evocative objects

MIT Initiative on Technology and Self
Evocative Objects Seminars

BACKGROUND:
One of the hallmark activities of the Initiative has been a speaker series known as the "Evocative Objects" seminars. These seminars, open to the public, are informal gatherings focused on an (evocative) object, that is, an object that causes us to think differently about such categories as self, other, intention, desire, emotion, the body...

Upcoming Evocative Objects Events:

Over the past two and a half years, the Initiative has sponsored an"Evocative Objects" seminar that has sparked significant conversation about material culture, emotions, and epistemology through close "readings" of objects, ranging from Olivetti portable typewriters and Moog synthesizers to 19th century pumps and 1950s Ford Falcons.

This academic year we plan an "Evocative Objects" symposium on March 5th, 2004, a full day of presentations on objects and supporting theoretical papers. A poster for the symposium can be downloaded here (.pdf format). The symposium is free and open to the public. A map can be found here.

We are also currently collecting essays for our first publication, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, edited and with an introduction by Sherry Turkle. This volume will include highlights from our seminar series as well as new papers from authors who share its object-oriented perspective on the social studies of science and technology.

Read more about the "Evocative Objects" symposium in this Boston Globe article.

Schedule: Evocative Objects 2004
Symposium
Friday, March 5, 2004
Killian Hall

The "Evocative Objects" seminar has been a defining activity of the Initiative over the past two and a half years, a series of conversations about the changing relationship between human beings and their artifacts. We have examined material culture, emotions, and epistemology through close "readings" of objects, ranging from 19th century pumps and Olivetti portable typewriters to Moog synthesizers and 1950s Ford Falcons. In this sixth term of the seminar, we have
adopted a new format, a full-day symposium on objects and supporting theoretical discussions.

We hope you will join us for one or more of the day's presentations and events.

Please RSVP to initiative@mit.edu, if you plan to join us.

Morning Session (Killian Hall - 14W - 111)

8:00-8:30
Breakfast

8:30-9:00
Sherry Turkle, MIT, Science, Technology, and Society
Director of the Initiative on Technology and Self
Welcome: Things We Think With

9:00-10:00
Mitchel Resnick, MIT, Media Lab
Stars of My Childhood

10:00-11:15
Christopher Csikszentmihályi, MIT, Media Lab
Caroline Jones, MIT Architecture; and Krzysztof Wodiczko, MIT, Architecture
A Conversation: Are Aesthetic Objects Transitional Objects?

11:15-11:30
Break

11:30-12:30
Tod Machover, MIT, Media Lab
My Cello: Listening, Touch, and Evocative Music

12:30-2:00
Real/Faux Lunch (Media Lab Atrium - E15)
Robert Kanigel, Director, Graduate Program in Science Writing, MIT and Kelly Dobson, MIT, Media Lab
Everyone is encouraged to bring examples of their favorite real and faux objects -- from Mont Blanc to Prada.

Afternoon Session (Killian Hall - 14W - 111)

2:00-3:00
Anne Pollock, MIT, Science, Technology, and Society
Technology to the Heart: Experiences of Internal

Defibrillators

3:00-4:00
David Gordon Mitten, Harvard University,
Classical Art and Archaeology Archaic Native American stone three-quarter-grooved axehead, from Holmes County, Ohio. Date: around 3400 B.C.

4:00-4:15
Break

4:15-5:30
Working Group Leaders
MIT Initiative on Technology and Self
Panel and audience discussion: What have we learned
about Evocative Objects?

6:00
Reception (MIT Faculty Club - E52-6th Floor)

Presenters

Christopher Csikszentmihályi is the Fukutake Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences. He directs the MIT Media Lab's Computing Culture group, and works in the intersection of new technologies, media, and the arts, frequently lecturing, showing new media work, and presenting installations in both Europe and North America. Csikszentmihályi has toured with DJ I, Robot, which was nominated for the Best Artistic Software award at Berlin's Transmediale, and he serves on the National Academy of Science's IT & Creativity panel.

Kelly Dobson is a researcher and PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab. She is developing a new method of personal, societal, and psychoanalytical
engagement termed Machine Therapy. Combining art, design, neuroscience, and engineering, Dobson explores connections between people and machines, empathic opportunities, and transitional object architectures.

Caroline Jones teaches contemporary art and theory in the History, Theory, and Criticism Section of the Department of Architecture at MIT. Producer/director of two documentary films and curator of several exhibitions, her books include the award-winning Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago 1996/98), and the forthcoming Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses.

Robert Kanigel is director of MIT's new Graduate Program in Science Writing. He is the author of The Man Who Knew Infinity and The One Best Way, a biography of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the first efficiency expert. His current project, Faux Real, explores the borderland between the natural and artificial using leather and the quest for ever-better imitation leathers.

