Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Fall 1998
Digital Cities:
Urban Environments and Interactive TechnologiesFriday, September 25
9 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Bartos Theater, MIT Media Lab
20 Ames Street
Cambridge, MAHow are new technologies representing urban spaces? How will these representations affect our notions of what cities are, how they look, how they might be designed or reimagined. This symposium will include commentary from urban planners and specialists in cultural geography as well as audio-visual demonstrations of a range of projects--pedagogical, documentary, games--that represent real or imagined urban environments. The symposium will conclude in a synthesizing discussion with the audience on the uses of digital media to capture something of the experience of living in cities.
9-9:30 -- Welcome and Introduction
- William Mitchell, MIT
9:30-10:30 -- Emerging Cultural Geographies of Cyberspace
- Malcolm McCullough, Carnegie Mellon University
- Distinguishing Among "Community," "Place," "Brandname," and "Business Ecology": A Spotcheck on Issues and Overexposures in Digital Neighborhood Building
- Thomas Campanella and Anne Beamish, MIT
- Anti-Urbanism and the Image of the City in New Media Culture, with Lessons from the Physical World for Digital Design
10:30-11 Break
11-12 noon: Designing Interactive Virtual Worlds
- Bruce Joffe, GIS Consultants, Inc.
SimCity: Myths and Folklore- Linda Stone, Microsoft Corp.
Microsoft's Virtual Worlds
12-12:30 -- Audience response/general discussion
12:30-2 Lunch
2-4 -- Four Versions of the Digital City
- Theresa Duncan, Rhinestone Publishing
- Zero Zero: Paris By Gaslight
- Shigeru Miyagawa, MIT
- StarNet: Digital Presentation of a Japanese Town -- Time, Space, and People
- Glorianna Davenport, MIT
- City: Time, Space and Story
- Kurt Fendt and Ellen Crocker, MIT
- "Berliner sehen": Life stories in a changing city. A hypermedia exploration of urban cultures.
4-4:15 Break
4:15-4:45 -- Reponse to the Demos: Audience Discussion
4:45-5:30 -- Summing Up and Looking Ahead: Panelists and Audience
Free and Open to the Public
For more information: 617 253-3144
Speakers
Anne Beamish is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. Her research interests center on the design of on-line environments and how information technology can support both virtual and physical communities, collaborative work, and institutional learning.
Thomas J. Campanella, also completing Ph.D. in Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, specializes in American landscape history, the geography of new media technology, and emerging urbanism in southeast Asia. His writing has appeared in Wired, Metropolis, Harvard Design Magazine and other publications.
Ellen Crocker is Lecturer in German in Foreign Languages and Literatures at MIT. She is co-director of "Berliner sehen," author of the interactive CD-ROM "In der Niederlausitz," and author of several German language textbooks.
Glorianna Davenport heads the Interactive Cinema Group at the MIT Media Laboratory. Trained as a documentary film director, her research explores issues related to cinematic journalism and the collaborative creation of digital media experiences, where the task of narration is split among authors, consumers and computer mediators.
Kurt Fendt is Research Associate in Foreign Languages and Literatures at MIT and co-director of "Berliner sehen." His research focuses on hypertext and literary theory and their application in digital media for the Humanities.
Bruce Joffe is founding Principal of GIS Consultants of Oakland, CA, which provides planning and implementation management services to cities, counties, and utility companies around the world. He serves on the editorial advisory board of Geo-Info Systems magazine, and works on city simulation modeling games in his spare time.
William J. Mitchell is Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences and Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT. His publications include City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn and The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era.
Shigeru Miyagawa is Professor of Linguistics and Kochi Prefecture - John Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture at MIT. He is the Executive Producer of "Star Festival," a multimedia, interactive novel about Japan which was awarded the "Best of Show" at MacWorld. He is also working on a digital narrative about the civil rights movement in the South. These projects are being incorporated into the social studies curriculum (K-12) in Boston and elsewhere.
Linda Stone is the director of Microsoft Research's Virtual Worlds Group, a team of engineers, artists, and animators working to develop multi-user, multimedia technologies for the construction of social environments in cyberspace.
| Home | Overview | Schedule | Speakers | Papers | Session Summary | 11.947 Graduate Seminar |