http://mitworld.mit.edu/ MIT World media in category 'Arts'. en-us Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:06:05 GMT Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/717 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/717 Who knew that one of mankind’s greatest scientists also worked as a gumshoe on London’s mean streets, or that this same absent-minded professor helped England fix its monetary policy from an office in the Tower of London? Thomas Levenson brings all sorts of surprises to light in his own sleuthing of a little known but significant episode in British history involving Sir Isaac Newton -- subject of his recent book, Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist.

Levenson stumbled onto his story while working on a larger history of science: He read a letter in Newton’s files from a “human voice in desperation:” William Chaloner, stuck in Newgate Jail in 1699, facing the gallows for treason (counterfeiting). Levenson was unable to link together this unlikely pair for a decade, until he struck gold in a stash of 400 documents signed by Newton while he served as a civil servant in the British Mint.

The tale Levenson pieced together follows Chaloner from his rural origins to a cunning criminal career in plague-stricken 17th century London, as well as Newton’s passage from world-renowned natural philosopher in isolated Cambridge University, to a promised sinecure in the Royal Mint. The tale of their intertwined fates illuminates a time when science was beginning to make its mark not just on the intelligentsia, but on all of society. Levenson describes how the scientific revolution meant “a much broader change in thinking,” new ways of problem-solving that gave even common people a leg up.

Newton entered his second career in London to find the English currency in a state of crisis: rampant counterfeiting, as well as the loss of silver from existing currency. One of the geniuses behind this state of affairs was Chaloner, who had come to “coining” by way of such money-making schemes as pornographic watches. Levenson describes “Newton’s mind at work” as he builds chains of evidence and pursues his prey with elaborate traps, including informants and double agents placed in counterfeiting gangs.

Levenson finds “evidence of Newton’s ruthlessness,” as he brings Chaloner to the gibbet with a case that “was rhetorical and persuasive more than precisely accurate.” In their calculation and drive, both men somehow captured the new scientific spirit of the times. Says Levenson, “When big ideas happen, they don’t just happen in own spheres. There’s an effect that spreads well beyond them. And if they matter to the way people lead their lives, then people will find out about them and do things with them...” ]]> Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/685 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/685 Nostalgia, anxiety and optimism mix in this panel devoted to imagining what lies ahead for the book, as publishing professionals and others discuss the impact of digital technology on the business.

Small Beer Press, Gavin Grant’s boutique Massachusetts publishing company, “is still in the business of producing paper objects.” But new technologies are transforming his work in several ways: He licenses some books via Creative Commons; releases others as downloads in a variety of ebook formats (generating these can be an expensive “hassle”); and deploys social media, in the form of blogs and Facebook-enabled communication, to publicize and attract passionate readers to the firm’s website. Grant sees Amazon and its Kindle as a bully driving readers toward best sellers, and is interested in the “hyperlocal” possibilities of the web for publishing: finding readers for his one-of-a-kind publications, and inviting them to peruse his non-mainstream book lists.

Agent Jennifer Jackson describes some intriguing direct marketing activities made possible by the web, including author-produced book trailers on YouTube, and an online media project undertaken by clients and other authors: a website consisting of episodes for a fictional TV show. Jackson also maintains blogs that she hopes provide “transparency” about her end of the business, a way to bridge “the great divide” between agents and authors. Her authors are concerned with digital piracy but Jackson feels wide distribution of an author’s work ends up generating more sales over time.

Robert Miller’s frustration with the trade publishing model-- in particular, astronomical advances to authors, and book return rates of 40% -- led to HarperStudio (a Harper Collins offshoot). His notion of “starting something from scratch” involves making digital and physical books available simultaneously to the reader. His first offering is a collection of previously unpublished pieces by Mark Twain that are available as individual books, or in discounted bundles with audio books and downloadable books. He celebrates the reduction in production costs in moving to digital, but he’s wary of the small but rapidly expanding ebook market, which he anticipates will impose a “downward pressure on prices,” a loss of revenue that will negatively impact his business.

Bob Stein envisions a wholesale evolution of the essence of books, from objects to “a place where readers and sometimes authors congregate.” His Institute on the Future of the Book hosts experiments in publishing, such as one where an author essentially blogs and moderates responses around a particular subject. Readers could someday collaborate with dead authors, adding chapters to finished books, for instance. He sees ebooks as transitional: “The experiments which have to do with increasing sales of book are interesting, and will prolong publishing but won’t invent the future of how humans work together to increase our knowledge, which is what publishing used to do.” These new expressive forms won’t emerge quickly. It took 300 years after the invention of the printing before the first novel was written, he notes, but inexorably, “we’re shifting the ways humans communicate with each other.” ]]> Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/663 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/663 In a panel that at times resembles a late-night ramble and conversation, three film music professionals discuss changes in their industry, with some no-holds-barred dishing and kvetching.

Martin Marks sets the scene historically, starting with the revolutionary introduction of sound to film. He plays a clip from the original 1933 film King Kong, which he describes as both a technological and aesthetic landmark of soundtrack production. Paul Chihara continues the story, explaining that the score’s creator, Max Steiner, was part of the first wave of film composers, classically trained musicians, fleeing Hitler’s Germany. Steiner drew on the music he knew best, the kind performed by the Vienna Staatsoper, for his King Kong score, so we get a movie that’s “wall to wall music, filled with leitmotifs,” played by a giant orchestra.

Cut to 2005, and the Peter Jackson remake of King Kong. In what he describes as “an electro-acoustic seminar on how digitally sound is enhanced,” Chihara plays several clips of the same scene that demonstrate the evolutionary leap in soundtrack scoring since 1933. The process involves the demo track, a score with digital sampling and no acoustic instruments intended to help the filmmaker imagine how music will work with the film; next an acoustic score; and the final dub version, where acoustic and digital music sources combine, and the rest of the sound elements are added in post production (dialogue and sound effects).

The new scoring process can prove dangerous to composers, as Dan Carlin reveals. “We have a term called ‘demo love,’ describing how the director gets attached to the very first track offered by the composer.” This is a digitally sampled score often drawn from other composers’ work. The editor and director become accustomed to it, and test audiences watch films with demo tracks. “So the composer comes in with a new approach, and often gets fired at this point.” This has led to composers fearful of originality. Carlin says starting in the ‘90s, generic romantic and action scores began to emerge: “Everything starts to sound alike.” He also describes how composer Georges Delerue went to see Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple, and heard one of his own themes, which had started as a temporary music cue but then was essentially plagiarized. This led to a very lucrative law suit. Marks notes that “one of America’s film music geniuses,” Elmer Bernstein, essentially dropped out of the business because of the insistence on demo tracks over original music.

Panelists also bemoan the demise of orchestral recording sessions at production studios, as digital audio tools put the composer’s work in the hands of directors and editors, who play with increasingly authentic sounding software-based instruments. Companies are buying up the rights to the sounds of famous symphony orchestras, down to the staccato and legato notes of strings and horns in different keys and pitches. The craft involved in composing music, then conducting an orchestra through a movie scene, has become obsolete. Chihara concludes sadly, “It’s an unnecessary art.” ]]> Sat, 11 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/660 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/660 Bill Viola dims the lights in MIT’s Room 10-250, and begins to talk of life, death and all that lies between, leaving the realm of classroom and entering a place of potential enlightenment. Weaving together his video art, personal anecdotes, poetry and other writings from religious traditions spanning the globe and the ages, Viola illuminates his own spiritual journey and search for meaning. With a light touch, he manages to tap into reservoirs of deep feeling.

