Digital Cinema
November 3-5, 2000
This conference brings together filmmakers, critics, and media industry leaders to explore the nature of digital cinema and its cultural significance. The conference will combine screenings of significant works in digital cinema with panel discussions centered on such issues as the political consequence of broadening media access, the shifting status of amateur filmmaking, the aesthetics of this emerging media form, the economics of digital film production and distribution, the historical antecedents of digital cinema, and the ways in which digital cinema may influence our media future.
home page | agenda | speakers | panels | screenings


Computer and Video Games Come of Age:
A National Conference to Explore the State of an Emerging Entertainment Medium
February 10-11, 2000
The time has come to take an inventory of today's game industry and envision tomorrow's technological innovations and creative implications, not only from industrial and professional perspectives but also from the perspective of cultural and media scholars. Just as industry leaders and academics worked together to establish a serious national conversation about the aesthetic and cultural importance of cinema in the 20th centry, we believe that academic and industry exchanges can promote the art of digital entertainment media for the 21st century.
agenda | speakers | panels | readings | transcripts

Media in Transition
An International Conference
October 8-10, 1999
To celebrate the launch of the graduate program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, this final event of the Media in Transition Project aims to establish a broad-gauged discussion of our emerging computer culture in the perspective of ancestor technologies and older media. The conference will include some 75 presentations on many aspects of this subject, a series of multi-media demonstrations and films offered in parallel with the presentations, and three plenary "conversations" in which distinguished panelists will speak briefly and then participate in extended dialogue with the audience. Among the panelists: Phil Agre, Robert Darnton, Henry Jenkins, Elaine Kamarck, Adam Powell, Mitchel Resnick, Paul Starr, Bob Stein, Maria Tatar, Sherry Turkle.
agenda | speakers | summaries | papers | dialogue

Wiring the Classroom: Moving Beyond Access in K-12 Education
May 1, 1999
A conversation among researchers and Boston area teachers about new educational
technologies. Keynote lecture by Elliot Soloway of the University of Michigan, followed by discussions about educational principles and new media and by demonstrations of computer programs designed by MIT faculty and local teachers for studying foreign languages,
literature, history, writing and media studies.
agenda | abstract | speakers | summaries

The Internet: Next Generation and Beyond
December 1-2, 1998
"The Internet is a fast moving phenomenon, generating lots of excitment, and also lots of confusion. On the one hand, it has the potential to change the way we work, play, communicate, and participate in society. On the other hand, it has the potential to topple the structure of major industries."
-- Dr. David D. Clark, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
agenda


Digital Cities: Urban Environments and Interactive Technologies
Friday, Sept 25, 1998
How 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 includes 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.
agenda | speakers | summaries