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Awards Offered: Bachelors degree,Masters degree,Doctors degree - research/scholarship
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This course will study the question of Global Architecture from the point of view of producing a set of lectures on that subject. The course will be run in the form of a writing seminar, except that students will be asked to prepare for the final class an hour-long lecture for an undergraduate survey course. During the semester, students will study the debates about where to locate "the global" and do some comparative analysis of various textbooks. The topic of the final lecture will be worked on during the semester. For that lecture, students will be asked to identify the themes of the survey course, and hand in the bibliography and reading list for their lecture.
This course is an introduction to modern Indian culture and society through films, documentaries, short stories, novels, poems, and journalistic writing. The principal focus is on the study of major cultural developments and social debates in the last sixty five years of history through the reading of literature and viewing of film clips. The focus will be on the transformations of gender and class issues, representation of nationhood, the idea of regional identities and the place of the city in individual and communal lives. The cultural and historical background will be provided in class lectures. The idea is to explore the "other Indias" that lurk behind our constructed notion of a homogeneous national culture.
This advanced video class serves goes into greater depth on the topics covered in 4.351 , Introduction to Video. It also will explore the nature and function of narrative in cinema and video through exercises and screenings culminating in a final project. Starting with a brief introduction to the basic principles of classical narrative cinema, we will proceed to explore strategies designed to test the elements of narrative: story trajectory, character development, verisimilitude, time-space continuity, viewer identification, suspension of disbelief, and closure.
This course explores the urban environment as a natural phenomenon, human habitat, medium of expression, and forum for action. The course has several major themes: how ideas of nature influence the way cities are perceived, designed, built, and managed; how natural processes and urban form interact and the consequences for human health and welfare; how planners and designers can shape the urban natural environment. Each student researches and presents a case, either historical or an example of contemporary theory and practice.
This interdisciplinary course surveys modern European culture to disclose the alignment of literature, opposition, and revolution. Reaching back to the foundational representations of anarchism in nineteenth-century Europe (Kleist, Conrad) the curriculum extends through the literary and media representations of militant organizations in the 1970s and 80s (Italy's Red Brigade, Germany's Red Army Faction, and the Real Irish Republican Army). In the middle of the term students will have the opportunity to hear a lecture by Margarethe von Trotta, one of the most important filmmakers who has worked on terrorism. The course concludes with a critical examination of the ways that certain segments of European popular media have returned to the "radical chic" that many perceive to have exhausted itself more than two decades ago.
This course focuses on Ambient Intelligence, and how it envisions a world where people are surrounded by intelligent and intuitive interfaces embedded in the everyday objects around them. These interfaces recognize and respond to the presence and behavior of an individual in a personalized and relevant way. Students are required to do extensive literary research on the subject and participate in class discussions.
This course focuses on Ambient Intelligence, and how it envisions a world where people are surrounded by intelligent and intuitive interfaces embedded in the everyday objects around them. These interfaces recognize and respond to the presence and behavior of an individual in a personalized and relevant way. Students are required to do extensive literary research on the subject and participate in class discussions.
The television landscape has changed drastically in the past few years; nowhere is this more prevalent than in the American daytime serial drama, one of the oldest forms of television content. This class examines the history of these "soap operas" and their audiences by focusing on the production, consumption, and media texts of soaps. The class will include discussions of what makes soap operas a unique form, the history of the genre, current experimentation with transmedia storytelling, the online fan community, and comparisons between daytime dramas and primetime serials from 24 to Friday Night Lights, through a study of Procter & Gamble's As the World Turns.
The goal of this course is to investigate with students backgrounds on some of the pivotal events that have shaped our understanding and approach to architecture. Emphasis of discussion will be primarily on buildings and works of individual architects. Canonical architects, buildings and movements that have exerted significant influences on the development of architecture will be studied in detail. We will visit some of these buildings for a first-hand look and to evaluate for ourselves their significance or lack thereof. As a final project, each student will analyze a building through drawings, text, bibliography and a physical model in a format ready for documentation and exhibition.
An analysis of historical structures is presented themed sections based around construction materials. Structures from all periods of history are analyzed. The goal of the class is to provide an understanding of the preservation of historic structures for all students.
This course examines traditional performances of the Arabic-speaking populations of the Middle East and North Africa. Starting with the history of the ways in which the West has discovered, translated and written about the Orient, we will consider how power and politics play roles in the production of culture, narrative and performance. This approach assumes that performance, verbal art, and oral literature lend themselves to spontaneous adaptation and to oblique expression of ideas and opinions whose utterance would otherwise be censorable or disruptive. In particular we will be concerned with the way traditional performance practices are affected by and respond to the consequences of modernization. Topics include oral epic performance, sacred narrative, Koranic chant performance, the folktale, solo performance, cultural production and resistance.
This class investigates the use of computers in architectural design and construction. It begins with a pre-prepared design computer model, which is used for testing and process investigation in construction. It then explores the process of construction from all sides of the practice: detail design, structural design, and both legal and computational issues.
This class investigates the theory, method, and form of collage. It studies not only the historical precedents for collage and their physical attributes, but the psychology and process that plays a part in the making of them. The class was broken into three parts, changing scales and methods each time, to introduce and study the rigor by which decisions were made in relation to the collage. The class was less about the making of art than the study of the processes by which art is made.
An intensive nine day remote collaborative workshop involving MIT and Miyagi University in Japan. The objective is to develop a small housing project using shape computation as a design methodology. Students will use and test new interactive software for designing, sharing applications with overseas partners, presenting projects on an Internet workspace, and critiquing design proposals through the web and other advanced digital technologies. Students will be expected to do most of their work in class.
This studio explores the notion of in-between by engaging several relationships; the relationship between intervention and perception, between representation and notation and between the fixed and the temporal. In the Exactitude in Science, Jorge Luis Borges tells the perverse tale of the one to one scale map, where the desire for precision and power leads to the escalating production of larger and more accurate maps of the territory. For Jean Baudrillard, "The territory no longer precedes the map nor survives it. it is the map that precedes the territory... and thus, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map." The map or the territory, left to ruin-shredding across the 'other', beautifully captures the tension between reality and representation. Mediating between collective desire and territorial surface, maps filter, create, frame, scale, orient, and project. A map has agency. It is not merely representational but operational, the experience and discursive potential of this process lies in the reciprocity between the representation and the real. It is in-between these specific sets of relationships that this studio positions itself.
This semester students are asked to transform the Hereshoff Museum in Bristol, Rhode Island, through processes of erasure and addition. Hereshoff Manufacturing was recognized as one of the premier builders of America's Cup racing boats between 1890's and 1930's. The studio, however, is about more than the program. It is about land, water, and wind and the search for expressing materially and tectonically the relationships between these principle conditions. That is, where the land is primarily about stasis (docking, anchoring and referencing our locus), water's fluidity holds the latent promise of movement and freedom. Movement is activated by wind, allowing for negotiating the relationship between water and land.
The theme that unites the Level II studios in the fall semester is a focus upon the 'making of architecture and built form' as a tectonic, technical and materially driven endeavor. It is a design investigation that is rooted in a larger culture of materiality and the associated phenomena, but a study of the language and production of built form as an integrated response to the conceptual proposition of the project. The studio will look to works of architecture where the material tectonic and its resultant technology or fabrication become instrumental to the realization of the ideas, in whatever form they may take. This becomes the 'art of technology' -- suggesting a level of innovation and creative manipulation as part of the design process to transform material into a composition of beauty and poetry as well as environmental control. In this regard the studio will look to the works and design processes of a number of architects including Shigeru Ban, Peter Zumthor, Herzog and deMeuron, Kazuyo Sejima, Richard Horden, Rick Joy and Glenn Murcutt among others.
The project for this studio is to design a demonstration project for a site near the French Quarter in New Orleans. The objectives of the project are the following: 1. To design more intense housing, community, educational and commercial facilities in four to six story buildings. 2. To explore the "space between" buildings as a way of designing and shaping objects. 3. To design at three scales - dwelling, cluster and overall. 4. To design dwellings where the owners may be able to help build and gain a skill for employment. 5. To provide/design facilities that can help the residents to gain education and skills.
This studio will investigate the social, programmatic, tectonic and phenomenological performance and character of a student gathering place on the MIT campus. Whether it is simply for socializing or for more specific events, the student gathering place will serve as a refuge from the vigorous educational environment of the Institute, and it will reinforce a critical sense of "place" through the almost logical organization of its program. The place will foster a casual discovery of "being": a reflection upon the student's own existence based upon participation in group events and an intellectual attitude toward acting. To create a space that inspires, rather than imposes: such a discovery is the foremost challenge of this studio.