Viola imparts the vital interplay between his life experience, and the evolution of his vision. After his mother’s death, for instance, he ‘recovered’ her after finding a bowl she’d given him years earlier. Objects outlive us, Viola realized, and contain their own “spark of life.” This is true of technologically enabled things including Viola’s own video art. He admits that this medium makes him nervous. One of the world’s most dangerous weapons is the camera, whose “narrow focus, which is its strength, allows me to see inside a soul.” It can also “intentionally obscure an entire class or race.” Technology may be used to enrich or to harm, but its goal must be knowledge.

Viola recalls Buddha, who told his followers to treat his teachings like a raft, which should just be used “to get to the other side. From that point on, only an idiot would carry a boat around.” This is a good time for Buddhist ideas, suggests Viola. The world “seems like it’s deconstructing before our eyes.” Yet Viola says he’s “excited about this age. People who’ve been making money, doing stuff, must suddenly start living like artists.” He tells students they should be “very happy graduating into this emptiness,” because collapse brings opportunities for regeneration.

Viola recounts various other experiences and insights: a visit to an exhibit of Bodhisattva sculptures, which he regarded merely as ancient art, until an old lady adorned them with scarves, revering them as sacred objects; a Flemish painting of Mary that left him weeping, and made him realize that he “was using art, mourning his mother who was leaving this world.”

Only after years of training, says Viola, “could I see how my personal and professional life was not at odds, that it holds the whole edifice of the self up.” One profound expression of that interdependence is played in this talk: his 1992 Nantes Triptych, whose three ‘panels’ consist of videos of the live birth of a baby, the last moments of Viola’s mother’s life, and a clothed man drifting in an underwater pool “in currents between the poles of life.” ]]> Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/653 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/653 There are times when it’s necessary to judge a book by its cover, or a single page, because that’s all that remains. Michael Scott Cuthbert and Nancy Schrock reveal some treasures from MIT’s early music collection which, while often incomplete or damaged, sing volumes about their origins and use.

Cuthbert demonstrates that when it comes to medieval and renaissance music manuscripts, there’s really no substitute for the real thing. His discussion concerns several recent additions to MIT’s Lewis Music Library. Online perusal alone cannot reveal which of his manuscripts was designed to be read by a large group of singers in a cathedral, and which served as a valued part of a priest’s collection for personal study. Holding the two artifacts up, Cuthbert makes it clear: He first displays a giant, two-sided leaf, and then an aged volume containing the much smaller page.

To examine these specimens, says Shrock, she must use special tools of the trade: a fiber optic light sheet for studying paper; microscopes, digital cameras. In examining and preserving music manuscripts and other rare MIT books, Schrock needs to know the process by which the object came into being. She shows the large leaf from the choir book: it’s parchment, made from the lined skins of young animals, with the hair scraped off, shaved and rubbed with pumice to achieve a smooth surface perfect for text and binding. Schrock shows a 15th century book of hours, an illuminated manuscript that was rebound by a collector in the 18th century. While she admires the redo (red morocco tooled in gold), the object “no longer reflects the way this manuscript was originally made, and we’ve lost knowledge about it.” Flaws are more informative than beauty.

Says Cuthbert, “For many of us, modern musicology is less about spending time in dusty archives and more about recreating what we see in CSI.” New technology may hold the key to answering longstanding mysteries, such as the abrupt abandonment or evolution of certain kinds of religious music. Some manuscripts may hide their beginnings, or travel widely: “Maybe the choir book left the cathedral in a sack in the middle of the night,” he says. With computer software, researchers can now compare music manuscripts that originated in widely separated regions of the world. New machines can peer into manuscripts where the music has been scraped off to make room for other information (such as land ownership records, or an illustrated bestiary), to see what originally existed; and advances in digital imaging can discern the flow of notes on a page where they had once been obliterated or obscured. DNA tracing, he hopes, will ultimately permit musicologists to determine the provenance of animals used in parchment down to the cathedral green where they grazed. ]]> Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/640 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/640 Noted philosopher, critic and essayist Boris Groys, who has previously delved into the Soviet post-modernist and Russian avant-garde art scene, turns his attention now to the recent and dangerous marriage of religion and digital media. In a talk based on his paper, Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Groys draws freely on such predecessors as Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger and Nietzsche to draw a bead on fundamentalism. He contends that the revival of extremist religion worldwide, in the face of a secular and skeptical world, depends on the broadcast of video and distribution of data, particularly through the Internet.

Groys argues that in older times, religious rituals were practiced “in isolated sacred places.” Today, “ritual, repetition and reproduction have become the fate of the entire culture. Everything reproduces itself -- capital, commodities, technology and art.” In our day, public media sites like MySpace and YouTube feature private hopes, dreams and beliefs, substituting for the public discussions of a previous age. This new configuration of the media, especially the Internet, encourages and even favors sovereign religious politics over institutionalized secular politics, says Groys. “The Internet is the space in which it is possible for contemporary, aggressive religious movements to install their propaganda material and act globally.”

Today’s religious rituals are enacted in a wired global space, where they can be faithfully reproduced an unlimited number of times, through the apparent magic of digital duplication. Video, believes Groys, serves as the principal medium of fundamentalism, serving up images over broadcast TV, the Internet, and in stores. Digital images are all the more powerful because they “have the ability to originate, multiply and distribute themselves through the open fields…of communication, like climbing out of nowhere, like being divine…”

Groys shows two video clips: a Christian evangelical ritual in Siberia, where a man dressed in Biblical garb straight out of Franco Zeffirelli’s bio-pic, Jesus of Nazareth, greets the faithful; and the taped confession of a Lebanese communist suicide bomber with commentary. Video recordings, digital images transmitted to countless many, are attempts to generate belief and passion, and function in some ways like “a Byzantine icon,” says Groys. “The digital file functions as an angel -- an invisible messenger transmitting a divine command.” ]]> Sun, 18 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/637 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/637 Friends, colleagues and fans unite in loving praise of a children’s author who, though renowned, never got his due. James Marshall was writer/illustrator of the George and Martha and The Cut-Ups book series (he also illustrated Miss Nelson and The Stupids series, among many others). He died at age 50 in 1992, never having received the coveted children’s picture book honor, The Caldecott Medal. These panelists do their best to redress the injustice.

Susan Meddaugh of Martha Speaks fame, remembers Marshall from her days as a book designer. She has fond memories of him “trying his stories out on us as he went from office to office” at Houghton Mifflin, and credits him with launching her freelance career when he found her an apartment in Charlestown, MA for an improbable $75 a month. Meddaugh celebrates Marshall’s ability to “establish characters instantly,” and the way in which “Jim didn’t have to find originality, he just was. Every part of his personality came through in his books.”

“My appreciation for his work leapt exponentially,” says David Wiesner (The Three Pigs, Tueday) “after I began reading his books to my kids.” There’d be “the big smile, laughing and total connection.” When Wiesner repeatedly paused to marvel at how Marshall’s words and pictures came together, his children would have to remind him to get on with the story. Wiesner finds much to admire in the George and Martha books: “They’re so concise; there’s nothing extraneous going on.” He enjoys their “beautifully minimalistic art,” as well as the “ornate, almost dense” illustrations of The Stupids. Says Wiesner, “He’s one of the few people I think about when I’m doing a book: How can I take what I’m doing and keep it to its essence and not fill it up?” The beauty of Jim’s work, he says, is that “it looks like it was created in the moment.”

Anita Silvey has been reading, editing and reviewing children’s books for years, and had the pleasure of accompanying Marshall on book tours. Silvey has recently been exploring Marshall’s notebooks and studying his working style. He often pursued several ideas at a time, and his beginning sketches and text have a lot of detail. “There’s a long evolutionary process, with thumbnail sketches” and rewriting “and all of a sudden, he circles one word, the perfect word...” Yet his final sketch had “a lightness of touch,” the appearance of spontaneity. Silvey recalls, “I once saw Jim sketch an entire book out on a cocktail napkin. He could do a quick, creative thing, then he went to work.” That’s why his books “are so timeless.”

