In a 1971 interview with Leslie Katz, Walker Evans was reluctant to talk about photographers and photographs that influenced him. Paul Strand’s 1916 image of the blind peddler was the one photograph he cited:
I remember coming across Paul Strand's Blind Woman when I was very young, and that really bowled me over. I'd already been in that and wanted to do that. It's a very powerful picture. I saw it in the New York Public Library file of
The dark side of user-generated content: Lara Jade, a 17-year-old Flickr photographer, discovered that a vampish self-portrait she made at age 14 had been ripped off for the cover art of a porn DVD. She tells the story in a Flickr post and asks for help. She writes:
Please could someone help me with this? It feels like I'm pulling at loose strings and that I have no power over people like this. I'm still only 17 and trying to make my way in photography. I feel like I cannot display this picture anymore in case someone knows it from the movie.. or even the fact that someone THINKS im in the movie and it gives me a bad name..
A Thomas Hawk post led me to this photographer, her image, her story… all encapsulated in one Flickr blog post. Maybe the most significant thing I’ve learned in photo wandering over the past few days is the fact that Flickr is a blog aggregator. When I started looking at Flickr last year, I thought of it as an assemblage of photo albums with tags. It didn’t occur to me that someone’s photo stream actually streamed through a feed. I saw comments under images, but only minimal text from the photographer. Stumbling into Rebekka’s photo stream showed me that photographers might include extended text, not just captions. I finally got it! Flickr is a photo blog. Now I’m on the lookout for photo blogs that go beyond the scrapbook mode, blogs that have some ambition about discussing photography and image-making.
The launch vehicle in Hawk’s post was this quote about photo ethics: “I hope that whoever is responsible for the theft of this image pays dearly for what they have done. This is worse than most image theft and is a violation of Lara's human spirit.”
Image theft. A bane to photographers, also to the subjects of photos who are not involved in the social contract implicit in the photograph. In Lara Jade’s case, photographer and subject are one and the same. Consider how “violation of the human spirit” also applies to the blind woman in Paul Strand’s famous 1916 photograph.
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
Trebor Scholz is assistant professor and researcher in the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at
Moderator:
Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan
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.
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?
Lewis Hyde is the Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at
Thomas Pettitt is an associate professor at the
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
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.
When I searched for “blind photographer” I got dozens of results for bird blinds a photographer might buy and use to hide in. Therein lies a story, but I may not get back to it today. When I tried again with “photographer who is blind,” the first result was Henry Butler, the
“I was always curious as to why sighted people looked at images and got so focused and intrigued by and enamored with images on paper or on canvas,” Henry says. “So I decided I needed more than just an intellectual explanation for what I was either touching or realizing through somebody else’s eyes. I decided maybe I’ll just become a participant in capturing visual images.”
I went looking for an image created by a blind photographer to illustrate that point, precisely, in my M.I.T. talk. The talk is titled “Re-Imagining Accessibility in Participatory Culture.” The meaning of accessibility goes deeper than minimum standards of access to media allowing passive consumption. Accessibility’s deeper meaning is engagement in creating and transforming media. Henry was curious about the power of visual images, and he knew he wouldn’t understand that power until he began to make visual images for himself. He wanted to participate.
I’ve had a similar experience this month as I’ve constructed the PowerPoint presentations that support the Re-Imagining Accessibility talks. PowerPoint is a highly ritualized use of visual rhetoric supporting, sometimes displacing, oral discourse. PowerPoint always alienated me in meetings and seminars when my role was limited to passive visual consumption. I didn’t begin to make peace with PowerPoint until I figured out how to work with it using my own accessible technology. Now I’m re-imagining its creative possibilities for me. And I’m thinking about how a blind rhettor can re-claim a little gaze in visual rhetoric.
Marlene Manoff, Volatility, Instability, Ambiguity: The Evolving Digital Record
Mark Willis, Reimagining Accessibility in Participatory Culture
Thomas Hart
This image is part of a large wall mural called Arts in the City, which itself is one of an assemblage of large murals called Arts of Life in America. The murals were painted in 1932 in a room of the Whitney Museum of American Art in its former
I stumbled upon this image in a Google search for images from the Harlem Renaissance. Most of what I found were grainy, B/W photos, so
Finding this image and putting it into my first PowerPoint presentation was the moment I discovered that I could play in PPt. Until then, PPt had been a barrier to overcome, not a tool for my own creative discovery.
This is the first image of my Gallery Stroll series that I have seen only digitally, not physically. Now I’ve added the New Britain Museum of Art to my wanderlust list so I can stand in a room surrounded by the
David This photograph was part of a David Seymour retrospective exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art In 2006.
The Collyer Brothers were eccentric hermits who lived and died in their family’s brownstone townhouse on The first time I heard the Collyer Brothers story, it’s telling focused on the sensational details of their demise. I figured they were bums. Maybe, maybe not. Their family traced its origin to the Mayflower. Father was a doctor, Mother a socialite. The brothers had Ivy League educations. Homer Collyer trained as an engineer but aspired to be a concert pianist. He affected long, flowing hair in the Franz Liszt tradition. His younger brother Langley trained as an admiralty lawyer but aspired to be an inventor. He tinkered with junk salvaged in the streets. I use the words “trained” and “aspired” because it’s not clear from the historical record whether either of them ever had a job.
After graduating from nearby
At this point, you might say the Collyer Brothers were a bit odd, but not necessarily pathological. Father’s stuff, Mother’s stuff, the kids stuff, adult kids who won’t move out. Many of us can relate to that on one level or another. Acquisitiveness, after all, is as American as apple pie. In the Collyers’ day, Thorstein Veblen called it conspicuous consumption. That’s what the Leisure Class was supposed to do. In our day, we call it consumer confidence, and it’s everyone’s duty. Jobs and economic growth depend on it.
Something happened in the 1920s. As
Something else happened. In 1933, Homer Collyer went blind. Rheumatism had already limited his mobility.
Five years later, on March 21, 1947, a neighbor called the police. It smelled like somebody died next door. The NYPD knew all about Langley Collyer’s eccentricity and truculence. When they didn’t get an answer at
Later on the first day, a policeman broke through a second-story window and hacked through another wall of junk. He found Homer slumped in a rocking chair, wearing a tattered bath robe, emaciated, dead from starvation. The coroner determined that Homer had been dead no more than ten hours.
Langley Collyer (1885-1947) was a notorious recluse who lived with his brother Homer in a dilapidated townhouse in 
More than 100 tons of debris were removed from
Collyer Mansion became a term used by firefighters to designate junk-filled buildings that should be condemned as fire hazards. Collyer Brothers Syndrome, or disposophobia, names a fear of throwing anything away. It is also called compulsive hoarding, which is related to obsessive compulsive disorder.
Let this photograph of the interior of the Collyer Brothers townhouse stand as a metaphor for the attention economy. What is scarce here? Not information, but the attention to do something with it. Many of us feel overwhelmed by the avalanche of information that pours through our lives everyday. Does your email inbox ever seem like this?
I’ve added this statement to the Re-Imagining Accessibility home page:
Re-Imagining Accessibility In An Attention Economy
Ohio State University – April 3
Multiple Perspectives on Access, Inclusion, and Disability 2007 Conference
Re-Imagining Accessibility With The Rise Of The Creative Class
Wright State University – April 13
Quest for Community 2007 Conference
Re-Imagining Accessibility In Participatory Culture
Massachusetts Institute of Technology – April 28
Media in Transition 5 Conference
See the home page. Follow the blog thread.