This is the second undergraduate design studio. It introduces a full range of architectural ideas and issues through drawing exercises, analyses of precedents, and explored design methods. Students will develop design skills by conceptualizing and representing architectural ideas and making aesthetic judgments about building design. Discussions regarding architecture's role in mediating culture, nature and technology will help develop the students' architectural vocabulary.
While no businesses succeed based on their architecture or space design, many fail as a result of inattention to the power of spatial relationships. This course demonstrates through live case studies with managers and architects the value of strategic space planning and decision making in relation to business needs. The course presents conceptual frameworks for thinking about architecture, communication and organizations. This course is offered during the Sloan Innovation Period (SIP), which is a one-week period at the MIT Sloan School of Management that occurs midway through each semester.
This is the second undergraduate architecture design studio, which introduces design logic and skills that enable design thinking, representation, and development. Through the lens of nano-scale machines, technologies, and phenomena, students are asked to explore techniques for describing form, space, and architecture. Exercises encourage various connotations of the "machine" and challenge students to translate conceptual strategies into more integrated design propositions through both digital and analog means.
This architectural studio will have one main project for the semester: to explore the issues surrounding the redesign of an area in Havana, Cuba. It is a typical area about the size of a Law of Indies block that presently has a mix of housing, work, and shopping, in buildings that need to be replaced and others that need to be rehabilitated. There is also vacant land, and buildings that are unused. Part of the blocks front on the Malecon, the street next to the water. The other edge fronts onto a typical neighborhood. The intention is to study the culture through an understanding of one area of Havana and then design an "echo" in architectural form. The design will include public space as well as a mix of buildings: some new, some rehabilitated.
4.125 is the third undergraduate design studio. This subject introduces skills needed to build within a landscape establishing continuities between the built and natural world. Students learn to build appropriately through analysis of landscape and climate for a chosen site, and to conceptualize design decisions through drawings and models.
This subject introduces skills needed to build within a landscape establishing continuities between the built and natural world. Students learn to build appropriately through analysis of landscape and climate for a chosen site, and to conceptualize design decisions through drawings and models. This class was taught concurrently with 4.125B. Some of the assignments are the same, some are different, and the sites for the final project are different. But since they were taught in tandem, it would be useful to look at both together.
This subject introduces skills needed to build within a landscape establishing continuities between the built and natural world. Students learn to build appropriately through analysis of landscape and climate for a chosen site, and to conceptualize design decisions through drawings and models. This class was taught concurrently with course 4.125A. Some of the assignments are the same, some are different, and the sites for the final project are different. But since they were taught in tandem, it would be useful to look at both together.
This is the second undergraduate design studio. It introduces a full range of architectural ideas and issues through drawing exercises, analyses of precedents, and explored design methods. Students will develop design skills by conceptualizing and representing architectural ideas and making aesthetic judgments about building design. Discussions regarding architecture's role in mediating culture, nature and technology will help develop the students' architectural vocabulary.
This seminar introduces, through studio projects, the basic principles regarding the use of color in the visual arts. Students explore a range of topics, including the historical uses of color in the arts, the interactions between colors, and the psychology of color.
This subject focuses on the objects, history, context, and critical discussion surrounding art since World War II. Because of the burgeoning increase in art production, the course is necessarily selective. We will trace major developments and movements in art up to the present, primarily from the US; but we will also be looking at art from Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, as well as art "on the margins" art that has been overlooked by the mainstream critical press, but may have a broad cultural base in its own community. We will ask what function art serves in its various cultures of origin, and why art has been such a lightning rod for political issues around the world.
Asia in the Modern World: Images and Representations examines visual representations of Asia, interpreting them from both historical and modern contexts. This course is based around using the Visualizing Cultures website. Case studies focus on Japan and China from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries.
This course provides students with a basic knowledge of structural analysis and design for buildings, bridges and other structures. The course emphasizes the historical development of structural form and the evolution of structural design knowledge, from Gothic cathedrals to long span suspension bridges. Students will investigate the behavior of structural systems and elements through design exercises, case studies, and load testing of models. Students will design structures using timber, masonry, steel, and concrete and will gain an appreciation of the importance of structural design today, with an emphasis on environmental impact of large scale construction.
"Becoming Digital" traces the change in practice, theory and possibility as mechanical and chemical media are augmented or supplanted by digital media. These changes will be grounded in a semester length study of "reports from the front." These reports, found and introduced by students throughout the semester, are the material produced by and about soldiers and civilians on the battlefield from the introduction of wet photography during the Crimean and Civil Wars to contemporary digital content posted daily to Web 2.0 sites from areas such as Iraq and Afghanistan and possibly even the games and simulations they've inspired. Students will work through the ethical, aesthetic, technical and cultural problems raised by the primary content and secondary readings in three papers, a group project written with Inform 7, a presentation, and frequent discussion.
This is an intermediate workshop designed for students who have a basic understanding of the principles of theatrical design and who want a more intensive study of costume design and the psychology of clothing. Students develop designs that emerge through a process of character analysis, based on the script and directorial concept. Period research, design, and rendering skills are fostered through practical exercises. Instruction in basic costume construction, including drafting and draping, provide tools for students to produce final projects.
The Beijing Urban Design Studio is a joint program between the MIT and Tsinghua University Schools of Architecture and Planning. The goal of the studio is to foster international cooperation through the undertaking of a joint urban design and planning initiative in the city of Beijing involving important, often controversial, sites and projects. Since 1995, almost 250 MIT and Tsinghua University students and faculty have participated in this annual studio, making it one of the most successful and enduring international academic programs between China and the US. It has received the Irwin Sizer Award from MIT for outstanding innovation in education. The studio takes place over five weeks in June and July including several weeks in residence at Tsinghua University and two brief study tours to locations and projects that inform the work. It will include 18-20 MIT and 10-15 Tsinghua Architecture and Planning students. The Beijing City Planning Institute, responsible for strategic planning in the city, participates in the studio as the client.
This is the 20th anniversary of the Beijing Urban Design Studio, which is a joint program between the MIT and Tsinghua University Schools of Architecture and Planning. The goal of the studio is to foster international cooperation through the undertaking of a joint urban design and planning initiative in the city of Beijing involving important, often controversial, sites and projects. Since 1995, almost 250 MIT and Tsinghua University students and faculty have participated in this annual studio, making it one of the most successful and enduring international academic programs between China and the U.S. It has received the Irwin Sizer Award from MIT for outstanding innovation in education. The studio takes place over five weeks in June and July including several weeks in residence at Tsinghua University and two brief study tours to locations and projects that inform the work. It will include 18-20 MIT and 10-15 Tsinghua Architecture and Planning students. The Beijing City Planning Institute, responsible for strategic planning in the city, participates in the studio as the client.
In 2008, the Beijing Urban Design Studio will focus on the issue of Beijing's urban transformation under the theme of de-industrialization, by preparing an urban design and development plan for the Shougang (Capital Steel Factory) site. This studio will address whether portions of the old massive factory infrastructure can be preserved as a national industrial heritage site embedded into future new development; how to balance the cultural and recreational value of the site with environmental challenges; as well as how to use the site for urban development. A special focus of the studio will be to consider development approaches that minimize energy utilization. To research these questions, students will be asked to interact with clients from the factory, local residents, city officials and experts on transportation, environment, energy and real estate. They will assess strategic options for the steel factory and propose comprehensive plans for the design and development of the brownfield site.
This class is an interdisciplinary survey that explores the experiences of people of African descent through the overlapping approaches of history, literature, anthropology, legal studies, media studies, performance, linguistics, and creative writing. It connects the experiences of African Americans and of other American minorities, focusing on social, political, and cultural histories, and on linguistic patterns. Activities include lectures, discussions, workshops, and required field trips that involve minimal cost to students.
There are several hundred thousand Brownfield sites across the country. The large number of sites, combined with how a majority of these properties are located in urban and historically underserved communities, dictate that redevelopment of these sites stands to be a common theme in urban planning for the foreseeable future. Students form a grounded understanding of the Brownfield lifecycle: how and why they were created, their potential role in community revitalization, and the general processes governing their redevelopment. Using case studies and guest speakers from the public, private and non-profit sectors, students develop and hone skills to effectively address the problems posed by these inactive sites.
