Café Mouffe Presents: Henry Butler

After talking about Henry Butler’s photography at MIT, I’ve been hankering to hear some of his music. Here’s a YouTube clip of Henry Butler and Bruce Katz at the Clavia booth at the NAMM 2007 trade show. Henry plays a Nord Stage and Bruce jams on a Clavia C1 organ. This blues sounds like it could go on forever; too bad the clip cuts out so abruptly.

Want more? Another clip features Henry Butler at SxSW. He accompanies an unidentified gospel singer in a church illuminated by stained glass windows. The sound is quite good for a cell phone recording from the audience, and even though the performers are telescopically distant, I like the dark mysterioso effect.

While you’re YouTubing, check out this clip of the blind pianist driving a car.

MiT5 Plenary Session Podcasts Are Live

From Rik Eberhardt, Technologist in Residence, MIT Comparative Media Studies:

Audio recordings from the MiT 5 plenary sessions have been posted to the MIT CMS Podcast. Below are links for each entry. To subscribe to the MIT CMS Podcast for future recordings, go to http://cms.mit.edu/news/podcast for instructions.

Video webcasts will be posted in a few weeks to MIT World (we'll update you all when this happens).

1: Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures
http://cms.mit.edu/news/2007/04/mit_5_folk_cultures_and_digita.php

2: Collaborationand Collective Intelligence
http://cms.mit.edu/news/2007/04/mit_5_collaboration_and_collec.php

3: Copyright, Fair Use and the Cultural Commons
http://cms.mit.edu/news/2007/04/mit_5_copyright_fair_use_and_t.php

4: Learning through Remixing
http://cms.mit.edu/news/2007/04/mit_5_learning_through_remixin.php

5: Reproduction, Mimicry, Critique and Distribution Systems in Visual Art
http://cms.mit.edu/news/2007/04/mit_5_reproduction_mimicry_cri.php

6: Summary Perspectives
http://cms.mit.edu/news/2007/04/mit_5_summary_perspectives.php

MiT5 - Learning through Remixing

Plenary Session 4: Learning through Remixing

aturday, April 28, 2007
7:30-9:30
Bartos Theater
Media Lab

Historically, engineers learned by taking machines apart and putting them back together again. Can young people also learn how culture works by sampling and remixing the materials of their culture? Might this ability to appropriate and transform valued cultural materials be recognized as an important new kind of cultural competency, what some people are calling the new media literacies? How might we meaningfully incorporate this fascination with mash-ups into our pedagogical practices and what values should we place on the kinds of new content which young people produce by working on and working over existing cultural materials? In this program, we will showcase a range of contemporary projects that embrace a hands-on approach to contemporary and classical media materials as a means of getting young people to think critically about their own roles as future media producers and consumers.

Speakers

Erik Blankinship is a co-founder of Media Modifications, a new start-up whose mission is to expose and enhance the structure of media to make its full learning and creative potential accessible to all. He has many years of experience working with children as an inventor of educational technologies and activities and as a researcher studying the potential of digital media for teaching and learning literature, history, mathematics, and game design. While an undergrad at the University of Maryland, College Park he was a recipient of the Jim Henson Award for Projects Related to Puppetry. email
Juan Devis is a new media producer at KCET/PBS Los Angeles in charge of all original web content including Web Stories, KCETs multimedia webzine. He is currently working with the USC School of Cinematic Arts and the Institute for Multimedia Literacy to develop a serious game based on Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Devis was recently awarded a writer's fellowship at ABC/Disney for his original screenplay Welcome to Tijuana which is scheduled for production early in 2008. Devis is president of the board of Freewaves, a non-profit media arts organization. email

Renee Hobbs is associate professor of communication and education at Temple University where she directs the Media Education Lab. She has worked extensively with state departments of education in Maryland and Texas, and her new book Reading the Media: Media Literacy in High School English (2007) provides empirical evidence to document how media literacy improves adolescents' reading comprehension skills. email
Ricardo Pitts-Wiley has been the artistic director of Mixed Magic Theatre for over 20 years. I that role, he has written/ produced/ directed a number of productions including From the Bard to the Bounce: A Hip-Hop Shakespeare Experience, Kwanzaa Song, The Great Battle for the Air, About Me and the Adventure (with Community Prep and the Rhode Island School for the Deaf) and four Annual Black History Month Celebrations at Portsmouth Abbey. Pitts-Wiley was resident artist at Brown University Summer High School in 2001.
Alice J. Robison is a postdoctoral fellow in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT where she is a consultant for several new media initiatives including New Media Literacies and advises several student-run organizations devoted to the study of videogames and interactive media including the Harvard Interactive Media Group and the MIT Videogame Theorists. email

Moderator:

Henry Jenkins is co-director of Comparative Media Studies and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities at MIT. He is the author and/or editor of several books on various aspects of media and popular culture including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and is the author of the blog Confessions of an ACA/Fan. email

An audio recording of Learning through Remixing will be available following the event.

