D. Fox Harrell, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in conversation with Alondra Nelson, Columbia University
According to D. Fox Harrell, who coined the term, the notion of phantasmal media is about "artful uses of computational systems. Phantasmal media works both create mental imagery and challenge and provoke users' idealized cognitive models by enabling active participation imbued with culture and critical awareness...computing to enable new imaginative possibilities and attempting to understand the cognitive origins of these possibilities are the central concerns."
D. Fox Harrell is Associate Professor of Digital Media, joint in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, Comparative Media Studies Program, and in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.. His research explores the relationship between imaginative cognition, digital media arts, and computation, developing new forms of interactive narrative, gaming, social computing, and other types of culturally engaged AI-based media. Harrell received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for his project “Computing for Advanced Identity Representation.” He is currently completing a book,Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression, for the MIT Press....
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D. Fox Harrell, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in conversation with Alondra Nelson, Columbia University
According to D. Fox Harrell, who coined the term, the notion of phantasmal media is about "artful uses of computational systems. Phantasmal media works both create mental imagery and challenge and provoke users' idealized cognitive models by enabling active participation imbued with culture and critical awareness...computing to enable new imaginative possibilities and attempting to understand the cognitive origins of these possibilities are the central concerns."
D. Fox Harrell is Associate Professor of Digital Media, joint in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, Comparative Media Studies Program, and in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.. His research explores the relationship between imaginative cognition, digital media arts, and computation, developing new forms of interactive narrative, gaming, social computing, and other types of culturally engaged AI-based media. Harrell received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for his project “Computing for Advanced Identity Representation.” He is currently completing a book,Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression, for the MIT Press.
Harrell holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego. His other degrees include a Master's degree in Interactive Telecommunication from New York University, and a B.F.A. in Art, B.S. in Logic and Computation, and minor in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He has worked as an interactive television producer and as a game designer. He is currently completing a book, Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression, under contract with MIT Press.
Alondra Nelson is Associate Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, and holds an appointment in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWaG). Her areas of specialization include race and ethnicity in the U.S.; gender and kinship; socio-historical studies of medicine, science and technology; and social and cultural theory. Nelson’s research focuses on how science and its applications shape the social world. With Thuy Linh Tu, Nelson edited the influential collection Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life (New York University Press, 2001), and is the author of Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Politics of Health and Race (forthcoming, University of California Press), the first book-length exploration of the radical organization’s health-focused activities that included the formation of a network of neighborhood clinics, the implementation of genetic screening programs, and intervention into debates over the medicalization of violence.
He has recorded and performed with Don Cherry, Lee Konitz, John McLaughlin, Gunther Schuller, the Mingus Epitaph Orchestra, Dave Brubeck, Ingrid Sertso, Dave Holland, Ed Blackwell, Ray Anderson, Carlos Ward, Pharoah Sanders, Blood Ulmer, Hozan Yamamoto and many others at festivals and concerts in the US, Canada, Europe, Africa, India, Phillippines, Japan, Mexico and Brazil, and he has served as arranger for recordings by Natalie Merchant, Buckethead, Bootsy Collins, The Swans, Sly + Robbie, Angelique Kidjo, and many others.
Throughout this day-long symposium, a series of panels, moderated by Berger, Howard Mandel, and Ben Young, will feature CMS musicians such as Oliver Lake, Adam Rudolph, Sylvain Leroux, Don Davis, Ingrid Sertso, Rob Saffer, Ilene Marder, James Emery, Peter Apfelbaum, Marilyn Crispell, Steve Gorn, and Pauline Oliveros. The panels will explore the history of CMS, assessing the impact of the CMS experience on musical developments and individual careers, as well as presenting CMS philosophies and practices, including “Music Universe”--the concept CMS pioneered that adopts an inclusive, non-stylistic focus on the common ground of the world's musical expressions, exploring and expanding multiple languages of contemporary improvised music; and “Music Mind”--finding ways to deepen the experience of playing and listening to music, focusing on attention, expression and communication.
CMF is now working with the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University for the future development and maintenance of the CMS Archive Project, a massive undertaking aimed at the preservation of the large collection of CMS live recordings created between 1972 and 1986, which featured some of the most outstanding and ground-breaking composers/performers in World Jazz, World Music, and New Music.
The Project will also include an Oral History component, and this full-day colloquium will capture many oral histories concerning the Creative Music Studio years and the variegated impact of those experiences on the musical outlook of its participants and the larger world of music and culture.
Free and Open to the Public!
Exploring her transformation from Alice McLeod, Detroit church pianist and bebopper, to guru Swami Turiya Sangitananda, Franya Berkman’s new book, Monument Eternal: The Music of Alice Coltrane (Wesleyan University Press, 2010). illuminates her music and, in turn, reveals the exceptional fluidity of American religious practices in the second half of the twentieth century. Most of all, this book celebrates the hybrid music of an exceptional, boundary-crossing African-American artist. Dr. Berkman’s talk will focus primarily on two aspects of Berkman’s scholarly approach: ethnomusicological life history as a mode of inquiry in jazz studies, and the necessity of defining “a spiritual aesthetics” in exploring Alice Coltrane’s work.
Franya Berkman is Assistant Professor of Music at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She received her Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University in 2003, and she is currently working on her second book, Obo Addy: Ga Master Drummer, Global Musician. Her interdisciplinary scholarly interests include spiritual, cultural, and musical hybridity in the 20th/21st century, and life history in the study of music culture.
Free and Open to the Public
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