This class offers a foundation in the visual art practice and its critical analysis for beginning architecture students. Emphasis is on long-range artistic development and its analogies to architectural thinking and practice. Students will learn to communicate ideas and experiences through various two-dimensional, and three-dimensional, and time-based media, including installations, performance and video. Lectures, visiting artist presentations, field trips, and readings supplement studio practice.
This course addresses advanced topics in structures, exterior envelopes and contemporary production technologies. It continues the exploration of structural elements and systems; expanding to include more complex determinant, indeterminate, long-span and high-rise systems. Some of the topics covered include reinforced concrete, steel and engineered wood design, and an introduction to tensile systems. The contemporary exterior envelope is discussed with an emphasis on the classification of systems, their performance attributes and advanced manufacturing technologies. This course is the second of two graduate structures courses, the first of which is 4.462. They offer an expanded version of the content presented in the undergraduate course, 4.440.
This course offers an introduction to the history, theory, and construction of basic structural systems as well as an introduction to energy issues in buildings. It emphasizes basic systematic and elemental behavior, principles of structural behavior, and analysis of individual structural elements and strategies for load carrying. The course also introduces fundamental energy topics including thermodynamics, psychrometrics, and comfort. It is a required class for M. Arch. students.
This course addresses advanced structures, exterior envelopes and contemporary production technologies. It continues the exploration of structural elements and systems, and expands to include more complex determinate, indeterminate, long-span and high-rise systems. It covers topics such as reinforced concrete, steel and engineered wood design, and provides an introduction to tensile systems. Lectures also address the contemporary exterior envelope with an emphasis on their performance attributes and advanced manufacturing technologies. This course is required of MArch students.
In this class, concepts of building technology and experimental methods are studied, in class and in lab assignments. Projects vary yearly and have included design and testing of strategies for daylighting, passive heating and cooling, and improved indoor air quality via natural ventilation. Experimental methods focus on measurement and analysis of thermally driven and wind-driven airflows, lighting intensity and glare, and heat flow and thermal storage. Experiments are conducted at model and full scale and are often motivated by ongoing field work in developing countries.
This course serves as an introduction to urban form and design, focusing on the physical, historical, and social form of cities. Selected cities are analyzed, drawn, and compared, to develop a working understanding of urban and architectural form. The development of map making and urban representation is discussed, and use of the computer is required. A special focus is placed on the historical development of the selected cities, especially mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth century periods of expansion. Readings focus on urban design theory in the twentieth century and will be discussed during a weekly seminar on them. This is a methods class for S.M.Arch.S. students in Architecture and Urbanism.
This class is intended to introduce students to understandings of the city generated from both social science literature and the field of urban design. The first part of the course examines literature on the history and theory of the city. Among other factors, it pays special attention to the larger territorial settings in which cities emerged and developed (ranging from the global to the national to the regional context) and how these affected the nature, character, and functioning of cities and the lives of their inhabitants. The remaining weeks focus more explicitly on the theory and practice of design visions for the city, the latter in both utopian and realized form. One of our aims will be to assess the conditions under which a variety of design visions were conceived, and to assess them in terms of the varying patterns of territorial "nestedness" (local, regional, national, imperial, and global) examined in the first part of the course. Another will be to encourage students to think about the future prospects of cities (in terms of territorial context or other political functions and social aims) and to offer design visions that might reflect these new dynamics.
Do you want to think about ways to help solve New Orleans' problems? CityScope is a project-based introduction to the contemporary city. "Problem solving in complex (urban) environments" is different than "solving complex problems." As a member of a team, you will learn to assess scenarios for the purpose of formulating social, economic and design strategies to provide humane and sustainable solutions. A visit to New Orleans is planned for spring break 2007.
This course will explore the state of the art in common sense knowledge, and class projects will design and build interfaces that can exploit this knowledge to make more usable and helpful interfaces. This year's theme will be about how common sense knowledge differs in different languages and cultures, and how machine understanding of this knowledge can help increase communication between people, and between people and machines.
This class covers the analysis, design, implementation and testing of various forms of digital communication based on group collaboration. Students are encouraged to think about the Web and other new digital interactive media not just in terms of technology but also broader issues such as language (verbal and visual), design, information architecture, communication and community. Students work in small groups on a semester-long project of their choice.
This class explores composition and arrangement for the large jazz ensemble from 1920s foundations to current postmodern practice. Consideration given to a variety of styles and to the interaction of improvisation and composition. Study of works by Basie, Ellington, Evans, Gillespie, Golson, Mingus, Morris, Nelson, Williams, and others. Open rehearsals, workshops, and performances of student compositions by the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble and the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra.
This class explores sound and what can be done with it. Sources are recorded from students' surroundings - sampled and electronically generated (both analog and digital). Assignments include composing with the sampled sounds, feedback, and noise, using digital signal processing (DSP), convolution, algorithms, and simple mixing. The class focuses on sonic and compositional aspects rather than technology, math, or acoustics, though these are examined in varying detail. Students complete weekly composition and listening assignments; material for the latter is drawn from sound art, experimental electronica, conventional and non-conventional classical electronic works, popular music, and previous students' compositions.
In this interdisciplinary seminar, we explore a variety of visual and written tools for self exploration and self expression. Through discussion, written assignments, and directed exercises, students practice utilizing a variety of media to explore and express who they are.
A computational camera attempts to digitally capture the essence of visual information by exploiting the synergistic combination of task-specific optics, illumination, sensors and processing. In this course we will study this emerging multi-disciplinary field at the intersection of signal processing, applied optics, computer graphics and vision, electronics, art, and online sharing through social networks. If novel cameras can be designed to sample light in radically new ways, then rich and useful forms of visual information may be recorded beyond those present in traditional photographs. Furthermore, if computational process can be made aware of these novel imaging models, them the scene can be analyzed in higher dimensions and novel aesthetic renderings of the visual information can be synthesized.We will discuss and play with thermal cameras, multi-spectral cameras, high-speed, and 3D range-sensing cameras and camera arrays. We will learn about opportunities in scientific and medical imaging, mobile-phone based photography, camera for HCI and sensors mimicking animal eyes. We will learn about the complete camera pipeline. In several hands-on projects we will build physical imaging prototypes and understand how each stage of the imaging process can be manipulated.
This class introduces design as a computational enterprise in which rules are developed to compose and describe architectural and other designs. The class covers topics such as shapes, shape arithmetic, symmetry, spatial relations, shape computations, and shape grammars. It focuses on the application of shape grammars in creative design, and teaches shape grammar fundamentals through in-class, hands-on exercises with abstract shape grammars. The class discusses issues related to practical applications of shape grammars.
In this project-based course, students from all disciplines are encouraged to understand how we learn from interactive computer environments, and delve into the process of designing and understanding simulations and games for learning.
This class, required of all Master of Architecture students, presents a critical review of works, theories, and polemics in architecture in the aftermath of World War II. The aim is to present a historical understanding of the period, and to develop a meaningful framework to assess contemporary issues in architecture. Special attention will be paid to historiographic questions of how architects construe the terms of their "present."
This course examines cultural performances of Asia, including both traditional and contemporary forms, in a variety of genres. Students will explore the communicative power of performances with attention to the ways performers, media, cultural settings, and audiences interact. The representation of cultural difference is considered and how it is altered through processes of globalization. Performances are viewed live when possible, but the course also relies on video, audio, and online materials as necessary. There are no prerequisites for this course and it is taught in English.
This class is divided into a series of sections or "modules", each of which concentrates on a particular large technology-related topic in a cultural context. The class will start with a four-week module on Samurai Swords and Blacksmithing, followed by smaller units on Chinese Cooking, the Invention of Clocks, and Andean Weaving, and end with a four-week module on Automobiles and Engines. In addition, there will be a series of hands-on projects that tie theory and practice together. The class discussions range across anthropology, history, and individual development, emphasizing recurring themes, such as the interaction between technology and culture and the relation between "skill" knowledge and "craft" knowledge. Culture Tech evolved from a more extensive, two-semester course which formed the centerpiece of the Integrated Studies Program at MIT. For 13 years, ISP was an alternative first-year program combining humanities, physics, learning-by-doing, and weekly luncheons. Culture Tech represents the core principles of ISP distilled into a 6-unit seminar. Although many collections of topics have been used over the years, the modules presented here are a representative sequence.
This course focuses on cyberspace and its implications for private and public, sub-national, national, and international actors and entities.