Roger Sutton notes how Marshall respected his audience: he never talked down to kids, and trusted them to pick up on things. Even sarcastic adult humor was okay. Librarian Susan Moynihan says that the kids to whom she reads get Marshall’s humor without requiring adult filtering, and they also get his “message of kindness.” In Marshall’s books, “nobody was made fun of.” ]]> Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/635 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/635 The best way to help a community help itself, say Dayna Cunningham and Alexa Mills, is to enable its members to find their voices and talk to each other. In several projects in the U.S. and overseas, the two speakers are developing methodologies for enabling communities to express and define themselves, so they may become more engaged in a larger civic and political process.

Cunningham describes her particular focus on African-American civic engagement. She confesses she had “come to the conclusion that the infrastructure of black civic engagement was dead” -- and then the U.S. elected its first black president. However, in spite or because of this triumph, she feels there’s more reason than ever to find channels for African-American involvement in the civic process.

Alexa Mills recounts her efforts in two historically black Brooklyn neighborhoods to create community-based media projects. A large Baptist church, the cornerstone of the community, was challenged by various issues of gentrification, and asked Mills to conduct interviews with a diverse group of African- American community members to hear their perspectives. “Their goal is to hear one another before projecting their voice,” says Mills. Although she went into the enterprise imagining organizing the community around affordable housing, she found that instead, there was fierce concern about white people moving in and behaving in an uncivil way: New neighbors wouldn’t say hello as they passed on the street or in buildings. She hopes her interviews and an envisioned future website will help make connections among new and old community members, and ultimately inform the church’s future efforts.

In another project, Mills worked with people in an Eastern Kentucky town who felt oppressed by the destructive environmental behaviors of local coal companies. She helped make a movie about one local man’s fish pond -- his life’s work -- that was poisoned by mining runoff. The web site designed by a community group hosts lively conversations about this video, and other issues provoked by mining, and partly through this technology, the group is learning to “fight for what it wants,” says Mills. ]]> Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/634 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/634 Contemporary science has done a great disservice to Sigmund Freud, suggests Sherry Turkle, who believes the psychoanalytic tradition can teach us much about the often concealed connections between physical objects and our thoughts and feelings. On the occasion of the publication of her latest book, The Inner History of Devices -- the third in a trilogy -- Turkle speaks of the importance of technology as a subjective tool, as a window into the soul.

When she first arrived at MIT, Turkle relates, colleagues viewed devices like their computers as simply instruments for accomplishing work. Turkle set out on her life’s work to demonstrate that technology serves a much greater purpose in our lives. People turn their devices “into beings, which they animate, anthropomorphize.” Her research and writing involves the ways people invest themselves in physical objects, and how those objects “inflect inner life, relationships, carry ideas, sensibilities and memory.”

Turkle’s latest work, as she describes it, brings together the artful listening of a memoirist, the interpretive skills of a clinician, and the participant observational skills of an ethnographer. Together, these enable her to dig deep into such questions as how cellphones can change people’s sensibilities, what is intimacy without privacy (e.g., texting and Second Life); and how people are starting to add robots as companions to their lives. There is no doubt that technology is “changing our hearts and minds,” and that people increasingly attach “to the inanimate without prejudice.” Whether online or with robotic creatures, “we are lost in cyber intimacies and solitudes, and we often don’t know if we’ve been alone, together, close or distant.”

Turkle reads snippets from her three books, which, as an ensemble, tell the story of the intellectual and emotional links between objects and ourselves. Technology, she says, serves as a Rorschach for personal, political and social concerns, carrying ideas, expressing individual differences in style. It also “acts as a foil we use to figure out what it means to be human,” crystallizing memory and identity and provoking new thought. For instance, kids have at least seven radically different styles of using Legos, she says, which allow us “to see who the child is.” “For too long we have stressed … that technology has affordances that constrain its use. I take it from the other side: how do different personalities, cognitive styles and desires take a technology and turn it into what that person wants to know and express.” ]]> Tue, 09 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/592 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/592 This exploration/homage arrives in the form of a lecture/conversation, breaking some conventions, not unlike the object/subject of the event, Chantal Akerman, filmmaker and video artist. Two Akerman experts discuss her work in the kick-off event to an exhibition at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center.

First, Giuliana Bruno offers history and perspective on Akerman’s oeuvre, starting with her pathbreaking 1975 film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which “changed the way we looked at film, and opened up ideas for feminist thinking, theory and filmmaking.” Bruno discusses Akerman’s unique way of breaking down barriers between documentary and fiction film, and more recently between film and museum installations. Akerman fascinates, says Bruno, for her “movement of space and time,” particularly long duration shots “showing the unfolding of everyday life, and especially flowing temporality, and women’s time.” Akerman uses faces like landscapes in a painting, and takes grand journeys through history, including personal history. Bruno is particularly captivated by the way Akerman “veils something,” using the camera to reveal psychic, inner life. In what Bruno describes as “intimate distance,” Akerman uses long, tracking shots from afar, maintaining “a kind of reserve…we need to get very close.”

In her conversation with Terrie Sultan, Akerman says she doesn’t see herself as an artist – “I’m working,” she says simply. Her journey from filmmaking to museum installations happened “by accident,” the convergence of friends, money and a few suggestions. She embraces this kind of serendipity, which fuels the process of discovery she most loves in whatever she’s working on. “I hate when it’s predictable,” she says. “If in a movie or installation you don’t discover something, it’s not worthwhile doing it.”

Akerman discusses her documentary journey into the lives of illegal migrants crossing into the U.S., and her 78-minute film about a short stay in a Tel Aviv apartment that is comprised of just a few shots of long duration and voice-over. She also describes the process of creating some of the installations that appear in the current museum tour.

Her father, who enjoyed her critically acclaimed work while he was alive, asked repeatedly when she would enter the commercial film world. While Akerman admits “one part of me wants to make a big commercial film and have money,” she finds the entire fiction film process cumbersome. Writing “is annoying when you have to make a fiction film –sometimes it is destroying the film or experience of the film…and everyone putting money in it has to read the script…” She prefers projects that permit many interpretations, rather than the “one chosen by producer, writer, director…who don’t want anything to escape from their unconscious. That’s why it’s so boring.” ]]> Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/588 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/588 Cynthia Breazeal makes social robots, machines with the capacity to interact with people on psychological terms. She says they “open up a new world of questions.” But these increasingly sophisticated devices make Sherry Turkle uneasy, since they challenge the idea of human relationships and the very “purpose, importance, of living things.”

Since inventing her famously expressive, anthropomorphic Kismet, a robot that engages and learns from people through auditory, facial and social cues, Breazeal has evolved her work using robots as a scientific tool for social understanding. Her labs are putting robots through the paces of major child development milestones, such as appreciating the mental states of others. For instance, robot Leonardo has rudimentary object permanence, inferring from a tricky human’s behavior where a Big Bird toy has been hidden.

Another project uses robots in home-based weight management studies, where they cue dieters to provide information on food intake, and provide moral support to wavering calorie counters. People form emotional attachments and name their robot partners, says Breazeal, and the robot method easily outperforms pen and paper, or computers, in helping people stick with their programs.

Another effort involves the Huggable, a teddy bear robot that acts via an internet connection to allow a distant grandparent to touch and play with the grandchildren -- “as a new kind of communication media.” And Breazeal provides a first-view of the MDS, a semi-autonomous robot that will combine state-of-the-art mobility, dexterity and social interaction.

This new species of extremely appealing, touchy, feely, humanoid machine puts Sherry Turkle on edge. She sees society on the verge of a “robotic moment,” as plugged in, instant messaging, virtual world denizens increasingly embrace machines as “creatures they feel a desire to connect with and nurture.” She believes people are passionately attaching themselves to sociable robots, and fantasizing a reciprocal interest from these machines. “You care about them and want them to care about you. Nurturance turns out to be the killer app in robotics.” She describes a graduate student who would gladly trade in her boyfriend for a robot exhibiting “caring human behavior.”

