https://mlml.io/ Recent projects on metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel en-US Mon, 31 Jan 2028 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/glacial-sensibilities/ Mon, 31 Jan 2028 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/glacial-sensibilities/ project This SNF postdoc project (2026-2028) is an anthropology of media and design that examines how human environmental consciousness is impacted by the affective dimensions of sensing technologies that transform our understanding and representation of the cryosphere, focusing on their scientific, cultural, and political dimensions, hosted at the ICDP HGK Basel FHNW. This research is comparative and spans strategic cryosphere sites in the Swiss Alps, Central Asia, and Antarctica. Through multimodal ethnographic fieldwork, the project explores narratives and affective sensibilities embedded in the modelling and simulation of glacial sites. https://mlml.io/p/spatial-affairs/ Thu, 31 Dec 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/spatial-affairs/ project The project is a two-year, joint program between the cultural institutions House of Electronic Arts (HEK) in Basel, Switzerland, Museum of Art & Photography in Bangalore, India, and Tabakalera International Center for Contemporary Culture in San Sebastián, Spain, in collaboration with the technological partners iart, studio for media architectures, and TEKNIKER in Eibar in the Basque Country in Spain, as well as research partner metaLAB (at) Basel, Switzerland. The SPATIAL AFFAIRS. https://mlml.io/p/data-twist/ Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/data-twist/ project The Data Twist is a participatory art project that kinesthetically plays with survey data to promote public discourse−to be fully developed in workshops, deployed as a performative installation, and supported by a choreographic interface. The project’s dance games are designed to balance humor and discomfort in order to facilitate nonverbal debate in public settings. The structural similarities between the survey format of The Data Twist and the U.S. Census, elections, and polls presents the conditions for participants to civically exercise parrhesia or “fearless speech,” but in the nonverbal register of dance. https://mlml.io/p/sustainable/ Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/sustainable/ project ¿SUSTAINABLE? A Spring 2026 Online Symposium Series Launching in the Spring 2026 semester, **¿SUSTAINABLE? ** is a five-part online symposium series that critically interrogates the notion of sustainability across landscape architecture, design, urban planning, and environmental studies. Structured as a sequence of focused conversations, the series asks whether, how, and for whom current practices can truly be called “sustainable,” and what kinds of frameworks are needed to move beyond rhetorical claims toward more rigorous, accountable approaches. https://mlml.io/e/postscriptumobservatory/ Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100 https://mlml.io/e/postscriptumobservatory/ workshop The Postscript Observatory is a temporary sound installation, publishing experiment, and listening protocol developed by continent. as a parallel intervention within Echoes of Authority (Collegium Helveticum, Zurich, March 24–27, 2026). Situated in the Collegium’s small historic observatory tower—a circular domed space originally designed for astronomical attention—the project reimagines the observatory as an acoustic instrument. Rather than looking outward toward celestial bodies, The Postscriptum Observatory listens inward and sideways: to the margins, hesitations, and after-effects of speech. https://mlml.io/p/humane-infrastructures/ Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/humane-infrastructures/ project Humane Infrastructures is a deep journey into humanistic and humane knowledge and how it can be engaged to help us collaboratively respond in ethical and sustainable ways to our current global challenges. Patrik Svensson takes the reader through a series of examples, case studies, experiments, and lively dialogues to reconsider infrastructure. He brings people, ideas, and perspectives in through a set of documents and documented experiences, some of which draw from the author’s practice in Umeå, Stockholm, New York City, and Los Angeles. https://mlml.io/e/heavy-is-the-root-of-light/ Thu, 29 Jan 2026 17:30:00 +0100 https://mlml.io/e/heavy-is-the-root-of-light/ talk Artist talk: 5:30 pm to 6:30 pm CET | 11:30 to 12:30 am EST Free admission to the exhibition: 5:00 pm CET The meeting-link for online participation For attendance at PalaisPopulaire, please register here. Charmaine Poh is going to introduce the philosophical underpinnings of the solo exhibition, “Make a travel deep of your inside, and don’t forget me to take.” “Heavy is the root of light” is a line from the Daoist text, the Dao De Jing, and is quite symbolic of the seemingly contradicting imagery that the text is centred on. https://mlml.io/e/ai-design-for-ocean-solutions-2026/ Mon, 12 Jan 2026 13:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/ai-design-for-ocean-solutions-2026/ event Climate change and human industrialization are having an accelerating negative impact on the ocean, the source of life and water on earth, which covers 71% of the planet. This hands-on course will bring generative AI tools and design interventions to one of our biggest climate challenges today: the ocean. Through a series of short lectures and design-thinking activities, we will use generative AI tools to engage creatively with select topics in marine and climate science. https://mlml.io/e/reflections-on-decolonial-data/ Thu, 08 Jan 2026 18:00:00 +0100 https://mlml.io/e/reflections-on-decolonial-data/ talk This is a hybrid event taking place at the Institute for Theater Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. Online participation is welcome via the link of this event page. For attendance in Berlin, please register by mailing to regina.ziegler@@fu-berlin.de Location: Hörsaal at the Institute for Theater Studies Freie Universität Berlin Grunewaldstraße 35 12165 Berlin In this artist talk, Nora Al-Badri will explore colonial museum collections and narratives by examining their data through an anti-colonial lens. https://mlml.io/e/designassignments/ Sun, 21 Dec 2025 12:00:00 +0100 https://mlml.io/e/designassignments/ event We invite you – educators, practitioners, scholars, researchers, and peers from a variety of fields in design (such as Graphic Design, Interaction Design, Transformation Design, Social Design, Game Design, Fashion Design, Scenographic Design, Product and Industrial Design, Architecture, Interior Architecture, Landscape Architecture) to share a design assignment you consider poetic, playful, thought-provoking, joyful, boundary-pushing, or else, that prompts, probes, prototypes, invites, immerses, imagines collaborative future worlds. We are interested in applied and engaged approaches to teaching design. https://mlml.io/e/algorithmic-altruism/ Tue, 02 Dec 2025 18:00:00 +0100 https://mlml.io/e/algorithmic-altruism/ talk Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is a multidisciplinary artist examining our fraught relationships with nature and technology. She experiments with simulation, representation, and the nonhuman perspective to question our ongoing societal fixation on innovation over preservation. Based at Somerset House Studios in London, her work has been exhibited at leading institutions including MoMA in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 2023, she won the S+T+ARTS Grand Prize for Artistic Exploration for her experimental interspecies artwork Pollinator Pathmaker. https://mlml.io/p/data-storytelling-a-century-of-olympic-history/ Sun, 30 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/data-storytelling-a-century-of-olympic-history/ project Curated by metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin, & Basel under the direction of Jeffrey Schnapp, the installation is part of Performance—the second of three exhibitions leading up to the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, hosted at the Gallerie di Piedicastello in Trento. Supported by the Fondazione Museo Storico del Trentino in collaboration with the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Performance reflects on a century of Olympic evolution through a visual and data-driven lens. https://mlml.io/p/panopticum-news/ Sun, 30 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/panopticum-news/ project In contrast to its past made of ink and paper, digital news is a volatile, lightweight, and ambiguous item. News has absorbed the characteristics and affordances of digital media. These affordances are remodeling the social and cultural role of news and journalism at large. For instance, news articles and snippets are published across platforms, copied, edited, and repurposed. Online news is shape-shifting. It is impossible to talk about the “news flow”, it is more appropriate to talk about “flows” – plural. https://mlml.io/e/technology-democracy-and-the-rule-of-law/ Mon, 10 Nov 2025 16:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/technology-democracy-and-the-rule-of-law/ talk How are technologies being misused to undermine democratic processes? Where might we have leverage to steer things back on course? What can we expect to see over the next few years, and what can we do about it? Please join us for a fireside chat about how technology and democracy both support and undermine each other. Moderated by Sarah Newman. Event Details Date & Time: Monday, November 10, 2025 @ 4:00–5:00 PM Location: Berkman Klein Center, 1557 Massachusetts Avenue, 5th Floor In-person is open to Harvard ID holders. https://mlml.io/p/relating/ Fri, 10 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/relating/ project Technologies of Relating Technologies of Relating is a participatory workshop series that explores embodied movement as a fundamental technology for enhancing human connection and interaction. This series invites participants to delve into the art and science of movement, understanding how our bodies communicate, connect, and create relationships in both analogue and digital spaces. The series is presented by Partnering Lab and metaLab (at) Harvard, in partnership with the Office for the Arts at Harvard (OFA) Dance Program. https://mlml.io/e/humanities-futures/ Thu, 09 Oct 2025 16:30:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/humanities-futures/ talk A conversation about the future of the Humanities between the directors of metaLAB Harvard, Berlin, and Basel – in dialogue with Humanities Dean Sean Kelly, Harvard Professor Peter Bol, Columbia Professor Dennis Tenen. Schedule 4:30-6 pm ET: Houghton Library (Newman & Edison Room) Roundtable Discussion 6:30-8 pm ET: Reception at metaLAB (42 Kirkland St) Speakers Jeffrey Schnapp, Harvard Sean Kelly, Harvard Peter Bol & Kwok-Leong Tang, Harvard Dennis Tenen, Columbia Dario Rodighiero, University of Groningen Annette Jael Lehmann, Freie Universität Berlin Aylin Tschoepe, Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW Opening remarks by Tom Hyry (Director of Houghton Library) RSVP here https://mlml.io/e/metabolic-commons/ Thu, 02 Oct 2025 12:00:00 +0200 https://mlml.io/e/metabolic-commons/ talk A Metabolic Commons: Many Hands Make Light Work is a collaborative media work by WorkOverTime (Louise Carver & Jamie Allen), presented at the 7th Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2 October – 8 December 2025) within the Lighter exhibition curated by Territorial Agency at MAC/CCB. The single-channel video combines layered soundscapes, poetic narration, and situated field recordings to explore how bodies, infrastructures, labour, and love shape our shared metabolisms. Filmed and researched across copper mines in Chile, sugar ports in the UK, fishing villages in Malta, and speculative blockchain forests of the future, the project creates an ethnographic fiction reflecting on reciprocity, ecological limits, and planetary commons. https://mlml.io/e/narrative-intelligence/ Tue, 23 Sep 2025 16:30:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/narrative-intelligence/ talk Description In this talk, Dennis Yi Tenen will draw on his recent book Literary Theory for Robots (2024) to offer a broad view of the shared pasts of literature and computer science, ranging from medieval Arabic philosophy to Hollywood fiction factories, to missile defense systems trained on Russian folktales. Then, he will present new work that puts large language models into conversation with one another—literally—to study their techniques of persuasion. https://mlml.io/p/audiovisual-aesthetics-in-formation/ Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/audiovisual-aesthetics-in-formation/ project How did the aesthetics of television come to define the way we perceive audiovisual media today? Audiovisual Aesthetics in Formation examines the history of crossmodal alignment, the interplay between sound and image, across Swedish and American television between 1970 and 1989. Combining computational methods such as variational autoencoders and signal analysis with historical interpretation, the project uncovers how stylistic conventions took shape within contrasting broadcasting environments and how these conventions continue to inform the rhythms of contemporary media culture. https://mlml.io/e/public-ai-summit/ Wed, 13 Aug 2025 12:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/public-ai-summit/ event Are you intrigued by AI but overwhelmed by the hype, terminology, and rapid changes surrounding it? Do you wonder how this powerful technology will affect your life, or how you can have a say in its future? The Public AI Summit is an opportunity to learn, explore, and talk about AI with community members! Co-hosted by the Data Nutrition Project and metaLAB’s AI Pedagogy Project, the summit’s goal is to equip everyone, whether you’re a curious beginner or a frequent user, to better understand and participate in the direction of AI. https://mlml.io/p/wayzgoose/ Thu, 31 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/wayzgoose/ project The term “Wayzgoose” refers to a long-standing tradition in the printing and publishing world, dating back to the 16th century. Historically, the Wayzgoose was an annual event organized by master printers to mark the end of the summer and the beginning of the longer working hours of winter and working by candlelight. It was a time when printers and their apprentices would come together to celebrate their craft and hard work, with feasts and outings. https://mlml.io/e/openhaus-july-2025/ Thu, 17 Jul 2025 19:00:00 +0200 https://mlml.io/e/openhaus-july-2025/ opening On July 17, the residents and projects situated at ZK/U Berlin – Center for Art and Urbanistics – will open the doors of their studios for OPENHAUS. OPENHAUS invites you to get to know the work of the artists who currently live and work at ZK/U. Take the opportunity to talk to artists and researchers on site, find out about ongoing projects at ZK/U and take a look at methods and processes that otherwise often take place behind closed doors. https://mlml.io/e/sunkcosts/ Sat, 05 Jul 2025 12:00:00 +0200 https://mlml.io/e/sunkcosts/ opening From July 5–9, 2025, the interactive sound installation Sunk Costs: The Saga of the Felicity Ace will be presented at the Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) conference in Funchal, Madeira. The project explores the 2022 shipwreck of a luxury car carrier as a speculative site of logistical failure, ecological transformation, and financial abstraction. Using spatialised audio, sculptural debris, and responsive headphones, the piece immerses visitors in a fragmented evidence room of submerged value, capitalist excess, and material afterlives. https://mlml.io/p/showcases/ Tue, 01 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/showcases/ project Showcases is a data-driven investigation that visualizes police reports of politically motivated crimes to draw attention to a mounting normalization of xenophobic, trans- and homophobic violence and right-extremism in Germany. It roots in disturbing records of incidents such as: swastikas (Hakenkreuz) appearing on walls of mosques, synagogues and schools; people tearing off the Hidschāb from a 14-year-old and spitting in her hair; cashiers confronted with drunk customers that perform the Hitler salute. https://mlml.io/e/event-2/ Mon, 16 Jun 2025 17:30:00 +0200 https://mlml.io/e/event-2/ workshop If it is true that the world population is ageing and living longer, it is equally true that there is no single “typical” aging person. People’s experiences, needs, and the social and physical environments in which they live and grow are diverse. As a consequence, designing for the aging population becomes challenging if the experience is not collectively defined and understood. Rewiring the Post-Reproductive Sensorium is a practice based research intervention on aging through collective sense-making run by OBOT (Our Bodies Our Tech) collective, a distributed network and a nomadic wet-lab working on ways to lower the barriers to research, production and scientific knowledge through new forms to access tools, protocols and data by promoting co-research practices. https://mlml.io/e/data-art-symposium/ Wed, 11 Jun 2025 12:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/data-art-symposium/ event Bringing together artists, curators, scientists, designers, and technologists, this symposium examines the material, political, and poetic dimensions of data in contemporary art and curatorial strategies. Hosted by BarabásiLab and metaLAB, Data | Art is a space for exchange and reflection on the ways in which data is collected, interpreted, and mobilized - shaping not only images and narratives, but also institutions, disciplines, and lived realities. At a time when data permeates every aspect of life—from structuring knowledge to informing AI—Data | Art asks: How does data not only represent reality, but also produce it? https://mlml.io/e/digitalhealthcare/ Wed, 04 Jun 2025 14:00:00 +0200 https://mlml.io/e/digitalhealthcare/ talk Bringing together experts in the field of design research working at the intersection of participatory practices, data ethics, and healthcare, the discussion invites all interested participants to join the dialogue, ask questions, and actively engage with the presenters. The following experts will contribute by presenting their work, before opening the dialogue: Arthi Manohar, Senior Lecturer and Director for the BSC Product Design in Brunel Design School; Aylin Tschoepe, Professor of Design Anthropology, Head of Research ICDP Basel Academy of Art and Design, Head of metaLAB (at) at Basel; Laura Ferrarello, Lecturer at the EPFL in Lausanne; Teresa Almeida, Assistant Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon and Researcher at ITI/LARSyS; Paulina Yurman, Research Fellow and Lecturer at the University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins. https://mlml.io/p/be-longings/ Sun, 01 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/be-longings/ project This project assembles practical and imaginative approaches in speculative spatial design, data visualisation, graphic experimentation, and—at its heart—experimental publishing. It gathers a diverse range of voices, including students, researchers, designers, and practitioners in interior architecture, each contributing from their own unique lived experiences and needs. The result is a collection of playful, poetic, and practice-based counter-strategies—tools for shaping micro-habitats, retooling economies of space, and imagining zones of be.longing within the constraints of small-unit housing. https://mlml.io/e/wayzgoose/ Thu, 29 May 2025 12:00:00 +0200 https://mlml.io/e/wayzgoose/ workshop On May 29–30, 2025, editors, publishers, artists, and researchers will gather in Berlin for a Wayzgoose—a historical tradition of printers and bookmakers, reimagined for experimental and collective publishing. Hosted by Temporal Communities, continent. and partners, this event explores editorial work as a transformative, care-driven practice. Too often, publishing is shaped by extractive economies, invisible labour, and competitive frameworks. This Wayzgoose asks: What if editing focused on expansion, support, and the unexpected rather than refinement and correction? https://mlml.io/e/poetic-futures/ Wed, 28 May 2025 18:00:00 +0200 https://mlml.io/e/poetic-futures/ talk In this interactive talk, Petja Ivanova, artist and researcher from the Studio for Poetic Futures & Speculative Ecologies, explores “soul loss” as a condition of imperial modernity — a psychic fracture shaped by exile, economic precarity, normalized machine-ic abuse, and the inherited wounds of dis-belonging. Weaving personal narrative with theoretical inquiry, the talk draws from decolonial philosophy, feminist technoscience, somatic poetics, and digital media practice to ask: How does empire dismember love, turning care into labor, longing into shame, connection into data? https://mlml.io/e/algorithmic-ecologies/ Mon, 26 May 2025 10:00:00 +0200 https://mlml.io/e/algorithmic-ecologies/ workshop Bringing together students from the Freie Universität, the Technische Universität and the University of Arts in Berlin, as well as the ZK/U community and local citizens, the event aims to collaboratively co-design rainwater installations that will be showcased on the platform of the former cargo station in Moabit. By incorporating sensors, data translations and visualisations, and interactive experiences, participants will explore the potential of open source soft- and hardware as critical design tools for shaping urban spaces. https://mlml.io/e/openhaus-may-2025/ Thu, 22 May 2025 19:00:00 +0200 https://mlml.io/e/openhaus-may-2025/ opening On May 22, the residents and projects situated at ZK/U Berlin – Center for Art and Urbanistics – will open the doors of their studios for OPENHAUS. OPENHAUS invites you to get to know the work of the artists who currently live and work at ZK/U. Take the opportunity to talk to artists and researchers on site, find out about ongoing projects at ZK/U and take a look at methods and processes that otherwise often take place behind closed doors. https://mlml.io/e/echoessanctuarysound/ Sat, 05 Apr 2025 12:00:00 +0200 https://mlml.io/e/echoessanctuarysound/ workshop Opening in April 2025 at Ocean Space in Venice, Echoes of the Sanctuary is a research-led exhibition exploring the role of sound and listening in ocean conservation