This course introduces students to the art and formal ideologies of contemporary dance. We explore the aesthetic and technical underpinnings of contemporary dance composition. Basic compositional techniques are discussed and practiced, with an emphasis on principles such as weight, space, time, effort, and shape. Principles of musicality are considered and developed by each student. Working with each other as the raw material of the dance, students develop short compositions that reveal their understanding of basic techniques. Hopefully, students come to understand a range of compositional possibilities available to artists who work with the medium of the human body.
This course explores natural and electric lighting that integrates occupant comfort, energy efficiency and daylight availability in an architectural context. Students are asked to evaluate daylighting in real space and simulations, and also high dynamic range photography and physical model building.
The course considers the growing popularity of sustainability and its implications for the practice of engineering, particularly for the built environment. Two particular methodologies are featured: life cycle assessment (LCA) and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). The fundamentals of each approach will be presented. Specific topics covered include water and wastewater management, energy use, material selection, and construction.
This course will examine theory of scenic design as currently practiced, as well as historical traditions for use of performance space and audience/performer engagement. Four play scripts and one opera or dance theater piece will be designed after in-depth analysis; emphasis will be on the social, political and cultural milieu at the time of their creation, and now.
Teaches creative design based on the scientific method through the design, engineering, and manufacture of a detailed inlaid tile. This is an introductory lecture/studio course designed to teach students the basic principles of design and expose them to the design process. Throughout the course, students will be introduced to the terminology and concepts that underlie all forms of visual art; which--in many ways--forms the basis for the design of all physical objects. Along with learning mechanical skills, thinking both critically and visually, and working with different media, the students will consider how the arts grow out of and respond to particular cultural contexts and ideas; and how these thinking patterns can be applied to virtually all types of design. Presentations, lectures, demonstrations, discussions and various artistic works will be used to show students how other artists and designers have dealt with the same issues they will be facing in lab. Each class will begin with a critique of the students' homework, followed by a discussion (and presentation when appropriate) of the pertinent issues of that week. All aspects of the course will aid the teams of students in designing and building a major inlaid tile whose elements are designed as digital solid models and manufactured on an abrasive waterjet machining center. The course will conclude with an exhibit of the completed tiles open to the MIT and the Greater-Boston public. Enrollment is limited to 16 students who will be divided into groups of 4 students each. Preference will be given to students who attend the first day of class in a pre-selected team of 4.
The goal of this class is practical: to interrogate, make explicit, and thus to develop the powerful musical intuitions that are at work as you make sense of the music all around you. Reflecting, we will ask how this knowledge develops in ordinary and extraordinary ways.
In this class we will examine how the idea of the city has been "translated" by artists, architects, and other diverse disciplines. We will consider how collaborations between artists and architects might provide opportunities for rethinking / redesigning urban spaces. The class will look specifically at planned cities like Brasilia, Las Vegas, Canberra, and Celebration and compare such tabula rasa designs with the redesign of recyclable urban spaces demonstrated in projects such as Ground Zero, Barcelona 2004, and Boston's Rose Kennedy Greenway. While the course will involve some reading and discussion, coursework will focus largely on the students' own projects / interventions that should evolve over the course of the semester. Of the two weekly class meetings, one will be a group discussion or lecture with the whole class and visiting guests, and the other will be an individual meeting between the student and the instructor to discuss his or her work for the class, including the final project.
Digital Anthropology is a Spring 2003 applied social science and media arts seminar, surveying the blossoming arena of digital-artifact enabled experimental sociology/anthropology. We will emphasize on both (a) Technology Testbeds systematically deploying research lab prototypes and corporate pre-production products in a sample human organizational population and carefully observing the social consequences, and (b) Sociometrics using digital artifacts to better observe and measure the complex social reality of interesting human systems.
This course will guide graduate students through the process of using rapid prototyping and CAD/CAM devices in a studio environment. The class has a theoretical focus on machine use within the process of design. Each student is expected to have completed one graduate level of design computing with a full understanding of solid modeling in CAD. Students are also expected to have completed at least one graduate design studio.
This is an advanced subject in computer modeling and CAD CAM fabrication, with a focus on building large-scale prototypes and digital mock-ups within a classroom setting. Prototypes and mock-ups are developed with the aid of outside designers, consultants, and fabricators. Field trips and in-depth relationships with building fabricators demonstrate new methods for building design. The class analyzes complex shapes, shape relationships, and curved surfaces fabrication at a macro scale leading to new architectural languages, based on methods of construction.
This class investigates theory and practice of digital or new media poetry with emphasis on workshop review of digital poetry created by students. Each week students examine published examples of digital poetry in a variety of forms including but not limited to soundscapes, hypertext poetry, animation, code poems, interactive games, location-based poems using handheld devices, digital video and wikis.
This class introduces studies in the algorithmic manipulation of type as word, symbol, and form. Problems covered will include semantic filtering, inherently unstable letterforms, and spoken letters. The history and traditions of typography, and their entry into the digital age, will be studied. Weekly assignments using Java will explore new ways of looking at and manipulating type.
Documentary Photography and Photojournalism: Still Images of A World In Motion exposes students to the work of a number of great documentary photographers and photojournalists, as well as to writing about the documentary tradition. Students work throughout the term on a photo documentary project of their own, attempting to reduce a tiny area of the moving world to a set of still images that convey what the viewer needs to know about what they saw - without hearing the sounds, smelling the odors, experiencing what was happening outside the viewfinder, and without seeing the motion. Students also write papers about the subjects of their photo documentaries.
This course is an introduction to the great tradition of documentary photography. Students learn to see the world around them in a new way and produce a documentary project. The course requires reading and writing about photography, as well as doing it on a regular basis. The class emphasis is on thinking about why people photograph, what photographs do and do not mean to us, and on doing documentary work, on telling stories with photographs. This is not a technical class, and it should not be considered an "introduction to photography." I work on the assumption that any student signing up for the class has at least a minimal sense of the difference between f stops and T stops, and can find his or her way around a camera. While there will be some technical discussion in class, it will be limited.
How and why do people seek to capture everyday life on film? What can we learn from such films? This course challenges distinctions commonly made between documentary and ethnographic films to consider how human cultural life is portrayed in both. It considers the interests, which motivate such filmmakers ranging from curiosity about "exotic" people to a concern with capturing "real life" to a desire for advocacy. Students will view documentaries about people both in the U.S. and abroad and will consider such issues as the relationship between film images and "reality," the tensions between art and observation, and the ethical relationship between filmmakers and those they film.
This seminar focuses on downtowns in U.S. cities from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. Emphasis will be placed on downtown as an idea, place, and cluster of interests; on the changing character of downtown; and on recent efforts to rebuild it. Subjects to be considered will include subways, skyscrapers, highways, urban renewal, and retail centers. The focus will be on readings, discussions, and individual research projects.
The aim of this course is to highlight some technical aspects of the classical tradition in architecture that have so far received only sporadic attention. It is well known that quantification has always been an essential component of classical design: proportional systems in particular have been keenly investigated. But the actual technical tools whereby quantitative precision was conceived, represented, transmitted, and implemented in pre-modern architecture remain mostly unexplored. By showing that a dialectical relationship between architectural theory and data-processing technologies was as crucial in the past as it is today, this course hopes to promote a more historically aware understanding of the current computer-induced transformations in architectural design.
This course examines European music from the early Middle Ages until the end of the Renaissance. It includes a chronological survey and intensive study of three topics: chant and its development, music in Italy 1340-1420, and music in Elizabethan England. Instruction focuses on methods and pitfalls in studying music of the distant past. Students' papers, problem sets, and presentations explore lives, genres, and works in depth. Works are studied in facsimile of original notation, and from original manuscripts at MIT, where possible.
Ecologies of Construction examines the resource requirements for the making and maintenance of the contemporary built environment. This course introduces the field of industrial ecology as a primary source of concepts and methods in the mapping of material and energy expenditures dedicated to construction activities.
This is a project to assist in the design, drawing, modeling and hopefully constructing of a small Community Children's Center near Guayaquil, Ecuador. For the last year, Nicki Lehrer, from MIT's Aero/Astro Department, has been organizing efforts to build the project. The goal of the workshop is to provide her with a full fleshed out design for the community center so it can be built in the summer of 2007.
This course will focus on providing students with the tools needed to practice responsible architecture in a contemporary context. It will familiarize students with the materials currently used in responsible practice, as well as the material properties most relevant to assembly. The course will also introduce students to materials that are untested but hold promise for future usage. Finally, the course will challenge students to refine their understanding of responsible or sustainable design practice by looking at the evolution of those ideas within the field of architecture.