There is a danger that we’ll become accustomed to superficial cyber connections, and develop lower expectations for human to human interactions, says Turkle. Cyber intimacy may lead to cyber solitude. And you can turn off a robot when it bores you, or conversely, depend on it to “live” forever, while human relations come with endless baggage, complexities and sometimes unhappy endings. Says Turkle, “Roboticists have come to speak of ‘I Thou’ relationships with machines, but what is the value of interactions that contain no understanding of us and that contribute nothing to the shared store of human meaning? These are not questions with ready made answers.” ]]> Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/568 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/568 This presentation feels akin to a new Disney ride: During your tour inside David Macaulay’s imagination, prepare to soar over Rome’s great monuments, raft within the human body’s circulatory system, and dismantle and rebuild the Empire State Building.

Don’t expect much in the way of explanation or background, but simply sit back and enjoy as this master illustrator rolls out sketches and storylines from some of his greatest published and unpublished hits. Macaulay delves into the structure beneath the built and the biological. But as detailed and accurate as his examinations may be, he embraces the whimsical and fantastic. He admits to loving ruins, so creates his own – “It makes one almost nostalgic.” He imagines an archaeologist 2000 years hence exploring the ruins of a motel, exhuming a pair of skeletons on a bed watching a dead TV, described by Macaulay as “deceased on a platform facing the sacred altar.”

These flights of fancy come whizzing at us so fast, it’s hard to keep up. Macaulay takes us on a tour of an alphabet book constructed of landscapes-- cows in a field and railway tracks, shadows and reflections. Ducks flying are arrayed as a melody from Handel’s Water Music. The book “died at F…More than anything, the world needs another alphabet book!” Asked to do drawings for a book on the brain, Macaulay decided to build a giant brain that would be fun “to wander through.” He recounts, “Hippocampuses are nice and shiny and smooth, it would be fun to slide down a few times, enlivening the brain experience.”

Macaulay never loses sight of his goals, though. “Making things big seemed an ideal way of reacquainting people with the mundane and familiar.” His drawings help him, and his readers, understand the structure, properties, and forces underlying organic and inorganic things in the world, whether zippers or can openers, ancient sailing vessels, digestive systems, or entire cities. His ongoing fascination with Rome has led to multiple attempts to unpeel its historic and architectural layers. A pigeon swoops through the city, revealing perspectives of the Pantheon and Rome’s treasures only a bird could see. Macaulay likes “twisting and distorting to reinforce a sense of movement.” Another approach employs a man on a scooter, providing a street-level view, fragmentary, and yet another uses a television repair man, who shows us details in buildings, “the way stones are cut, old and new.”

Next stop for Macaulay: a book on the Earth and how it works. ]]> Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/562 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/562 Fear not, fans of character-based TV fiction: reality shows will not obliterate tales featuring “transactions between human beings – the Jane Austen end of things,” as John Romano puts it. This veteran of some of TV’s finest cop dramas (including Hill Street Blues and Monk) sees wrenching changes in his business, but reassures his audience that “TV will always be a place for storytelling.”

It comes as no surprise that this Yale English major prefers writing for and watching programs that deal in “human fallibility and doubt,” even or especially when the characters are super sleuths armed with the latest (or fantastic) technology. In the series 24, Romano is most interested in human dilemmas that are not comfortably solved. There are real political threats, evils that the series protagonist Jack faces, at his moral peril. The question is how Jack can retain his own humanity through it all. Romano confesses being bored by the “techno side” of 24, that “somehow we’ll invent the right widget to solve whatever problem is being faced.”

The events of 9/11 provoked some television writers to portray an even darker world, believes Romano. He cites Lost as an example of such programming, where there’s “a sense that we are an island threatened by strange alien creatures, and can only depend on each other, and who knows if we can depend on each other.” 9/11, says Romano, “fed a lot of impulses, not all of which are admirable.”

He believes the police drama has an enduring appeal for audiences. “I think the obsession with cops and robbers is hardwired into human beings,” says Romano. “ Sophocles’ Antigone is centrally about that; that’s the first cop show in my imagination.” Some of the great writers of narrative fiction, such as Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky “found cops very interesting,” because it allowed them to “explore the social contract, our deepest issues,” says Romano.

Romano believes there will probably always be “a terrific appetite” for such stories on TV, although these days the ones that succeed tend to be “aggressive and crazier,” because that’s what thrills studio executives. Nevertheless, this humanist writer looks forward to “what TV might be –and movies.” He finds special promise in a budding group of filmmakers who are more “John Sayles than David Milch,” and whose smallest movies are “about something.” In Hollywood, there will “always be a lot of crap,” predicts Romano, but “expect great storytelling and narrative truth.” ]]> Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/541 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/541 His latest book, Ingmar Bergman, Cinematic Philosopher, came about quite accidentally, Irving Singer recounts. Singer was writing a book about several filmmakers, and discovered, when starting on the Bergman chapter, that the filmmaker had directed dozens of movies. Singer set out to explore this oeuvre – no easy task, since only the most recognizable titles are to be found at Netflix or the public library.

Thus began Singer’s ardent exploration of Bergman, and his appreciation of Bergman’s genius. “He created a new art form by combining his talents as a man of the theater, cinema and TV,” says Singer. In this lecture, he discusses how Bergman used philosophical ideas “in an extended sense” -- not by including philosophical discussions in his films, but through his masterful use of cinematic technique to examine the particularities of human experience.

Singer describes how Bergman wove aspects of his own life’s story into his films, in intense and vivid ways. A son of a harsh Lutheran priest, Bergman was nearly paralyzed by his fear of death. Singer recounts how Bergman worked through a series of movies with religious significance (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Seventh Seal), and was finally “cured of his fear of death.” He also became an atheist, but may have returned to some kind of religious faith at his life’s end.

Singer quotes Bergman denying that his “movies are full of symbols.” Rather, Bergman used close-ups of faces and hands (relying on a repertory company of 18 actor-friends), and created bleak landscapes and silences, to convey feelings like fear, isolation and oppression, in contrast to the comedic and optimistic elements in many of his films. Singer reads a selection from his book that deals with the film, From the Life of the Marionettes, which is “the most consummate expression of Bergman’s pessimistic vision.” Singer draws analogies to Hitchcock’s Psycho, but believes Bergman goes much farther, examining political evil, and how contemporary capitalist society “dehumanizes, and turns people into emotional illiterates.” ]]> Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/527 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/527 In the tradition of his favorite childhood writers, Dickens, Thackeray and the “curiously forgotten James Hadley Chase,” Vikram Chandra explores the seamier sides of human relations. In Chandra’s latest, sprawling novel, Sacred Games, his backdrop is Bombay, a city steeped in corruption from head to toe. Reading three short sections, the author introduces us to some key characters, including Sartaj Singh, a detective from Chandra’s last book, Love and Longing in Bombay, who navigates the underworld and politics; and Ganesh Gaitonde, a ruthless gangster who slashes and bribes his way to the top of a crime kingdom.

This book began as a little thriller, Chandra explains, but during his research with policemen and gang members, he realized that “local crime has links to things apparently far removed.” Between local politics and criminals Chandra perceived “a constant exchange of power and value.” But, he says, “If you’re going to talk about politics in today’s India, you cannot not talk about religion.” And, he continues, “all of this exists within what’s been called the great game, the struggle for power between nation states in the sub-continent.”

Chandra acknowledges his debt to traditional thrillers and noir, but says that his aim is to twist tradition and make things real. That was one reason he chose the first person for his portrait of the gangster Gaitonde. Chandra seeks opportunities for “specificity and particularity” to advance his characters beyond cutouts and formula.

