MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

An MIT Communications Forum

Christian Picciolini was 14 when he became a Neo-Nazi skinhead. He denounced eight years later and dedicated himself to helping others disengage from extremist groups. Picciolini has done peace advocacy work for more than a decade and in 2018, he founded the Free Radicals Project, a nonprofit dedicated to transitioning former extremists. He has conducted more than 200 interventions with white supremacists, as well as with ISIS members and other types of violent extremists. Now an internationally-renowned speaker, author, and MSNBC contributor, Picciolini discussed the state of extremism in America and how to combat it alongside Lee-Or Ankori-Karlinsky, senior program officer at Beyond Conflict, a nonprofit research and consulting group that uses the behavioral and neuroscience of social conflict to create peace-building initiatives in dozens of countries around the world. Christina Couch, a science journalist who has written extensively about deradicalization and dehumanization research, moderated.

Speakers:

Christian Picciolini is a peace advocate and the author of White American Youth: My Descent Into America’s Most Violent Hate Movement — and How I Got Out. In 2009, he co-founded Life After Hate, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping communities and organizations implement long-term solutions that counter racism and violent extremism. Christian currently leads the Free Radicals Project, a global network of extremism preventionists who help people disengage from hate movements and other violent ideologies around the world.

Lee-Or Ankori-Karlinsky is the senior program officer for Beyond Conflict, a nonprofit research and consulting group that applies lessons from brain and behavioral sciences to address a range of racial justice and inclusion, conflict resolution and reconciliation, and other challenges.

Moderator: Christina Couch is a science journalist and coordinator for the MIT Communications Forum. Her work explores psychology, technology and the intersections of the two. Her bylines can be found in Nova Next, MIT Technology Review, Fast Company Co.Exist, Science Friday, and Wired Magazine.

Daniel Bacchieri is an award-winning Brazilian journalist, documentary film maker and collaborative web developer/curator, whose visually inspiring StreetMusicMap platform has been widely praised for its curation of street performers from across the globe. Combining a documentarian vision with a trans-cultural appreciation of the public art of vernacular musicians, the StreetMusicMap collaborators are exploring the creative possibilities of collective story-telling through performance. The StreetMusicMap Instagram channel has more than 41,000 followers and 1,300 artists documented on videos in 97 countries, all filmed by more than 700 collaborators.

The Civic Arts Series, which is part of the CMS graduate program Colloquium, features talks by four artists and activists who are making innovative uses of media to reshape the possibilities of art as a source of civic imagination, experience and advocacy. Using a variety of contemporary media technologies–film, web platforms, game engines, drones–the series presenters have opened up new pathways to artistic expression that broaden public awareness around compelling civic issues and aspirations of our time.

CAST Visiting Artist Agnieszka Kurant joins Stefan Helmreich, professor of Anthropology; Caroline Jones, professor of History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art; and Adam Haar Horowitz, master’s student and research assistant in the Fluid Interfaces Group, to discuss the idea of collective intelligence in relation to emerging technology, artistic inquiry, and social and cultural movements.

Kurant will reflect on outsourcing her artworks to human and non-human collective intelligence and the system of profit-sharing she has created, artworks as complex systems or collective tamagotchis emulating life, and the observable evolution of individual authorship, culture, nature, labor and society. Haar Horowitz will touch on the collective in relationship to experience research in the neurosciences and experience production in the arts. Helmreich will discuss metaphors of collective human action derived from physics, computer science, animal worlds, and fluid dynamics, and will reflect on the politics of these framings. Jones will address the curious invocation of “intelligence” in discussions of aggregated agency, with specific reference to the so-named “mobile brain” or “immune brain” of the distributed system (mostly outside the cranium) that learns, remembers, and teaches, negotiating between tolerance and threat in relation to xeno-bacteria.

The panel will be moderated by Nick Montfort, professor of Comparative Media Studies/Writing.