Shakespeare "doth bestride the narrow world" of the English Renaissance "like a colossus," leaving his contemporaries "walk under his large legs and peep about" to find themselves in "dishonourable graves." This course aims in part to correct this grave injustice by surveying the extraordinary output of playwrights whose names have largely been eclipsed by their more luminous compatriot: Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, and Ford, among others. Reading Shakespeare as just one of a group of practitioners -- many of whom were more popular than him during and even after his remarkable career -- will restore, I hope, a sense not just of the richness of English Renaissance drama, but also that of the historical and cultural moment of the English Renaissance itself. This course will examine the relationship between theatre and society through the lens of the drama produced in response to these changes. However, we will not try to map the progress of drama directly onto the social world, as if the former can simply read off the latter. Rather, focusing on discrete issues and problems, we will try to understand the ways in which a particular text not only reflects but responds to and shapes aspects of the culture from which it derives, developing an aesthetic that actively engages its world. The topics addressed over the course of the semester will be wide-ranging but will include: gender and class dynamics in Renaissance society; money, trade, and colonialism; the body as metaphor and theatrical "object"; allegory and aesthetic form; theatricality and meta-theatricality; the private and the public.
Through site-specific client-based work, this course will allow students to materially contribute to redevelopment decision-making regarding a former inner-city industrial site. The course will focus on generating and analyzing pragmatic redevelopment scenarios given the issues of brownfields and environmental contamination, community preferences, regulatory constraints and economic realities. The course is designed along two parallel and mutually reinforcing educational tracks: Field learning and classroom reflection, with ample time built into the schedule for both. As the course will focus on an actual site, there will be a sizeable portion of student time spent on location and in the surrounding community.
This course uses scale models to design environments that orchestrate contrasting material properties and conventional constructional systems to create places that foster specific ways of inhabiting space. It also demonstrates how architecture differs from other forms of design. Intended for students to test aptitude for architectural design and to experience an unfamiliar mode of thought, it's conducted in a studio format, with lectures on architectural theory and history, and structured for students with no previous experience in design. Required of Architecture majors.
This course focuses on developing and refining the skills that will you need to express your voice more effectively as an academic writer. As a focus for our writing this semester, this course explores what it means to live in the age of mass media. We will debate the power of popular American media in shaping our ideas of self, family and community and in defining social issues. Throughout the semester, students will focus on writing as a process of drafting and revising to create essays that are lively, clear, engaging and meaningful to a wider audience.
This course examines problems in the philosophy of film as well as literature studied in relation to their making of myths. The readings and films that are discussed in this course draw upon classic myths of the western world. Emphasis is placed on meaning and technique as the basis of creative value in both media.
Inspired by the work of the architect Antoni Gaudi, this research workshop will explore three-dimensional problems in the static equilibrium of structural systems. Through an interdisciplinary collaboration between computer science and architecture, we will develop design tools for determining the form of three-dimensional structural systems under a variety of loads. The goal of the workshop is to develop real-time design and analysis tools which will be useful to architects and engineers in the form-finding of efficient three-dimensional structural systems.
This class will investigate the ways in which the formal aspects of Western storytelling in various media have shaped both fantasies and perceptions, making certain understandings of experience possible through the selection, arrangement, and processing of narrative material. Surveying the field chronologically across the major narrative genres and sub-genres from Homeric epic through the novel and across media to include live performance, film, and video games, we will be examining the ways in which new ideologies and psychological insights become available through the development of various narrative techniques and new technologies. Emphasis will be placed on the generic conventions of story-telling as well as on literary and cultural issues, the role of media and modes of transmission, the artistic significance of the chosen texts and their identity as anthropological artifacts whose conventions and assumptions are rooted in particular times, places, and technologies. Authors will include: Homer, Sophocles, Herodotus, Christian evangelists, Marie de France, Cervantes, La Clos, Poe, Lang, Cocteau, Disney-Pixar, and Maxis-Electronic Arts, with theoretical readings in Propp, Bakhtin, Girard, Freud, and Marx.
The goals of this class are two-fold: the first is to experience the creative processes and storytelling behind several of theater's arts and to acquire the analytical skills necessary in assessing the meaning they transmit when they come together in production. Secondly, we will introduce you to these languages in a creative way by giving you hands-on experience in each. To that end, several Visiting Artists and MIT faculty in Theater Arts will guest lecture, lead workshops, and give you practical instruction in their individual art forms.
There has been much discussion in recent years, on this campus and elsewhere, about the death of the book. Digitization and various forms of electronic media, some critics say, are rendering the printed text as obsolete as the writing quill. In this subject, we will examine the claims for and against the demise of the book, but we will also supplement these arguments with an historical perspective they lack: we will examine texts, printing technologies, and reading communities from roughly 1450 to the present. We will begin with the theoretical and historical overviews of Walter Ong and Elizabeth Eisenstein, after which we will study specific cases such as English chapbooks, Inkan knotted and dyed strings, late nineteenth-century recording devices, and newspapers online today. We will also visit a rare book library and make a poster on a hand-set printing press.
This class covers the history of 20th century art and design from the perspective of the technologist. Methods for visual analysis, oral critique, and digital expression are introduced. Class projects this term use the OLPC XO (One Laptop Per Child) laptop, Csound and Python software.
This design-based subject provides a first course in energy and thermo-sciences with applications to sustainable energy-efficient architecture and building technology. No previous experience with subject matter is assumed. After taking this subject, students will understand introductory thermodynamics and heat transfer, know the leading order factors in building energy use, and have creatively employed their understanding of energy fundamentals and knowledge of building energy use in innovative building design projects. This year, the focus will be on design projects that will complement the new NSTAR/MIT campus efficiency program.
This class introduces students to the rudiments of Western music through oral, aural, and written practice utilizing rhythm, melody, intervals, scales, chords, and musical notation. The approach is based upon the inclusive Kodly philosophy of music education. Individual skills are addressed through a variety of means, emphasizing singing and keyboard practice in the required piano labs.
Furniture making is in many ways like bridge building, connections holding posts apart with spans to support a deck. Many architects have tried their hand at furniture design, Wright, Mies Van Der Rohe, Aalto, Saarinen, Le Corbusier, and Gerhy. We will review the history of furniture making in America with a visit to the Decorative Arts Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and have Cambridge artist/craftsman Mitch Ryerson show us his work and talk about design process. Students will learn traditional woodworking techniques beginning with the use of hand tools, power tools and finally woodworking machines. Students will build a single piece of furniture of an original design that must support someone weighing 185 lbs. sitting on it 12 inches off the ground made primarily of wood. Students should expect to spend approximately 80 hours in the shop outside of class time. Preregistered architecture students will get first priority but first meeting attendance is mandatory. Twelve student maximum, no exceptions.
This course provides practical instruction in the design and analysis of non-digital games. Students cover the texts, tools, references and historical context to analyze and compare game designs across a variety of genres, including sports, game shows, games of chance, card games, schoolyard games, board games, and roleplaying games. In teams, students design, develop, and thoroughly test their original games to understand the interaction and evolution of game rules. Students taking the graduate version complete additional assignments.
An historical examination and analysis of the evolution and development of games and game mechanics. Topics include a large breadth of genres and types of games, including sports, game shows, games of chance, schoolyard games, board games, roleplaying games, and digital games. Students submit essays documenting research and analysis of a variety of traditional and eclectic games. Project teams required to design, develop, and thoroughly test their original games.
The studio will focus on the district of Gaoming, located in the northwest of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) - the fastest growing and most productive region of China. The District has recently completed a planning effort in which several design institutes and a Hong Kong planning firm prepared ideas for a new central area near the river. The class will complement these efforts by focusing on planning and design options on the waterfront of the proposed new district and ways of integrating water/hydrological factors into all aspects and land uses of a modern city (residential, commercial, industrial) - including watershed and natural ecosystem protection, economic and recreational activities, transportation, and tourism.
This course examines representations of race, class, gender, and sexual identity in the media. We will be considering issues of authorship, spectatorship, (audience) and the ways in which various media content (film, television, print journalism, advertising) enables, facilitates, and challenges these social constructions in society. In addition, we will examine how gender and race affects the production of media, and discuss the impact of new media and digital media and how it has transformed access and participation, moving contemporary media users from a traditional position of "readers" to "writers" and/or commentators. Students will analyze gendered and racialized language and embodiment as it is produced online in blogs and vlogs, avatars, and in the construction of cyberidentities. The course provides an introduction to feminist approaches to media studies by drawing from work in feminist film theory, journalism, cultural studies, gender and politics, and cyberfeminism.
