Steve Anderson

Computational designer Jonathan Harris will present a talk titled "Escaping Aesthetic Alcatraz: Re-imagining the Architecture of our Online Homes" as part of UCLA's Mobile Media Lecture Series this Tuesday October 27 at 6:00 pm in the Broad Art Center.

"Jonathan Harris makes projects that re-imagine how humans relate to technology and to each other. Combining elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling, his projects range from building the world’s largest time capsule (with Yahoo!) to documenting an Alaskan Eskimo whale hunt on the Arctic Ocean (with a warm hat). He is the co-creator of We Feel Fine, which continuously measures the emotional temperature of the human world through large-scale blog analysis, and has made other projects about online dating, modern mythology, anonymity, news, and language."

After studying computer science at Princeton University, he won a 2005 Fabrica fellowship and three Webby Awards. His work has also been recognized by AIGA, Ars Electronica, the state of Vermont (for which he co-designed the state quarter), Print Magazine (which named him a 2008 New Visual Artist) and The World Economic Forum (which named him a 2009 Young Global Leader). He has given talks at Google, Princeton and Stanford Universities, the TED Conference, and at two hippy forest gatherings. His projects have been shown at The Museum of Modern Art (New York), Le Centre Pompidou (Paris), and have appeared on CNN, NPR, BBC, and Bhutanese television. Born in Vermont, he now floats between Brooklyn, NY, the open road, and cyberspace.

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The IKEA company just issued this unusually recondite solicitation for counter-intelligence agents to document potential weaknesses and points of resistance in their pursuit of world domination of the home furnishings market. IMD students - especially those enrolled in CTIN 532: Interactive Experience and World Design - may want to take this opportunity to analyze an IKEA retail outlet in terms of its deployment of world-building strategies and its production of scripted spaces. What really is the difference between an IKEA store and a theme park?

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The Nowcasting conference on Design Theory and the Digital Humanities, organized by Peter Lunenfeld of the Design|Media Arts program at UCLA continues tomorrow with presentations by Julia Lupton, Benjamin Bratton, Todd Presner and Lunenfeld himself, followed by a roundtable discussion concluding with a response by Lorraine Wild of Cal Arts. Today's conference was an eclectic array of talks by designers and theorists in and around the digital humanities and even included some real-live academic controversy around the role of technology, design, culture and affect as scholarship takes a computational turn. Complete schedule here and below.

SATURDAY OCTOBER 17, 2009 / 8:30-9:00 COFFEE

9:00-12:00 MESSAGE + MEANING:

"DESIGNS FOR THE HUMANITIES: OBJECT, METHOD, INTERFACE."
JULIA REINHARD LUPTON (UCI)
English + Comparative Literature / UCI Design Alliance

"AMBIENT INTERFACE."
BENJAMIN H. BRATTON (UCSD)
Visual Arts Department / Director, Design Policy Program CALIT2

"GOOGLE EARTH?"
TODD PRESNER (UCLA)
Germanic Languages + Jewish Studies/ Director, Hypercities: Berlin Los Angeles

"UNIMODERN UNIMEDIA."
PETER LUNENFELD (UCLA) DESIGN MEDIA ARTS
Director, MIT Press Mediawork Project

12:00-1:30 LUNCH / DEMOS

1:30-4:00 ROUND TABLE DISCUSSION

RESPONDENT: LORRAINE WILD (CALARTS)
Graphic Design / Principal, Green Dragon Office

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With great sadness, iMAP mourns the untimely death of its founding faculty member Anne Friedberg. Anne’s passing comes as a hard blow to the iMAP program, which was conceived and launched on her initiative and vision in 2007, but it is equally a loss for the field of media studies as a whole. At the time of her cancer diagnosis a little over a year ago, Anne was the Chair of USC’s program in Critical Studies, President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and a few months from being honored as an Academy Film scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to produce a work of digital scholarship on Slavko Vorkapich. Her exhaustively researched book The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft appeared the year before from MIT Press, followed soon after by a companion digital media project The Virtual Window Interactive, created in collaboration with designer Erik Loyer. The completion of these two projects coincided with Anne’s conception and inauguration of the iMAP program and it’s hard to imagine that her experience translating nearly a decade of research and written scholarship into an interactive, media-rich form did not contribute to her thinking about iMAP and the potentials of exploring emerging modes of scholarship. Anne helped select and mentor two cohorts of iMAP students but more importantly she served as the program’s intellectual center of gravity, challenging students and faculty alike to pursue the highest levels of scholarly rigor even as we seek new modes of creative expression. We have missed her guidance for the past year and will continue to feel her absence profoundly and in ways that are impossible to articulate in the years ahead.

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Real Time Live presents acclaimed media artist Mia Makela (aka Solu), one of several international visual innovators dedicated to live cinema, an emerging artform in which moving images and sounds are mixed live, and cinema becomes a performative event unfolding in real time. Makela’s work has been described as “a dark delirium of images, a disintegrated vision on a complex world - a digital version of William Blake's poetry,” and her style ranges from minimal abstractions to multilayered compositions following a dreamlike narrative journey. Don't miss this rare opportunity to see Makela's live performance and learn to create your own live cinema experience! RSVP requested for workshop participants.

Workshops: October 9 and Saturday, October 10, 11:00 am - 4:00 pm

Location: IML Blue Lab, 746 West Adams Boulevard, Los Angeles

Performance: October 10, 2009, 8:30 p.m.

Location: SCA 112, George Lucas Building, 900 W. 34th Street, Los Angeles

Presented by the Institute for Multimedia Literacy



Workshops

Makela will explore the history, tools and techniques of live cinema in two free, hands-on workshops open to the first 20 participants to sign up via email (iml@cinema.usc.edu). Session one takes place on Friday, October 9, from 11:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.; session two takes place on Saturday, October 10, from 11:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Performance

The live performance event will feature Makela performing a live cinema mix in SCA 112.

About Mia Makela
The Finnish media artist is also a teacher, investigator and curator currently residing in Berlin. Her previous work includes the study of shamanism, media art and design, and her current work includes performance, instruction and presentation. Until 2002, she was part of the fifyfifty.org collective, where she organized the Hacker Techniques workshops, the Gameboy Sound Lab and the Playtime events. Makela began performing with visuals in 2001 as Solu at festivals around the world; she has presented at Sonic Acts in Amsterdam, Sonar in Barcelona, Transmediale in Berlin, Transit_MX in Mexico City, Ars Electronica in Linz and more. She has also collaborated with many experimental musicians, including ARBOL, Heidi Mortenson and DJ Rupture, and she has worked with theaters (Conservas and the Dani Panullo Dance theater). Makela has also written and lectured on the history and forms of live cinema internationally, and is a leader in the field.

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The Future of Digital Scholarship workshop series for graduate students offers an overview of digital scholarship, digital humanities and new directions in technology-enhanced teaching and learning, with a lab component designed to unite theory and practice. This month's hands-on workshop will introduce students to the newly released Version 5 of the Korsakow System, a user-friendly software applicationfor creating nonlinear, database narratives, documentaries and works of scholarship. This free, open source software will be demonstrated, and attendees will design and assemble their own K-Films. The workshop begins at 1:00PM at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at 746 W. Adams Blvd.

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