efforts. With a focus on Jamaica’s East Portland Fish Sanctuary, the project brings together artistic research, sound practice, and ecological science to examine the ways in which sound shapes our relationships with marine environments. The exhibition will include a multi-channel sound installation, workshops, and public programming throughout Spring and Summer 2025, inviting local communities, researchers, and students to engage with critical questions around environmental stewardship, sound ethnography, and conservation policy. https://mlml.io/p/algorithmic-ecologies/ Sun, 02 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/algorithmic-ecologies/ project Environmental events such as increased rainfall and heat waves are becoming pressing issues for both human and nonhuman residents – globally, and in Berlin. In response, the two-day hack at the ZK/U Berlin - Center for Art and Urbanistics prototyped artistic installations that deepen an understanding of rainwater and rainfall patterns, and their impacts on urban life. From the droplet on the roof, through the rainwater downpipe, into the barrel, and from there into the garden – from abundance to absence: Three site-specific interventions were explored to help to build ecological literacy among participants and the wider public, proposing possible prototypes and pathways for near-future human-nonhuman companionship. https://mlml.io/p/records/ Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/records/ project The history of Olympic sport is written in records. Records tell the tale of individual athletes and national teams, of the rise and fall of ancient and modern sports, of changing approaches to athletic training and preparation. They also track the history of human achievements: firsts that are followed by new firsts in the pursuit of ever higher summits of excellence. Records are achieved by human bodies that compete both against their peers and against precedent, which is to say, against the “record book. https://mlml.io/e/ai-design-for-ocean-solutions-2025/ Tue, 07 Jan 2025 14:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/ai-design-for-ocean-solutions-2025/ seminar Climate change and human industrialization are having an accelerating negative impact on the ocean, which covers 71% of the planet. This hands-on course, co-taught by metaLAB Director of Art & Education Sarah Newman and scientist and ocean enthusiast Heather Newman, will bring generative AI tools and design interventions to some of the biggest climate challenges today. Through a series of short lectures and design-thinking activities, we will use AI tools to creatively approach selected topics in marine and climate science. https://mlml.io/e/moot-court-design-fiction-rendering-ames-real/ Mon, 06 Jan 2025 12:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/moot-court-design-fiction-rendering-ames-real/ seminar Course Instructors: Sankalp Bhatnagar and Talia Cotton Course Tutors: Camryn Given, Katrynna Jackowicz, and Juvaria Shahid Course Format: Gund Hall 12pm-1:30pm on M/T/W/R/F January 6-17, 2025. In person but enrollees can seek permission to participate virtually. Course Limits: Limited to 10 participants. No prerequisites. Ames does not “exist”. However, facts about its people and laws do. In this course, participants will render realistic competing ways of life at stake amongst the people of Ames—a fictional place whose conflict of laws serves as the hypothetical backdrop to a century of award-winning arguments invented, countered, and judged at Harvard Law School. https://mlml.io/p/prompting-flora-archives/ Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/prompting-flora-archives/ project Focusing specifically on World Flora Online and Global Genome Diversity Network, the project investigates the potential of these datasets to transcend categorical boundaries and conventional visual forms. In doing so, it generates new spatial constellations for collections that echo the historical logic of cabinets of curiosities. These so-called wonder-rooms were encyclopedic collections that aimed to present the universal connection of all things—fusing history, art, nature, and science into a unified worldview. https://mlml.io/e/rockets-for-the-sake-of-poetry/ Thu, 14 Nov 2024 18:15:00 +0100 https://mlml.io/e/rockets-for-the-sake-of-poetry/ talk REGISTRATION: harvard.zoom.us/j/96487565928?… SYNOPSIS: Legendary artist Eduardo Kac will revisit key highlights in his forty-year career, with emphasis on his current space artworks. After an introduction contextualizing his pioneering telepresence works from the mid-1980s, Kac will give examples and further discuss his development of bio art. Kac first gained prominence at the beginning of the twenty-first century with his transgenic work GFP Bunny (2000), in which he used molecular biology to literally create a green-glowing rabbit named Alba. https://mlml.io/e/event/ Mon, 11 Nov 2024 17:30:00 +0100 https://mlml.io/e/event/ talk A City of Longevity is an innovative urban framework that uses technology, data analytics, and citizen engagement to promote healthier, longer lives through preventive measures, while optimizing city resources and addressing the challenges of aging populations in urban environments. https://mlml.io/e/aivsacademicintegrity/ Fri, 25 Oct 2024 12:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/aivsacademicintegrity/ talk As generative AI becomes increasingly accessible, its influence on how students approach assignments and learning is undeniable. Should schools and universities ban AI from the classroom, embrace it as a powerful learning tool, or some mixture of both? In this webinar, Sarah Newman, Director of Art & Education at metaLAB (at) Harvard, will share best practices for creating AI course policies. These insights stem from workshopping ideas with students at Harvard, while engaging with educators in the US and internationally. https://mlml.io/e/jetsam-acts-of-queering-ai/ Tue, 01 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0200 https://mlml.io/e/jetsam-acts-of-queering-ai/ workshop One Day Laboratory October 1 2024 Jetsam – Acts of Queering AI *Organized by Annette Jael Lehmann, Ariadna Blanch López, Charlotte Hannah Peters, Giacomo Nanni, Suzan Hanow, Till Rückwart and in collaboration with: Circulating Narratives - Entangling Communities: Case Studies in Global Performance Art based at the Cluster of Excellence EXC 2020 “Temporal Communities”, Freie Universität Berlin. In collaboration with metaLAB (at) Harvard & FU Berlin and Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart. https://mlml.io/p/ai-personality-study/ Tue, 01 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/ai-personality-study/ project A new feature advertised alongside all of the latest large language models (LLMs) are “multilingual” capabilities. OpenAI states that ChatGPT can respond in over 50 languages, while Meta and Anthropic recently expanded their models to support 7 non-English languages. Beneath these claims lies a more complex reality: LLMs are inherently shaped by the biases of their training data and the humans involved in the fine-tuning process. Recent investigations have critiqued how LLMs perpetuate stereotypes and spread misinformation, especially towards racial and cultural groups. https://mlml.io/e/commons-cosmodrome/ Thu, 12 Sep 2024 19:00:00 +0200 https://mlml.io/e/commons-cosmodrome/ opening In cooperation with ClimArt, situated within ZK/U Berlin, metaLAB (at) Berlin presents Up-Dates on Weather: a collaborative research investigating in/visibilities of climate change through case studies, prototypes, and strategic interventions to raise awareness and mobilize urban climate resilience. The multi-faceted project is taking part in “Commons Cosmodrome—Re-entering the spaces of ZK/U”. “Commons Cosmodrome” is the reopening of ZK/U Berlin and takes place from September 12–15, 2024. ZK/U is a partner of Berlin Art Week with “Commons Cosmodrome”. https://mlml.io/p/arnold-arboretum/ Sun, 01 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/arnold-arboretum/ project What stories can an arboretum tell us? As ecological concerns become increasingly urgent, botanical collections have gained recognition as vital bioinformatic resources. It has even been argued that these collections are “uniquely placed to address several challenges to conserving the world’s plant diversity” (Westwood: 2021). From studying the behavior of bees to measuring the lifespan of trees, botanical collections offer much more than just peaceful surroundings. The Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University is a prime example. https://mlml.io/e/openhaus-july-2024/ Thu, 18 Jul 2024 19:00:00 +0200 https://mlml.io/e/openhaus-july-2024/ event On July 18 from 7 pm (CEST), the residents of ZK/U Berlin – Center for Art and Urbanistics – will open the doors of their studios for OPENHAUS JULY. In July, OPENHAUS invites you to get to know the work of the artists in residence who currently live and work at ZK/U. Take the opportunity to talk to artists and researchers on site, find out about ongoing projects at ZK/U and take a look at methods and processes that otherwise often take place behind closed doors. https://mlml.io/e/quality-of-slownesses-in-expanded-neural-networks/ Tue, 09 Jul 2024 09:30:00 +0200 https://mlml.io/e/quality-of-slownesses-in-expanded-neural-networks/ workshop Please click here to join online from 8:00 am EDT/ 2:00 pm CEST Based on interdisciplinary, practice-based research contributions by data scientist Dario Rodighiero artist Helene Nymann, research-practitioner Ilya Vidrin, anthropologist Joe Dumit and choreographic designer Lins Derry, this interactive workshop examines the plasticity of “Slownesses” and suggests it as a quality or modality, rather than a temporality. Exploring so-called “attentioning”, in terms of physical and neural movements, as well as more-than-human-perspectives, participants will explore how memories may be imagined in spaces of the future. https://mlml.io/e/evolving-nature-of-knowledge/ Tue, 02 Jul 2024 17:30:00 +0200 https://mlml.io/e/evolving-nature-of-knowledge/ talk Tuesday, 2 July 2024, at the Institute for Theater Studies, Freie Universität Berlin and on Webex. Building on previous studies about the mapping of library collections through library loans (Casey et. al 2024), this lecture proposes expanding and refining these methodologies for dynamic classification systems. Libraries, particularly in academic and research settings, require classification systems that evolve in response to shifts in scholarly focus and the introduction of new fields — needs that are pressing today and will become more urgent as digital literature continues to expand. https://mlml.io/e/love-hate-ethics-in-the-age-of-ai/ Fri, 28 Jun 2024 18:00:00 +0200 https://mlml.io/e/love-hate-ethics-in-the-age-of-ai/ talk CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE ENVENT After years of deliberation there has been a great surge of AI products. Whether you love them or hate them, these products are now rapidly transforming our existing practices as designers, technologists, and educators. This talk considers AI through a number of ethical lenses, use cases, and speculative examples. Laura Scherling is a designer, researcher, and educator. She is a director and lecturer at Columbia University where she teaches courses in ethics of media, design, and technology and data visualization. https://mlml.io/e/changing-the-world-one-stitch-at-a-time/ Wed, 22 May 2024 16:00:00 +0200 https://mlml.io/e/changing-the-world-one-stitch-at-a-time/ talk In 2024, Kat Jungnickel, Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of London, joins metaLAB (at) Basel as researcher-in-residence! During their research stay, Kat will explore inventive approaches to archival research, radical histories of clothing patents, speculative sewing, and DIY wearable tech cultures. In collaboration with Aylin Tschoepe, Director of metaLAB (at) Basel, Kat will further connect across the Institute of Contemporary Design Practices at HGK Basel FHNW and shared interests in feminist technoscience, feminist spatial and embodied practice, etc. https://mlml.io/e/aesthetics-of-the-im-mobile/ Wed, 15 May 2024 02:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/aesthetics-of-the-im-mobile/ talk CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT The research project Aesthetics of the Im/Mobile explores which new approaches performing arts festivals and cultural institutions, mainly in Switzerland and neighboring countries, have developed in dealing with “im/mobility” as one of the challenges of our times. Performing arts festivals tend to take on a pioneering role as incubators for new ways of working and aesthetical practices, both in the context of accessibility for disabled artists and audiences, as well as ecological questions or climate change, or more sustainable ways of working in general. https://mlml.io/e/understanding-metaverse-performance/ Wed, 08 May 2024 02:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/understanding-metaverse-performance/ talk CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT The proliferation of metaverse-inspired cultural activities raises questions about the meaning of metaverse art and its performative aspect. What does metaverse performance mean in terms of extending the human body within constantly evolving technology? How does the body function within both autopoietic and allopoietic processes when participating in highly immersive and interactive art? What is human agency in metaverse performance, and how far does it go beyond art? https://mlml.io/e/panel-future-of-dance/ Wed, 24 Apr 2024 14:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/panel-future-of-dance/ talk CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT This roundtable brings together a diverse group of dance practitioners and scholars focusing on the transmedia flow of dance in the twenty-first century. The global pandemic offered an opportunity for dance to spearhead innovative transmedia formats that move fluidly across media boundaries, artistic genres, and geographical borders. Site-specificity, VR, and video games have influenced dance in multi-faceted ways, transporting audiences into an “otherworld. https://mlml.io/e/choreorobotics-talk/ Thu, 18 Apr 2024 17:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/choreorobotics-talk/ talk Sydney Skybetter is an expert in choreorobotics, a portmanteau of choreography and robotics, and a field which he has pioneered at the interdisciplinary intersection of choreographic theory and robotic motion planning. Choreorobotics offers a rich, critical aperture to consider how bodies in motion - human or otherwise - move through space and time to generate meaning. In Clock, Fall, Skybetter dives into the origin of choreorobotics, recent advancements in the field, and how emerging technologies can be informed or disrupted by collective action and coalition building, drawing from his work as the founder of the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces and podcast, “Dances with Robots. https://mlml.io/p/up-dates-on-weather/ Mon, 01 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/up-dates-on-weather/ project ClimArt, situated within ZK/U Berlin, focuses on raising awareness and mobilizing urban climate resilience through artistic interventions. The collaborative research between metaLAB and ClimArt investigates in/visibilities of climate change through case studies, prototypes, and strategic interventions. The project challenges the politics of truths and data representations from the perspectives of artistic and practice-based research. Project Context The current knowledge system about climate change predominantly relies on a planetary-scaled sensing system — a technological megastructure that abstracts nature into data, transforms data into analysis, and converts analysis into predictions. https://mlml.io/e/contextualizing-liveness/ Wed, 20 Mar 2024 02:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/contextualizing-liveness/ talk CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT What makes a performance live, and how is liveness changing? After the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated a wave of digital theatre, the liveness of live performance has never been more contested. This lecture draws on Hawthorne’s doctoral thesis Contextualising Liveness: Digitally Distributed, Digitally Mediated and Digitally Located Theatre in Edinburgh and Berlin, 2017-19’ to discuss the historical role of liveness within theatre and performance studies and in the broader context of evolving digital media. https://mlml.io/e/basel-launch/ Thu, 14 Mar 2024 14:00:00 +0100 https://mlml.io/e/basel-launch/ opening On Thursday, March 14, metaLAB (at) Basel will officially launch at the Basel Academy of Art and Design, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland! The event will include contributions from various members of the international metaLAB community, as the two existing labs at Harvard (2011) and Berlin (2022) will be joined by Basel (2024). Attend in person or view the event live on Vimeo! metaLAB Basel launch program Thursday, March 14, 2024, 2-7 pm Central European Time (CET)/Basel https://mlml.io/p/artificial-worldviews/ Fri, 01 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/artificial-worldviews/ project The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized natural language processing and understanding. Over the past years, these models have achieved remarkable success in various language-related tasks, a feat that was unthinkable before. After its launch, ChatGPT quickly became the fastest-growing app in the history of web applications. But as these systems become common tools for generating content or finding information—from research and business to greeting cards—it is crucial to investigate the worldviews of these systems. https://mlml.io/e/ai-pedagogy-workshop/ Wed, 14 Feb 2024 12:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/ai-pedagogy-workshop/ workshop Are you an educator? Are you feeling challenged, or inspired, or overwhelmed by this moment in AI? Come join some of the leaders of the AI Pedagogy Project for an interactive session that helps develop critical AI literacy. We will do this by exploring some resources from the AI Pedagogy site, including a tutorial and engaging with some curated assignments. We will also discuss challenges educators are facing, and workshop ideas for the year to come. https://mlml.io/e/negotiating-difference-in-soma-a-social-vr-experience/ Wed, 31 Jan 2024 14:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/negotiating-difference-in-soma-a-social-vr-experience/ talk [CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT](REGISTER: zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIld… ) The ‘empathy machine’ is a claim that has been directed at the assumed potential of virtual reality (VR) (Sanchez Laws, 2017). Other common claims relate to the potential for VR to enable first-person experience and transformation of self (Slater, 2009) or to ‘body ownership’ and ‘full body illusion’ (Schoeller et al, 2019; Maister et al, 2015) where it is claimed that when a person embodies another in VR, there is a blurring of self and other (Hasson et al, 2019). https://mlml.io/e/digital-theatre-in-africa/ Wed, 24 Jan 2024 02:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/digital-theatre-in-africa/ talk CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT Even before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, some theatre groups in Africa had begun experimenting with digital promotion and distribution of their shows. However, the pandemic and its attendant global lockdowns catalyzed the digitization process and encouraged more innovative and high-tech development, promotion, and execution of live theatre. This lecture examines how specific theatre groups adapted to the global upheaval (and general competition from electronic entertainment forms such as television, film, and video games). https://mlml.io/e/designing-speculations-from-moot-courts/ Wed, 03 Jan 2024 10:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/designing-speculations-from-moot-courts/ seminar Course Instructors: Sankalp Bhatnagar and Phoebe Walton Course Tutors: Elena Kuran, Brandon Martinez, and Kelsey Cumiskey Course Format: Hybrid/GSD 10am-12pm on M/W/F January 3-12, 2024 In 1911, students at Harvard Law School founded the Ames Moot Court Competition as the first co-curricular space for law students to practice their legal writing and presentation skills before a panel of experienced judges. In the last century, “mooting” has become a commonplace practice throughout legal education in the United States. https://mlml.io/p/weather-map/ Sun, 31 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/weather-map/ project The Weather Map is a project designed for visually analyzing public debates in the media. Using Media Cloud, the dynamic digital tool converts specific queries into advanced visualizations inspired by synoptic weather charts. This approach sheds light on media conflicts through atmospheric dynamics metaphors, offering a fresh perspective on the intricate nature of media controversies and their actors. In the field of Science and Technology Studies, the Weather Map is a notable contribution to controversy mapping tools. https://mlml.io/p/autographic-design/ Tue, 19 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/autographic-design/ project Data analysis and visualization are crucial tools in today’s society, and digital representations have steadily become the default. Yet, more and more often, we find that citizen scientists, environmental activists, and forensic amateurs are using analog methods to present evidence of pollution, climate change, and the spread of disinformation. In this illuminating book, Dietmar Offenhuber presents a model for these practices, a model to make data generation accountable: autographic design. https://mlml.io/e/digital-mapping/ Thu, 07 Dec 2023 10:00:00 +0100 https://mlml.io/e/digital-mapping/ workshop Digital Mapping of Contemporaneity, Activism & Ecology Organized by Annette Jael Lehmann and Till Rückwart as part of the research project Circulating Narratives - Entangling Communities: Case Studies in Global Performance Art based at the Cluster of Excellence EXC 2020 “Temporal Communities”, Freie Universität Berlin. In collaboration with metaLAB (at) Harvard & FU Berlin and ZK/U Berlin – Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik. Hosted by Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF) in Berlin. https://mlml.io/e/performing-ai-labor-and-complexity-on-the-contemporary-stage/ Wed, 29 Nov 2023 02:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/performing-ai-labor-and-complexity-on-the-contemporary-stage/ talk CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT This talk focuses on the entanglements between human labor and machine “intelligence” in artistic performance. Indeed, as artificial intelligence in the guise of large-scale, data-driven neural networks rewrites the rules on what constitutes human language, thought, and action, this lecture will examine the bodily, mental, and affective work required to integrate neural networks into the profoundly anthropocentric domain of the performing arts so that these mathematical entities might also be seen to be expressive and “perform,” thus leveling the playing field between human beings and non-human machines. https://mlml.io/e/m-l-talks-autographic-design/ Wed, 08 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/m-l-talks-autographic-design/ talk Join us for a conversation with Dietmar Offenhuber and Lev Manovich about Offenhuber’s forthcoming book Autographic Design - The Matter of Data in a Self-Inscribing World (MIT Press) which examines the material life of data and post-digital practices of visualization. RSVP here *Cover image by Frank Kleinbach. https://mlml.io/e/transmedia-and-immersive-theatre-in-central-and-eastern-europe/ Wed, 25 Oct 2023 02:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/transmedia-and-immersive-theatre-in-central-and-eastern-europe/ talk CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT The lecture will explore various experiments in transmedia and immersive theatre initiatives in Central and Eastern Europe. Bakk will offer a framework of how to understand these genres based on the level of interactivity or immersion and will also explain how immersive & transmedia productions have emerged in the CEE region and how it can be interpreted through various types of immersiveness or categorized based on their use of media, including the body as media. https://mlml.io/e/waves-hls-beyond/ Tue, 24 Oct 2023 12:20:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/waves-hls-beyond/ talk Have you ever wondered what the world would look like if we could see the information that moves invisibly around us via wifi, cellular, and satellite? Most of us take for granted the basic functioning of our electronics and the modes of transmission used to move the massive amounts of information that support our daily lives, economy, and tech development in the 21st century. If you want to clear up some of your own misconceptions about how things really work, come meet the team behind metaLAB’s Swimming in a Sea of Invisible Waves for an engaging afternoon of discussion and interaction as they share some of the creations that have emerged from this multimodal project. https://mlml.io/e/tradition-and-technology/ Thu, 12 Oct 2023 19:00:00 +0200 https://mlml.io/e/tradition-and-technology/ talk A delegation of cultural bearers (Teal Hansen, Danaya Hoover, Brooke Mallory and Lloyd Montgomery) from the Alaska Native Village of Eyak are currently working with the Eyak collection held by the Ethnological Museum Berlin. On October 12th, they will present their work on building a VR traditional Eyak Village, introduced by the metaLAB B4 Tomorrow project team and hosted at gamelab.berlin. We warmly invite you to attend. October 12th 2023 | 1pm EST / 7pm EDT | gamelab. https://mlml.io/e/data-kinesthetics/ Fri, 06 Oct 2023 10:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/data-kinesthetics/ seminar Vimeo from Lins Derry’s opening talk at the symposium. Friday, October 6, 2023 at the ArtLab, Harvard University and on Zoom 9:30 am*: arrive + breakfast 10:00 - 10:30 am: opening remarks + presentation (hybrid) 10:30 am - 12:00 pm: movement workshop (hybrid) 12 - 1 pm: lunch break 1:00 - 3:30 pm: exposition + discussion (in-person) Schedule is in Eastern Daylight Time/Boston How can performance research help us make sense of abstract data, whether through choreographing a dataset, visualizing a dance as data, or interrogating training sets in the studio? https://mlml.io/p/b4-tomorrow/ Sat, 30 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/b4-tomorrow/ project The project’s overall goal is to support Chugach investigation of their heritage artifacts once taken from their home, the Prince William Sound and Kachemak Bay, and to accommodate the Chugach People as they make connections with traditions and memories to enhance cultural identity and spiritual well-being. The people engaged in the cooperation are members of the Chugach community and visitors of all ages from the preschool through Elder years. https://mlml.io/p/circulating-narratives-entangling-communities/ Sat, 30 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/circulating-narratives-entangling-communities/ project In collaboration with Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, the project will primarily focus on the intersections between Southeast Asian and ‘Western’ performative practices while addressing the blind spots in traditional historiography in ’the West’ as well as the consequences of colonialism and relationships capable of advancing the deconstruction of the ‘Western’ canon. “Circulating Narratives – Entangling Communities: Case Studies in Global Performance Art” will investigate how performance or performative practices relate to embodying histories, the transfer of embodied knowledge, and the establishing of (temporal or lasting) communities in acts of collecting, archiving and presenting performance art practices in exhibitions and outreach programs for future communities. https://mlml.io/e/ai-as-performer/ Wed, 27 Sep 2023 02:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/ai-as-performer/ talk CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT One of the most fascinating aspects of the newest generation of chatbots seems to lie in an increased level of theatricality: self-learning machines such as ChatGPT impress with their ability to engage in vivid dialogue, to create empathy, to (re)act spontaneously, and to charm by critically self-reflecting on the “artificial” nature of their real effects. Meanwhile, ChatGPT users immerse themselves in giving directions - prompts - and revel, mostly also self-critically, in the suspension of disbelief created by the AI. https://mlml.io/e/comics-as-computation-an-uninterrupted-thread-of-operational-intensity/ Sun, 27 Aug 2023 12:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/comics-as-computation-an-uninterrupted-thread-of-operational-intensity/ event While considerations of the growing role of automation in artistic production have been a consistent trope in modern and contemporary art debates since the mid-twentieth century (from Siegfried Giedion to Jack Burnham and Rosalind Krauss), in comics, industrial manufacturing, automation and scalability are hard-coded features of the medium’s production routines. Concepts such as efficiency, marginal utility, and computability hold significant conceptual and technical importance in comics. As a medium, comics have developed within a dense information economy driven by the standardization of best practices for the transformation of craft into mass production. https://mlml.io/e/ai-code-of-conduct/ Tue, 11 Jul 2023 09:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/ai-code-of-conduct/ event Proposed Harvard AI Code of Conduct Download PDF https://mlml.io/e/m-l-talks-jacek-smolicki/ Tue, 13 Jun 2023 11:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/m-l-talks-jacek-smolicki/ talk A note from Jacek Smolicki on his talk, Soundwalking through Time, Space, and Technologies: Departing from several of my recently developed artistic research projects, I will discuss how creative and critical approaches to recording technologies, particularly those concerned with sound, can help rewire some of our preconceptions about the surrounding environment, its human and more-than-human actors, histories and temporalities. I will talk and speculate about how sonic thinking and doing can aid us in connecting (with) those seemingly disparate and distant realms. https://mlml.io/p/ai-pedagogy-project/ Thu, 08 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/ai-pedagogy-project/ project As AI tools explode into public conversation, there is a clear need for an informed, critical, and multidisciplinary analysis of their applications, limitations, and risks, both in the current moment and looking towards the future. At the same time, for those without technical expertise, it is often unclear how to engage productively in these conversations. Within education and institutions of higher learning in particular, this is a time when the gap between technical and non-technical fields could grow even more. https://mlml.io/p/waves/ Thu, 01 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/waves/ project Radio wave technologies are the foundation of modern information and communications systems. Cellular signals enable smartphone communication, Wi-Fi routers facilitate internet access, and various other technologies such as Bluetooth and satellites provide additional layers of connectivity. Although radio waves are crucial to our daily lives, economic development, and technological advancement, they often go unnoticed. Invisible Waves seeks to make the invisible signals of our connected world visible and comprehensible. It combines design and science communication to demystify and visualize how radio wave technologies work, and how we rely on them for everyday tasks. https://mlml.io/e/constructing-testimony-in-the-times-of-pandemic/ Fri, 12 May 2023 12:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/constructing-testimony-in-the-times-of-pandemic/ talk CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT The pandemic had compelled many of us to rely on online platforms to create performances, design seminars, and conferences, and make art. As a meditation on that moment in time, Kai Tuchmann and Anuja Ghosalkar conceived a VR exhibition on the open source platform Mozilla Hubs for the Serendipity Arts Foundation, New Delhi between December 16th-18th 2020. The title of this show was, Look, here is your machine. https://mlml.io/e/the-fusion-of-transmedia-storytelling-and-performing-arts/ Fri, 28 Apr 2023 12:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/the-fusion-of-transmedia-storytelling-and-performing-arts/ talk CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT How do we create a participatory experience? How can you foresee participation and design for it? Drawing from Belén’s extensive experience in creating immersive and participatory experiences, she will discuss the key insights and learnings she has acquired through her work, including the importance of collaboration, the role of technology in enhancing the experience, and the value of placing the audience at the center of the creative process. https://mlml.io/e/impossible-choices/ Wed, 19 Apr 2023 17:30:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/impossible-choices/ talk “Anjan Sundaram is one of the great reporters of our age. He writes with exceptional courage and deep humanity. An inspiring chronicler of the world and the spirit.” —Fergal Keane, author of The Madness: A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD In this upcoming public event, co-hosted by metaLAB (at) Harvard, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, and the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School, metaLAB Affiliate and TED Fellow Anjan Sundaram will be in conversation with BBC editor and Nieman Fellow Ashish Dikshit about the personal costs that journalists and frontline war correspondents pay, and the common but underexpressed tension between public service work and the toll it takes on one’s personal life. https://mlml.io/e/iotf2023/ Mon, 17 Apr 2023 00:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/iotf2023/ event Following the vision of digital accessibility and environmental sustainability of performing arts outlined in our Future Stage Manifesto, metaLAB joins TheTheatreTimes.com, European Theatre Convention, and Digital Theatre Plus, to launch the 4th edition of IOTF: International Online Theatre Festival. IOTF also includes a partnership with STAGES (Sustainable Theatre Alliance for a Green Environmental Shift, an ambitious theatre experiment aiming to challenge how the cultural sector interacts with the concept of sustainability. https://mlml.io/p/institute-for-climate-sound-and-society/ Sat, 01 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/institute-for-climate-sound-and-society/ project The institute launched with a Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar on Thursday, February 29 - Friday, March 1, 2024. Now, the Institute is focused upon research, experimental publishing, and community-building through exhibitions & events. The Institute for Climate Sound & Society (ICSS) is being incubated at metaLAB (at) Harvard and the AIRLab at IT University of Copenhagen. Kara Oehler, a senior researcher at ITU, co-Founder of metaLAB (at) Harvard and long-time innovator in sound, technology, and storytelling is Executive Director. https://mlml.io/e/art-by-team-lab/ Fri, 31 Mar 2023 10:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/art-by-team-lab/ talk CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT teamLab (f. 2001) is an international art collective, an interdisciplinary group of specialists such as artists, programmers, engineers, CG animators, mathematicians, and architects, whose collaborative practice seeks to navigate the confluence of art, science, technology, and the natural world. teamLab aims to explore the relationship between the self and the world and new perceptions through art. In order to understand the world around them, people separate it into independent entities with perceived boundaries between them. https://mlml.io/e/emanuele-coccia-1/ Tue, 28 Mar 2023 10:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/emanuele-coccia-1/ talk On March 28, 2023, Emanuele Coccia from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris presented a talk that anticipates some of the arguments contained in a forthcoming book collaboratively written with the former art director of Gucci and noted fashion designer, Alessandro Michele, entitled Fashion as Philosophy :: making philosophy with fabrics:: making clothes with concepts. After a doctorate in medieval philosophy and philology at the University of Florence, Coccia received post-doctoral grants at the Max Planck Institut in Frankfurt am Main, the CNRS, and the Universitat Autonoma di Barcelona. https://mlml.io/p/re-touch/ Mon, 06 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/re-touch/ project On the occasion of the EMOP Berlin – European Month of Photography 2023, we invite professional and amateur photographers to submit images that explore the expanded surfaces of digital photographic images. Although digital images on screens and smartphones play a significant role in our everyday social lives, media and networks, they are still often underestimated as photographic practices with potential for critical agency and aesthetics. This open call aims to engage critically with smartphone imagery to unfold the potential of a Re:Touch. https://mlml.io/e/the-inverted-theatre-transmedia-is-as-hybrid/ Fri, 24 Feb 2023 12:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/the-inverted-theatre-transmedia-is-as-hybrid/ talk The last couple of years redefined the way performing arts live. Trapped behind small screens, artists stopped moving, and the shared time/space experience was lost. How did we cope with this? What did we have to say? Did we learn something from all this technology? Drawing on La Quinta del Lobo’s own research and artistic production, this lecture explores the place where media and contemporary art intersect the theater experience and invert the way performing arts are built today. https://mlml.io/e/data-drama-how-machine-audiences-reprogram-theatre/ Fri, 27 Jan 2023 12:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/data-drama-how-machine-audiences-reprogram-theatre/ talk In 2017, the Canadian Arts Presenting Association (CAPACOA) published its digital innovation assessment, “Digitizing the Performing Arts: As Assessment of Opportunities, Issues, and Challenges.” As the rationale for its work, CAPACOA noted that, “… as audiences gain the ability to curate their own content, and seek content on multiple devices and platforms, artists and arts organizations have had to respond to new intermediaries such as search engines, applications, video, and audio streaming services, online booksellers or on-demand downloading options. https://mlml.io/e/what-should-or-could-scholarly-knowledge-look-like-in-the-21st-century/ Mon, 23 Jan 2023 10:15:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/what-should-or-could-scholarly-knowledge-look-like-in-the-21st-century/ seminar The phrase “Knowledge Design” in the course subtitle strives to capture the spirit that animates much advanced and experimental work in a wide array of contemporary disciplines, from the arts and humanities to the social sciences: the circumstance that the form that scholarship assumes is no longer considered a given. The tools of inquiry are becoming as much objects of research and experimentation as are the modes of dissemination. Statistical methods press against one edge of the qualitative human sciences; graphic, information, and experience design press up against another. https://mlml.io/p/digital-access-research-project/ Mon, 23 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/digital-access-research-project/ project Digital Access Research Project (DARP) is concerned with the future of the performing arts and the social and technological challenges brought on by the pandemic. The DARP focuses on the digital accessibility of performing arts events and the codification of streaming as part of the disability laws in the US and globally. The group consists of leading international experts in disability law, copyright law, digital technology, and performing arts management. The objective of the group is to develop a set of guidelines for policy- and lawmakers, and performing arts organizations that would balance the digital accessibility needs of formerly marginalized groups with the performer and institutional copyright rights. https://mlml.io/e/collaborating-w-ai/ Thu, 12 Jan 2023 14:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/collaborating-w-ai/ workshop Collaborating with Artificial Intelligence, a J-Term course taught by Sarah Newman, Dir. of Art & Education, metaLAB and Juliana Castro Varon, Fellow, Berkman Klein Center for the Internet & Society, will take place on Thur., Jan. 12 and Fri., Jan. 13 from 2-4:30pm at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). The two-day workshop explores the implications of artificial intelligence systems on our everyday lives and allows students to experiment with contemporary tools that aid creativity. https://mlml.io/e/m-l-talks-salome-asega/ Thu, 12 Jan 2023 18:00:00 +0100 https://mlml.io/e/m-l-talks-salome-asega/ talk Salome Asega / @computers_puting (she/her/hers) is an artist, researcher, and educator working between participatory design and emerging technology. Salome believes in leveraging the power of collective imagination to redistribute power, change culture, and shift policy. Before joining the NEW INC team in 2021, she worked at the Ford Foundation as a Technology Fellow supporting artists and organizations in the new media arts ecosystem. Salome has participated in residencies and fellowships with Eyebeam, The Laundromat Project, and Recess and has exhibited at the Shanghai Biennale, MoMA, Carnegie Library, August Wilson Center, Knockdown Center, and more. https://mlml.io/p/how-the-light/ Sun, 08 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/how-the-light/ project There are fragments of wisdom everywhere. —S. Newman How the Light Gets In is an interactive art installation in two parts — offered at Lawrence Public Library and the Spencer Museum of Art — and exploring themes of learning and knowledge, chance encounters, and finding wisdom in unexpected places. Created by metaLAB Principal Sarah Newman and the metaLAB team and developed in collaboration with Professor Hyunjin Seo and the KU Center for Digital Inclusion, this project builds on the work of Professor Seo and her team with formerly incarcerated women reentering society. https://mlml.io/e/conflux-art-tech/ Wed, 04 Jan 2023 12:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/conflux-art-tech/ workshop Conflux is a new Harvard student organization dedicated to expanding the intersection between art and technology. It is co-led by metaLAB researchers and Harvard College students Peggy Yin and Alice Cai. Conflux Winter Residency Overview The Conflux Winter Residency is a free, student-led residential program for Harvard undergraduates to immerse themselves in exploring, learning, and creating art tech during January term. The program will take place January 4th - 22nd, 2023, and is hosted at the Paulson School Of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) by Conflux, metaLAB, and the SEAS Teaching and Learning Group. https://mlml.io/e/mixing-theatre-and-film/ Fri, 09 Dec 2022 12:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/mixing-theatre-and-film/ talk Theatre and film are intimately related representational media. In both, actors embody fictional characters to convey narratives. At the same time, as both practitioners and theorists have long recognized, there are profound ontological, phenomenological, and structural differences between them. One of the most significant and least explored of these differences is that theatre and film conventionally engage radically different modes of representation. The film is primarily a pictorial medium. Theatre, by contrast, is a ludic medium, that is to say, a medium rooted in the spirit of play and make-believe. https://mlml.io/e/comics-as-a-computational-object/ Thu, 17 Nov 2022 17:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/comics-as-a-computational-object/ talk https://mlml.io/p/post-networks/ Tue, 01 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/post-networks/ project Networks consist of conglomerates of points connected by lines. Two forces allocate their positions. Points repulse each other; they