This course is an intensive introduction to architectural design tools and process, and is taught through a series of short exercises. The conceptual basis of each exercise is in the interrogation of the geometric principles that lie at the core of each skill. Skills covered in this course range from techniques of hand drafting, to generation of 3D computer models, physical model-building, sketching, and diagramming. Weekly lectures and pin-ups address the conventions associated with modes of architectural representation and their capacity to convey ideas. This course is tailored and offered only to first-year M.Arch students.
The topic for Fall 2006 is short film and radio plays. This course investigates current trends and topics in German literary, theater, film, television, radio, and other media arts productions. Students analyze media texts in the context of their production, reception, and distribution as well as the public debates initiated by these works. The topic for Fall 2006 is German Short Film, a popular format that represents most recent trends in film production, and German Radio Art, a striving genre that includes experimental radio plays, sound art, and audio installations. Special attention will be given to the representation of German minorities, contrasted by their own artistic expressions reflecting changes in identity and a new political voice. Students have the opportunity to discuss course topics with a writer, filmmaker, and/or media artist from Germany. The course is taught in German.
This course focuses on development of interpretive skills, using literary texts (B. Brecht, S. Zweig) and contemporary media texts (film, TV broadcasts, Web materials). The emphasis is on discussion and exploration of cultural topics in their current social, political, and historical context via hypermedia documentaries. It also covers further refinement of oral and written expression and expansion of communicative competence in practical everyday situations.
Prepares students for working and living in German-speaking countries. Focus on current political, social, and cultural issues, using newspapers, journals, TV, radio broadcasts, and Web sources from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Emphasis on speaking, writing, and reading skills for professional contexts. Activities include: oral presentations, group discussions, guest lectures, and interviews with German speakers. No listeners.
This course explores how and why Japan, a late-comer to modernization, emerged as an industrial power and the world's second-richest nation, notwithstanding its recent difficulties. We are particularly concerned with the historical development of technology in Japan especially after 1945, giving particular attention to the interplays between business, ideology, technology, and culture. We will discuss key historical phenomena that symbolize modern Japan as a technological power in the world; specific examples to be discussed in class include kamikaze aircraft, the Shinkansen high-speed bullet train, Godzilla, and anime.
In this subject we will study the basic harmonic, melodic, and formal practices of western music, principally the classical music of central Europe during the eighteenth century. Topics will include diatonic harmony, simple counterpoint in two parts, and tones of figuration. The coursework will combine composition, listening, analysis, and work in sight-singing and keyboard musicianship.
In this subject, we explore the harmonic, melodic, and formal practices of western music, principally the so-called "Classical" idiom of central Europe, ca. 1750-1825. Topics include a quick review of material covered in 21M.301, chromatic harmony (viio7, bII6, and chords of the augmented sixth), and chromatic modulation; lecture study and discussion are complemented by work in the keyboard laboratory and sight-singing laboratory. All areas of study will be integrated in a semester-long project of composing a theme and two variations in Classical style.
The goal of this course is to review grammar and develop vocabulary building strategies to refine oral and written expression. Speaking and writing assignments are designed to expand communicative competence. Assignments are based on models and materials drawn from contemporary media (newspapers and magazines, television, Web). The models, materials, topics and assignments vary from semester to semester.
This class explores the political and aesthetic foundations of hip hop. Students trace the musical, corporeal, visual, spoken word, and literary manifestations of hip hop over its 30 year presence in the American cultural imagery. Students also investigate specific black cultural practices that have given rise to its various idioms. Students create material culture related to each thematic section of the course. Scheduled work in performance studio helps students understand how hip hop is created and assessed.
History of Media and Technology addresses the mutually influential histories of communications media and technological development, focusing on the shift from analog to digital cultures that began mid-century and continues to the present. The approach the series takes to the study of media and technology is a multifaceted one that includes theoretical and philosophical works, histories canonical and minority, literature and art, as well as hands-on production issues toward the advancement of student projects and research papers. The topic for this term is Eternal War.
This course looks at the history of avant-garde and electronic music from the early twentieth century to the present. The class is organized as a theory and production seminar for which students may either produce audio/multimedia projects or a research paper. It engages music scholarship, cultural criticism, studio production, and multi-media development, such as recent software, sound design for film and games, and sound installation. Sound as a media tool for communication and sound as a form of artistic expression are subjects under discussion. The artists' work reviewed in the course includes selections from audio innovators such as the Italian Futurists, Edgard Varse, John Cage, King Tubby, Brian Eno, Steve Reich, Afrika Bambaataa, Kraftwerk, Merzbow, Aphex Twin, Rza, Bjrk, and others.
MAS.450 is a laboratory course about holography and holographic imaging.
Kevin Lynch's landmark volume, The Image of the City (1960), emphasized the perceptual characteristics of the urban environment, stressing the ways that individuals mentally organize their own sensory experience of cities. Increasingly, however, city imaging is supplemented and constructed by exposure to visual media, rather than by direct sense experience of urban realms. City images are not static, but subject to constant revision and manipulation by a variety of media-savvy individuals and institutions. In recent years, urban designers (and others) have used the idea of city image proactively -- seeking innovative ways to alter perceptions of urban, suburban, and regional areas. City imaging, in this sense, is the process of constructing visually-based narratives about the potential of places.
This studio proposes to engage tectonics as a material process. By exploring transformation, indeterminacy and mutability inherent in material and landscape processes, students will be challenged to engage notions of duration as a design strategy for architecture and urbanism. While the second law of thermodynamics states that the material universe tends toward a state of increasing disorder, architects build and construct in opposition to these forces. Attempting to delay the processes of disorder, decay and collapse, tectonics is often seen as the embodied expression of an arrested moment the finite resolution of the building process. Yet the processes that enable and disable architecture extend beyond any arrested moment. A more detailed description can be found in the syllabus section.
This subject explores the varied nature and practice of computation in design. We will view computation and design broadly. Computation will include both work done on the computer (digital computing) and by-hand. Design will include both the process of making designs and artifacts, as well as the designs and artifacts themselves. The aim of the course is to develop a view of computation and design beyond the specifics of techniques and tools, and a critical, self-awareness of our own approaches and metaphors for computation and design.
This course explores the properties of non-linear, multi-linear, and interactive forms of narratives as they have evolved from print to digital media. Works covered in this course range from the Talmud, classics of non-linear novels, experimental literature, early sound and film experiments to recent multi-linear and interactive films and games. The study of the structural properties of narratives that experiment with digression, multiple points of view, disruptions of time, space, and of storyline is complemented by theoretical texts about authorship/readership, plot/story, properties of digital media and hypertext. Questions that will be addressed in this course include: How can we define 'non-linearity/multi-linearity', 'interactivity', 'narrative'. To what extend are these aspects determined by the text, the reader, the digital format? What kinds of narratives are especially suited for a nonlinear/ interactive format? Are there stories that can only be told in a digital format? What can we learn from early non-digital examples of non-linear and interactive story telling?
This course covers techniques of creating narratives that take advantage of the flexibility of form offered by the computer. The course studies the structural properties of book-based narratives that experiment with digression, multiple points of view, disruptions of time and of storyline. The class analyzes the structure and evaluates the literary qualities of computer-based narratives including hypertexts, adventure games, and classic artificial intelligence programs like Eliza. With this base, students use authoring systems to model a variety of narrative techniques and to create their own fictions. Knowledge of programming is helpful but not necessary.
This course is an interdisciplinary exploration of three broad topics concerning music in relation to time. 1. Music as Architecture: the creation of musical shapes in time; 2. Music as Memory: how musical understanding depends upon memory and reminiscence, with attention to analysis of musical structures; and 3. Time as the Substance of Music: how different disciplines such as philosophy and neuroscience view the temporal dimension of musical processes and/or performances. Classroom discussion of these topics is complemented by three weekend concerts with pre-concert forums, jointly presented by the Boston Chamber Music Society (BCMS) and MIT Music & Theater Arts.
This workshop is designed to introduce students to different perspectives on politics and the state of the world through new visualization techniques and approaches to interactive political gaming (and selective 'edutainment'). Specifically, we shall explore applications of interactive tools (such as video and web-based games, blogs or simulations) to examine critical challenges in international politics of the 21C century focusing specifically on general insights and specific understandings generated by operational uses of core concepts in political science.