Thomas Allen Harris is a critically acclaimed, interdisciplinary artist who explores conceptions of family, identity, environmentalism, and spirituality in a participatory practice. Graduate of Harvard College with a degree in Biology and the Whitney Independent Study Program, member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and published writer/curator, Harris lectures widely on the use of media as a tool for social change with a keen recognition for its potential to organize social movements and impact the biological body. He currently holds a position at Yale University as a Senior Lecturer in African American and Film & Media Studies, where he is teaching courses titled “Family Narratives/Cultural Shifts” and “Archive Aesthetics and Community Storytelling”. He is also working on a new television show, Family Pictures USA, which takes a radical look at neighborhoods and cities of the United States through the lens of family photographs, collaborative performances, and personal testimony sourced from their communities.

Family Pictures USA uses methodologies Harris and his team developed with Digital Diaspora Family Reunion, LLC (DDFR), a socially engaged transmedia project that has incorporated community organizing, performance, virtual gathering spaces, and storytelling into over 60 unique audio-visual events in over 50 cities. Harris will talk about his trajectory as a media artist that led to DDFR and his documentary film work, including Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, his 2015 film that was developed in tandem with DDFR. Through A Lens Darkly features leading Black cultural figures, scholars, and photographers sharing their archives with Harris in an exploration of the ways photography has been used as a tool of representation and self-representation in history, garnering an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Documentary film, the Fund for Santa Barbara Social Justice Award, and an Africa Movie Academy Award, among others.

In conversation with MIT Professor Vivek Bald, Harris will reveal his process, experiences, and unexpected outcomes working with communities in online and offline shared spaces and places. Immediately following a Q&A, participants will be invited to share images that represent their conceptions of family and engage in a collaborative workshop highlighting the impact of new technologies in community archiving practices.

== Co-hosted with the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology ==

Erik Loyer‘s award-winning work explores new blends of game dynamics, poetic expression and interactive visual storytelling. From his best-selling Strange Rain story-playing iPad/iPhone app, to his visually stunning digital fiction The Lair of the Marrow Monkey (powered by Shockwave software animation), and his interactive explorations of post-Katrina racial politics in Blue Velvet, Loyer’s interactive artistic hybridizations of music, new narratives and algorithmic play have won numerous awards, been exhibited widely, and found their way into permanent museum collections.

The Civic Arts Series, which is part of the CMS graduate program Colloquium, features talks by four artists and activists who are making innovative uses of media to reshape the possibilities of art as a source of civic imagination, experience and advocacy. Using a variety of contemporary media technologies–film, web platforms, game engines, drones–the series presenters have opened up new pathways to artistic expression that broaden public awareness around compelling civic issues and aspirations of our time.

This talk by Kimberly Juanita Brown considers the prominence of graphic photographic images during the decades of apartheid in South Africa. Specifically, she is interested in an archive of indifference that permeates the era and orchestrates the viewer’s relationship to black subjectivity. For the talk she focuses on US news media coverage of apartheid in the last year of its existence, and the images that anchored viewers’ interpretation of the event.

Kimberly Juanita Brown is Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Assistant Professor for 2017-2018, hosted by MIT Literature and MIT Women’s & Gender Studies. She is an Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies at Mount Holyoke College and author of The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary.

Before fake news dominated headlines, Kevin Young was tracking down its roots.

The author of 13 books of poetry and prose, poetry editor for The New Yorker and director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Young has spent the past six years tracing the history of news-worthy fraudulence all the way back to the 18th century. Young’s latest book Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News chronicles the racially prejudiced path that brought fake news to where it is to today. Longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award, Bunk dives into hoaxes big and small that permeate American history and the cultural attitudes that drive them. Young joins Carole Bell, an assistant professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University whose research explores the connections between media and politics, for a broad-ranging discussion on the current state and political consequences of fake news. A book signing will follow.

Speakers:

Kevin Young is poetry editor for The New Yorker, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, and the author of 13 books of poetry and prose including The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and Jelly Roll: A Blues, which was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Carole Bell is an assistant professor of Communication Studies and affiliated faculty in Political Science at Northeastern University. Bell’s teaching and research focuses on the intersections of media, politics, public opinion and public policy, with a particular focus on issues of social identity. Her first book, The Politics of Interracial Romance in American Film, is forthcoming from Routledge.

