MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

Myron Dewey is an indigenous journalist, educator, documentary filmmaker and the developer of Digital Smoke Signals, a social networking and filmmaking initiative, emerging out of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline project of 2016-17. Using a full range of contemporary media, including drone technologies, Dewey has pioneered the blending of citizen monitoring, documentary filmmaking, and social networking in the cause of environment, social justice and indigenous people’s rights; he co-directed the 2017 award-winning documentary, Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock. Introduction by Lisa Parks, Professor, Comparative Media Studies; Director, Global Media Technologies & Cultures Lab and recently awarded MacArthur Fellow.

In the 20th century, America led the world in scientific and technological innovation, with federally funded basic research leading to breakthroughs ranging from the Internet to the Human Genome Project, with many positive impacts on society. More recently, possibilities ranging from autonomous weapons to eugenic application of genetic editing tools have made it clear that the rate of discoveries has outpaced our ability to predict their moral and ethical consequences. How the scientific community addresses these essential questions could mean the difference between societal benefit and dystopia. Eric Lander, president and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and a principal leader of the Human Genome Project, and Maria Zuber, MIT Vice President for Research and the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics, will be joined by Communications Forum director Seth Mnookin for a wide-ranging discussion on the ethical issues entangled in innovation and the real, and sometimes devastating, effects of invention without culpability. Speakers: Dr. Eric Lander is the president and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. A geneticist, molecular biologist, and mathematician, he has played a pioneering role in the reading, understanding, and biomedical application of the human genome and was a principal leader of the Human Genome Project. Dr. Maria Zuber is the MIT Vice President for Research and the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics. Dr. Zuber was principal investigator for the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL), the first woman to lead a NASA spacecraft mission, and the first woman to lead a science department at MIT. In her role as Vice President for Research, Dr. Zuber oversees research administration and policy for more than a dozen interdisciplinary research laboratories and centers. Moderator: Seth Mnookin is the director of the MIT Communications Forum and director of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, won the “Science in Society” award from the National Association of Science Writers. All Communications Forum events are free and open to the general public. Seating is given on a first come, first served basis. There are no tickets. This event is co-sponsored by Radius at MIT.

[Video and photos available at https://cmswm.it/bendis-mit] MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing is thrilled to welcome award-winning comics creator Brian Michael Bendis, a New York Times bestseller and one of the most successful writers working in mainstream comics, for the 2018 Julius Schwartz lecture, in conversation with fellow comics writer Marjorie Liu. For the last eighteen years, Brian’s books have consistently sat on the top of the nationwide comic and graphic novel sales charts. Now with DC Comics, he is the co-creator and consulting producer of the Peabody Award-winning Jessica Jones on Netflix from Marvel TV. For Marvel entertainment, Bendis was the monthly writer of the bestselling Defenders, Jessica Jones, Iron Man, Spider-Man, and Guardians of the Galaxy series. The introduction of the multiracial Spider-Man, Miles Morales, made the front page of USA Today and went on to become an international hotbed political topic featured on Fox News, CNN, The Daily Show, Conan O’Brien, Howard Stern and many others. The news of a new ‘Iron man’ character in the form of 15-year-old Riri Williams made massive international headlines when the story broke in Time magazine. Her solo debut as Invincible Iron man debuted in the top five nationwide. Before that, Brian completed a 100 issue run on the X-Men franchise with the debut of ALL NEW X-MEN and UNCANNY X-MEN and 9 years helming Marvel’s popular AVENGERS franchise by writing every issue of the NEW AVENGERS plus debuting the hit books AVENGERS, MIGHTY AVENGERS and DARK AVENGERS along with the wildly successful ‘event’ projects AVENGERS VERSUS X-MEN, HOUSE OF M, SECRET WAR, SPIDER-MEN, SECRET INVASION, AGE OF ULTRON, SIEGE and CIVIL WAR 2. In delivering the 2018 Julius Schwartz Lecture, Brian follows comics and science fiction legends Neil Gaiman (https://youtu.be/KU-tncC7qIw) and J. Michael Straczynski (https://youtu.be/OMNtVURpLzM?t=2m55s). ======= The Julius Schwartz Lecture, produced with generous support by the Gaiman Foundation (http://www.gaimanfoundation.org/), is hosted by the Comparative Media Studies/Writing program (https://cmsw.mit.edu) at MIT and was founded to honor the memory of longtime DC Comics editor Julius “Julie” Schwartz, whose contributions to our culture include co-founding the first science fiction fanzine in 1932, the first science fiction literary agency in 1934, and the first World Science Fiction Convention in 1939. Schwartz went on to launch a career in comics that would last for 42 years, during which time he helped launch the Silver Age of Comics, introduced the idea of parallel universes, and had a hand in the reinvention of such characters as Batman, Superman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and the Atom.

