Lecture Series 2009

FALL 2009

variable_d presents DIALOGUES
The DIALOGUES are student-conducted interviews and conversations with leading artists, scientists, and scholars of our time with the support of the Digital Humanities initiative. The conversations are digitally mediated via SKYPE software and held in the context of the weekly digital salon at Tiltfactor.


Tuesday October 27 2009, 4:00 pm
"A Conversation with Katherine Hayles"
Dartmouth Campus, Tiltfactor Lab

Join us for a DIALOGUE with N. Katherine Hayles, a Professor of English at Duke University and a major figure in the study of literature and science in the 20th and 21st centuries. She is the author of Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (2008),My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005), Nanoculture: Implications of the New Technoscience (ed.) (2004) Writing Machines (2002), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999) and The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (1984)

PREREQUISITE VIEWING:
N. Katherine Hayles professor of literature at Duke University is interviewed by Stacey Cochran for Raleigh Television Network program http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBhFYkaift4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._Katherine_Hayles



Tuesday December 1 2009, 4:00 pm
"A Conversation with Brenda Laurel"
Dartmouth Campus, Tiltfactor Lab

Join us for a DIALOGUE with Brenda Laurel, who currently serves as chair of the new Graduate Program in Design at California College of the Arts. Her career in human-computer interaction spans over twenty-five years. She holds an M.F.A. and Ph.D. in theatre from the Ohio State University. Her doctoral dissertation was the first to propose a comprehensive architecture for computer-based interactive fantasy and fiction. He is editor of the book, The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design [Addison-Wesley 1990]; author of Computers as Theatre [Addison-Wesley 1991; 2nd edition 1993]; an online collection of essays entitled Severed Heads; author of the narrative of her start-up adventure of "games for girls"Utopian Entrepreneur [M.I.T. Press, 2001]; and her newest book is Design Research [M.I.T. Press, 2004]. She was also one of the founders and VP/Design of a spinoff company from Interval - Purple Moon - formed to market products based on this research. Purple Moon was acquired by Mattel in 1999. In 1990 she co-founded Telepresence Research, Inc. to develop virtual reality and remote presence technology and applications. She has worked as a software designer, producer, and researcher for companies including Atari, Activision, and Apple. She served as Chair and graduate faculty member of the graduate Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and also worked as a Senior Director and Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Labs in Menlo Park, California. Brenda has published extensively on topics including interactive fiction, computer games, autonomous agents, virtual reality, and political and artistic issues in interactive media.
http://www.tauzero.com/Brenda_Laurel/BrendaBio.html

PREREQUISITE VIEWING:
Brenda Laurel on TED. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6FT80ZoVJY


Tuesday December 1 2009, 4:00 pm
"A Conversation with the Guerrilla Girls"
Dartmouth Campus, Tiltfactor Lab

Join us for a DIALOGUE with a member of the Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous group of women artists fighting discrimination in politics, media, and art. Formed in 1985, the artists assumed the names of dead women artists and wore gorilla masks in public, concealing their identities and focusing on the issues rather than their personalities. Between 1985 and 2000, close to 100 women, working collectively and anonymously, produced posters, billboards, public actions, books and other projects bring gender issues to the forefront of discussion.
http://www.guerrillagirls.com

PREREQUISITE VIEWING:
Frida Kahlo and Kathe Kollwitz, two founding members of the feminist activist group the Guerrilla Girls, present on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHVBZh5HBgc

Look at Guerrilla Art:
http://images.google.com/images?q=the+Guerrilla+Girls&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=eW_eSvigLJPf8Abq741r&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CC0QsAQwAw


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past events

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The inaugural Digital Arts and Humanities Lecture Series at Dartmouth,
variable_d, brings humanists, technologists, and artists to campus who focus on the
interplay of digital technology, culture, games, art, and science.
The series is possible through the generous support of the Sherman Fairchild Foundation,
who endowed the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professorship in the Digital Humanities.

SPRING 2009

Tracy Fullerton, M.F.A., is a game designer, educator and writer with fifteen years of professional experience. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Interactive Media Division of the USC School of Cinematics Arts and Director of the Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab. Tracy is the author of Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Designing Innovative Games. This design textbook is in use at game programs worldwide. Recent credits include faculty advisor for the award-winning student games Cloud, and flOw; and game designer for The Night Journey, a unique game/art project with media artist Bill Viola. She is currently designing a game for the CPB's History and Civics initiative in partnership with KCET, Activision, the USC Game Innovation Lab, the Center for Civics Education and other key contributors.