This course is based on the work of the MIT-African Internet Technology Initiative (MIT-AITI). MIT-AITI is an innovative approach by MIT students to integrate computers and internet technology into the education of students in African schools. The program focuses upon programming principles, cutting-edge internet technology, free open-source systems, and even an entrepreneurship seminar to introduce students in Africa to the power of information technology in today's world.
"Parrhesia" was an Athenian right to frank and open speaking, the right that, like the First Amendment, demands a "fearless speaker" who must challenge political powers with criticism and unsolicited advice. Can designer and artist respond today to such a democratic call and demand? Is it possible to do so despite the (increasing) restrictions imposed on our liberties today? Can the designer or public artist operate as a proactive "parrhesiatic" agent and contribute to the protection, development and dissemination of "fearless speaking" in Public Space?
This course examines the production, transmission, preservation and qualities of folk music in the British Isles and North America from the 18th century to the folk revival of the 1960s and the present. There is a special emphasis on balladry, fiddle styles, and African-American influences. The class sings ballads and folk songs from the Child and Lomax collections as well as other sources as we examine them from literary, historical, and musical points of view. Readings supply critical and background materials from a number of sources. Visitors and films bring additional perspectives.
The course aims at providing a fundamental understanding of the physics related to buildings and to propose an overview of the various issues that have to be adequately combined to offer the occupants a physical, functional and psychological well-being. Students will be guided through the different components, constraints and systems of a work of architecture. These will be examined both independently and in the manner in which they interact and affect one another.
This course offers an introduction to the interdisciplinary study of videogames as texts through an examination of their cultural, educational, and social functions in contemporary settings. Students play and analyze videogames while reading current research and theory from a variety of sources in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and industry. Assignments focus on game analysis in the context of the theories discussed in class. Class meetings involve regular reading, writing, and presentation exercises. No prior programming experience required. Students taking the graduate version complete additional assignments.
This course will introduce students to architectural design and computation through the use of computer modeling, rendering and digital fabrication. The course focuses on teaching architectural design with CAD drawing, 3-D modeling, rendering and rapid prototyping. Students will be required to build computer models that will lead to a full package of architectural explorations with computers. Each semester we will explore the design process of a particular building type and building material. The course also investigates a few design processes of selected architects. The course is critical of design principles and building production methods. Student assignments are graded based on the quality of design, representation and constructability. Great design input is always encouraged.
Introduction to Design Inquiry explores the nature and exercise of design intelligence. It aims to open avenues for further research and, along them, to open vistas on the teaching of design and on more mindful professional design practices.We see design as processes located in individuals and groups, shaped by the formation and experience of each individual and by the characteristics of the groups that play a role in the design process. People construct the worlds they inhabit out of what they know and have experienced. So also does the designer, but the designers worlds must be possible for others to inhabit and, therefore, to construct. Indeed the success of a design depends in large part on the degree to which these constructive processes yield similar results.
This subject explores the varied nature and practice of computation in design. We will view computation and design broadly. Computation will include both work done on the computer (digital computing) and by-hand. Design will include both the process of making designs and artifacts, as well as the designs and artifacts themselves. The aim of the course is to develop a view of computation and design beyond the specifics of techniques and tools, and a critical, self-awareness of our own approaches and metaphors for computation and design.
This course is intended for students pursuing research projects at the Media Laboratory. Topics include Media Lab research areas, documenting research progress, ethical issues in research; patents, copyrights, intellectual property, and giving oral, written, and online presentations of results. A final oral presentation is required. Enrollment limited with preference given to students in the Media Arts and Sciences freshman program.
Drama combines the literary arts of storytelling and poetry with the world of live performance. As a form of ritual as well as entertainment, drama has served to unite communities and challenge social norms, to vitalize and disturb its audiences. In order to understand this rich art form more fully, we will study and discuss a sampling of plays that exemplify different kinds of dramatic structure; class members will also participate in, attend, and review dramatic performances.
Drama might be described as a game played with something sacred. It tells stories that go right to the heart of what people believe about themselves. And it is enacted in the moment, which means it has an added layer of interpretive mystery and playfulness, or "theatricality." This course will explore theater and theatricality across periods and cultures, through intensive engagement with texts and with our own readings.
During this course, we will be exploring basic questions of architecture through several short design exercises. Working with many different media, students will discover the interrelationship of architecture and its related disciplines, such as structures, sustainability, architectural history and the visual arts. Each problem will focus on one of these disciplines and one exploration and presentation technique.
This course offers an overview of the social, cultural, political, and economic impact of mediated communication on modern culture. Combines critical discussions with experiments working with different media. Media covered include radio, television, film, the printed word, and digital technologies. Topics include the nature and function of media, core media institutions, and media in transition.
Introduction to Media Studies is designed for students who have grown up in a rapidly changing global multimedia environment and want to become more literate and critical consumers and producers of culture. Through an interdisciplinary comparative and historical lens, the course defines "media" broadly as including oral, print, theatrical, photographic, broadcast, cinematic, and digital cultural forms and practices. The course looks at the nature of mediated communication, the functions of media, the history of transformations in media and the institutions that help define media's place in society. Over the course of the semester we explore different theoretical perspectives on the role and power of media in society in influencing our social values, political beliefs, identities and behaviors. Students also have the opportunity to analyze specific media texts (such as films and television shows) and explore the meaning of the changes that occur when a particular narrative is adapted into different media forms. We look at the ways in which the politics of class, gender and race influence both the production and reception of media. To represent different perspectives on media, several guest speakers also present lectures. Through the readings, lectures, and discussions as well as their own writing and oral presentations, students have multiple opportunities to engage with critical debates in the field as well as explore the role of media in their own lives.
Introduction to Media Studies is designed for students who have grown up in a rapidly changing global multimedia environment and want to become more literate and critical consumers and producers of media. Through an interdisciplinary comparative and historical lens, the course defines "media" broadly as including oral, print, performance, photographic, broadcast, cinematic, and digital cultural forms and practices. The course looks at the nature of mediated communication, the functions of media, the history of transformations in media and the institutions that help define media's place in society. This years course will focus on issues of network culture and media convergence, addressing such subjects as Intellectual Property, peer2peer authoring, blogging, and game modification.
Through a progressive series of composition projects, students investigate the sonic organization of musical works and performances, focusing on fundamental questions of unity and variety. Aesthetic issues are considered in the pragmatic context of the instructions that composers provide to achieve a desired musical result, whether these instructions are notated in prose, as graphic images, or in symbolic notation. No formal training is required; this version of the class is a general elective suitable for a relatively large-enrollment class. Weekly listening, reading, and composition assignments draw on a broad range of musical styles and intellectual traditions, from various cultures and historical periods.
Through a progressive series of composition projects, this course investigates the sonic organization of musical works and performances, focusing on fundamental questions of unity and variety. Aesthetic issues are considered in the pragmatic context of the instructions that composers provide to achieve a desired musical result, whether these instructions are notated in prose, as graphic images, or in symbolic notation. No formal training is required. Weekly listening, reading, and composition assignments draw on a broad range of musical styles and intellectual traditions, from various cultures and historical periods.
This course combines practical instruction, field trips, group discussions, and individual reviews intended to foster a critical awareness of how images in our culture are produced and constructed. Student-initiated term projects are at the core of this exploration of the relationship of image to language and issues of interpretation and personal history. Besides, this course also offers practical instruction in basic black and white techniques, digital imaging, fundamentals of camera operation, lighting, film exposure, development and printing. Course provides opportunity for continued exploration.
This course provides practical instruction in the fundamentals of analog and digital SLR and medium/large format camera operation, film exposure and development, black and white darkroom techniques, digital imaging, and studio lighting. This semester we will explore the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences for our theme- and site-specific term project, which provides opportunities to develop technical skills and experimental photographic techniques, and for personal artistic exploration. Final projects will be presented on site in exhibition format. Work in progress is continuously presented and discussed in a critical forum. Lectures, readings, visiting professionals, group discussions, and site visits encourage aesthetic appreciation of the medium and a deeper understanding of our semester theme, as well as a critical awareness of how images in our culture are produced and constructed.