The book has received tremendous attention in India, and compelled many people to reveal unsavory personal encounters with corrupt politicians. Chandra notes dryly, “I’ve become the go-to guy for stories of badness. I’m kind of sick of this. I don’t want to be in this violent, dirty world for the next eight years.”

Chandra, while acknowledging the cinematic quality of his writing (not surprising given that his mother and other family members are in the Bollywood biz), says he much prefers sitting alone in a room for eight years cooking up a book, to the collaboration cauldron of movie-making. Sacred Games has been optioned, and says Chandra, “I think they’re insane. I said, ‘Save me two seats at the premiere. See you in three years.’” ]]> Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/517 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/517 Noam Chomsky, around whose work much of the Syntax series revolves, gives listeners a glimpse into the evolution of his own thinking, with an emphasis on areas of linguistics where computational considerations play a major role.

Chomsky briefly outlines the key components of a biologically based linguistics that began to emerge 50 years ago: first, a genetic language endowment (Universal Grammar), which interacts with the external environment, and second, the individual’s development and learning strategies. While UG has been called “controversial,” says Chomsky, the “alternative is magic,” since something has to account for the fact that “my granddaughter picked out part of her environment as language related, and almost reflexively developed a language while her pet kitten, a chimp or songbird, exposed to exactly the same data, didn’t take the first step and couldn’t conceivably take the second.”

Chomsky links a third factor of language involving architecture and the principles underlying data acquisition to natural laws that may apply generally in biology, and not specifically to language. Research suggests that between 50 and 100 thousand years ago, humans made an abrupt evolutionary leap forward in cognitive capacity. Language seems to have emerged at this time. While long-term evolution can lead to great complexity, a sudden leap like this, says Chomsky, tends to yield something “simple, almost perfect -- a perfect solution to design problems imposed by circumstances and conditions prevailing at the time of emergence...” This proposal has been dubbed the Strong Minimalist Theory (SMT), and offers a plausible approach to studying the complexity of language, believes Chomsky. It might prove profitable to “examine the range of phenomena that fall under what’s loosely called language,” and try to “disentangle them so some parts of them conform more or less to SMT.” And here, says Chomsky, issues of computational efficiency play perhaps an overwhelming role.

Chomsky links SMT to transformational grammar, a long-standing component of his linguistic theory. He states that “a simple form of transformational grammar is just the optimal system, and if you don’t have it, you’d have to have an argument as to why you don’t.” Well-designed systems should have simple, sensible properties. He recommends “chipping away at the stipulated properties of Universal Grammar, and technologies proposed to deal with particular problems to see how closely you can show that language does approximate to the perfect design that would be a natural expectation in light of what appears to be evolutionary history.” ]]> Wed, 09 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/515 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/515 Young children say many surprising and funny things – funny, often, because how they say it is not quite right in an endearing way. “My friend goed to the playground,” and “I ated two desserts” both demonstrate errors that we readily understand, sympathize with, and are confident will go away with further listening and speaking.

But there are other kinds of errors that children just don’t seem to make. In his pathbreaking work on transformational grammar, Noam Chomsky has written extensively about sentences like “The dog in the corner is hungry.” By applying a formal operation Chomsky described in detail, we can form the question “Is the dog in the corner hungry?” But confronted with “The dog that is in the corner is hungry,” we do not end up asking “Is the dog that in the corner is hungry?” Instead, we apply the transformational rule in a different, more complex way, to ask “Is the dog that is in the corner hungry?”

Chomsky draws two conclusions from close study of many such cases. First, he says, this shows that the transformational grammar rules we follow are “structure-dependent,” that is, they apply to phrases, not simply to a string of words in sequence. Second, because a person can go through life without recognizing or even encountering some structure-dependent cases – and yet make the correct choice when presented with alternatives – this aspect of grammar has deep implications for human psychology. In fact, Chomsky claims, this is an argument for the existence of invariant principles of language, a universal grammar.

Howard Lasnik cites evidence for a different interpretation: Chomsky’s “poverty of the stimulus” scenario may not be relevant. By examining a large collection of speech (drawn from the CHILDES database), and applying a Bayesian model of grammar induction – making use, in other words, of the speaker’s knowledge of prior probabilities – it is possible to show that a rational learner could in fact learn that transformational linguistic rules depend on phase structure.

Lasnik’s former student, now colleague, Juan Uriagereka, broadens the argument. Drawing on a startling range of examples – from animal behavior to protein folding, Uriagereka wonders if the structural properties of grammar are unique to human language, or extend to other forms of human cognition, including music, mathematics, and complex planning. Structure dependence may be true, it may be specific to language or at least to human thought … but how did it get there? Where does structure come from? These are the bold questions Lasnik and Uriagereka believe that contemporary linguistic cognitive science has to address. ]]> Mon, 17 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/508 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/508 Sometimes the world gives off a glare “that’s hard to look at directly,” says Susan Cooper, and for her, making sense of things means engaging in fantasy -- “a way of getting to the truth without looking at the real.” Cooper and fellow writer Gregory Maguire admit to working out personally difficult questions, and often cosmic conflicts, in their books of fantasy for children and adults.

Maguire, author of Wicked, says he was bothered by the build-up to the first Gulf War, which fed into his novel for grownups about a children’s character (the Wicked Witch of the West). He calls fantasy “escapism plus something else.” Says Maguire, “When I sense I’m approaching a story that’s going to have to be told in a fantastic way, it is usually because it’s about something so upsetting to me that I wouldn’t trust myself to write about it in a naturalistic way, whether it be corruption of government in any particular decade of my life, or whether it be stress that can exist within children between the need to believe in magic and the injunction to believe in God...”

Says Cooper, “You’re talking to yourself really. So many of us say, ‘I don’t write for children,’ and we don’t; we are published for children, read by children. You deal with your own passions, emotions, problems, by having them flow into a piece of writing that needs that particular emotion.…”

When moderator Roger Sutton wonders about “this human impulse to make things up that are impossible,” Cooper responds about her desire to tell “deep truths,” cloaked in extraordinary features. Fantasy offers the freedom “to think bigger” while offering the protagonist something to identify with. Says Cooper, “There’s a reason why a lot of us start from the real world and go into magic, the way I tend to do…It’s partly that you want your reader to retain a sense of reality, but you’re going through fantasy to truth. It’s that indirect approach that’s going to get you somewhere.”

Maguire believes that the origins of his fantasy literature, while connecting with the tradition of myths and legends, spring from “the wet ground of the subconscious.” As a child he was dreaming and play acting in the dirt alley next to his home. This nourished a more deliberate engagement with fantasy as he got older. “One of the reasons one bothers to write as well as read fantasy is to continue to strengthen the muscle of the imagination, the muscle that in fact can consider that things can be different, things in the hard world in which we live, our hard lives.”

]]> Mon, 03 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/502 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/502 In a talk that interweaves philosophy, history, religion and some classic rabbinic banter, Sir Jonathan Sacks calls for a “paradigm shift in understanding of religion” in the face of globalization, which threatens to pull the world apart in tribal and religious strife. The “three great institutions of modernity -- science, economics and politics” have failed us, and cannot answer the key questions of the 21st century, which are “Who am I” and “Why am I here,” says Sacks. With great difficulty, people increasingly confront others from different places, and develop a “politics of identity.” There is “no overarching neutral power,” says Sack, that will “make and hold peace between warring groups.”

The answer is to find a new mode of existence “that will allow fervent religious believers to live in the conscious presence of difference without violence and war.” Sacks’ travels back to the roots of culture and identity found in the Torah. We must “read the Bible again with new ears to hear a message simple and profound:” The human story begins with the world sharing one language and common speech. Inverting the order of Plato, the Bible sets the universal as a starting point. What is revolutionary about Genesis, says Sacks, is not that human beings can be in the image of God, but “that it applies to every single one of us, rich, poor, young or old,” and that after the Flood, God makes a covenant with all of humanity. These are the same sentiments that “lie behind the great foundational sentence of American political life: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ Plato would have thought that sentence stark, raving mad.”