<< Friday April 24, 2009-- Recommended Talk : Robert Plotnik"The Future of Invention">>

"Human Computation"
Filene Auditorium in Moore Hall, 4:30pm

-- Luis Von Ahn, a professor of Computer Science
at Carnegie Mellon University. I am working on Human Computation, which
harnesses the combined computational power of humans and computers to solve large-scale problems.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/



** Joint Session with the Computer Science Colloquium!**

"Touchy Feely Games - Broadening Designers' Social and Emotional Palette"
Filene Auditorium in Moore Hall, 4:30pm

--Katherine Isbister is the Director of the Social Game Lab at NYU-Poly. Research interests include emotion and gesture in games, supple interactions, design of game characters, and game usability. She received her PhD from Stanford. Katherine is the author of three books: Better Game Characters by Design: A Psychological Approach (2006), Game Usability: Advice from the Experts for Advancing the Player Experience (2008). Better Game Characters was nominated for a Game Developer Magazine Frontline Award in 2006.

--Rosalind Picard is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Laboratory, co-director of the Things That Think Consortium, and leader of the Autism Communication Technology Initiative at MIT. Picard is known internationally for envisioning and conducting research in the field of affective computing.



Past Visitors


WINTER


Wednesday January 14, 2009 4:30 pm
"The Meaning of Video Games: On Today's Debates in Video Game Studies"
Dartmouth Campus, Silsby 028
-- Jesper Juul, MIT GAMBIT LAB, author of Half-Real. Juul is a theorist in the field of video game studies. He is a lecturer at Comparative Media Studies at MIT. He holds a PhD. in video game theory from the Center for Computer Games Research in Copenhagen.

Tuesday February 3, 2009 4:30pm
"Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds.
Dartmouth Campus, Silsby 028
Celia Pearce, Director of the Experimental Game Lab at Georgia Tech. Celia Pearce, aka Artemesia, is a game designer, author, researcher, teacher, curator and artist, specializing in multiplayer gaming and virtual worlds, independent, art, and alternative game genres, as well as games and gender. She began designing interactive attractions and exhibitions in 1983, and has held academic appointments since 1998. She received her Ph.D. in 2006 from SMARTLab Centre, then at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. She currently is Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at Georgia Tech, where she also directs the Experimental Game Lab and the Emergent Game Group. Her game designs include the award-winning virtual reality attraction Virtual Adventures (for Iwerks and Evans & Sutherland) and the Purple Moon Friendship Adventure Cards for Girls. She is the author or co-author of numerous papers and book chapters, as well as The Interactive Book (Macmillan 1997). She has also curated new media, virtual reality, and game exhibitions and is currently Festival Chair for IndieCade, an international independent games festival and showcase series. She is a co-founder of the Ludica women's game collective. www.cpandfriends.com

Wednesday February 11, 2009 4:30 pm
"A New Dimension for All-Text Interactive Fiction"
Dartmouth Campus, L01 Carson
Nick Montfort, Nick Montfort is assistant professor of digital media in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned a Ph.D. in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania and masters degrees from MIT (in media arts and sciences) and Boston University (in creative writing — poetry). The digital media writing projects Montfort has undertaken include the blog Grand Text Auto, where he and five others write about computer narrative, poetry, games, and art; ppg256, a 256-character poetry generator; Ream, a 500-page poem written on one day; Mystery House Taken Over, a collaborative "occupation" of a classic game; Implementation, a novel on stickers written with Scott Rettberg; The Ed Report, a serialized novel written with William Gillespie; and several works of interactive fiction: Book and Volume,Ad Verbum, and Winchester's Nightmare: A Novel Machine.


Monday April 6, 2009 4:30 pm CANCELLED - MOVED TO FALL 2009
Doris Rusch, MIT GAMBIT lab. Doris C. Rusch holds a postdoctoral position with the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab in the Programme at Comparative Media Studies at MIT. In her habilitation project titled "Once More with Meaning", Rusch investigates the medium specific characteristics of digital games and their potential to produce a wide range of emotionally satisfying and deeply meaningful experiences. Although her work is theory-driven, she aims at applicability of her research to actual game design with the goal of pushing the boundaries of games as media.

Eric Zimmerman is a game designer living in New York City. He helps run run Gamelab, a game development company he founded in 2000 with Peter Lee. An entrepreneur in the game industry since 1994, Zimmerman has created dozens of games for a wide variety of contexts -- from award dinning multi-million dollar PC CD-ROM games, MMORPGs, to small scale web based games. He has even created games off the computer. Zimmerman teaches at NYU and writes, and agitates about games.

Course Discussions: (in Tiltfactor)
Thursday January 15, 2-4 pm
Jesper Juul leads a discussion on Half-Real and his recent work

Tuesday February 3, 2008 2-4 pm
Celia Pearce, on game art doll play, and dress up.

Thursday February 12, 2008 2-4 pm
Nick Montfort on platforms, interactive fiction, classic games, and narrative
Tuesday April 14th, 2009 10-12
Eric Zimmerman on playtesting and design practices

Thursday April 23th, 2009 10-12
Tracy Fullerton on playcentric design