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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from Weird Studies/Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams
  • Quoted a manfesto of Herzog where he sneers at cinema verité, that gave me a small sad since I have fond memories of Ricky Leacock at MIT Media Lab. JFM defended it later on though. Yay. And he does an excellent Herzog impersonation.
from Negroponte
  • Founder of the MIT Media Lab, kind of a sleazebag, we did not get along during my time there.
from About
from Media Science Heroes
  • See Media Science
    • Jun 1st, 2024 impulse to revamp this page into something like a book prospectus for a survey of software visionaries and the history of human-centric computing.
from Ted Nelson
  • Ted versus The Media Lab - YouTube Media Lab
    • His philosophy of software design: look right, feel good, come across clearly (Media Lab was the opposite, in his view). "self-revealing" UIs.
    • Not sure he is fair to the Media Lab but I'd concur with his negative view of Negroponte. Ted was a visionary, Negroponte had no vision whatsoever but was good at coralling people who did and getting them funding from the powers that be.
from Full STEAM Ahead
  • MIT Media Lab , especially, aimed to integrate them. Mixed success, because money rules, and science and technology command more of that.
from OLPC
  • The One Laptop Per Child project that spun out of the Media Lab.
from Narrative Intelligence
  • Narrative intelligence got started as an underground reading group at the MIT Media Lab that some of my fellow grad students and I started. Broadly speaking we were asking two rather different but related questions:
    • How can narrative techniques be used to build better user interfaces and experiences?
    • Can ideas from narrative theory be used to improve our models of cognition and AI?
from Agency at the Media Lab
  • I glommed onto the topic of agency in graduate school at the MIT Media Lab , and wrote a dissertation that explored its relationship to computation. That work, while it garnered some praise, I have thought of mostly as a failure. It opened up some interesting questions, but didn't really provide much in the way of answers. It tried to do too many different things (which might indicate problems with my own agency).
from Generative art/theory
  • Cute paper (first author is at MIT Media Lab) where they tweak the assignment of agency by language choice.
from I Fight Authority
  • In my time I've had some quite monumental fights with authorities – I walked out of middle school to attend an antiwar rally; much later in grad school I was in an epic battle over IP and freedom to publish with the director of the MIT Media Lab (an extremely powerful and high-status person; I was in the right but frankly was a fucking idiot to fight him, it severely derailed my academic career).
from Whole Earth (book)
  • Consider, for example, what Stewart Brand might have written had he not been drawn into the egotistical orbit of MIT’s Media Lab founder and consummate salesman Nicholas Negroponte. What if he had discovered and written about the confluence of art, design, and engineering at another university or art center where the ratio of flashy marketing to deliverable had been lower?
from A Sense of Rebellion
  • podcast by Morozov A Sense of Rebellion. It tells the story of an extremely obscure private research lab in Boston in the 1970s, led by Warren Brodey and his associates. I was very surprised to have never heard of this lab or people before; given how close it was to my own world (in fact some of Brodey's ideas made it into Negroponte's Architecture Machine and from there to the later Media Lab ).

Media Science

30 Oct 2021 - 01 Jan 2025
Open in Logseq
    • I have a PhD in the fake-sounding field of Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab, which is not only a lab, but also its own academic quasi-department. It's never been quite clear to me what the field really is, despite my fancy degree.
    • While at the Media Lab, I and some of my fellow graduate students
      see Narrative Intelligence
      occasionally tried to take seriously the idea that we were founding a field and there should be some sort of intellectual core to it. This didn't really happen back then, and as far as I can tell it hasn't happened in the 25 years since I left.
    • That's not to say there isn't some really excellent and important work done there (as well as some not so great); just that there is no real unifying theme or core ideas. Back then the gamut of research activities ran from digital holography to documentary film; today it includes all that and neurobiology and agriculture (sort of) and public policy. This is all very exciting but what ties it all together, other than coolness?
    • What the Media Lab excelled in back then was pushing digital technology into places where it had yet to invade (such as newspapers – this was pre-web). And more importantly, figuring out ways to get funded by these industries that didn't have one clue about research or digital technology. I imagine it's a lot harder to do that today, given that we are several stages further into the digital transformation of everything.
    • Post image
    • The real strength of the place likes is being interdisciplinary, because that's a much more fruitful zone for innovation than within an established discipline. It's a bolder, more exciting, and more risky way to do research. So not having an intellectual core is actually something of a plus. Why would you want to give the field a rigid definition? (See illegibility) Certainly that was the most attractive feature of the place for me, I had a shit-ton of intellectual freedom there, for better or worse.
    • The lack of a formal definition of Media Science didn't bother me one bit at the time, and now it's only a minor annoyance in that I have to explain it to be people all the time. But it might hint at larger problems of mission in the lab, which seemed to lose its way and as a result got mired in scandal. That was long after I had left, thankfully.