This event is sponsored by Radius at MIT. All Communications Forum events are free and open to the general public.

Closed-circuit television (CCTV) has become synonymous with surveillance society and the widespread use of media technologies for contemporary regimes of power and control. Considered from the perspective of television’s long history, however, closed-circuit systems are multifaceted, and include, but are not limited to sorting and surveillance. During the media’s experimental phase in the 1920s and 1930s, closed-circuit systems were an essential feature of its public display, shaping its identity as a new technology for instantaneous communication. With the emergence of activist video practices in the 1970s, closed-circuit TV became a core feature for alternative experiments such as the Videofreex’ Lanesville TV, where it offered access to community-based media making. This use of CCTV as a tool for participatory media took place simultaneously with the rise of CCTV as a surveillance technology, which had been promoted under the label of “industrial television” already from the early 1950s on. Based on war-driven technological developments, industrial TV implemented televisual monitoring in industrial, educational, and military spheres decades before the global spread of surveillance cameras in public space.

This talk by Anne-Katrin Weber explores the politics of CCTV as they unfold in different institutional and ideological settings. Examining television’s history beyond broadcasting and programs, it focuses on television’s multiple applications and meanings in public space – from the early presentation of television at World’s Fairs to community-based initiatives – and thus highlights the adaptability of closed-circuit technologies, which accommodate to, and underpin variable contexts of media participation as well as of surveillance and control.

Anne-Katrin Weber is a postdoctoral fellow supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation and is a visiting scholar at MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing. Her research examines the history of television outside broadcasting institutions. Currently preparing her first monograph titled Television on Display: Visual Culture and Technopolitics in Europe and the USA, 1928-1939, she is the editor of La télévision du téléphonoscope à Youtube: pour une archéologie de l’audiovision (with Mireille Berton, Antipodes, 2009) and an issue of View: Journal of European Television History and Culture (“Archaeologies of Tele-Visions and –Realities,” with Andreas Fickers, 2015).

Stuart Stevens believes Republicans are in a “GOP apocalypse,” and he’s urging Republicans to resist. Stevens is a Republican political consultant who’s worked on presidential campaigns for Bob Dole and George W. Bush, served as the lead strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, and helped elect more governors and US Senators than any other GOP consultant working today. He’s also an outspoken critic of Donald Trump, starting from the earliest days of Trump’s candidacy. Jennifer Nassour, founder of Conservative Women for a Better Future, and Dr. Daniel Barkhuff, president of Veterans for Responsible Leadership, a group promoting “integrity, sobriety, and civility” in government, joined Stevens to discuss the future of the GOP, how Donald Trump has influenced the American political system, and predictions for the 2018 midterm and the 2020 presidential elections.

As attention spans shrink and the representation of factual information is under scrutiny by the public, news organizations need clear, engaging storytelling that reaches readers where they are. In this talk, Emily Rueb, a reporter for The New York Times, shares insights gained in bursting boundaries of traditional storytelling for The New York Times’s Metro desk. Weaving video, audio, illustrations and text across multiple platforms, she chronicled aspects of New York’s complex but rarely seen infrastructure, like the power grid and the water system, and also its overlooked neighbors, like red-tailed hawks. Her talk also looks at what’s next for an organization that cherished its customs but has come to realize that its most important legacy values cannot survive without steady, rapid integration of new techniques.

Ms. Rueb writes and produces New York 101, a multimedia column explaining infrastructure. At the Times, she pioneered new approaches to storytelling for the breaking news blog, City Room, where she covered Hurricane Sandy and major elections, and created a niche writing about avian life. She also edited Metropolitan Diary. Her New York 101 series examined the power grid, road construction, organics recycling and the water system. Winner of an Emmy and a Knight-Batten Award for Innovation in Journalism, Rueb also has contributed to The Financial Times, BBC Scotland, Time Out Paris and Cleveland Magazine.