drift away from one another through time. Lines draw points together. A performance without width or thickness of separation and togetherness. Networks segment space, creating borders through their connectedness without occupying the surface. Networks are spaceless entities defined by the power relationship of attraction and separation. Network connections create boundaries without walls. https://mlml.io/e/documenting-viral-theatres/ Fri, 28 Oct 2022 12:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/documenting-viral-theatres/ talk What does the hybrid future of theatre look like? Hybrid Futures is the title of an exhibition, currently on view at the Theatre Museum in Düsseldorf that responds to this question by putting the work of the VolkswagenFoundation-funded artistic research project Viral Theatres on display. Over the last 1.5 years, Viral Theatres has developed a range of creative and participatory documentation formats to gather responses of German and international theatre artists and audiences to the theatre closures of 2020-2021 and to highlight hybrid theatre work in action. https://mlml.io/e/future-stage-manifesto-eastern-europe/ Thu, 20 Oct 2022 12:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/future-stage-manifesto-eastern-europe/ workshop In October 2021, the futureStage research group published the Future Stage Manifesto, which has been translated and published in thirteen languages, including Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, and Russian. This panel of international researchers and translators discussed the impact of the Future Stage Manifesto on the Eastern European performing arts scene, and the opportunities it opens for transcultural collaborations, access, and political engagement. The panel was moderated by Kasia Lech, Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam, and metaLAB principal, Magda Romanska. https://mlml.io/p/peirce-interprets-peirce/ Sat, 01 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/peirce-interprets-peirce/ project Charles S. Peirce is widely acknowledged as one of the founders of philosophical pragmatism and semiotics. After he died in 1914, Harvard University acquired Pierce’s writings to preserve them for future study, collecting approximately 1,650 unpublished manuscripts for over 100,000 pages. Carefully cataloged by his pupil Richard Robin, the archive was microfilmed in the 1960s, and the Houghton Library subsequently digitized the microfilms, but their limited legibility recently persuaded the library to undertake a renewed digitization effort working with the original manuscripts. https://mlml.io/e/future-of-opera/ Thu, 29 Sep 2022 17:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/future-of-opera/ seminar This roundtable brings together a diverse group of opera practitioners and scholars focusing on the transmedia flow of opera in the twenty-first century. The global pandemic offered an opportunity for opera to spearhead innovative transmedia storytelling formats that move fluidly across media boundaries, artistic genres, and geographical borders. Long considered innovative storytelling formats, site-specificity, VR, and video games have influenced opera in multi-faceted ways, transporting audiences into an “otherworld.” Recently, we have witnessed a shift towards site-specific reimagination of repertory opera (Twilight: Gods by Lyric Opera of Chicago and Michigan Opera Theater), gamification of opera (Yuval Sharon’s Die Walküre Act III, White Snake Projects’ PermaDeath, Death by Life), and a radical re-conception of opera as observed in VR – and zoom – operas (On Site Opera’s Lesson Plan, Kamala Sankaram’s Parksville Murders, all decisions will be made by consensus). https://mlml.io/e/future-stage-manifesto-asia/ Thu, 22 Sep 2022 21:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/future-stage-manifesto-asia/ workshop In October 2021, the futureStage research group published the Future Stage Manifesto, which has been translated and published in thirteen languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. This panel of international researchers and translators discussed the impact of the Future Stage Manifesto on Asian performing arts scene, and the opportunities it opens for transcultural collaborations, access, and political engagement. The panel was moderated by Cui Qiao, President of Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation. https://mlml.io/p/black-lives-matter-street-mural-map/ Wed, 31 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/black-lives-matter-street-mural-map/ project Following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in the summer of 2020, a vital trend propagated throughout the country and even internationally as communities—big and small, urban and rural, sanctioned and unsanctioned—engaged in a memetic dialogue of installing and remixing anti-racist artworks on their streets. The Black Lives Matter Street Mural Map—an open research project created as a collaboration between the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center (Stephen Larrick) and metaLAB (at) Harvard & FU Berlin (Kim Albrecht)—documents these works as a research database and as a map featured in the Designing Peace (2022 – 2023) exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Museum of Design in Manhattan. https://mlml.io/p/processing-the-page/ Sun, 31 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/processing-the-page/ project The Busch-Reisinger Museum was recently gifted more than 70 sketchbooks kept by artist Otto Piene (1928–2014). Dating from 1935 to 2014, the largely unpublished sketchbooks reflect interdisciplinary, cross-media experiments from Piene’s long career in the Boston area and abroad, including both realized and unrealized projects. A pioneer in multimedia and technology-based art, Piene was long interested in optical perception and kinetic forces, resulting in a body of work that emphasizes collaboration and the intersections of art, science, and nature. https://mlml.io/p/living-by-protocol/ Sun, 03 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/living-by-protocol/ project Exhibition, May 17–July 3, 2022 Harvard Art Museums, Lightbox Gallery Summary Living by Protocol queries the contemporary reflections of artists and artistic researchers on, with, and by social media. While scientific research deepens the knowledge of a specific domain, art and artistic research has the power to transfer questions, problems, and opportunities into wider spectrums of society. The nine-grid structured monitors within Harvard Art Museum’s Lightbox Gallery become a lens into untold stories of social databases and networked culture. https://mlml.io/e/m-l-talks-andrea-lissoni/ Mon, 27 Jun 2022 18:00:00 +0200 https://mlml.io/e/m-l-talks-andrea-lissoni/ talk In his lecture Attunement, Dr. Andrea Lissoni discusses his leadership approach as artistic director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich. The talk was organized by metaLAB (at) Harvard & FU Berlin and was offered online to both campus communities. “The vision that I am developing for the Haus der Kunst is based on a central force: to share the significance of contemporary art and culture in an interdisciplinary way and in an open, original, visionary, inviting, and optimistic way,” Lissoni said at a press conference. https://mlml.io/p/choreographic-interface/ Thu, 23 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/choreographic-interface/ project What is a choreographic interface and what role does dance choreography play in its design process? In 2019, metaLAB began work on Curatorial A(i)gents, a group exhibition presenting a series of machine-learning-based experiments with museum collections developed by members and affiliates of the lab. The show was slated to premiere the following year at the Harvard Art Museums’ Lightbox Gallery. Postponed until 2022 due to the pandemic, metaLAB assembled a team to develop a “touchless” solution for interacting with the digital projects in the show. https://mlml.io/p/surprise-machines/ Tue, 31 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/surprise-machines/ project Surprise Machines is a visual investigation that will take the form of a digital installation, part of the exhibition Curatorial A(I)gents that took place at the Harvard Art Museums in Spring 2022. The project sets out to visualize and curate the entire universe of museums’ collections, intending to open up unexpected insights into the more than 200,000 objects that make them up. To accomplish these surprise encounters, “black box” algorithms are curatorially employed to shape the data visualization, and a “choreographic interface” has been designed to connect the audience’s movement with several unique views of the objects. https://mlml.io/p/igun/ Mon, 16 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/igun/ project Igùn is an ongoing investigation into a 17-year artistic decline (1897-1914) in Benin Kingdom—following the 1897 British colonial invasion. During the invasion, British colonial officers torched Benin city, deposed the Oba (King), stole over 3000 cultural objects from the royal palace, shipped the objects off to England for sale to private and institutional collectors. The 1897 invasion ushered in an interregnum (1897-1914) which was characterized by an artistic decline, because the absence of an Oba (also considered “the sole commissioner of the arts”) would have limited the amount of commissions available to artists. https://mlml.io/p/a-flitting-atlas-of-the-human-gaze/ Sun, 15 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/a-flitting-atlas-of-the-human-gaze/ project A Flitting Atlas of the Human Gaze When the Harvard Art Museums collection looks back at us, which direction does it look? Up, down, left, or right? How deeply or shallowly does it cast its gaze? Do most images peer straight into the visitor’s eyes? What is the orientation of the subject’s head, frontal or rotated? Do particular media or cultural traditions correlate with preferences regarding the directionality of the human gaze? https://mlml.io/p/curatorial-aigents/ Sun, 15 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/curatorial-aigents/ project Curatorial A(i)gents presented a series of machine-learning experiments with the Harvard Art Museums’ digital collections developed by members and affiliates of metaLAB (at) Harvard. The exhibition ran from March 1 through May 15, 2022 as part of an extended metaLAB residency in the museums’ Lightbox Gallery. During this period, four panel discussions among the artists and designers of Curatorial A(i)gents were offered on Zoom and remain available with closed captions on Vimeo. https://mlml.io/p/ham-object-map/ Sun, 15 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/ham-object-map/ project Designed to serve as a capstone experience for visitors to the Harvard Art Museum, the Object Map greets the visitor with a mosaic of thumbnail images of the 1803 objects, each scaled to occupy the same area irrespective of its actual physical size, that are on display on the Harvard Art Museum’s galleries below. Navigating them with an air mouse, she can settle upon and click on any one of these works, perhaps on the basis of a faint memory or curiosity, triggering an overlay which exposes the works as data objects made up of metadata fields–25 data fields are featured in the overlay covering everything from authorship, provenance, and date of acquisition to how many clicks the item has received on the museum’s online database or how many times it has been exhibited. https://mlml.io/e/panorama-panel/ Wed, 11 May 2022 12:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/panorama-panel/ seminar Over the course of an hour, Zoom attendees had the opportunity to hear about three perspective-shifting projects featured in Curatorial A(i)gents: Surprise Machines, Object Map, and Aixquisite Corpse. For background, Curatorial A(i)gents was a metaLAB exhibition that featured 11 projects centered on the theme of AI and curatorial practice. The projects utilized the Harvard Art Museums digital collections or data, and were exhibited at the Museums’ Lightbox Gallery in spring 2022. https://mlml.io/e/perspectives-on-metaverse/ Thu, 28 Apr 2022 17:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/perspectives-on-metaverse/ seminar WHAT IS TRANSMEDIA? PERSPECTIVES ON METAVERSE There are multiple histories entailed by the term “transmedia,” and only some of them are worthy of contemporary artists’ affection and attention. This talk will summarize the competing claims of mixed media, new media, intermedia, expanded cinema, and transmedia storytelling, from the perspective of visual art and media theory. Sifting through the dramatic proliferation of platforms and software tools involved in today’s virtual production of the “metaverse,” I will offer an MIT-centric answer to the question posed by the talk’s title. https://mlml.io/e/viral-theatres-pandemic-past-hybrid-futures/ Thu, 28 Apr 2022 11:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/viral-theatres-pandemic-past-hybrid-futures/ seminar VIRAL THEATRES: PANDEMIC PAST / HYBRID FUTURES SYMPOSIUM How hybrid is the future of theatre? In what ways has the pandemic changed how we work in theatre and gather in it as a public space? We would like to invite you to our Symposium Viral Theatres: Pandemic Past/Hybrid Futures as we explore these questions. In three days of events, we will take stock of how pandemic time has moved from a state of exception to new normality between viral outbreak and containment and what that means for theatrical production. https://mlml.io/e/m-l-talks-mirabelle-jones/ Mon, 25 Apr 2022 12:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/m-l-talks-mirabelle-jones/ talk In this talk, metaLAB Visiting Researcher Mirabelle Jones shares their prior and current research on AI and ethics, discussing the actual versus perceived risks of language models, while demistifying some of the hype that is so prevalent in the mainstream press. Mirabelle is a PhD student at the University of Copenhagen where they work on a number of AI-based arts interventions, particularly with language models. https://mlml.io/e/gpt-3-chatbot/ Thu, 21 Apr 2022 09:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/gpt-3-chatbot/ workshop In this workshop, participants will learn how to fine-tune the large natural language processing model GPT-3 on their social media data to create a chatbot version of themself. They will then converse with their chatbot self and compare their own values to those they perceive in the chatbot. In this workshop, we will explore: What are our values, and how are these reflected in our social media presence? What happens when we create a fine-tuned natural language processing model using such data? https://mlml.io/e/critical-panel/ Wed, 13 Apr 2022 12:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/critical-panel/ seminar Over the course of an hour, Zoom attendees had the opportunity to hear about three critical projects featured in Curatorial A(i)gents: This Recommendation System Is Broken, Igùn, and Second Look. For background, Curatorial A(i)gents was a metaLAB exhibition that featured 11 projects centered on the theme of AI and curatorial practice. The projects utilized the Harvard Art Museums digital collections, or data, and were exhibited at the Museums’ Lightbox Gallery in spring 2022. https://mlml.io/e/choreographic-interfaces-demos/ Fri, 08 Apr 2022 12:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/choreographic-interfaces-demos/ event For two hours every Friday, from April 8 to May 13, meet Pablo Castillo in the Lightbox Gallery to experience the choreographic interface developed by Lins Derry, Jordan Kruguer, and Maximilian Mueller. Using a full-torso movement vocabulary, enter the digital landscapes of various Curatorial A(i)gents projects, zooming in and out, selecting and moving objects, etc. https://mlml.io/e/choreographic-panel/ Wed, 06 Apr 2022 12:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/choreographic-panel/ seminar Convening different “schools” of thought - quite literally from Harvard, MIT, and Brown, and more figuratively from design and performance studies - Lins Derry, Hiroshi Ishii, Ozgun Kilic Afsar, and Sydney Skybetter met on Zoom to talk about the choreographics of interactive technology. At metaLAB, Lins Derry researches how choreography models can be applied to design processes; at the MIT Media Lab, the Tangible Media Group researches how technology interactions can be more embodied; and at Brown, Sydney Skybetter founded the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces, through which he facilitates discourses on “choreorobotics,” surveillance technologies, and more. https://mlml.io/e/temporal-communities-and-hybrid-performance/ Thu, 31 Mar 2022 17:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/temporal-communities-and-hybrid-performance/ seminar BEING ALONE/TOGETHER: TEMPORAL COMMUNITIES AND HYBRID PERFORMANCE REGISTER HERE FOR THIS ONLINE EVENT The lecture focuses on how the corona-pandemic affected practices as well as the understanding of theatre and performance audiences. Like in a magnifying glass, the pandemic did expose one central, yet unsolved question of audience research: how do dimensions of collectivity and individuality come and act together in the temporal community of a theatre audience? While theatre houses were closed and the theatrical art of assembly was in crisis, theatre-makers were highly innovative in addressing, in getting in contact, and in staying in touch with their audiences – especially – but not only – by using digital tools and Social Media in developing online and hybrid performances. https://mlml.io/e/creating-space-for-magic/ Tue, 08 Mar 2022 17:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/creating-space-for-magic/ talk Jeanette Andrews presented her performance-talk, Creating Space for Magic, to students and guests in Jeffrey Schnapp’s course The Spectacle Factory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The course examines the modern history of immersive theater, entertainment, experience, and media spaces from the standpoint of the history of architecture and design. In her talk, Andrews discussed the cultural spaces that magic has historically occupied, contrasting the design of historic magic theaters to that of unconventional sites like parks and museums. https://mlml.io/e/investigative-panel/ Wed, 02 Mar 2022 12:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/investigative-panel/ seminar Over the course of an hour, Zoom attendees had the opportunity to hear about four investigative projects featured in Curatorial A(i)gents: Second Look: Gender and Sentiment on Show, Watching Machines Loving Grace, A Flitting Atlas of the Human Gaze, and Processing the Page: Computer Vision and Otto Piene’s Sketchbooks. For background, Curatorial A(i)gents was a metaLAB exhibition that featured 11 projects centered on the theme of AI and curatorial practice. The projects utilized the Harvard Art Museums digital collections, or data, and were exhibited at the Museums’ Lightbox Gallery in spring 2022. https://mlml.io/p/watching-machines-loving-grace/ Tue, 01 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/watching-machines-loving-grace/ project Watching Machines Loving Grace observes the otherwise unwanted parts of facial recognition. The project visualizes the media negativity of algorithmic visual sense-making within the Harvard Art Museums collection. Computer vision is reductive by design. It proceeds by splicing rectangles out of images to determine age, gender, or facial expression, among others but removes the contextual framework to perform the task. For a human observer, the image of a smiling 24-year-old belly dancer and a smiling 24-year-old old soldier may appear sharply distinct. https://mlml.io/e/transmedia-storytelling-for-real-life-rehearsal/ Thu, 24 Feb 2022 17:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/transmedia-storytelling-for-real-life-rehearsal/ seminar TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING FOR REAL-LIFE REHEARSAL In his lecture, Robert Pratten discusses his current business of creating participatory experiences for major corporations and governments to simulate disasters and narrative-reality distortions. The marketing phrase “perception is reality” is no truer than in everyday life around confrontations between vaxxers & anti-vaxxers, remainers & brexiteers, preppers, flat-earthers, incels, and the rest of us! The struggle of society is the battle of narratives, and Pratten’s clients rehearse for these confrontations. https://mlml.io/p/data-sensorium/ Tue, 01 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/data-sensorium/ project Data Sensorium 1 - Environmental Migration is a transmedia performance work that expresses data through movement and graphics. The work explores environmental migration data from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre with the intent to raise awareness on the relationship between climate change and disaster displacement. It does this through a process of data visualization and data embodiment, a communicative and artistic method that approaches the body as a choreographic medium to physicalize and perform abstract data. https://mlml.io/e/m-l-talks-stephanie-hankey-tactical-tech/ Mon, 31 Jan 2022 12:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/m-l-talks-stephanie-hankey-tactical-tech/ talk Stephanie is a current Loeb fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and co-founder and executive director of Tactical Tech. She is an international leader in the fields of design, technology, art, and politics, and we are very excited that she’ll be sharing practice with us. (Stephanie also co-curated the amazing Glass Room exhibition, which many of you may be familiar with, and which has reached over 220,000 in 47 countries. https://mlml.io/p/community-life-raft/ Fri, 17 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/community-life-raft/ project During the 2021 fall semester, metaLAB (at) Harvard facilitated a student datathon in conjunction with The Opportunity Project (TOP) run by the United States Census Bureau’s Open Innovation Lab (for more on the datathon see TOP (at) Harvard). One of the projects was Community LifeRAFT by Claudia Molina, Alan Tebuev, Jody Elizabeth Trumbull, and Filip Wodnicki with mentorship by Kim Albrecht. The team focused on delivering a functional tool to better understand the ten factors defined by the U. https://mlml.io/p/re-root/ Fri, 17 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/re-root/ project During the 2021 fall semester, metaLAB (at) Harvard facilitated a student datathon in conjunction with The Opportunity Project (TOP) run by the United States Census Bureau’s Open Innovation Lab (for more on the datathon see TOP (at) Harvard). One of the projects was Community LifeRAFT by Mier Chen, Lily Huang, Karma Tarap, Pranay Varada, Yujie Wang, and Thomas Zhang with mentorship by Sabelo Mhlambi and Jack Cushman. As social, economic, and climate landscapes change, individuals and families tend to move to where they can find a suitable community. https://mlml.io/p/top-at-harvard/ Fri, 17 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/top-at-harvard/ project During the 2021 fall semester, metaLAB (at) Harvard facilitated a student datathon in conjunction with The Opportunity Project (TOP) run by the United States Census Bureau’s Open Innovation Lab. Since 2016, The Opportunity Project has helped companies, non-profits, and universities turn federal open data into new technologies that solve real-world problems for people across the country. During the 12-week program, metaLAB mentored two student teams that built data-powered solutions to critical problems facing the public by translating their design and data science learning to a real-world context. https://mlml.io/e/social-sculpture-temporal-communities/ Sun, 05 Dec 2021 12:00:00 +0100 https://mlml.io/e/social-sculpture-temporal-communities/ talk A practice-based laboratory featuring Stephanie Comilang, Rosalia Namsai Engchuan, Soydivision, members of EXC 2020, Research Area “Travelling Matters” and metaLAB (at) FU Berlin with metaLAB (at) Harvard’s founder and faculty director Prof. Jeffrey T. Schnapp. The one-day event “Social Sculpture – Temporal Communities” contributes to the project’s broader inquiry into how embodied creative practices, such as performance, can unfold alternative narratives, practices of embodying histories and the transfer of embodied knowledge. https://mlml.io/e/heteroglossia-and-intelligibility-in-transmedia-theatre/ Thu, 02 Dec 2021 05:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/heteroglossia-and-intelligibility-in-transmedia-theatre/ seminar HETEROGLOSSIA AND INTELLIGIBILITY IN TRANSMEDIA THEATRE The question of intelligibility keeps returning to the scholarship and practice of multilingual theatre. Technological developments like surtitles and translating glasses have opened unprecedented possibilities for the audience to engage with productions performed in different languages. At the same time, they have also fed Western anxieties based on the need to understand every word and fix meanings to experience theatre. The talk discusses alternative opportunities that transmedia creates in multilingual theatre practice. https://mlml.io/p/me-too-anti-network/ Tue, 30 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/me-too-anti-network/ project From a random selection of one million #MeToo tweets, we read through all examples with more than 100 retweets. Only 8 out of the 894 tweets are actual tweets about sexual assault or experiences around the topic of #MeToo. Of the rest, the vast majority are news media posts and political (trolling) discussions, most of them neglecting the specific issues and survivor voices at the heart of the MeToo movement. https://mlml.io/e/future-stage-manifesto/ Fri, 19 Nov 2021 05:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/future-stage-manifesto/ seminar With new expectations for media, culture, and presence in a hyperconnected world, the civic stakes of the performing arts are shifting. futureStage is a global research collaborative dedicated to investigating new scenarios for the performing arts in society. Newly released, the futureStage Manifesto offers a vision of performance as a human right, intimately entangled with all the stages on which contemporary life is performed, and offering global society new skills, sensibilities, and points of view. https://mlml.io/e/decentralized-storytelling/ Thu, 28 Oct 2021 05:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/decentralized-storytelling/ seminar DECENTRALIZED STORYTELLING – WHERE AI, THE BLOCKCHAIN, CODE, AND METAVERSE INTERSECT We find ourselves in a unique moment where traditional systems are being decentralized. From banking to retail to education to entertainment – consumers, students, and fans are taking control. The blockchain is ushering in new opportunities for storytelling, collecting, and monetization of digital assets. This, combined with advancements in AI, gaming engines, and mixed-reality-based technologies is giving rise to the metaverse – a collective shared space that has the potential to bridge the virtual and the physical in unexpected and powerful ways. https://mlml.io/p/futurestage/ Fri, 15 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/futurestage/ project Future Stage is an international initiative broadly concerned with the future of the performing arts: with the needs and possibilities for media, culture, and presence in a hyperconnected world; the civic stakes of the performing arts today; emergent modes and genres of performance and organization; the architecture of future performance spaces; and the future professions that will animate those performance venues. It is both theoretical and practical: consisting in A Manifesto for the Future Stage (which was published on Oct. https://mlml.io/e/ransmedia-technology-and-the-future-of-theatre/ Thu, 30 Sep 2021 05:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/ransmedia-technology-and-the-future-of-theatre/ seminar TRANSMEDIA, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE FUTURE OF THEATRE The lecture focuses on the collaboration between digital pioneers and theatre, and how it can help theatre reimagine its connection with its audiences. From candlelight to Pepper’s ghost, the printing press to the internet, theatre has always used the newest technologies to tell and share its stories. The tools that have developed over the past 400 years have been critical to enabling Shakespeare’s plays to be performed, reimagined, and reinterpreted for diverse audiences, keeping the form of presentation as perennially relevant as the content of his work. https://mlml.io/p/3d-cartography-of-covid-19/ Thu, 30 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/3d-cartography-of-covid-19/ project The 3D Cartography of Covid-19 is a collaborative project showcased in 2021 at Ars Electronica, a prominent new media art festival in Linz, Austria. The project employs a three-dimensional data visualization to showcase the tireless efforts of scientists during the pandemic to cope with the fear the virus has generated. The visualization features over 600,000 scientific articles collected from the Covid-19 Open Research Dataset Challenge. These articles are arranged based on language similarity using dimensionality reduction, while their publication dates are factored in to create a timeline on the third axis. https://mlml.io/p/light-box/ Mon, 12 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/light-box/ project How do we experience a collection? The Lightbox Gallery in the Renzo Piano designed facility is a venue for digital experiments and new media projects that respond to collections held at the Harvard Art Museums. Built in collaboration with faculty, staff, students, and visiting artists, projects in this space use digital tools to reveal connections between objects and play with traditions of display. Some of these projects are responsive, allowing users to navigate and manipulate the collections. https://mlml.io/p/hindsight-20-21/ Thu, 01 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/hindsight-20-21/ project The holdings of the Harvard Art Museums are part of a larger collection: that of Harvard University, itself a collection of departments and schools, institutes and centers, laboratories, libraries, and museums. Varied in shape, scope, and size, these component parts have their roots in the curriculum: in what we teach and learn as a community of researchers, teachers, and students. The Covid-19 pandemic and the protest movement ignited by the killing of George Floyd have surely left their mark on the curriculum during the academic year 2020-2021. https://mlml.io/p/algorithm-inventarium-ai/ Thu, 24 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/algorithm-inventarium-ai/ project Algorithm Inventarium (also known as AI+) is a recently concluded collaboration between the Austrian Academy of Science (ÖAW) and metaLAB (at) Harvard that sought to explore the development of an open knowledge base regarding algorithmic culture. Five main areas were explored in the course of the project: • the sketching out of an open-source citizen science digital repository (“inventarium”) and taxonomy of algorithms • experimentation with toolkits and protocols for a series of sprints dedicated to the collaborative analysis of algorithms pertinent to urban settings https://mlml.io/p/dear-loneliness/ Tue, 01 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/dear-loneliness/ project Over half of Americans say their mental health is suffering amid the COVID-19 outbreak, exacerbating the fact that one in five already reported feeling lonely before it. For BIPOC communities, the toll of both physical and psychological isolation has only been greater. Created by by Jessica Lao, Sarah Lao, and Carissa Chen, “Dear Loneliness” is a large-scale collaborative art project that seeks to write the longest letter in the world as a memorial to 2020, the COVID-19 era, and the racial injustices that have dominated this year. https://mlml.io/e/2021-virtual-creative-spring-workshops/ Fri, 28 May 2021 20:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/2021-virtual-creative-spring-workshops/ workshop metaLAB’s experimental, materials-based creative workshops bring together hybrid formats that include design thinking exercises, group discussion, and physical prototyping (yes, even on zoom!) to think through pressing questions and work toward possible reformulations, new metaphors—and maybe, some solutions. Created and led by metaLAB Director of Art & Education, Sarah Newman, these workshops will cover wide ranging topics including artificial intelligence, time, and online communication, through the lenses of technology, psychology, and philosophy. https://mlml.io/e/animals-in-the-machine/ Thu, 15 Apr 2021 05:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/animals-in-the-machine/ seminar ANIMALS IN THE MACHINE: ROBOTIC ANIMAL AGENTS Building on the work around cyborgs and the non-human “others,” this talk illustrates the development of several types of robotic animals and insects, from animal drones and animal “spys,” to artistic robotic/cyborgean animal installations. My aim is to begin to discern in which cases a possible animal “agency” might provoke a rethinking of the human-technological-animal relationship. Looking specifically at work such as Korean/US artist Doo Sung Yoo’s animal-machine hybrids, biomimetic “mixed societies” of robotic and live cockroaches, and animal drones and automata, this talk examines questions of relationality, and possibilities for how mechanized animals, controlled by humans and, at times, at their least “animal,” might produce a disturbance that provokes possibility as a dissenting agent. https://mlml.io/e/playable-theatre-on-gaming-and-aesthetic-control/ Tue, 23 Mar 2021 05:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/playable-theatre-on-gaming-and-aesthetic-control/ seminar PLAYABLE THEATRE: ON GAMING AND AESTHETIC CONTROL Discussions of the remediation of video games in theatre often adopt a language of enhanced agency: greater choice, participation, openness, recasting the spectator as a player. But the procedural orientation of gaming also imposes significant constraints, both in terms of explicit rule sets and occluded controls. This talk will combine interviews with artists and case studies to examine the conflicting ideological and dramaturgical functions of digital games within theatre, and to propose that the “minimal gameplay” movement is a more accurate model for the marriage of gaming and theatre than “open-world games” or “environmental storytelling. https://mlml.io/e/technology-and-transmedia-dramaturgy-in-contemporary-japanese-performing-arts/ Thu, 18 Feb 2021 17:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/technology-and-transmedia-dramaturgy-in-contemporary-japanese-performing-arts/ talk TECHNOLOGY AND TRANSMEDIA DRAMATURGY IN CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE PERFORMING ARTS This lecture focuses on the recent trends of transmedia and technology in contemporary Japanese performing arts. It begins with an overview of a wide scope of artists exploring objects, images, and new media dramaturgy. This includes a discussion of works by Dumb Type, Takayama Akira, Tanino Kuro, Hirata Oriza. Representatives of the younger generation, such as Ichihara Satoko and the theatre collective Hanchu-Yuei, are also included. https://mlml.io/p/ocean-amplification/ Mon, 01 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/ocean-amplification/ project The shape of the world’s oceans is changing. According to a 2019 report in the journal Science, wind speed increases in the Earth’s southernmost oceans induced by ocean warming have led over the last thirty or so years to an .25% surge in the wave height of the largest 10 percent of waves. As such, the wave emerges as a key symbol of ocean transformation: of the material effects of climate change, alongside intensified storms, sea-level rise, and increasing temperatures. https://mlml.io/e/printed-matter/ Thu, 28 Jan 2021 16:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/printed-matter/ event We were very pleased to inaugurate our distribution partnership with Printed Matter, one of the oldest and most venerable artist’s bookstores in the US. In a webinar hosted by Printed Matter on January 28th, the metaLAB team showcased the three mL “knowledge objects” now carried by Printed Matter: Curatorial A(I)gents, metaLAB (at) Harvard: Selected Works, and Library Beyond the Book Card Deck. These three publications are physical manifestations of the work within metaLAB, highlighting the team’s constant flux and growth as an idea foundry, a knowledge design lab, and a production studio. https://mlml.io/e/the-future-of-science-museums/ Thu, 10 Dec 2020 16:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/the-future-of-science-museums/ event ONLINE Thursday, December 10 12–1 pm EST The Future of Science Museums: Michael John Gorman in conversation with Jeffrey Schnapp from metaLAB(at)Harvard on Vimeo. In Idea Colliders (the first volume in the new metaLAB projects series with MIT Press), Michael John Gorman issues a provocative call for the transformation of science museums and science centers from institutions dedicated to the transmission of cultural capital to dynamic “idea colliders” that spark creative collaborations and connections. https://mlml.io/e/spectral-storytelling/ Thu, 03 Dec 2020 17:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/spectral-storytelling/ talk SPECTRAL STORYTELLING. SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT THROUGH TECHNOLOGY IN TRAUMATIZED ENVIRONMENTS How to responsibly design open transmedia environments engaging audiences and using critical theories, speculative design, and distributed leadership? Can technology work for the benefit of excluded, both human and nonhuman actors, and reveal the essential problems of traumatized places, historically unclear and hidden events? The lecture will be focused on the analysis of two examples from the practice of the Humanities/Art/Technology Research Center: the interactive installation Post-Apocalypsis (2015) dealing with the problem of the spectral nature of the Chernobyl disaster as a multifaceted and long-term cultural trauma, and the Ecological and Social Archive of Lake Elsensee-Rusałka (2018-2021), which is a media platform for social interaction with the historical, urban and ecological problems of this place. https://mlml.io/e/designing-mixed-reality-experiences/ Thu, 19 Nov 2020 17:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/designing-mixed-reality-experiences/ talk EMBODIMENT AND PRESENCE IN DESIGNING PERFORMATIVE MIXED-REALITY EXPERIENCES In the last few years, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have seen rapid development in usability and accessibility. As a result, such technologies increasingly appeal to performing artists who want to explore their creative potential. Unlike the 90s, when escapist ideas embraced disembodied cyberspace, current VR/AR experiences are purposely embodied and connected to the actual physical environment. In this lecture, Joris Weijdom discusses some of the key concepts, such as embodiment, presence, and immersion, that concern mixed-reality design in the performing arts. https://mlml.io/e/from-sea-to-seen/ Thu, 05 Nov 2020 16:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/from-sea-to-seen/ event ONLINE Thursday, November 5 12–1 pm EDT From Sea to Seen: a metaLAB conversation with A. Kendra Greene from metaLAB(at)Harvard on Vimeo. With a population roughly that of St. Louis, Iceland boasts 265 museums: museums of driftwood; museums of birds; museums of sorcery and sea monsters. Here, metaLAB’s Matthew Battles joins a conversation with author A. Kendra Greene, whose lively, wise book explores the collections of this long-isolated, tourist-buffeted nation. At metaLAB, we’re fascinated with & flummoxed by museums large and small. https://mlml.io/e/covid19-transmedia-and-posthuman-existence/ Fri, 23 Oct 2020 17:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/covid19-transmedia-and-posthuman-existence/ talk COVID19, TRANSMEDIA AND THE ART OF POSTHUMAN EXISTENCE During the Covid19 crisis, technological addiction has evolved into the digitalization of daily life and experience. In this delicate historical moment, the biological body, at risk of viral infection, is reclaimed by the booming of virtualized life. No longer related to work or entertainment, the screen has become our mirror. This talk will focus on transmedia as our existential manifestation, full of potential, agency, and response-ability. https://mlml.io/e/transmedia-dramaturgy-1/ Fri, 09 Oct 2020 17:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/transmedia-dramaturgy-1/ talk TRANSMEDIA DRAMATURGY OF PRE- AND POST-PANDEMIC THEATRE The classical, Aristotelian dramaturgy of two-dimensional linear storytelling traditionally used in theatre and film no longer works in transmedia narratives which in addition to deploying familiar plot-driven structural devices (inciting incident, climax, denouement), often incorporate multiple access points, serendipity, immersion, worldbuilding, role play, seriality, and time/space co-presence. The vertical and horizontal structure of transmedia narratives has unpenned our previously familiar dramaturgical concepts, demanding a whole new vocabulary and structural understanding of how meaning is created in the three-dimensional paradigm of multiplatform storytelling. https://mlml.io/e/every-body/ Thu, 08 Oct 2020 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/every-body/ event ONLINE Thursday, October 8 12–1 pm EDT EVERY BODY: a conversation with SARA HENDREN & ELIZABETH GUFFEY from metaLAB(at)Harvard on Vimeo. What does it look like when we engineer assistance for adaptation, rather than “normalcy”? How do makers, users, and designers actively reshape environments into usable worlds? In this conversation with Sara Hendren, author of What Can a Body Do? (Riverhead 2020); and Elizabeth Guffey, co-editor of & contributor to Making Disability Modern (Bloomsbury 2020), we explore the hidden assumptions on which our everyday environment is built, and the roles of design & technology in defining ability & disability. https://mlml.io/e/curatorial-a-i-gents-at-ars-electronica-2020/ Fri, 11 Sep 2020 20:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/curatorial-a-i-gents-at-ars-electronica-2020/ event ONLINE Friday, September 11 12-2pm EDT In partnership with the Austrian Academy of Sciences, metaLAB is bringing Curatorial A(i)gents to the Ars Electronica 2020 festival, happening 9–13 September in Linz, Austria and, virtually, around the world. The theme for this year’s festival, “Kepler’s Gardens,” highlights the tenuous connections binding the world together in this critical time, with attention to two binaries in particular: AUTONOMY vs. DEMOCRACY and TECHNOLOGY vs. ECOLOGY. The projects in Curatorial A(i)gents cut across these binaries with wit and great pertinence, and we’re excited to bring them to Ars Electronica’s worldwide audience. https://mlml.io/p/lexical-cartography-of-dh-2020/ Mon, 31 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/lexical-cartography-of-dh-2020/ project Lexical Cartography is a digital tool that combines network visualization and natural language processing to help scholars navigate scientific conferences in a new and innovative way. This tool visually displays conference speakers based on their lexical similarity, where the closer two speakers are in the visual space, the more their subject matters are related. The tool was created by grouping articles from the conference Digital Humanities 2020, transforming tokens into graph edges connecting authors, and drawing the network as an interactive interface through JavaScript and WebGL. https://mlml.io/p/second-look/ Mon, 31 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/second-look/ project Not unlike animal forms of intelligence, artificial intelligence relies upon pattern recognition. But its understanding of patterns is dependent upon rigid and rigorous categories predefined by human programmers and upon far more limited data inputs than those provided by the sensory apparatus of a sentient being. Second Look calls attention to the circularity of how an artificial intelligence “sees” and “knows” by asking it to infer gender and sentiment in paintings from the Harvard Art Museums. https://mlml.io/p/their-names/ Tue, 30 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/their-names/ project We live in a world of systemic racism and systemic violence. The two are inextricably intertwined. This violence tears at victims’ families, communities, and everyone involved in fatal encounters with law enforcement. Its effects fall disproportionately on communities of color and Black communities, families, and lives in particular. This page