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.

Our society is in the midst of an extremely urgent conversation about the benefits and harms of digital technology, across all spheres of life. Unfortunately, this conversation too often fails to include the voices of technology practitioners whose work is already focused on social justice, the common good, and/or the public interest. This talk by Sasha Costanza-Chock explores key findings and recommendations from #MoreThanCode (morethancode.cc), a recently-released field scan based on more than 100 practitioner interviews. * The report was produced by the Tech for Social Justice Project (t4sj.co), co-led by Research Action Design (RAD) and the Open Technology Institute at New America (OTI), together with research partners Upturn, Media Mobilizing Project, Coworker.org, Hack the Hood, May First/People Link, Palante Technology Cooperative, Vulpine Blue, and The Engine Room. NetGain, the Ford Foundation, Mozilla, Code For America, and OTI funded and advised the project. Sasha Costanza-Chock (pronouns: they/them or she/her) is a scholar, activist, and media-maker, and currently Associate Professor of Civic Media at MIT. 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. More info: schock.cc.

Marisa Morán Jahn is a multi-media artist, writer, educator and activist, whose colorful, often humorous uses of personae and media create imaginative pathways to civic awareness of urgent public issues. Working collaboratively, her projects include a classic American road trip, CareForce One, in a 50-year-old station wagon, advocating issues concerning care workers that became a PBS film series; and Bibliobandido, a story-telling initiative for Honduran children featuring a masked bandit who devours stories. Jahn, winner of numerous awards, is co-founder of Studio REV-, a non-profit organization of artists, technologists, media makers, low-wage workers, immigrants and teens who producing creative media and public art about the issues they face. She will be sharing Snatch-ural History of Copper (working title), an art project, book, and feature-length film initiated by artist Marisa Morán Jahn that investigates copper, an element found in electrical wires, computers, lightning rods, and the IUD (intrauterine device) implanted in Jahn’s own ‘snatch’ (womb). Jahn interviews a range of experts in search of otherworldly answers that trammel the boundaries of myth, literary studies, science, alchemy and political controversy. Interviewing scientists in Saint Petersburg Florida who use rockets outfitted with a copper nose to trigger (and capture) lightning, Jahn asks, “Do you think that when the lightning goes off I’ll feel it in my cooch?” She visits a shrine on the island of Cyprus, home of the earliest copper mines dating to 8700 BCE as well as the pre-Christian god, Venus of Aphrodite who share the same symbol (♀) most familiar to us today as the symbol for women, females, and a movement for women’s liberation. Throughout these real-world investigations, Jahn seeks access to the top of a building and solder her copper IUD on top of a copper lightning rod, raising its height by an imperceptible inch. “I can’t wait for the moment when a bolt of lightning hits this thing — just imagine my little IUD radiating. It might even be sizzled into a thousand little parts distributed and distended into the atmosphere.” Poetically and playfully weaving the issues into a new cosmology, the film touches upon timely issues such as planetary sustainability, labor, and reproductive self-determination during a moment when both sides of the spectrum mount all-offensive campaigns. Also featuring…Sasha Costanza-Chock, Jane M. Sak, and Steve Seidel.

== An MIT Communications Forum == As a senior producer on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah, Sara Taksler has spent her career taking comedic pot shots at politicians. When she met Dr. Bassem Youssef, an Egyptian satirist who uses comedy to criticize Middle Eastern politics, Taksler witnessed first-hand how laughter thrives, even in terrifying circumstances. Tickling Giants, Taksler’s documentary about Youssef, is a hilarious story about finding comedy in unexpected places. Taksler joins Dr. Amber Day, author of Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate, to discuss the power of free speech and what’s so funny about oppressive regimes.

