News/Research

HTNM 2018-2019 In Review

09 Jul, 2019

HTNM 2018-2019 In Review

Join us as we loook back on the incredible History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series of 2018-2019! Check out the highlights below!

2018

09/12 Molly Steenson

Architectural Intelligence

In partnership with the Department of Architecture

Molly Wright Steenson is a designer, author, professor, and international speaker whose work focuses on the intersection of design, architecture, and artificial intelligence. She is Senior Associate Dean for Research for the College of Fine Arts, the K&L Gates Associate Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies, and an associate professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. Steenson is the author of Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT Press, 2017), which tells the radical history of AI’s impact on design and architecture, and the forthcoming book Bauhaus Futures (MIT Press, expected 2019), co-edited with Laura Forlano & Mike Ananny. A web pioneer since 1994, she’s worked at groundbreaking design studios, consultancies, and Fortune 500 companies.

She has worked with companies including Reuters, Scient, Netscape, and Razorfish. She cofounded Maxi, an award-winning women’s webzine, in the 90s. As a design researcher, she examines the effect of personal technology on its users, including projects in India and China for Microsoft Research and ReD Associates/Intel Research.

Tara Shi reviewed the program:

“Technology is the answer. But what is the question?”

As a closing note, Molly Steenson reasks Cedric Price’s original provocation from 1966 to think about our present-- a moment fueled by wild growth in digital technologies, like social media and machine intelligence, and an increasingly complex landscape of ethical paradigms.

Read Tara's full recap here!

Watch the video below!

10/04 Timothy Stott

Learning To Interact: Cybernetics and Play

Play was, and remains, a social technology for the cybernetic age. Advocated by many as a humanist corrective to a technocratic and automated post-war society, play also expanded cybernetic ideas of interaction, feedback, and systems modelling into the social domain. From the late nineteen-fifties on, especially, cybernetics and play converged through games, toys, and interactive exhibitions.

This talk will consider the shared history of play and cybernetics, where a generation of users were trained to the behavioural and cognitive repertoires required by interactive technologies, and which correlated modes of sociability, learning and governance that have become norms in the ongoing ‘ludification’ of culture.

Timothy Stott is a historian of contemporary art and design, with a focus on play and games, systems theory and ecology, and the decorative and cognitive arts. He is Lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture at the Dublin School of Creative Arts, Dublin Institute of Technology. His monograph Play and Participation in Contemporary Arts Practices was published in 2015. In 2016, he was Visiting Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds. His talk at BCNM draws on material from his current book project, A Constructive Intelligence: Art, Design and Play After 1945. With Johanna Gosse (University of Idaho), he is also co-editing Expanding Systems Aesthetics: Art, Systems, and Politics since the 1960s. Further research can be found at http://dit.academia.edu/TimStott

Tara Shi reviewed the program:

In his research and work, Stott hopes to contribute to the history of the ludification of culture. For him, the late 1960’s was a especially critical moment for a generation of players trained to relate to new medias and interactive technologies thru play. While the present is saturated by personal and infrastructural machines, augmented and virtual spaces, perhaps with a deeper understanding of our ludic culture we might find new ways of relating to the playful cat batting at the ball.

Read Tara's full recap here!

Watch the video below!

2019

03/20 Saifya Noble

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism

Co-sponsored by the CITRIS Policy Lab

In her recent best-selling book Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem. Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color- and contributes to our understanding of how racism is created, maintained, and disseminated in the 21st century.

In 2019, Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble will join the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford as a Senior Research Fellow/Associate Professor. She is currently visiting at the University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg School of Communication, and is on the faculty of the Department of Information Studies in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and the Department of African American Studies at UCLA. Previously, she was in Media and Cinema Studies and the Institute for Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

She is the author of a best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines, entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press) and was the recipient of a Hellman Fellowship and the UCLA Early Career Award. She is regularly quoted for her expertise by national and international press on issues of algorithmic discrimination and technology bias, including The Guardian, the BBC, CNN International, USA Today, Wired, Time, and the New York Times, to name a few.

Tara Shi reviewed the program:

For Noble, the United States has less of a reckoning and acknowledgment of the harmful outcomes of hate content and propaganda online than other countries like France or Germany for instance. At large, she asserts that “social inequity will not be solved by an app,” pushing instead for regulation in algorithmic technologies, and a call back on some projects with a closer look at what they mean.

Read Tara's full recap here!

Watch the video below!

04/03 Stefanos Geroulanos

The Human Computer in the Stone Age: Technology, Prehistory, and the Redefinition of the Human after World War II

After World War II, new concepts and metaphors of technology helped transform the understanding of human history all the way back to the australopithecines. Using concepts from cybernetics and information theory as much as from ethnology and osteology, scientists and philosophers reorganized the fossil record using a truly global array of fossils, and in the process fundamentally re-conceptualized deep time, nature, and the assemblage that is humanity itself. This paper examines three ways in which technological prehistory, that most distant, speculative, and often just weird field, came to reorganize the ways European and American thinkers and a lay public thought about themselves, their origins, and their future.

Stefanos Geroulanos is Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of Transparency in Postwar France (2017), co-author of The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War (2018), and co-editor of The Scaffolding of Sovereignty (2017). He is also a Co-Executive Editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas.

Tara Shi reviewed the program:

For Geroulanos, prehistory is a “decidedly modern history.” Following the technique tradition, the body is no longer confined as an “organism versus environment problem,” but rather an assemblage that is “built and rebuilt constantly.” Everything is a tool—”stones, pelvises or machines”—and the meaning of tools, in the wake of these traditions, continue to be shaped by politically diverse responses from Marshall McLuhan, Gregory Bateson, Donna Haraway, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, to Jane Goodall. Ending on a darker note, Geroulanos suggests that the nature, or violence argument may have been forgotten: “In radically expanding these tools, these thinkers have played out the dreams and anguish of technology. Now that technology has escaped manual human industry, it is capable of dissecting the human at the same time that it powers ecological catastrophe.”

Read Tara's full recap here!

Watch the video below!