visualizes the names of over 28,000 fatal encounters with police nationwide, from 2000 until the death of George Floyd. It treats the victims as individual persons, highlighting the often sad and disturbing stories behind each datapoint. https://mlml.io/p/womanhouse-kunsthaus-graz/ Sun, 07 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/womanhouse-kunsthaus-graz/ project This exhibit is an installation of Womanhouse (a memory theater). From Kunsthaus Graz: About the exhibition This group exhibition presents the legendary founding years (1970–1980) of the American art university ‘California Institute of the Arts’ (CalArts), which gathered numerous well-known teachers and personalities such as Allan Kaprow, Judy Chicago, John Baldessari or Alison Knowles and brought forth such artists as Mike Kelly, Stephen Prina or Suzanne Lacy. The exhibition with the title Where Art Might Happen. https://mlml.io/p/hypercam/ Sun, 31 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/hypercam/ project During the first months of 2020, human relationships turned virtual. Once a bounded practice, a backup for otherwise face-to-face encounters, video conferencing became the normative mode of interaction for work meetings, friendships, education, love relationships and family gatherings on both the local and global scales. Hypercam enacts a gesture of visual resistance to the squared-off talking heads that we have all become; it converts the interface flatland into a multidimensional space of play. https://mlml.io/e/future-of-transmedia-performance/ Thu, 14 May 2020 05:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/future-of-transmedia-performance/ seminar THE FUTURE OF TRANSMEDIA PERFORFORMANCE This panel of six distinguished speakers—scholars, dramaturgs, and directors—moderated by the Transmedia Arts seminar co-Chair, Magda Romanska, will explore the impact of pandemic on the experimental transmedia theatre and performance. Before the pandemic, theatre and performing arts had been experimenting with new media in a limited way. Although there were some experiments in multiplatform, transmedia, and digital theatre, they remained the domain of experimental avant-garde artists. https://mlml.io/p/this-recommendation-system-is-broken/ Thu, 09 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/this-recommendation-system-is-broken/ project Imagine that you are gazing at Claude Monet’s The Gare Saint-Lazare: Arrival of a Train. A typical recommendation algorithm will suggest that you look at other Impressionist paintings: why not another work by Claude Monet, perhaps Red Boats, Argenteuil? It relies upon conventional, longstanding, consecrated associations: between artists, art movements, periods, schools, and subject matters. The present project turns this familiar matchmaking practice on its head, seeking to transport the viewer from center to periphery, from the gallery wall to deep in the storage closet, from the highly valued to the undervalued and rarely seen. https://mlml.io/p/a-ixquisite-corpse/ Wed, 01 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/a-ixquisite-corpse/ project AIxquisite Corpse Images of the objects that museums collect are increasingly analyzed by algorithms. What is the relationship between algorithmic image analysis and time-honored traditions of human study, analysis, and curation? How might humans interact with algorithms to produce new modes of creative and curatorial expression? AIxquisite Corpse invites museum patrons to explore these questions by playing a variant of the famed surrealist game. According the game’s rules, players take turns drawing individual sections of a body; as the drawing is passed along, it is folded so as to conceal previous sections. https://mlml.io/p/sympoietic-system/ Wed, 01 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/sympoietic-system/ project Sympoietic System Expectations of artificial intelligence are typically drawn from expectations of ourselves as autonomous, thinking agents. However, humans are social as well as cognitive beings; they make worlds by interacting with one another, with objects, and with systems. Dempster and Haraway have called this phenomenon “sympoiesis,” or “making-together.” Here, the observed weather becomes the curator of an exhibition. The project was developed for the Harvard Art Museums’ Lightbox Gallery, which is located between a glass roof above and a sweeping courtyard view below. https://mlml.io/e/site-unscene/ Sun, 23 Feb 2020 16:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/site-unscene/ event THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED 2nd Annual Humanities & New Media Lecture Johanna Drucker, Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies at UCLA Monday, March 23, 5pm CGIS South, Tsai Auditorium Site Unscene: Medial Ideology and the Literary Interface Who speaks in an interface? How do we understand the work done by the graphical, tactile, audio and spatial features of on-screen and ambient works of literary production? The many aspects of language–subject positions and performative dimensions–do not map neatly onto the structuring features of literary work in on-screen and networked media. https://mlml.io/e/workshops/ Wed, 01 Jan 2020 16:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/workshops/ event metaLAB is committed to interdisciplinary work and collaboration across the humanities, arts, and technology, with innovative research methods and media-rich outputs. Over the past several years, we have offered a number of workshops, a wintersession course, and a graduate seminar that bridge disparate forms of scholarship. metaLAB has created a workshop methodology that brings creative and artistic materials to bear on otherwise abstract research problems. The workshops, designed by metaLAB Director of Art & Education, Sarah Newman, and led by scholars and artists from metaLAB, utilize design-thinking methodologies to contend with conceptual and philosophical questions through a series of exercises and artistic production. https://mlml.io/p/idea-colliders/ Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/idea-colliders/ project Today’s science museums descend from the Kunst-und Wunderkammern of the Renaissance—collectors’ private cabinets of curiosities—through the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851 to today’s “interactive” exhibits promising educational fun. In this book, Michael John Gorman issues a provocative call for the transformation of science museums and science centers from institutions dedicated to the transmission of cultural capital to dynamic “idea colliders” that spark creative collaborations and connections. This new kind of science museum would not stage structured tableaux of science facts but would draw scientists into conversation with artists, designers, policymakers, and the public. https://mlml.io/p/transmedia-arts-seminar/ Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/transmedia-arts-seminar/ project metaLAB (at) Harvard is partnering with the Mahindra Humanities Center to sponsor the Transmedia Arts Seminar, chaired by metaLAB principal researcher, Magda Romanska and metaLAB affiliate Ramona Mosse. The seminar considers the intersection of contemporary art/theatre and new media technologies, taking up immersive, multisite, and networked modes of transmedia storytelling, performances instrumentalizing a range of live and digital platforms and formats, including social media, augmented and virtual reality, haptic and digital technology, visual and audio mapping, human/AI interaction, algorithms, and bodily and sensory enhancements. https://mlml.io/p/womanhouse-a-memory-theater/ Sun, 10 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/womanhouse-a-memory-theater/ project This exhibit has moved to Kunsthaus Graz. Developed by Kim Albrecht and Jeffrey Schnapp with Chiara Fauda-Pichet and Mindy Seu, this room-sized installation is part of the exhibition Wo Kunst geschehen kann – Die frühen Jahre des CalArts :: Where art might happen: The early years of CalArts, which opened at the Kestnergesellschaft in Hannover, Germany on August 30. (The exhibition runs through November 10, 2019.) The Feminist Art Program at CalArts was barely three months old when, in November 1971, work commenced on Womanhouse: the program’s inaugural exhibition project. https://mlml.io/p/tacit-knowledge/ Tue, 22 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/tacit-knowledge/ project Tacit Knowledge provides an insight into the complex artistic and educational practices that characterized the first decade of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). There is a special focus on the conceptual and feminist strategies developed in and from John Baldessari’s Post Studio class as well as Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s Feminist Art Program, which was initiated in 1970 and brought to the newly founded art school in 1971. https://mlml.io/p/curricle/ Tue, 01 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/curricle/ project Try it out at curricle.berkman.harvard.edu (advanced beta) Keep up to date with the latest features and project updates Once, a university’s course catalog was a big book. Students could flip through it, write on its pages, and feel the depth of how many classes were offered. When the catalog went digital, this physical aspect was lost, leaving students with a flattened screen that showed courses as isolated atoms in a list. https://mlml.io/p/curricle-lens/ Mon, 30 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/curricle-lens/ project A research project of metaLAB (at) Harvard, C​urricle Lens​ uses data narration to explore the conversational nature of the college curriculum. With comprehensive data on more than three decades of course offerings, we’re able to detect historical trends. Shifts in course titles and formats allow us to trace the signals of topics, issues, and meanings. And by collating these data shifts with historical events, we can gauge the pulse of external events—social movements; musical genres; literary publications—that shape and redirect the ordered progress of college teaching and learning. https://mlml.io/p/the-future-of-secrets/ Wed, 18 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/the-future-of-secrets/ project “With the smallest as with the greatest happiness, however, there is always one thing which makes it happiness: being able to forget or, to express it in a more learned fashion, the capacity to live unhistorically while it endures.” - Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, 1874 The conversation about digital selves contends with a variety of platforms, including email as well as text message and social media. https://mlml.io/e/the-future-of-secrets-northeastern-school-of-law/ Tue, 17 Sep 2019 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/the-future-of-secrets-northeastern-school-of-law/ event When: Tuesday September 17, 2019 Time: 5 PM – 6:30 PM Where: Dockser Hall Lobby, Northeastern University School of Law Exhibition also open on Wednesday, September 18 from 9 am - 7 pm. The Future of Secrets was produced in collaboration with Jessica Yurkofsky (creative technologist) and Rachel Kalmar (data scientist), and metaLAB at Harvard. About CLIC’s Artist Residency: This exhibition is part of CLIC’s ART (Art Resistance Technology) Artist Residency. https://mlml.io/e/earth-measurer/ Sat, 07 Sep 2019 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/earth-measurer/ event At the annual meeting of the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S) in New Orleans, Matthew Battles will discuss his project, “Earth Measurer,” on a panel called “Regenerating Algorithms.” The panel will bring together a number of projects that address how algorithms might be rethought or reconfigured to support critical reflection and social justice. Presentations will illustrate a range of ways in which we can remake algorithms: rethinking the choices and authority of their training data; recalibrating their functionality for specific contexts; and realigning their outputs for new audiences. https://mlml.io/p/earth-measurer-networks-natures/ Sat, 07 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/earth-measurer-networks-natures/ project Slightly fewer than one million insect species have been identified, but some eight million may exist on the planet, and many of them may never be known. In Earth Measurer, we’re using machine learning to generate names for that invisible imaginary: species of moths and butterflies that have not yet been named, described, and entered into databases and museum collections. “Nature,” William James said, “is but another name we give to excess. https://mlml.io/p/distinction-machine/ Sat, 10 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/distinction-machine/ project Distinction Machine By rendering shapes of different colors in the same location, the computer reveals its incapacity of representing ambiguity. In these experiments, a computer-mediated aesthetic of strange and intricate patterns emerges. Intro: distinctionmachine.kimalbrecht… Main: distinctionmachine.kimalbrecht… When the computer is asked to perform the simple task of rendering shapes of different colors on the same position, it is confronted with a problem of “determining” which color to display. Instead of deciding for the one or the other, or blending colors, the machine creates strange and intricate patterns. https://mlml.io/e/futurefood-iii/ Sat, 15 Jun 2019 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/futurefood-iii/ event Cambridge Public Library Saturday, June 15, 1-4 PM In a series of three Spring events, FUTUREFOOD is working with local producers, brewers, and restaurateurs to create foods of the future drawn from the natural world around us—the kind of ingredients and flavors we’ll need to cultivate if we’re going to nourish ourselves and our communities on a warming planet. Featuring our nonhuman neighbors, the bees, who are involved in agriculture and flowering lives of all kinds. https://mlml.io/e/where-will-your-values-take-ai-1/ Fri, 14 Jun 2019 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/where-will-your-values-take-ai-1/ event Tunis 2019 metaLAB Workshop Where will your values take AI? Co-designing a Moral Labyrinth (and taking one home!) Sarah Newman, Jie Qi, Mindy Seu Friday June 14, 2019 9-10:15 am Rightscon Tunis, Tunisia This workshop, led by artists and designers from Harvard University and the University of Tokyo, will bring together participants to think through difficult questions questions about human relationships to technology, and create a visual work that each participant will get to take home. https://mlml.io/e/futurefood-ii/ Sat, 25 May 2019 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/futurefood-ii/ event Cambridge Public Library Saturday, May 25, 1-4 PM In a series of three Spring events, FUTUREFOOD is working with local producers, brewers, and restaurateurs to create foods of the future drawn from the natural world around us—the kind of ingredients and flavors we’ll need to cultivate if we’re going to nourish ourselves and our communities on a warming planet. Featuring the weedy ways of nature in the city, with an ice cream made with invasive Japanese Knotweed, cooked up by Toscanini’s Gus Rancatore. https://mlml.io/e/navigating-the-moral-labyrinth/ Mon, 13 May 2019 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/navigating-the-moral-labyrinth/ event Navigating the Moral Labyrinth: Intersections of Philosophy, AI, and Art Harvard Kennedy School, Carr Center for Human Rights May 13, 5:30-6:45 PM Wexner 102 Moral Labyrinth is a research project and art installation that focuses on human relationships to technology, and explores the difficult moral questions that emerge alongside the introduction of new technologies. The work contends with the challenge of embedding values into powerful systems when these systems are created by humans who, ourselves, are inconsistent and imperfect moral agents. https://mlml.io/e/futurefood-i/ Sat, 11 May 2019 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/futurefood-i/ event Cambridge Public Library Saturday, May 11, 1-4 PM In a series of three Spring events, FUTUREFOOD is working with local producers, brewers, and restaurateurs to create foods of the future drawn from the natural world around us—the kind of ingredients and flavors we’ll need to cultivate if we’re going to nourish ourselves and our communities on a warming planet. FUTUREFOOD I features KVASS, a traditional Russian fermented beverage made from leftover bread, created in collaboration with Aeronaut Brewery. https://mlml.io/e/moral-labyrinth-at-we-robot-miami/ Thu, 11 Apr 2019 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/moral-labyrinth-at-we-robot-miami/ event Moral Labyrinth at WeRobot Miami April 11-13 From WeRobot 2019: As machines get smarter, more complex, and able to operate autonomously in the world, we’ll need to program them with certain “values.” Yet we do not agree on what we value: across cultures, across individuals, even within ourselves. We often do not act in accordance with what we say we value, so should these systems learn from what we say or what we do? https://mlml.io/e/the-truelist-autopia-and-untitled-you-as-computing-and-poetry/ Tue, 02 Apr 2019 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/the-truelist-autopia-and-untitled-you-as-computing-and-poetry/ event The Truelist, Autopia, and Untitled [You] as Computing and Poetry Nick Montfort April 2, 12:00-1:15 PM Sever 110 Please join us in an intimate dialogue with computational poet Nick Montfort on Tuesday, April 2nd at Harvard. Nick will give a talk entitled “The Truelist, Autopia, and Untitled [You] as Computing and Poetry” to the English Department seminar, “Poetry Machines.” Light refreshments provided. Co-sponsors: MetaLab and Critical Media Practice Nick Montfort’s computer-generated books of poetry include #! https://mlml.io/e/open-session-artifacts-in-space/ Wed, 27 Mar 2019 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/open-session-artifacts-in-space/ event metaLAB_open session: Artifacts in Space Human Culture & Design Beyond Earth’s Bounds With Sands Fish March 27, 3-4 PM Cabot Library Discovery Bar Space provides dramatically different constraints from those with which we evolved. It follows that the way we design and create will change and adapt. As we look at the longer timeline of humans living in space, what emerges is nothing short of a new human culture. This talk will explore the unique human factors of microgravity, and review a number of cultural experiments being undertaken to understand how art and design will change in our interplanetary future. https://mlml.io/e/ai-big-ideas-and-shiny-objects/ Tue, 12 Mar 2019 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/ai-big-ideas-and-shiny-objects/ event AI, Big Ideas, & Shiny Objects March 12 12:30-2:30 and 3:30-5:30 SXSW 2019 There is so much buzz about AI. What is real? What is fiction? This hands-on session, led by Sarah Newman, Alexandra Dolan-Mescal, and Jessica Yurkofsky, will bring together tech professionals, creatives, and scholars to explore AI questions big and small, and come up with quick prototypes and creative solutions with unexpected (and yes, shiny) materials. Steeped in the practice of visualizing ideas, and making complex questions accessible to broad audiences, the workshop will focus on AI’s current and future impacts on society, and how to productively contend with and move forward in this exciting and challenging time. https://mlml.io/e/open-session-alterspace/ Wed, 06 Mar 2019 16:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/open-session-alterspace/ event metaLAB_open session: Alterspace March 6, 3-4 PM Cabot Library Discovery Bar Alterspace is a new kind of reading room that lets library patrons control light and sound, adapting conditions for brainstorming or quiet study. Join the Alterspace design team (from metaLAB & Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab) in this open session exploring digital placemaking and adaptive, emancipatory design in public spaces of all kinds. Through open sessions in Cabot Library’s Discovery Bar, metaLAB seeks to highlight the emerging community making new media and digital scholarship happen at Harvard and beyond. https://mlml.io/e/alterspace-at-cambridge-public-library/ Fri, 01 Mar 2019 16:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/alterspace-at-cambridge-public-library/ event An immersive library experience that gives visitors control over light, color, sound, and space to create the ideal environment for whatever brings them through the library’s doors. Debuting at Cambridge Public Library, March 1-4 Opening reception: March 1 at 3pm Rossi Room, Cambridge Public Library A collaboration between Harvard’s metaLAB and Library Innovation Lab, Alterspace is an immersive library experience that puts visitors in charge of their surroundings. The library’s collection can transport patrons into the worlds of fiction, history, art. https://mlml.io/e/is-a-i-laughing-at-us/ Mon, 04 Feb 2019 16:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/is-a-i-laughing-at-us/ event Cambridge Public Library Monday, February 04, 2019, 6:30-8pm Lecture Hall, Main Branch, 449 Broadway Join a spirited and accessible discussion of artificial intelligence and art, how humor and creativity interrelate, and the successes and the shortcomings of new Al technologies, featuring poet and lawyer Jessica Fjeld, Google AI Engineering Director Jon Orwant, and metaLAB research assistant (and incoming Harvard student) Nikhil Dharmaraj. Inspired by Cambridge Public Library’s recent exhibition, the-laughing-room The Laughing Room by Jonny Sun and Hannah Davis, in which visitors found themselves on a sitcom set where the laughter was controlled by an Al. https://mlml.io/e/overflow/ Sat, 19 Jan 2019 16:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/overflow/ event OVERFLOW: INEXPLICABLE PARTS OF THE INTIMATE January 19 – February 3, 2019 Rainbow Unicorn Gallery, Berlin An exhibition in conjunction with the Vorspiel program of transmediale 2019 in Berlin. “Nature,” William James said, “is but another name we give to excess.” Once seemingly endlessly abundant, life on earth has been revealed in its fragility and ephemerality. Our computational systems, meanwhile, processing endless layers of data, seem ever more like that natural excess of which James wrote. https://mlml.io/p/ai-art-at-meta-lab/ Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/ai-art-at-meta-lab/ project > > >Download the metaLAB AI + Art Overview, 2017-2019 While much public discourse on art and artificial intelligence focuses on the use of algorithms in art-making or the creative capacity of machines, metaLAB’s intent is different: to use artistic means to explore the human dimensions of artificial intelligence. In a series of projects ranging across interactive installation, creative computing, writing, teaching, and public speaking, metaLAB projects in this area explore the psychological and philosophical realms of electronic systems, reflect on the long history of human fascination with thinking machines, and consider our uncertain moral reckoning with the agency and autonomy of computers. https://mlml.io/p/ascoltando-la-corte/ Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/ascoltando-la-corte/ project Ascoltando la Corte explores how technology can illuminate history, focusing on the development of music and craftsmanship in two Italian Renaissance cities, Ferrara and Modena. In the late 15th century, music was a diplomatic ritual for the construction of power for the Este Family in Ferrara, featuring a polyphonic structure. Two centuries later, music was transformed as a result of the Church’s withdrawal of investiture to the family, forcing them to retreat to Modena. https://mlml.io/p/deep-learning-in-the-museum/ Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/deep-learning-in-the-museum/ project Deep Learning in the Museum seeks to explore how machine learning can be employed to develop new ways of working with museum collections in the interconnecting domains of cultural-historical scholarship and curatorial practice. It aims to investigate the generative powers and limits of emerging artificial- intelligence technologies while, in the process, looking into critical issues at the intersection between technology and culture. In so doing, the project seeks to experiment with new historio-graphical and critical practices and to engage a robust dialogue in theory and practice within the disciplines of curatorship, history, art history, and visual culture studies. https://mlml.io/p/futurefood/ Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/futurefood/ project FUTUREFOOD is an interactive and participatory series of events that engages the public on matters of food waste, food justice, sustainable uses of urban green space, habitat loss, and the invisible or overlooked effects of climate change on urban ecology. Each of three events features a food or beverage pairing produced in collaboration with a local chef, brewer, forager, or fermentation expert to highlight a distinct facet of our food system. https://mlml.io/p/meta-lab-portfolio/ Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/meta-lab-portfolio/ project metaLAB began in 2011 as team of makers and thinkers betwixt and between the disciplines, sharing a vision for the digital arts and humanities that was playful, inventive, and visionary. Nine years, 36 grants, and hundreds of projects later, we’re still growing strong. The metaLAB portfolio is an index to those years of adventure, a document of projects and discoveries, and a harbinger of things to come. Regular Copy: $25 + shipping. https://mlml.io/p/moral-labyrinth/ Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/moral-labyrinth/ project Visit the Moral Labyrinth website As machines get smarter, more complex, and able to operate autonomously in the world, we’ll need to program them with certain “values.” Yet we do not agree on what we value: across cultures, across individuals, even within ourselves. We often do not act in accordance with what we say we value, so should these systems learn from what we say or what we do? What are the implications of how our current belief systems manifest in the swiftly approaching technological future? https://mlml.io/p/the-archive-of-now/ Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/the-archive-of-now/ project The Archive of Now is a collaboration between Harvard Libraries and metaLAB that will make Harvard library digital collections readily available for use and remix, and address conceptual questions about archives, digital search engines, and the use of recontextualization and appropriation in contemporary culture, particularly with regard to archival materials. The project, at its core, permits those in the Harvard community (and potentially beyond) to search or discover digital objects from Harvard Library collections, to access a user-friendly workflow in which to combine or juxtapose these images in novel and surprising ways, and then to print these newly created works for large format output. https://mlml.io/e/the-laughing-room/ Fri, 16 Nov 2018 16:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/the-laughing-room/ event The Laughing Room November 16–18, 2018 An interactive multimedia installation by Jonny Sun, in collaboration with Hannah Davis and Christopher Sun. Research assistant: Nikhil Dharmaraj. Created at metaLAB(at)Harvard and Prof. Stephanie Frampton’s ARTificial Intelligence group at MIT. Funded by metaLAB(at)Harvard, the MIT De Florez Fund for Humor, the Council of the Arts at MIT, and the MIT Center For Art, Science & Technology. Supported by MIT FX and High Output, Inc. https://mlml.io/e/2018-lita-library-technology-forum/ Thu, 08 Nov 2018 16:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/2018-lita-library-technology-forum/ event Wifi-proof booths; study carrels for napping; digital campfires for charging devices convivially—in the Library Test Kitchen seminar at the Graduate School of Design, metaLAB (at) Harvard has been exploring participatory innovation for libraries through fun, creative, improvisatory projects. And what’s a test kitchen without recipes? In this session, members of metaLAB will be on hand to demo their new platform for sharing such “recipes” for playful innovation in libraries—and to invite participants to contribute recipes of their own. https://mlml.io/e/moz-fest/ Mon, 22 Oct 2018 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/moz-fest/ event metaLAB will make our debut appearance at the international Mozilla Festival, MozFest, in London this weekend, with Moral Labyrinth a walking installation created by Sarah Newman that contends with the Value Alignment Problem in artificial intelligence. This is part of metaLAB’s ongoing exploration of the intersection of Art + AI, particularly focused on using interactive art to reflect on social and ethical problems that AI developments make relevant. From MozFest: https://mlml.io/e/digital-cultures-hybrid-matter/ Sat, 22 Sep 2018 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/digital-cultures-hybrid-matter/ event Held September 22-25, 2018 in Warsaw, Poland, the Digital Cultures conference is a program of interdisciplinary debates and presentations that explore the ways digital media technologies are transforming contemporary culture, society, and the economy. The participants included researchers, scholars, and artists from a wide range of disciplines, and among the presenters were metaLAB at Harvard’s Sarah Newman and Kim Albrecht. Newman gave a talk entitled “Understanding Ourselves and AI through Art” and was a panelist for the discussion of cultural impacts of artificial intelligence. https://mlml.io/e/ars-electronica/ Thu, 06 Sep 2018 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/ars-electronica/ event Ars Electronica, held in Linz, Austria, is one of the world’s largest festivals for art, technology, and society. This year’s theme is “Error—The Art of Imperfection,” and it takes place from September 6-10, 2018. metaLAB at Harvard will have a significant presence at the festival, with four of its members exhibiting their current projects. Creative Researcher Sarah Newman’s Moral Labyrinth engages with the Value Alignment Problem in Artificial Intelligence by having users answer a series of questions that reveal the conflicting values we have within ourselves. https://mlml.io/e/curricle-preview/ Thu, 02 Aug 2018 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/curricle-preview/ event Curricle Preview August 2, 2018, 2-3:30pm Gund Hall 121 With Professor Jeffrey Schnapp and metaLAB (at) Harvard. As the first release of Curricle nears completion, we are currently preparing for a large scale test of the platform during the fall semester. In advance of testing, metaLAB is holding an informational event on Thursday August 2nd, 2-3:30 pm in room 121 of Gund Hall (GSD). The full development and design team will be there to walk you through the platform, to describe future plans, and to answer questions. https://mlml.io/e/passports/ Thu, 10 May 2018 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/passports/ event Passports: Knowledge Design Workshop May 10, 2-4pm Houghton Library Register online: bit.ly/2KkQwMi Passports signify sovereignty and control, the freedom of travel and the stricture of borders. Their design is bound up with the aesthetics of governmentality; their history is that of the nation-state itself. In the academy, we typically produce knowledge about such things in the form of written texts. But what other forms can knowledge of passports take? The concept of Knowledge Design marks a practice of discovering new forms for learning and discovery, taking cues from design, media, performance, and the graphic arts. https://mlml.io/e/meta-lab-friends-open-lab/ Tue, 06 Mar 2018 16:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/meta-lab-friends-open-lab/ event metaLAB + friends openLAB March 6, 5:30-7:30 29 Garden St. Cambridge, MA Please join us for metaLAB’s 2018 openLAB, showcasing work by metaLAB and friends. March 6, 5:30pm-7:30pm at Arts @ 29 Garden, 29 Garden St. in Cambridge. Refreshments will be served! For more information, get in touch. https://mlml.io/e/machine-experience-ii/ Fri, 19 Jan 2018 16:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/machine-experience-ii/ event January 19 - February 4 Rainbow Unicorn Anklamer Str. 50, 10115. Berlin The possibilities of artificial intelligence have long seemed futuristic and far-fetched. Today, however, AI technology is making its impact felt in such real-world realms as autonomous vehicles, online searches and feeds, and the criminal justice system. metaLAB at Harvard presents MACHINE EXPERIENCE II, a showcase of works by metaLAB artists exploring the emotional effects of algorithms, the uncanny experiences of sensor-enabled computers, and what intelligent machines might reveal about understandings of the nature of intelligence itself. https://mlml.io/p/feminist-in-a-software-lab/ Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/feminist-in-a-software-lab/ project For over a dozen years, the Vectors Lab has experimented with digital scholarship through its online publication, Vectors, and through Scalar, a multimedia authoring platform. The history of this software lab intersects a much longer tale about computation in the humanities, as well as tensions about the role of theory in related projects. Tara McPherson considers debates around the role of cultural theory within the digital humanities and addresses Gary Hall’s claim that the goals of critical theory and of quantitative or computational analysis may be irreconcilable (or at the very least require “far more time and care”). https://mlml.io/p/invasive-spirits/ Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/invasive-spirits/ project Invasive plants are treated with scorn, but they make the city green and provide a host of good things. Invasive Spirits explores the city’s riot of invasive biodiversity, brewing, distilling, and making food with the cosmopolitan plants that share our urban worlds. While we’re discovering sensational tastes, we’re using our senses explore the city wild. By learning to appreciate the weedy world, can we share a richer relationship with nature in the city? https://mlml.io/p/library-test-kitchen-cookbook/ Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/library-test-kitchen-cookbook/ project Started at Harvard in 2011, the Library Test Kitchen is a seminar and community bringing together librarians, students, and designers to explore innovative new programs, services, and spatial strategies for libraries. Participants created wifi-proof booths, study carrels for napping, and digital campfires for charging devices convivially. Over its life, the seminar created a pop-up library lab in a retail storefront space in Harvard Square, visited SXSW, and moved from Harvard to the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College. https://mlml.io/p/networks-and-natures/ Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/networks-and-natures/ project The phenomena of climate change and spiraling ecological devastation are complexly intertwined with the rise of computer technology, digital media, and global information networks. As Bruno Latour has shown, the ways in which we think natures and networks are too often governed by metaphors drawn clumsily from theology, economics, and politics. Through a series of kindred projects in mapping and data visualization, video, photography, writing, and speculative making, metaLAB is exploring the ramifications of networks emerging in nature’s midst. https://mlml.io/p/nobody-8217-s-listening/ Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/nobody-8217-s-listening/ project Are secrets uniquely human? Our private lives, relationships,experiences, and secrets are mediated, influenced, and recorded by digital devices. Where are our secrets now? Where will they be in the future, and who—or what—might read them? How will AI systems of the future process the data we leave behind? Will they know things about us that we don’t (and never could) know about ourselves? A multimedia installation shown at Harvard Art Museums on August 8, 2017, Nobody’s Listening provoked such questions as the above, and many others besides. https://mlml.io/p/the-cyberlaw-guide-to-protest-art/ Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/the-cyberlaw-guide-to-protest-art/ project Check out the Cyberlaw Guide to Protest Art series Art plays a significant role in American democracy. Across the political spectrum, protest art — posters, songs, poems, memes, and more —inspires us, gives us a sense of community, and provides insight into how others think and feel about important and often controversial issues. While protest art has been part of our culture for a very long time, the Internet and social media have changed the available media and the visibility of protest artists. https://mlml.io/p/the-military-45-entertainment-complex/ Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/the-military-45-entertainment-complex/ project With the rise of drones and computer-controlled weapons, the line between war and video games continues to blur. In this book, the authors trace how the realities of war are deeply inflected by their representation in popular entertainment. War games and other media, in turn, feature an increasing number of weapons, tactics, and threat scenarios from the War on Terror. While past analyses have emphasized top-down circulation of pro-military ideologies through government public relations efforts and a cooperative media industry, The Military-Entertainment Complex argues for a nonlinear relationship, defined largely by market and institutional pressures. https://mlml.io/p/turing-39-s-mill/ Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/turing-39-s-mill/ project Turing’s Mill Matthew Battles Multi-channel video installation 2017 Wednesday, August 9, 10am-5pm Gallery talk 3 pm Harvard Art Museums Lightbox Gallery Shown in the Harvard Art Museums’ Lightbox Gallery on August 9, 2017, Turing’s Mill explored fragments from the philosophical history of machine intelligence, the work of two authors in particular: the 18th-century philosopher Wilhem Gottfried Leibniz; and Alan Turing, the 20th century mathematician and computer scientist. In 1714, Leibniz proposed an arresting thought experiment: imagine “a machine,” he suggests, “so constituted as to think, feel, and have perception…. https://mlml.io/p/artificial-senses/ Fri, 01 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/artificial-senses/ project Contemporary culture is unimaginable without the machines that surround us every day. Our knowledge depends on Google search results, our music taste on the mixes Spotify creates for us and our consumption on Amazon recommendations. This strange new world became part of our reality in a very short timeframe. Interface design creates this natural feeling. But if we want to live with these devices and understand them, we cannot just rely on the machines becoming something easily understandable to us. https://mlml.io/e/study-card-to-playlist/ Tue, 07 Nov 2017 16:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/study-card-to-playlist/ event Study Card to Playlist: the Social Life of the Course Catalog November 7, 2017, 12pm Lamont Forum Room With Professor Jeffrey Schnapp and metaLAB (at) Harvard. Visualized, annotated, connected: what should the course catalog look like in the 21st century? In this interactive lunch talk, members of metaLAB’s Curricle team will share details of the new platform they’re building for course-selection and discovery—and invite participants to help design and refine the system. https://mlml.io/e/blueprint-for-counter-education-at-vassar/ Thu, 28 Sep 2017 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/blueprint-for-counter-education-at-vassar/ event September 28, 2017 Vassar College From Vassar CAAD: Blueprint for Counter Education was one of the defining (but neglected) works of radical pedagogy of the Vietnam War era. Originally published in 1970, the book was accompanied by large posters that could serve as a portable learning environment for a new process-based model of education. In 2016 Blueprint was reissued in facsimile with an added booklet of essays and interviews about the original publication by Harvard’s Jeffrey T. https://mlml.io/p/blueprint-for-counter-education/ Thu, 28 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/blueprint-for-counter-education/ project An unusual publication appeared in bookstores in the fall 1970, authored by the sociologist Maurice Stein and his collaborator Larry Miller. Published by Doubleday, its title was Blueprint for Counter Education: Curriculum – Handbook – Wall Decoration – Shooting Script. It assumed the form of a boxed set made up of three posters and an oversized paperback, whose wrappers proclaimed: “This counter-university makes obsolete the traditional university process… There is no text book, no final exam; and the ‘faculty’ includes Marcuse, McLuhan, Eldridge Cleaver, and Jean-Luc Godard. https://mlml.io/e/color-rx/ Fri, 11 Aug 2017 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/color-rx/ event Color Rx Maia Leandra Interactive installation with color prescriptions 2017 Thursday, August 11, 10am-4pm Gallery talk 3pm Harvard Art Museums Lightbox Gallery Color is ephemeral and complex. An installation in the Lightbox Gallery at Harvard Art Museums, Color Rx contended with the individuality of perception, while maintaining that the experiences in which perceptions are grounded can be traced back to, and tethered together by, a common, colorful trend. Drawing inspiration from from Harvard Art Museums’ Forbes Pigment Collection, scholarly texts, and the artist’s knowledge and intuition, the piece explored lines between truth and belief, color and illusion. https://mlml.io/e/sherlock/ Thu, 10 Aug 2017 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/sherlock/ event Sherlock Jonathan Sun Interactive chatbot 2017 Thursday, August 10, 10am-5pm Harvard Art Museums Lightbox Gallery Sherlock addresses inequality in the availability of technology by presenting museumgoers with a chance to talk to an advanced AI chat bot, only to have the bot refuse to cooperate in conversation. The bot cites various reasons for not engaging meaningfully with museumgoers, including being too busy to talk, a lack of energy, the presence of more interesting problems or conversations elsewhere, and a general disdain for the average user. https://mlml.io/e/machine-experience/ Tue, 08 Aug 2017 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/machine-experience/ event MACHINE EXPERIENCE The possibilities of artificial intelligence have long seemed futuristic and far-fetched. Today, however, AI technology is making its impact felt in such real-world realms as autonomous vehicles, online searches and feeds, and the criminal justice system. In conjunction with the Berkman Klein Center and MIT Media Lab’s recently announced Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative, metaLAB at Harvard presented MACHINE EXPERIENCE, a showcase of works by metaLAB artists exploring the emotional effects of algorithms, the uncanny experiences of sensor-enabled computers, and what intelligent machines might reveal about understandings of the nature of intelligence itself. https://mlml.io/e/ai-art-38-design-workshop/ Sat, 08 Jul 2017 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/ai-art-38-design-workshop/ event AI Art & Design Workshop with metaLAB An experimental, creative, design workshop to think through both small big questions that come up arise with AI and explore them through art-making, design, and expressive provocation. No experience of any sort is required -- just curiosity, willingness to experiment, and an open mind. Saturday, July 8th, 12-3 pm (includes lunch) BKC Conference Room, 23 Everett St, 2nd Floor Open to: Fellows, Berkterns, Staff, Affiliates, and friends of community https://mlml.io/e/nobody-8217-s-listening-at-fear-and-loathing-of-the-online-self/ Tue, 23 May 2017 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/nobody-8217-s-listening-at-fear-and-loathing-of-the-online-self/ event Nobody’s Listening The Future of Secrets is an artistic research project that explores our relationship to and trust in machines, examining the laws and norms for protecting or preserving digital correspondence, and considering what might happen to our secrets now, and in the future. The work will take shape as a sound and video installation in Rome. Fear and Loathing of the Online Self A SAVAGE JOURNEY INTO THE HEART OF DIGITAL CULTURES https://mlml.io/e/sounds-of-lesvos/ Tue, 16 May 2017 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/sounds-of-lesvos/ event metaLAB is teaming up with the Office of Displaced Designers to offer a workshop on multisensory participatory mapping, open to both locals and displaced persons living in and near Mytilene