God sends Abraham and Sarah out of their land to be holy (“which means in the Bible distinctive and set apart”) -- to teach all humanity the dignity of difference.” Each culture is different yet “each in its way echoes and reaches out to God.” Sacks offers a non-religious version of this concept to his MIT audience. The “real miracle of nature is ordered complexity,” biodiversity, made possible by the unity of a single genetic language, DNA.

“What we face in the 21st century is a battle of religious ideas,” concludes Sacks. He aims his “message of hope for a dangerous world” not at the world’s extremists, “who will not be persuaded by secular words like freedom and democracy,” but rather, at those willing to “envisage a different and more gracious future.” ]]> Mon, 22 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/485 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/485 A neuroscientist, lawyer and philosopher together manage to wrap their arms around the centuries’ old question of the origins of human morality.

Beatriz Luna’s behavioral and imaging studies of the human brain provide evidence of an innate circuitry supporting moral cognition, and of distinct phases of development that directly relate to a person’s ability to make a moral judgment. While the “cognitive control of behavior matures in adolescence,” there are limitations in executive processes in the brain “that may limit an adolescent’s ability to consistently determine and apply moral judgment.” Luna says she “doesn’t like people thinking adolescence is a disease.” Instead, she sees it “as the last stop we have to influence what the brain is going to look like,” and if we are interested in promoting responsible and ethical behavior, “maybe we need to sculpt the brain.” She notes that her research has implications for an often unforgiving juvenile justice system.

John Mikhail is working on a framework for a universal moral grammar that in some ways parallels the universal linguistic grammar of his mentor, Noam Chomsky. There’s plenty of psychological evidence that children appear biologically prepared to act morally. Mikhail cites studies showing three-year–old children able to distinguish moral rules from social conventions, and to distinguish lies from innocent or negligent mistakes. He points to other signs of universal morality, such as prohibitions against murder and rape, commonalities in criminal law worldwide. Mikhail is methodically constructing “an experimental version of Socratic methods,” in some sense testing the hypothesis that children are intuitive lawyers. The “scientific project here is to … flesh out in a comprehensive way what’s going on in our processing” that lies behind our moral principles.

There are four wellsprings of human morality, believes Patrick Byrne. Reason -- “the deep desire to know and do what is right” -- guides humans toward principles. Byrne sees an innate need in humans to solve problems and to conduct “critical conversations” with themelves on the best ways to act and live. Simultaneously, we selectively gather moral precepts from society, from what others say is right or wrong. The brain is yet another source of morality. Byrne invokes the work of animal behaviorists, who have traced the evolution of sympathy and empathy in socially organized animals. Here as well, humans apply reason “in deciding who to help, why and when.” Byrne cites the laws of God as another basis for moral conduct. God, says Byrne, “gives us the capacity to reason toward creative, critical and selective determination of what’s the best way to live our lives and act, in concert and in collaboration with others.” ]]> Tue, 18 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/478 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/478 Bill Arning extends his curatorial skills in this session, showcasing artists who are pioneering paths in digital media and installations. He poses central questions about this new art: At a time when reproductions can’t be distinguished from the original, should the artist seek “control of images” and create what Arning describes as “artificial scarcity”? And in an era of ubiquitous images, and mass distribution, why “go someplace special to see something?”

Michael Mittelman speaks from his dual role as teacher and artist. He came up with the notion of capturing interactive installation art (his own and that of colleagues) on DVD, and adding commentary track. This enables viewers who miss a gallery show to watch in the comfort of their own homes, at an affordable price. With his ASPECT DVD publications, Mittelman is also creating important collections of current art for students and future generations. However, Mittelman notes, while he has the support of one-half of the artistic community, he’s in conflict with the other half. Artists want to get their work known, “and the genre can only develop if other artists know what they’re doing,” but artists working in digital media may undercut gallery sales of their work by distributing it in Mittelman’s low-cost format. The goal, says Mittelman, “is many eyes, few hands. Scarcity is important but it’s also important many people know about the work.”

Tony Cokes’ genre involves putting “everyday images, texts and sounds in different contexts.” He says that he appropriates, rearranges, and also repurposes known forms, including music videos and discographies, so that they “make meaning in different ways.” In the past decade, he’s become increasingly interested in “audio cultures.” These days, he commits first to a soundtrack when producing new art. He shows an excerpt of Pop Manifestos, a work that emerged from his essays on pop music.

Andres Laracuente describes his art as a form of collaboration with others, and “a mediation between myself and performance -- an opportunity to increase or enlarge myself in culture.” Trolling places like Craig’s List, Laracuente has found people willing to share their passions (more accurately, fetishes) on camera with him. He shows two videos, which are also available online: “Dr. Popper” features a “blue collar guy who wants to pop balloons,” and in “MTMTN,” Laracuente subjects himself to intense tickling. Laracuente’s art consists of two stages: in the first a performance happens in a space “for the limited audience of creators.” The second part is the document, the video. He believes that if distribution of this kind of art helps create significant discourse, then it enhances the value of the work. ]]> Thu, 06 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/473 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/473 If anyone deserves the moniker of ‘arts miracle worker’, it’s Michael Kaiser. He’s turned around any number of blue ribbon organizations teetering on the edge of bankruptcy -- from the Kansas City Ballet, to England’s Royal Opera House, and the American Ballet Theatre. Now he’s taking his lessons and management techniques around the world, a virtual one-man ambassador for arts innovation and solvency.

Kaiser’s talk focuses on marketing, the kind that “creates excitement around an organization.” In his efforts to restore flagging dance, theater and opera groups, Kaiser often contends with boards that assume paring down performances and cutting labor costs is the only way back to fiscal health. Kaiser advocates a contrary strategy: an artistic group can thrive only by taking artistic risks, investing in bold ventures and communicating inventively to the public, what he calls “dense institutional marketing.”

He offers a case in point: the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, which in 1991 was $1.5 million in the red, and on the verge of laying off dancers. He generated a series of special events to spotlight the dancers and choreography. The two-year effort included landing prime appearances on the Phil Donahue show and at Bill Clinton’s first inaugural gala, an exhibition at the Smithsonian, a sponsored performance in Central Park, and multiple books, including one edited by Jackie Onassis. Kaiser’s persistence paid off, with a doubling of private fundraising.

He frets that a lot of arts organizations in the U.S. began “falling down after 9/11, pulling back on creativity and innovation, afraid of losing their audience.” Kaiser is emphatic: “When you pull back on risk taking, you pull back on the revenue stream. That’s why arts are suffering today.”

His success in reinvigorating performing arts groups, as well as his ease in both the corporate and non-profit worlds, has earned him the role of cultural ambassador for the U.S. State Department. He travels widely to lend his expertise to groups abroad, who find themselves with dwindling or no government support. He’s helping Chinese art administrators learn to raise money, since their government invests in infrastructure, but not in artists. He also found himself in Egypt recently: “140 Arab arts leaders from 17 countries, coming to study with an American Jew at Arab League headquarters—sort of astonishing, but absolutely no political problem.” He has few qualms about working in non-Democratic nations, if he can work freely with organizations to “make them strong,” which he believes helps spread rather than hinder democracy. “Voices become potent by becoming better financed. Dissident voices need access to capital,” Kaiser believes. ]]> Wed, 11 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/462 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/462 This panel demonstrates provocatively how literary criticism and cultural history have come to accommodate and embrace contemporary media. Says David Thorburn, the session’s moderator, “The founding texts of Western civilization belong to a textual category or engage in textual behavior that make it resemble something much closer to an ongoing, unfinished TV series...” Indeed, says Thorburn, “In his own day, Shakespeare was the equivalent of what TV is in our society, or what the movies had been in the studio era.” A new idea of the text is emerging, one that undergoes constant revision, in diverse media, and which never achieves a finished state. Consequently, notions of authorship, and ownership, are under siege.