Tod Machover is Professor of Music & Media at the MIT Media Lab, and head of its Hyperinstruments/Opera of the Future group. He has
composed five operas, including the celebrated Brain Opera, and is the inventor of Hyperinstruments, a technology that has been used by performers as diverse as Yo-Yo Ma, Prince, and Peter Gabriel. Machover is also the creator of the Toy Symphony, an international music performance and education project.

David Gordon Mitten is James Loeb Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology at Harvard University. He teaches classics, history of art, Near Eastern languages and literatures, and a Harvard Divinity School seminar on archaeology and the New Testament. George M.A. Hanfmann Curator of Ancient and Byzantine Art of the Harvard University Art Museums, Mitten's lifelong research is on classical bronze statues and vessels.

Anne Pollock is a third-year graduate student in the History and Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT. Her fields of interest include the social studies of medicine, the body and technology, and race and gender and medicine. Her presentation today focuses on the lived experiences of heart disease--with particular attention to the ways that implants (especially internal cardioverter defibrillators) and
pharmaceuticals (especially racialized ones) shape those experiences.

Mitchel Resnick is director of the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the MIT Media Lab, which explores how new technologies can help people (particularly children) learn new things in new ways. His research group developed the ideas and technologies underlying the LEGO Mindstorms robotics construction kit, and he co-founded the Computer Clubhouse project, a network of after-school learning centers for youth from under-served communities. Resnick is author of the book Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams (1994).

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. She is the author of Psychoanalytic Poltics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, and Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. Known for her work on children and computers and computer-mediated relationship, her most recent research focuses on the relationship between people and robots.

Krzysztof Wodiczko is director of A.C.T., the Center of Art, Culture, and Technology at MIT, formerly known as the Center for Advanced Visual Studies. His interests include nomadic design; art, identity and community; design, technology and ethics; the art of counter-memory; and interrogative design. Wodiczko was awarded the Hiroshima Prize for his contribution as an artist to world peace.Volumes of his writings have been published by Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris and more recently by MIT Press.

Final Session Panelists

Edith Ackermann is a Visiting Professor at the MIT School of Architecture. Developmental psychologist by training, she consults for LEGO, CREATE: TV and Film, and other organizations and research institutions interested in the intersections between children, learning, design, and digital technologies. Ackermann was a Senior Research Scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory; Associate and Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the
MIT Media Lab; and a Scientific Collaborator at the Centre International d'Epistémologie Génétique, under the direction of Jean Piaget.

Alexander Brown is a graduate student in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. His work examines engineering practice in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, using accidents and failures and their subsequent investigations to examine the changing cultures of engineering within NASA. He is particularly interested in the social, technological and epistemological consequences of the introduction of simulation and visualization tools into engineering.

Nate Greenslit is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. His research interests include the anthropology of pharmaceutical marketing and the social history of mood disorders. His work has been published in Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry, and The History of Psychiatry. Greenslit is also editing the first reader in pharmaceutical studies, entitled Pharmaceutical Cultures: Marketing Drugs and Changing Lives in the
U.S., which will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2005.

Yanni Loukissas is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Architecture at MIT and a Visiting Professor of Sculpture at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He leads the Initiative's working group on Design, Space, and Software. His personal research explores the intersection of design and computation at a sociological and a technical level.

Natasha Myers is a Doctoral Fellow in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. Her current research explores the visual cultures of contemporary biology, investigating a range of new digital imaging, modeling and simulation practices within laboratories. She aims to track how these technologies move beyond laboratories into pedagogical contexts (classrooms, museums, online educational sites) to learn more about how biological images of living bodies, tissues, cells and molecules are embodied in the imaginations of a wider public.

Rachel Prentice is finishing a doctorate in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. Her dissertation, "Bodies of Information: Reinventing Bodies and Practice in Medical Education," is an ethnography about groups of physicians, engineers, and computer experts building computer applications and simulations for teaching anatomy and surgery. Before graduate school, she worked as a newspaper reporter.

Aslihan Sanal is a doctoral candidate in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. As an anthropologist, she works on the impact of biomedical technologies on our changing understanding of the body and the self. Sanal looks into organ transplantations, tissue engineering, bioart and writes on how technology gives a new meaning to our sense of being.

Lily Shirvanee is a research assistant in the Synthetic Character's group at the MIT Media Lab, where her research focuses on issues of an intelligent behavior system which includes learning, social interaction, motor control, and animation. Within the area of artificial intelligence, she has been interested in the subset of empathy and how we learn reflexively through our emotional states and the research areas of Mixed Reality, Tangible Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence, and Human Computer Interfaces and Sensors.