IM Forum Speaker for 2/16/05: Bob Stein [POSTPONED]

IM Forum Speaker for 2/16/05: Bob Stein (in conversation with Michael Naimark, Peggy Weil, and Scott Fisher).

Title: Discursions
Location: USC Zemeckis Center, Room 201
Time: 6:00pm-8pm, 2/16/2005

From a recent post by Bob on Future of the Book:

"Some of the most important early work in interactive media took place at the Architecture Machine Group Laboratory at MIT (now the Media Lab). twenty years ago the lab made a videodisc, Discursions, containing videos of several key experiments. this early work at MIT was crucial in terms of fueling and defining my ideas about interactive media (see books unbound article).

Yesterday i met with a group of freshman in the interactive media honors program at the University of Southern California who signed up to work with the institute on presenting the Discursions material in some as-yet-to-be-decided form. the response was fantastic. (remember, these are young kids — none of whom were even born when Discursions was made). i know "awesome" is an overused word today, but that's a good description of what the students thought of what they saw. many of the experiments seemed as if they could have been done yesterday and they grasped the importance of making the work available to young people working in the field now. any fears i had that my interest in the Discursions material was merely an oppty. to walk down memory lane disappeared immediately.

We're planning to interview as many of the original researchers as possible, hoping that they can contextualize the work in terms of both its origin and its trajectory over the past twenty years".

BIO: Bob is Director of the Institute for Future of the Book, co-located at Columbia University and The University of Southern California. He was the founder of The Voyager Company. For 13 years he led the development of over 300 titles in 'The Criterion Collection', a series of definitive films on videodisc, and more than 75 CD ROM titles including the CD Companion to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, 'Who Built America', and the Voyager edition of 'Macbeth'. Previous to Voyager, Stein worked with Alan Kay in the Research Group at Atari on a variety of electronic publishing projects. Seven years ago, Stein started 'Night Kitchen' to develop authoring tools for the next generation of electronic publishing. That work will be continued at the Institute for the Future of the Book.