on the island of Lesvos, Greece. Participants will explore space using the senses, developing a set of maneuvers for using mapping to think about problems of community & cultural development, political economy, and the flow of people and resources. Through a variety of accessible digital media, deep looking/listening, and hands-on making and paper-based expression, we’ll develop a mosaic of mapped expressions of sensory experience, affect, and sociopolitical concerns. https://mlml.io/e/in-flux-browsing-the-collections/ Sat, 13 May 2017 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/in-flux-browsing-the-collections/ event Workshop by Freie Universität Berlin and metaLAB at Harvard, Harvard University, Boston Saturday, May 13, 2017 Institut für Theaterwissenschaft Grunewaldstraße 35, 12165 Berlin https://mlml.io/e/dialogues-with-data-at-infovis/ Thu, 11 May 2017 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/dialogues-with-data-at-infovis/ event information+visualization public talk series at Fachhochschule Potsdam - University of Applied Sciences As scholars and curators turn to technological means for exploring the collections of libraries, archives, and museums, they increasingly turn to data visualization to express relations and facilitate search and discovery. At the same time, such institutions also offer ready typologies for encountering, interacting with, and discovering texts and objects. The gallery, the reading room, the performance space—to name just three—offer not only spaces, but a rich array of social forms and experiences. https://mlml.io/e/the-presence-of-secrets-at-re-publica-17/ Tue, 09 May 2017 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/the-presence-of-secrets-at-re-publica-17/ event re:publica 2017 installation website The Presence of Secrets is an interactive installation that provokes questions around our relationship to machines, and the ways in which our private correspondence is digitally and intractably distributed. What kind of logic or intelligence is beyond or behind this screen? What sorts of secrets do we have? Who is watching or reading our words? The installation brings up questions around emerging technologies, cultural norms, individual identity, and uncertain futures. https://mlml.io/e/if-by-water-at-re-publica-17/ Mon, 08 May 2017 16:00:00 -0400 https://mlml.io/e/if-by-water-at-re-publica-17/ event re:publica 2017 installation website IF BY WATER is a silent video installation projected in a stairwell. The flickering abstraction incorporates thousands of unique and found images of water. The piece is entrancing and unnerving, and beautiful. There is no all-encompassing viewpoint of the piece; there is no correct perspective. In order to view the piece at all, one must necessarily be inside it, and thus implicated in it. Explore the video installation IF BY WATER in the staircase @labore:tory during the whole #rp17. https://mlml.io/e/knowledge-design-seminar/ Sun, 01 Jan 2017 16:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/knowledge-design-seminar/ event This Humanities Studio seminar will be run by the metaLAB (at) Harvard team. It will explore the shapes and forms that experimental scholarship is assuming in an array of arts and humanities disciplines, from media studies to digital humanities to cultural analytics. It will also explore emergent models of knowledge production and publication within and across media. Open to advanced undergrad and graduate students, and to students from the Graduate School of Design. https://mlml.io/e/robots-in-and-out-of-buildings/ Sun, 01 Jan 2017 16:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/robots-in-and-out-of-buildings/ event New forms of mobility are currently being developed for the transport of people and goods. From autonomous container ships and trucks, to autonomous buses and cars, to autonomous aerial and land drones, transportation and logistics are being reformulated. New forms of intelligent motion are already beginning to reshape urban, suburban, and rural environments. But little thought is being devoted to how buildings, their circulation and envelopes, and their interconnection to the urban landscape will be transformed by the proliferation of robotic agents whose electric drive trains allow them to cross thresholds and move freely around and between building interiors and exteriors. https://mlml.io/e/humanities-studios/ Fri, 01 Jan 2016 16:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/humanities-studios/ event Effective the spring semester of 2014, metaLAB launched a new category of studio courses that are open to all Harvard students. Humanities Studios are project-based courses designed to foster translational thinking. They combine in-depth research, design thinking, and hands-on training with digital tools and media in an environment that involves sustained cross-disciplinary teamwork. At once practical and experimental, Humanities Studio courses renew the relevance of the critical and narrative tools of the arts and sciences for a world in which technology is a means of inquiry. https://mlml.io/e/library-test-kitchen/ Fri, 01 Jan 2016 16:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/library-test-kitchen/ event Begun at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 2011, Library Test Kitchen has taken a multitude of forms over the years. For a semester, it was a pop-up space in Harvard Square called LABRARY. Projects have taken the form of furniture, pop-up spaces, publications, programming, services, or digital platforms. Currently, LTK is being offered as a summer 2017 course in collaboration with Simmons School of Library and Information Science. https://mlml.io/p/blueprint-for-counter-education-website/ Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/blueprint-for-counter-education-website/ project Alongside the expanded reprint of Blueprint for Counter Education, we created a companion website that layers high resolution scans of the posters over the sketches that preceded them. Check out recent happenings and explore archival content, including original sketches and interviews with Maurice Stein. https://mlml.io/p/book-a-nook/ Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/book-a-nook/ project Book a Nook is an open-source web application for managing library and other community space reservations. It’s funded by the Knight Foundation’s Prototype Fund. Inspired by innovative uses of libraries as flexible community space, it departs from other (overwhelmingly proprietary) room management systems in three major areas: Usability. Simplified workflow and a visual interface, expanded room information, consideration of in-library and at-home use cases. Data. In addition to streamlining annual reporting requirements, BaN prioritizes librarian control over data to inform library policy decisions and advocate for library resources while respecting the privacy of patrons. https://mlml.io/p/curarium/ Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/curarium/ project A web-based platform, Curarium aims to construct sharable, media-rich stories and elaborate arguments about individual items as well as groups of items within a corpus. The first project to be ingested into Curarium is Villa I Tatti’s Homeless Paintings of the Italian Renaissance collection, a unique archive of photographs of “homeless” paintings assembled by art historian Bernard Berenson. Taking the collection and its metadata out of VIA and putting it into Curarium will allow engagement with a wider audience, which will then identify, classify, describe and analyze the objects in the collection, as well as reconstruct the stories of objects that have either disappeared or been destroyed. https://mlml.io/p/dictionnaire-apollinaire/ Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/dictionnaire-apollinaire/ project Dictionnaire Apollinaire is a new research collaboration, based at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF), between L’Observatoire de La vie Littéraire (OBVIL) and metaLAB at the Université Paris-Sorbonne. OBVIL and metaLAB are working together on the design and construction of a nomadic interactive installation and database, which will reveal the thousands of diverse media objects (manuscripts, texts, audio, videos, photographs, and newspapers) of the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918). At present, many of these resources currently lie dormant, dispersed in several Parisian libraries and archives, such as the BnF, the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, and the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet. https://mlml.io/p/digital-giza/ Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/digital-giza/ project The tomb walls of the Pyramids of Giza capture frozen moments from almost every aspect of life in ancient Egypt. The site experienced its first “golden age” as the burial place of three pharaohs of the Egyptian Old Kingdom (Dynasty 4, ca. 2640–2510 BCE). A second golden age came almost five millennia later, when the first modern excavators applied their newly devised archaeological craft to the Giza Plateau. Now, with the advent of many new technologies in the twenty-first century, the Giza Necropolis is available in two, three, and even four dimensions. https://mlml.io/p/light-prop/ Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/light-prop/ project Light Prop for an Electric Stage, the most important early example of light and kinetic art, is the work of László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946). Making use of archival materials (drawings, photographs, video), conservation files, technical drawings and files (CAD; 3d renderings), and video footage of the machines in operation, metaLAB is developing a model for the multimedia “thick description” of a cultural object. Taking shape as both an experimental digital scholarly publication and an immersive exhibition in the Harvard Art Museum’s Lightbox Gallery, the project aims to forge a model of how the humanities’ unique skills in the arts of observation, description, classification, and interpretation can be brought to bear on the design of digital cultural records and the multimedia “description” of a seminal object, particularly as it undergoes processes of preservation and replication. https://mlml.io/p/networks-natures/ Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/networks-natures/ project Cities, nature, and knowledge itself: we often resolve images of these things in the branching forms of trees. Rivers, traffic, bits and bytes: these things, too, run in networks. We often speak of technology as antithetical to the natural world—where technology reigns, nature retreats. And yet wherever we look in the world, natural and technical things meet and merge, find ways to enfold one another. What are technology’s roles in our experience of the natural world? https://mlml.io/p/your-story-has-touched-my-heart/ Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/your-story-has-touched-my-heart/ project Your Story Has Touched My Heart is a video installation exploring the Harvard Art Museums’ remarkable American Professional Photographers Collection. Acquired by sociologist and pioneering photo-historian Barbara Norfleet during her career in Harvard’s Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, the collection spans the late 19th and most of the 20th century and includes nearly 20,000 images. The photographs depict the hopes and dreams—and fears—of Americans as they imagined themselves at their best. https://mlml.io/p/beautiful-data/ Thu, 16 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/beautiful-data/ project These publications serve as entry points to engagement with both the material and the modes of inquiry that shaped the Beautiful Data workshop. The first workshop took place July 2014, with the second (Beautiful Data II) the following summer, July 6–16, 2015. With planning, communications, and post-project documentation, the program ran 2015-16. Beautiful Data I (2014) The field guide documents the concepts and flows of information that came out of the Beautiful Data workshop, linking critical discussion with invitations to experimentation and making. https://mlml.io/p/cold-storage/ Mon, 01 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/cold-storage/ project Cold Storage is two interwoven media artifacts at once. It is a web documentary—a so-called “database documentary”—developed by metaLAB (at) Harvard in collaboration with students participating in Library Test Kitchen and Humanities Studio 1 that provides an institutional portrait of the one of the world’s largest book and document depositories: the Harvard Depository (HD). It is also a documentary short that reworks and updates Alain Resnais’s classic 1957 documentary on the National Library of France Toute la mémoire du monde, while serving as a dynamic extension of the volume The Library Beyond the Book, published in 2014 in the metaLABprojects series by Harvard University Press. https://mlml.io/p/re-verse/ Fri, 01 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/re-verse/ project re~verse is a location-based installation, accessible via iOS app, which was commissioned for Harvard’s LitFest 2015. The installation covers Harvard Yard in Cambridge, MA and consists of a continuous layer of location-sensitive music punctuated with recorded voices of poets who have visited Harvard in the past and given readings of their work. This project was made in collaboration with Harvard’s metaLAB and the Woodberry Poetry Room. In the words of metaLAB's Matthew Battles: https://mlml.io/e/beautiful-data-ii/ Thu, 01 Jan 2015 16:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/beautiful-data-ii/ event The second offering of Beautiful Data focused on “difficult collections” poised on the edge of the digital/material divide. An energetic, top-notch cohort of art historians, curators, and technologists convened in Harvard’s Carpenter Center to develop projects around collections of things that resist ready digitization, or exist as ephemeral and hybrid objects and events. Through workshops and demonstrations, participants pondered data as a medium for art with its own curatorial and preservation challenges, and considered ways of working with designers and new-media artists in the context of materials and mixed-media collections. https://mlml.io/p/book-biography-machine/ Thu, 01 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/book-biography-machine/ project The Book Biography Machine was a prototype interface for mapping the diffusion of books across time and space. Scholars may download rough bibliographic sets from WorldCat for visualization, save them, and upload curated sets in order to tell stories, make arguments, and ask new questions concerning the history of a single book or multiple books in comparison to each other. https://mlml.io/p/life-and-death-of-data/ Sat, 27 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/life-and-death-of-data/ project At the Arnold Arboretum, a long-lived collection of trees, vines and shrubs managed by Harvard University, landscapes from around the world and across time are stitched together by metadata. However, metadata are worthy of study themselves. Created in varied social and technological eras, they register the organizational structures and values of their time. Through a combination of data visualization and interviews with Arboretum staff, this essay illuminates what metadata can teach us about their own social and material histories, as well as how to study collections digitally. https://mlml.io/e/beautiful-data-i/ Wed, 01 Jan 2014 16:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/beautiful-data-i/ event For two weeks, a diverse group of curators, scholars, and technologists gathered at Harvard to consider the turn toward openness in museum collections and the metadata that order them. The goals: to think critically about the challenges and opportunities that openness presents for museums and publics, and to refine and put into practice the concepts and skills necessary to make full use of open collections. Over the two weeks, participants worked with metaLAB staff, guest speakers, and each other to explore modes of storytelling and cultural practice that included data visualization, interactive media, enhanced curatorial description and exhibition practice, digital publication, and object-oriented teaching. https://mlml.io/e/proseminar-in-art-design-and-the-public-domain/ Wed, 01 Jan 2014 16:00:00 -0500 https://mlml.io/e/proseminar-in-art-design-and-the-public-domain/ event In this course, students will develop independent art and design work and explore possible subjects for final projects in the Art, Design and the Public Domain concentration. The proseminar will serve as a space for student experimentation, intended to foreground the emergent interests and methods of participants. Through readings, precedent studies and critique sessions—all student-led—the course will build towards a shared set of questions about the changing meaning and importance of public realms—physical and/or virtual. https://mlml.io/p/graphesis/ Wed, 01 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/graphesis/ project We now take in more information through visual means than at any point in history. Johanna Drucker insists that learning to interpret how visual forms not only present but produce knowledge has become an essential skill in our current screen-saturated culture, in which the computers and smart phones that constantly flood us with images do more than simply convey information, they structure our relationship to information through graphical formats. In an interdisciplinary study fusing digital humanities with media studies and graphic design history, Drucker outlines the principles by which visual formats organize meaningful content. https://mlml.io/p/hyper-cities/ Wed, 01 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/hyper-cities/ project The prefix “hyper” refers to multiplicity and abundance. More than a physical space, a hypercity is a real city overlaid with information networks that document the past, catalyze the present, and project future possibilities. Hypercities are always under construction. Not merely a book about maps in the literal sense, Hypercities puts digital humanities theory into practice to chart the proliferating cultural records of places around the world. A digital platform transmogrified into a book, it explains the ambitious online project of the same name that maps the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment. https://mlml.io/p/the-library-beyond-the-book/ Wed, 01 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/the-library-beyond-the-book/ project With textbook readers and digital downloads proliferating, it is easy to imagine a time when printed books will vanish. Such forecasts miss the mark, argue Jeffrey Schnapp and Matthew Battles: libraries have always been mix-and-match spaces, and remix is their most plausible future scenario. Future bookshelves will not be wholly virtual, and libraries will thrive — although in a variety of new social, cultural, and architectural forms. Combining deep study of the library’s history with the metaLAB’s record of institutional and technical innovation, The Library Beyond the Book explores what libraries have been in the past to speculate on what they will become: hybrid places that intermingle books and ebooks, analog and digital formats, paper and pixels. https://mlml.io/p/zeega/ Wed, 01 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/zeega/ project Zeega is where it started: not only a software project, but a conjecture about the internet’s capacity to empower shared stories and meanings, the motivating spirit at metaLAB’s origins. From 2011 to 2014, a team of grad students, media artists, technologists, and scholars strove to create a platform to allow users to easily create immersive, participatory projects with media from across the web. The project’s core audience was media-makers—professionals and amateurs curious to explore new forms of producing and sharing media online, on mobile devices, and in physical spaces. https://mlml.io/p/sensate-journal/ Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/sensate-journal/ project Sensate is an online, media-based journal for the creation, presentation, and scholarly critique of innovative creative projects in the arts, humanities, sciences, and media. Driven by the conviction that the making of creative projects is an inherent part of academic or scholarly work, we aim to expand conversations and collaborative communities among scholars, film/videomakers, sound artists, and others. Initiated within Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab and produced jointly with metaLAB (at) Harvard, Sensate is a collaborative and interdisciplinary initiative involving graduate students and faculty as well as independent artists and scholars from various universities, centers and departments, with the intent to integrate new modes of media-based scholarship and critical media practice into the cognitive life of the academy and beyond. https://mlml.io/p/teaching-with-things/ Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/teaching-with-things/ project Teaching With Things advanced a technologically-enabled, media-rich, and intellectually lively approach to object-oriented instruction in the liberal arts. Leveraging Harvard’s unique archival, library, and museum collections, and established and emergent technology for digital imaging, 3D modeling, and multimedia annotation and presentation, and recognizing that collections- based teaching, research, and training remain, at best, of secondary importance within most fields of the humanities and social sciences, the project created a flexible, scalable, hybrid practice of digital curation to bear in the classroom. https://mlml.io/p/digital-archive-of-japans-2011-disasters/ Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://mlml.io/p/digital-archive-of-japans-2011-disasters/ project A project of Harvard University’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, the Japan Disasters Digital Archive (JDA) is an evolving, collaborative space for citizens, researchers, students, and policy makers, and a site of shared memory for those most directly affected by these events. The digital archive is an advanced search engine for archived materials from all over the web, individuals’ testimonials, tweets, prominently including content from international partners who are building digital repositories about the disasters.