A podcast of Learning through Remixing is now available from Comparative Media Studies.

MiT5 - Collaboration and Collective Intelligence

Plenary Session 2: Collaboration and Collective Intelligence

Friday, April 27, 2007
5:45-7:15
Bartos Theater
Media Lab

"Collective Intelligence" and "the wisdom of crowds" have become central buzz phrases in recent discussions of networked culture. But what do they really mean? What do we know about the new forms of collaboration that is emerging as people work together across geographic distances online? Are we working, learning, socializing, creating, consuming, and playing in new ways as a result of the emergence of our participation in online communities? What have we learned over the past decade that may help us to design more powerful communities in the real world? What lessons can we carry from our Second Lives into our First?

Speakers

Mizuko (Mimi) Ito is a cultural anthropologist of technology use focusing on children and youth’s changing relationships to media and communications. She has been conducting ongoing research on kids’ technoculture in Japan and the US, and is co-editor of Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. She is a research scientist at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication and a visiting associate professor at Keio University in Japan. email

Cory Ondrejka is the chief technology officer at Linden Lab where he leads the team developing Second Life. He also spearheaded the decision to allow users to retain the IP rights to their creations and helped craft Linden's virtual real estate policy. While an officer in the United States Navy, he worked at the National Security Agency and graduated from the Navy Nuclear Power School. email

Trebor Scholz is assistant professor and researcher in the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo and research fellow at the Hochschule fuer Kunst und Gestaltung, Zurich. He is founder of the Institute for Distributed Creativity and has contributed essays to several books, journals, and periodicals and co-edited The Art of Free Cooperation forthcoming with Autonomedia (NYC). email
Moderator:

Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is also the founder and director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and author of the book The Future of Work. Malone has published over 75 articles, research papers, and book chapters and is an inventor with 11 patents. email

An audio recording of Collaboration and Collective Intelligence is now available.

A podcast of Collaboration and Collective Intelligence is now available from Comparative Media Studies.

MiT5 - Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures

Plenary Session 1: Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures

Friday, April 27, 2007
12:30-2:00
E25-111

Digital visionaries such as Yochai Benkler have described the emergence of a new networked culture in which participants with differing intentions and professional credentials co-exist and cooperate in a complex media ecology. Are we witnessing the appearance of a new or revitalized folk culture? Are there older traditions and practices from print culture or oral societies that resemble these emerging digital practices? What sort of amateur or grassroots creativity have been studied or documented by literary scholars, anthropologists, and students of folklore? How were creativity and collaboration understood in earlier cultures? Are there lessons or cautions for digital culture in the near or distant past?

Speakers:

Lewis Hyde is the Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College and a fellow of the Berkman Center on Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School. He is a poet and essayist whose current book project is a defense of cultural commons. His book Trickster Makes This World (1999) is a portrait of the kind of disruptive imagination needed to keep any culture flexible and lively. email

Thomas Pettitt is an associate professor at the Institute of Literature, Media and Cultural Studies, University of Southern Denmark, where he lectures on late-medieval and early-modern literature and theatre, and on folk traditions. email
S. Craig Watkins writes about race, youth, media, and technology. His most recent book is Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement. He is currently working on a book examining the social consequences and implications of young people's changing media behaviors. He teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. email
Moderator:

David Thorburn is professor of literature and director of the Communications Forum at MIT. He is the author of Conrad’s Romanticism, and, most recently, co-editor of Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. email

An audio recording of Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures is now available.

A podcast of Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures is now available from Comparative Media Studies.

Accessing Knowledge at MiT5

Here’s my session at MiT5.
Accessing Knowledge: Saturday, April 28, 1:30-3:00 p.m. The location is Building 4, room 146.

Marlene Manoff, Volatility, Instability, Ambiguity: The Evolving Digital Record

Mark Willis, Reimagining Accessibility in Participatory Culture

Eva Wirten, Libratory Law: Unmaking Knowkedge

Moderator: Cabell Gathman