Thomas Pettitt offers the Gutenberg parenthesis, brackets around historical periods of artistic achievement. Before the parenthesis lie such glories as Elizabethan theatre and traveling players, where “the distinction between author and performer is problematic.” The text is neither fixed, nor authoritative, says Pettitt. Within the center of his parenthesis sit “original compositions, to passive reproductions.” As the digital age proceeds, Pettit observes culture “paradoxically advancing into the past,” our own a mirror age of Elizabethan times, with rock, rap, reggae and other vernacular traditions that emphasize performance coming to the fore.

In Lewis Hyde’s telling, Benjamin Franklin operated as “the first intellectual property pirate in this country,” perhaps a hero to the open access movement. Franklin was instrumental in spiriting out of England printing technology that was in the 18th century subject to laws forbidding the export of skilled labor and machinery. “Franklin is essentially supporting free movement of labor and ideas,” says Hyde, opposing tyrannical law and “underwriting the liberty of ideas and citizens.” Behind his actions lay the belief that the “true and good were best discovered collectively,” and that sacrifice of individual interest was essential in a republic concerned with the progress of knowledge and “public virtue in politics.”

A dialogue with the past and communal ownership of art (the latter vilified by corporate interests), serve as the foundations of African American cultural practice, says Craig Watkins. He traces the origins of rap music to slave songs and narratives, and black preachers and protest politics. This “oral culture created a space in which people could engage in dialog with each other that allowed them to survive horrific conditions.” The idea of sampling in music is consistent with African-America oral tradition and participatory culture, says Watkins. It’s central to art creation, building new kinds of musical experiences and “paying homage to the past -- an act of respect, inserting the past into present.” ]]> Thu, 05 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/460 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/460 Many writers long to see their work appear in The New Yorker. Miraculously, Jamaica Kincaid got her start in print generating “Talk of the Town” pieces for the magazine, back in the (good old) days when those pieces ran without bylines. Kincaid, who celebrates times “when the sheer doing of something was enough,” reads some of her “TOT” pieces and other examples of her early work, offering tips and asides to aspiring writers in her audience.

She admits having wanted to write differently from anyone else at the magazine, “a vanity or arrogance of youth.” Her piece about a book reception for economist Milton Friedman consists entirely of an inventory of the costs of the event to her and other participants (all rigorously fact-checked, Kincaid notes). She felt hostile to Friedman, because he was in those days an advisor “to a cruel government in Chile,” and Kincaid wanted to express this but ‘didn’t want to just say it.” When “Mr. Shawn published it, it was amazing to me.”

Her submissions to The New Yorker during the ‘70s just preceded the period of celebrity culture, Kincaid says. It was a time when “rich people in America wanted to be known for working, doing something other than being rich, and they would get jobs or something like that.”

She reads a long story, “Biography of a Dress,” that is based in large part on her early life in Antigua. Episodes from her girlhood, which in other hands might lean toward the nostalgic, are framed by a searingly honest and unsentimental adult voice. Kincaid utterly renounces the notion that dredging up and fictionalizing past events offers some release to her. Instead, once she puts memory into writing, “I’ve dispensed with it and it is no longer of any literary interest to me.”

“My Brother,” Kincaid’s account of her brother’s death from HIV, demonstrates her take-no-prisoners approach to biographical writing. She first acknowledges to the audience, “The most ridiculous thing -- I think why didn’t somebody tell me that having somebody die is so hard, that it’s just an amazing pain.” She wrote the first part of the book while he was alive, and then couldn’t continue, having what Kincaid describes as a “biological response to his death.” As difficult and extreme as her reaction was to his suffering, Kincaid was nevertheless committed to telling the story, in clear and brutal terms. “I rule out the memoir. It caramelizes and beautifies things…. I wouldn’t want to know how to make a beautiful thing. Implied in memoir is forgiveness that I don’t feel. I never forgive and I never forget, and I’m never cathartic.” ]]> Tue, 24 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/441 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/441 All hail Sir William Mix-a-Lot, da mash meister Shakespeare! These panelists sing his praises as an inspiration for crossover and convergence art, and discourse on the endless reworking of his oeuvre.

Says Diana Henderson, “When I hear people talking about digital and multimedia, I’m always forced to say yes, but that’s nothing new.” 50 years after Shakespeare’s death, King Lear’s ending received an extensive rewrite, Henderson recounts, where “Edgar and Cordelia have a nice romantic relationship and a happy ending.” We may mock this today, but “in its historical moment,” notes Henderson, when a generation was threatened by the usurpation of the throne, “it was not so silly.” Song and dance was added to serious dramas – a comic thought today -- but this paved the way for Verdi’s much celebrated opera version of Othello. While “it’s hard not to laugh” at some extreme Shakespeare revision, we need to develop a broader, historical perspective, Henderson urges. By way of showing how malleable the various ways of thinking about Shakespeare can be, Henderson plays clips from a stylized silent movie of Othello, and from a 1982 Paul Mazursky version of The Tempest, with a Liza Minnelli “New York, New York” soundtrack. They tap into assumptions about high and low culture, and different sociopolitical moments, she says. “It’s the reason some of us take a whole lifetime looking at Shakespeare, not just because of a particular play text but because of four centuries of how a remix allows you to reflect on the culture at large.”

While Peter Donaldson isn’t sure Shakespeare achieved the kind of miracles of remix in his own time that DJ Z-trip does live with two turntables, Donaldson does appreciate contemporary remixes of the plays. He delves deep into Michael Almereyda’s 2000 Hamlet, where Ethan Hawke ponders the big questions with the help of a kid’s Pixelvision camcorder. “He makes videos to try to understand his experience,” says Donaldson, which “cuts him off in a most severe way from the rest of the world around, capturing grief in a way that many Hamlets do not.” The most artistically significant Shakespeare films feature “elaborate remixing,” where the director is “moving around in a learned way within the tradition.” Donaldson has also dipped a toe in the wide, but not necessarily deep waters of YouTube, where Matrix and Star Wars elements somehow figure in Shakespeare mash-ups (e.g., Banquo and Macbeth fighting with light sabers). However, he hits pay dirt with a clip of Peter Sellers channeling Laurence Olivier in Richard III, and reciting the lyrics of The Beatles “A Hard Day’s Night.” ]]> Wed, 24 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/418 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/418 Shakespeare has powerfully influenced generations of artists in all fields. His works, in spite of their formidable iconic force, invite interpretive play, and Diana Henderson construes Shakespeare’s connection with his artistic descendants as collaboration. Artists use his plays “as a kaleidoscope,” and “shake up Shakespeare…. We remake him in our own image, often with spectacular results,” says Henderson.

Using film and novels to illustrate this point, Henderson’s new book explores several intriguing instances of Shakespeare “shifting.” Sir Walter Scott recast “Othello” in his novel, Kenilworth, and Virginia Woolf used “Cymbeline” in Mrs. Dalloway. Henderson’s talk takes up Franco Zeffirelli’s “Taming of the Shrew,” starring the dueling celeb couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. The film takes the Shakespeare story “over the top,” says Henderson. Zeffirelli uses comedic film touches, such as horror film shots, to frame the story. The soundtrack “saves it from farce,” she says, and “body gestures add to the text,” to help demonstrate the shift in power relationships.

