Scott Fisher

Speaker: John Underkoffler, Chief Scientist at Oblong Industries
Time: Wednesday, February 25, 6-9pm
Location: SCA Digital Collaboratory Annex, 509 W. 29th Street
(Between Flower and Figueroa Streets, Behind the Panda Express parking lot)

Tonight's CTIN 511 seminar will feature a special session and reception with John Underkoffler, chief scientist at Oblong Industries who will present and demonstrate Oblong’s G-speak Spatial Operating Environment. The G-speak SOE is a gesture-based immersive environment that was first envisioned in the film Minority Report; Underkoffler served as science advisor on the film and then went on to establish Oblong Industries to develop the platform.

The evening will also include demonstrations of other interactive experiences created by faculty and students who are part of the Interactive Media Division’s Collaborative-Design Lab (aka the Flower Street Lab). PLEASE NOTE: The talk and reception will take place at the School of Cinematic Arts’ Digital Collaboratory Annex.

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Discussion leaders: Nahil Sharkasi & Diane Tucker
Time: Wednesday, February 18, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC),
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Discussion Topic: Tonight's seminar will focus on the topic of "Social Computing" raised in the previous two seminar presentations by Warren Sack and Andreas Kratky. Logs for the backchannel discussion can be reviewed on the respective talk announcements..

Abstract: Social computing – the dynamic ways in which technologies and social behavior reflect and affect each-other -- has become pervasive in this era in which the network is the dominant metaphor for everything from information technology to international relations and as Hillary Clinton works to make the network and its associates – crowdsourcing and collaboration – into bases for American foreign policy in the Obama Administration (http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2009a/02/117345.htm )

Social computing's ubiquity has arguably inhibited our acknowledging the range of transformations linked to its rise-- e.g. changes in the geographies of networks, the economies of processing, and the topographies of expertise – and prevented our realizing that the peer production it facilitates constitutes a new mode of production. We'll talk about each of them as well as consider how radically what Benkler calls "commons-based peer production" promises to overturn businesses founded in more industrial models.

Readings/Watchings for this discussion:
TED Talks - Howard Rheingold: Way-new Collaboration
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/howard_rheingold_on_collaboration.html

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus" by Clay Shirky
http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html
TED Talks - Yochai Benkler: Open Source Economies
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/yochai_benkler_on_the_new_open_source_economics.html

Do We Need a New Internet by John Markoff
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/weekinreview/15markoff.html?emc=eta1

Other recommended Readings are:
M. Ito, "Amateur Cultural Production and Peer-to-Peer Learning"

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Speaker: Andreas Kratky, Visiting Asst. Professor, Interactive Media Division, USC School of Cinematic Arts
Time: Wednesday, February 11, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC),
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

Title: Simulation Versus Representation – What Can Simulations Tell Us About the Past?

Abstract: An increasing amount of successful interactive media works uses mechanisms of simulation to construct their experience. As systems defined by an initial state and transformation rules, simulations are directed towards a future result. To consider the importance of this kind of process-oriented work as a general cultural form we need to ask what they can tell us about the past and how our systematic abstractions shape how we perceive the world around us. This presentation will show a selection of works that investigate this question looking at the experience of a stroll through urban streets, museum collections, and theater.

Bio: A media artist whose work focuses on memory, database, and new forms of cinema, Andreas Kratky was born in Berlin, Germany, and lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles. He is designer and co-director of several award winning projects including That’s Kyogen (2001), Bleeding Through – Layers of Los Angeles 1920-1986 (2003), Soft Cinema (2004), and Title TK (2006).

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Speaker: Warren Sack, Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz
Time: Wednesday, February 4, 6-8pm
Location: USC's Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts (RZC),
Room 201 Zemeckis Media Lab (ZML)

TITLE: Technologies of Community, Conversation by Design: How should networked public spaces be designed?

ABSTRACT: In the United States, public space is splintering into shards. Poor urban planning and the demise of many institutions of civil society are two factors that are to blame. But, media technologies, like television, are usually, also, seen to be destructive forces in this shattering of public space. Can new media technologies be designed to engender community rather than undermine it? I outline “discourse architecture,” an approach to designing software for community and then present a few examples of technologies that my group and I have designed in the last several years.

BIO: Warren Sack is a software designer and media theorist whose work explores theories and designs for online public space and public discussion. He is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz and earned a B.A. from Yale College and an S.M. and Ph.D. from the MIT Media Laboratory. Warren's writings on new media and computer science have been published widely and his art work has been shown at the ZKM|Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the artport of the Whitney Museum of American Art; and, in the exhibition "The Art of Participation: 1950 - now" currently open at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

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