designer and educator whose work spans industry and academia. He is the CEO of Empathy Box, a company that specializes in narrative design for games and across media. He was the Narrative Designer at Harmonix Music Systems on Fantasia: Music Evolved, the Game Design Director of the GAMBIT Game Lab at MIT, and a consultant for Warner Bros., Microsoft, PBS, The National Ballet of Spain, and others on storytelling and game design. His work, both creatively and critically, focuses on transmedia adaptation with an emphasis on the challenges of adapting cinema into video games. Matt has given lectures and workshops on film-to-game adaptation all over the world, and has published work on how franchises like Alien, James Bond, and horror cinema in general are adapted into games. Links to his writing and game design work, including his IGF nominated The Snowfield, can be found at www.matthewweise.com. Karen Schrier, ’05, an educator, innovator, and creative researcher who is always looking for collaborators and new connections. She is an Associate Professor at Marist College and Director of the Games and Emerging Media program. She also runs the Play Innovation Lab, where she researches and creates games that support learning, ethical reflection, and compassion. Her recent book, Knowledge Games, was published last year (Johns Hopkins University Press), and was covered by Forbes, New Scientist, Times Higher Education, and SiriusXM. Dr. Schrier also edits the book series, Learning, Education & Games, which is published by ETC Press (Carnegie Mellon), and she is the president of the Learning, Education & Games group of the IGDA (International Game Developers Association). She holds a doctorate from Columbia University, master’s from MIT, and a bachelor’s from Amherst College. In addition, Karen and her family (husband, cats, 5 year old and 2 year old) currently live in the Hudson Valley but are hoping to move to Pound Ridge, NY in the winter. Ainsley Sutherland, ’15, a media technologist and researcher working in immersive computing and human-computer interaction design. Her project Voxhop, a tool for voice collaboration in virtual reality, is a 2017 j360 Challenge winner funded by the Knight Foundation and Google News Lab. She was a 2016 fellow at the BuzzFeed Open Lab, as well as a researcher in the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab at MIT. She has cofounded Mediate, an MIT DesignX-backed company that enables collaboration in and analysis of 3D environments. She has an M.S. from MIT in Comparative Media Studies, and a B.A. from the University of Chicago, in Economics. Beyza Boyacioglu, ’17, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and artist. Her work has been presented at MoMA Doc Fortnight, IDFA DocLab, Morelia International Film Festival, RIDM, Anthology Film Archives amongst other venues and festivals. She has received grants and fellowships from LEF Foundation, MIT Council for the Arts, Flaherty Seminar, SALT Research and Greenhouse Seminar. She was an artist in residence at UnionDocs in 2012 where she co-directed “Toñita’s” — a documentary portrait of the last Puerto Rican social club in Williamsburg. She is currently producing a cross-platform documentary about Turkey’s gender-bending pop legend Zeki Müren. The project is comprised of a feature film “A Prince from Outer Space: Zeki Müren”, a hotline and a web experience. Currently, Boyacioglu works as a Producer at the MIT Open Documentary Lab.

Gerry Flahive and Face2Face host David Peck talk about secrets, story, the “D” word, why he’s a 2001 fanatic and how a “real life” can be intimidating. Biography Gerry Flahive is a Toronto-based writer, producer and creative consultant at his media arts company, Modern Story. Until May 2014, Flahive was Senior Producer at the National Film Board of Canada, which he joined in 1981. He has done creative and storytelling consulting, strategic planning, course development and speechwriting for clients, including the Toronto Maple Leafs, Cirque de Soleil, Telefilm Canada, MaRS, TVOntario, Humber College and Giants of Africa. His productions have won many international awards including 2 Emmy Awards, a World Press Photo Award and a Peabody Award for HIGHRISE (highrise.nfb.ca), a global interactive documentary. He produced & co-produced more than 80 documentary projects on a wide range of subjects. Major projects include the international co-production PARIS 1919, the ground-breaking Filmmaker-in-Residence multi-media project at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, the NFB-Canadian Film Centre Feature Documentary Program, and short films for the Governor-General’s Performing Arts Awards, working with such recipients as Bryan Adams and Rush. In the early 1990's, as Senior Communications Manager, he managed NFB involvement in the Oscars and the Sundance Film Festival, as well as corporate communications and corporate branding.  Flahive is a frequent contributor to the Globe and Mail and has been published in Time, The New York Times and The Walrus, and many media industry publications, and is a National Magazine Award nominee for humour. He is a member of the boards of the Pages Unbound literary festival, the Toronto Irish Film Festival and the Seneca College Documentary Film Institute, and was on the Advisory Board for the MIT Open Documentary Lab report "Interactive Documentary and Digital Journalism".   He has been a guest speaker, presenter and mentor at many international events and institutions, including MIT, the I-Docs Lab in Switzerland, the MEDIMED Documentary conference in Barcelona, and the New York Film Festival. ---------- For more information about my podcasting, writing and public speaking please visit my site. With thanks to producer Josh Snethlage and Mixed Media Sound.   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Vivek Bald, an Associate Professor in CMS/W and member of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, discusses his transmedia project documenting the lives of Bengali Muslim ship workers and silk peddlers who entered the United States at the height of the Asian Exclusion Era, between the 1890s and 1940s, and quietly settled and intermarried within African American and Puerto Rican neighborhoods from Harlem to Tremé in New Orleans and Black Bottom, Detroit. The project consists of a book, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (2013), a linear documentary film, In Search of Bengali Harlem (currently in production), and a community-sourced, web-based documentary and oral history project, “The Lost Histories Project” (in development). Bald’s talk and demo presented a new iteration of the online project and newly edited material from the documentary.

Co-sponsored by the MIT Open Documentary Lab. Hybrid forms of multimedia, combining aspects of newspapers, documentary film and digital video are a notable feature of today's on-line journalism. How is this access to the power of the visual changing our journalism? What current projects are particularly significant? What will this convergence mean in the future? Jason Spingarn-Koff is the series producer and curator of Op-Docs, a new initiative at the New York Times for short opinionated documentaries by independent filmmakers and artists. He directed the feature documentary "Life 2.0", which premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and was acquired by OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network's Documentary Club, and his work has appeared on PBS, BBC, MSNBC, Time.com and Wired News. In 2010-2011, he was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Alexandra Garcia is a multimedia journalist for The Washington Post. She reports, shoots and edits video stories on topics ranging from health care and immigration to fashion and education. Awarded an Edward R. Murrow award, eight regional Emmy awards and named 2011 Video Editor of the Year by the White House News Photographers Association, Garcia is currently a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Moderator: Sarah Wolozin, director of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, has produced documentaries and educational media for a variety of media outlets including PBS, History Channel, Learning Channel and NPR.