An MIT Communications Forum Christian Picciolini was 14 when he became a Neo-Nazi skinhead. He denounced eight years later and dedicated himself to helping others disengage from extremist groups. Picciolini has done peace advocacy work for more than a decade and in 2018, he founded the Free Radicals Project, a nonprofit dedicated to transitioning former extremists. He has conducted more than 200 interventions with white supremacists, as well as with ISIS members and other types of violent extremists. Now an internationally-renowned speaker, author, and MSNBC contributor, Picciolini discussed the state of extremism in America and how to combat it alongside Lee-Or Ankori-Karlinsky, senior program officer at Beyond Conflict, a nonprofit research and consulting group that uses the behavioral and neuroscience of social conflict to create peace-building initiatives in dozens of countries around the world. Christina Couch, a science journalist who has written extensively about deradicalization and dehumanization research, moderated. Speakers: Christian Picciolini is a peace advocate and the author of White American Youth: My Descent Into America’s Most Violent Hate Movement — and How I Got Out. In 2009, he co-founded Life After Hate, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping communities and organizations implement long-term solutions that counter racism and violent extremism. Christian currently leads the Free Radicals Project, a global network of extremism preventionists who help people disengage from hate movements and other violent ideologies around the world. Lee-Or Ankori-Karlinsky is the senior program officer for Beyond Conflict, a nonprofit research and consulting group that applies lessons from brain and behavioral sciences to address a range of racial justice and inclusion, conflict resolution and reconciliation, and other challenges. Moderator: Christina Couch is a science journalist and coordinator for the MIT Communications Forum. Her work explores psychology, technology and the intersections of the two. Her bylines can be found in Nova Next, MIT Technology Review, Fast Company Co.Exist, Science Friday, and Wired Magazine.

Daniel Bacchieri is an award-winning Brazilian journalist, documentary film maker and collaborative web developer/curator, whose visually inspiring StreetMusicMap platform has been widely praised for its curation of street performers from across the globe. Combining a documentarian vision with a trans-cultural appreciation of the public art of vernacular musicians, the StreetMusicMap collaborators are exploring the creative possibilities of collective story-telling through performance. The StreetMusicMap Instagram channel has more than 41,000 followers and 1,300 artists documented on videos in 97 countries, all filmed by more than 700 collaborators. The Civic Arts Series, which is part of the CMS graduate program Colloquium, features talks by four artists and activists who are making innovative uses of media to reshape the possibilities of art as a source of civic imagination, experience and advocacy. Using a variety of contemporary media technologies–film, web platforms, game engines, drones–the series presenters have opened up new pathways to artistic expression that broaden public awareness around compelling civic issues and aspirations of our time.

CAST Visiting Artist Agnieszka Kurant joins Stefan Helmreich, professor of Anthropology; Caroline Jones, professor of History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art; and Adam Haar Horowitz, master’s student and research assistant in the Fluid Interfaces Group, to discuss the idea of collective intelligence in relation to emerging technology, artistic inquiry, and social and cultural movements. Kurant will reflect on outsourcing her artworks to human and non-human collective intelligence and the system of profit-sharing she has created, artworks as complex systems or collective tamagotchis emulating life, and the observable evolution of individual authorship, culture, nature, labor and society. Haar Horowitz will touch on the collective in relationship to experience research in the neurosciences and experience production in the arts. Helmreich will discuss metaphors of collective human action derived from physics, computer science, animal worlds, and fluid dynamics, and will reflect on the politics of these framings. Jones will address the curious invocation of “intelligence” in discussions of aggregated agency, with specific reference to the so-named “mobile brain” or “immune brain” of the distributed system (mostly outside the cranium) that learns, remembers, and teaches, negotiating between tolerance and threat in relation to xeno-bacteria. The panel will be moderated by Nick Montfort, professor of Comparative Media Studies/Writing.