Henderson also discusses Kenneth Branagh’s movie of “Henry V,” which brings Welsh characters to the fore, but deletes the Queen of France (assigning her lines to his own role of Henry). There’s a mix of ideas on nationalism and gender relations here that encourages readers (or film viewers) to puzzle at and rework the play, assigning it new meanings. She notes that one of the fashioners of the Iraq invasion, Kenneth Adelman, read “Henry V” “as an instruction manual for George Bush in Iraq.”

Henderson offers, like David Lettermen, the Top 10 Reasons why Shakespeare remains Top Dog. At number one: “Shakespeare wrote in a multimedia form in a way that can be reshaped across media.”

]]> Tue, 09 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/415 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/415 Joe Haldeman provides a sneak preview of an upcoming novel whose story plays out in MIT’s past, present and distant future. In his conversation with Henry Jenkins, Haldeman admits that he has “a lot of fun with the sociology of being in this joint.” He also discusses the history of his genre, and his own literary approach.

“The thing about science fiction,” says Haldeman, “is that it’s a form of writing but it’s also a way of looking at things – a mode of thought.” Early sci-fi writers sought to educate young people, and direct them toward careers as scientists or engineers. Not all of the writing was stellar. Some of the “old stuff can be ugly stuff,” he says. Haldeman can’t read the Foundation trilogy now – “My eyes lock,” the writing’s so bad. But some of the stories from the 1930s inspired the scientists on both sides of World War 2, those behind radar, the atom bomb and Germany’s V1 and V2 rockets. Today, as fewer people read novels, Haldeman says, science fiction has become less important. “The idea that science fiction can educate isn’t there anymore.”

Haldeman revels in the real world of science, especially at the far edges of research where astonishing discoveries are made. “I get more damn ideas out of popular science magazines,” like Scientific American. An article in Sky and Telescope, and a visit to a Boston science museum exhibit on preserved human bodies inspired a new story on non-carbon based life forms that live in a different timescale from humans.

Haldeman is determined to get both the science and fiction right, and he writes things he’d like to read. “I get so bored with cardboard characters…essentially giving a lesson.” He’s a big fan of Ernest Hemingway. As a Vietnam veteran who has written a number of war stories, he admits that “writing about war is the first natural, emotional thing to do,” but he resists getting too analytical about his work.

Today, Haldeman views science as under attack: “Religion is out of hand on a lot of different levels, and science fiction is a tool against religion,” he says. “Science fiction is a tool for rationalism, for a rational approach to solving life’s problems.”

]]> Mon, 02 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/383 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/383 This talk, by one of television’s most dark-minded auteurs, may inspire some viewers to upgrade their cable service to HBO, or at least to rent DVDs of his classic police dramas. David Milch, in the flesh, proves as provocative as some of his finest creations.

In the course of a conversation with David Thorburn, (a former Yale colleague), Milch touches on previous works, like NYPD Blue and Hill Street Blues, delves into Deadwood, his new, alternative Western series, and reveals astonishing pieces of his own biography.

Prodded to reflect on some of his twisted but charismatic TV characters, Milch says, “My old man used to beat me pretty good. And I adored him. He wound up taking his own life.” That’s for starters. Milch goes on to describe his surgeon father’s gangland relatives; his father’s suicide; and where he’d learned that his father had died (at a “pitch” meeting). It should not surprise, then, that Milch deeply understands “the torment some souls are exposed to.” He has suffered bouts of heroin and alcohol addiction, and describes himself as an obsessive-compulsive who doesn’t let his hands touch anything while writing, and so dictates his TV scripts.

His town of Deadwood incorporates real and fictional characters, whose language is salted with obscenity. Traditionalists have objected. Milch, after researching 19th century American history, feels that the classic American movie Western was a product of the Hayes production code, which prohibited profanity in deed and word. In his Deadwood, there is no rule of law, and “the metrics of speech are important” in reflecting this.

After 9/11, Milch determined never again to set a series in contemporary times. He says the popular media “assaulted the collective sensibility” with fear-mongering images, a deliberate “habituation of the viewing public to the shaping of human experience in distorted forms.” The war in Iraq was presented like a three-week miniseries, with a beginning, middle and end -- “an infantile drama, being staged to narcotize the American public.” Milch believes the American viewing public, addicted to TV, can’t grapple with moral problems present in the real world. So, he says, “I’m doing what I can to tell stories which engage those issues in ways that can engage the imagination so people don’t feel threatened by it.” ]]> Mon, 15 May 2006 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/354 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/354 There’s much to please the literate listener in this feast of spoken (and sung) words.

First, Robert Pinsky and his composer collaborator Tod Machover offer a glimpse of their opera-in-progress, Death and the Powers. A story about the evolution of humans, Pinsky reassures that it won’t be “a trite Frankenstein story.”

David Thorburn guides the subsequent conversation, with an occasional poke here and there for his old friend and graduate school classmate. They discuss the rationale behind Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project, where ordinary Americans read their favorite poems. Says Pinsky, “We’re establishing a true elite of people who understand a poem, can incorporate it and read it aloud in a way that other people can perceive it, against the false elite of people who get tenure at Yale or Harvard or BU and often don’t know anything about what a poem actually is.” Pinsky describes the difficulty of writing a good poem: “You’re much more like trying to keep an airplane in the air or save the patient. You’re desperately trying to make something that works.”

He reads from a recent book of prose, The Life of David. The character “is a killer and poet, artist and politician, a terrible and great person.” Pinsky is “interested in the yin and yang, the quality of David to be all of the above and of Jews to be all of the above,” which is related in his mind “to the ambition of writing a kind of poetry where anything can be included.”

Thorburn and Pinsky reminisce about their Stanford teacher, Yvor Winters, whose poetry inspired a Pinsky parody, including the following couplet: “I now insert a seedless roll into/ My lunchbox, but I shall be shortly through.”

About contemporary poetry, Pinsky notes: Lots of people want to write poetry, but are afraid of being clumsy….I feel every time I write I’m risking seeming stupid, banal. You have to confront your own ambivalence.” As for writing a good poem, “it’s like this: You have to climb a mountain, find your way through a maze, get to the field that has the tree in it, climb up to the top of the tree and wait for a thunderstorm. Then it’s easy once you’re hit by lightning. You go through a lot of froufrou before you get there.”

]]> Sat, 01 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/338 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/338 Running a high-profile arts organization can be a punishing profession. When Michael Kaiser arrived in London to take over the financially ailing Royal Opera House in 1998, one newspaper declared that his appointment was “the worst disaster to hit Covent Garden since the bombs of World War 2.” In spite of nasty public swipes like this, Kaiser accomplished a miraculous turnaround at the Opera House – as he has at other major companies. Kaiser’s current work involves transforming the Kennedy Center into a truly national destination.

Kaiser abandoned his dream of becoming a professional singer after realizing he was “just dreadful,” and built a successful career in financial consulting. His search for a more interesting product than money led him back to the arts. He developed a “mantra” for reviving near-moribund arts institutions: in order to thrive, provide “great art, well marketed.”

At the Opera House, which was running a deficit of $30 million when he arrived, Kaiser laid off 300 people -- not to balance the books but to refocus the organization on new arts programs and fundraising opportunities. With shrinking government funding, Kaiser sought to change public perception of the Opera House. He created “such exciting events that …those of means in England felt they had to participate” -- and donate. Within 18 months, he had paid off the deficit and raised an additional $40 million for renovations.

At the American Ballet Theater, Kaiser says, they had “no pointe shoes and were unscrewing the light bulbs to save money.” Seven years of “Romeo and Juliet” had left the audience bored. “The trick to turnaround in the arts,” says Kaiser, “is that you scrimp on everything but what goes on stage—your product—and the way you market it.” Unlike every other industry, Kaiser notes, in the arts “we can’t improve productivity” to counter rising costs. “Every decade gets harder, which means the sophistication of management has to get better.” ]]>