This class introduces fundamental issues in sculpture such as site, context, process, psychology and aesthetics of the object, and the object's relation to the body. During the semester Introduction to Sculpture will explore issues of interpretation and audience interaction. As a significant component to this class introductions to a variety of materials and techniques both traditional (wood, metal, plaster) as well as non-traditional (fabric, latex, found objects, rubber, etc.) will be emphasized.
Offered in the spring and fall terms, Introduction to Stagecraft is a hands-on course that gets students working with the tools and techniques of theatrical production in a practical way. It is not a design course but one devoted to artisanship. Among the many remarkable final projects that have been proposed and presented at the end of the course have been a Renaissance hourglass blown in the MIT glass shop and set into a frame turned on our set shop lathe; a four harness loom built by a student who then wove cloth on it; a number of chain mail tunics and coifs; a wide variety of costume and furniture pieces and electrified period lighting fixtures.
This course is a global-oriented survey of the history of architecture, from the prehistoric to the sixteenth century. It treats buildings and environments, including cities, in the context of the cultural and civilizational history. It offers an introduction to design principles and analysis. Being global, it aims to give the student perspective on the larger pushes and pulls that influence architecture and its meanings, whether these be economic, political, religious or climatic.
This class will introduce students to a variety of contemporary art practices and ideas. The class will begin with a brief overview of 'visual language' by looking at a variety of artworks and discussing basic concepts revolving around artistic practice. The rest of the class will focus on notions of the real/unreal as explored with various mediums and practices. The class will work in video, sculpture and in public space.
This course examines the evolving structure of cities and the way that cities, suburbs, and metropolitan areas can be designed and developed. Boston and other American cities are studied to see how physical, social, political and economic forces interact to shape and reshape cities over time.
This class serves as an introduction to video recording and editing, presenting video as a tool of personal apprehension and expression, with an emphasis on self-exploration, performance, social critique, and the organization of raw experience into aesthetic form (narrative, abstract, documentary, essay). Students are required to complete a variety of assignments to learn the basics of video capture and editing, culminating in a final assignment that has to do with personal storytelling.
This course offers an introduction to the interdisciplinary study of videogames as texts through an examination of their cultural, educational, and social functions in contemporary settings. Students play and analyze videogames while reading current research and theory from a variety of sources in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and industry. Assignments focus on game analysis in the context of the theories discussed in class. Class meetings involve regular reading, writing, and presentation exercises. No prior programming experience required. Students taking the graduate version complete additional assignments.
This course gives a broad overview of Western music from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, with emphasis on late baroque, classical, romantic, and modernist styles (1700-1910). It is also meant to enhance students' musical experience by developing listening skills and an understanding of diverse forms and genres. Major composers and their works will be placed in social and cultural contexts. Weekly lectures feature demonstrations by professional performers, and introduce topics to be discussed in sections. The focus of the course is on the weekly listening and reading assignments.
This course explores the ways that music is both shaped by and gives shape to the cultural settings in which it is performed, through studying selected musical traditions from around the world. Specific case studies will be examined closely through listening, analysis, and hands-on instruction. The syllabus centers around weekly listening assignments and readings from a textbook with CDs, supplemented by hands-on workshops, lecture/demonstrations and concerts by master musicians from around the world.
This subject investigates the special relation of women to several musical folk traditions in the British Isles and North America. Throughout, we will be examining the implications of gender in the creation, transmission, and performance of music. Because virtually all societies operate to some extent on a gendered division of labor (and of expressive roles) the music of these societies is marked by the gendering of musical repertoires, traditions of instrumentation, performance settings, and styles. This seminar will examine the gendered dimensions of the music - the song texts, the performance styles, processes of dissemination (collection, literary representation) and issues of historiography - with respect to selected traditions within the folk musics of North America and the British Isles, with the aim of analyzing the special contributions of women to these traditions. In addition to telling stories about women's musical lives, and studying elements of female identity and subjectivity in song texts and music, we will investigate the ways in which women's work and women's cultural roles have affected the folk traditions of these several countries.
This course covers medieval Japanese society and culture from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries, when political power rested largely in the hands of feudal warriors. Topics include religion (especially Zen Buddhism); changing concepts of "the way of the warrior;" women under feudalism; popular culture; and protest and rebellion. Presentations include weekly feature films. Assigned readings include many literary writings in translation.
This course includes surveys for both cinematic and literary representations of diverse eras and aspects of Japanese culture such as the classical era, the samurai age, wartime Japan and the atomic bombings, social change in the postwar period, and the appropriation of foreign cultural themes, with an emphasis on the modern period. The directors include Akira Kurosawa and Hiroshi Teshigahara. The authors include Kobo Abe and Yukio Mishima. The films are shown with subtitles in English. The course is taught in English.
This course examines Japanese popular culture as a way of understanding the changing character of media, capitalism, fan communities and culture. Topics include manga (comic books), hip-hop and other popular music in Japan, anime (Japanese animated films) and feature films, sports (sumo, soccer, baseball), and online communication. Emphasis will be on contemporary popular culture and theories of gender, sexuality, race, and the workings of power in global culture industries.
This class explores the artistry of Lighting Design. Students gain an overall technical working knowledge of the tools of the trade, and learn how, and where to apply them to a final design. However essential technical expertise is, the class stresses the artistic, conceptual, collaborative side of the craft. The class format is a "hands on" approach, with a good portion of class time spent in a theatre.
This course introduces the practice and theory of literary criticism. The seminar focuses on topics such as the history of critical methods and techniques, and the continuity of certain subjects in literary history. Instruction and practice in oral and written communication is a major component of the course. Other components include theory and use of figurative language and reading poetry.
This seminar provides intensive study of texts by two American authors (Herman Melville, 1819-1891, and Toni Morrison, 1931-) who, using lyrical, radically innovative prose, explore in different ways epic notions of American identity. Focusing on Melville's Typee (1846), Moby-Dick (1851), and The Confidence-Man (1857) and Morrison's Sula (1973), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1998), the class will address their common concerns with issues of gender, race, language, and nationhood. Be prepared to read deeply (i.e. a small number of texts with considerable care), to draw on a variety of sources in different media, and to employ them in creative research, writing, and multimedia projects.
This class does intensive close study and analysis of historically significant media "texts" that have been considered landmarks or have sustained extensive critical and scholarly discussion. Such texts may include oral epic, story cycles, plays, novels, films, opera, television drama and digital works. The course emphasizes close reading from a variety of contextual and aesthetic perspectives. The syllabus varies each year, and may be organized around works that have launched new modes and genres, works that reflect upon their own media practices, or on stories that migrate from one medium to another. At least one of the assigned texts is collaboratively taught, and visiting lectures and discussions are a regular feature of the subject.
The aim of the Portfolio Seminar is to assist in developing a critical position in relationship to their design work. By engaging multiple forms of representation, written and visual, students will explore methods that facilitate describing and representing their design work. Through a critical assessment of their existing portfolios, students will first be challenged to articulate design theses and interests in their past projects. Different mediums of representation will then be studied in order to hone an understanding of the relationship between form and content, and more specifically, the understanding of particular modes of representation as different filters through which their work can be read. Some of the questions that will be addressed are: * How does one go about describing an image? * How does one theorize representation? * How does one articulate a design thesis in writing verses visual media? * How can the two interact to enhance each other? * How do different media, printed verses web publishing, affect the representation of work? * How is your work best communicated?
This class examines frameworks for making and sharing visual artifacts using a trans-cultural, trans-historical, constructionist approach. It explores the relationship between perceived reality and the narrative imagination, how an author's choice of medium and method of construction constrains the work, how desire is integrated into the structure of a work, and how the cultural/economic opportunity for exhibition/distribution affects the realization of a work. Students submit three papers and three visual projects. Work is discussed and critiqued in class. Students present final projects an exhibition at the end of term. Instruction and practice in written and oral communication is provided.
This course explores the ways in which humans experience the realm of sound and how perceptions and technologies of sound emerge from cultural, economic, and historical worlds. It examines how environmental, linguistic, and musical sounds are construed cross-culturally. It describes the rise of telephony, architectural acoustics, sound recording, and the globalized travel of these technologies. Students address questions of ownership, property, authorship, and copyright in the age of digital file sharing. There is a particular focus on how the sound/noise boundary is imagined, created and modeled across diverse sociocultural and scientific contexts. Auditory examples will be provided. Instruction and practice in written and oral communication provided. At MIT, this course is limited to 20 students.
This instance of "Media, Education, and the Marketplace" focuses on the rise of information and communications technologies (ICTs) during the age of globalization, specifically examining its effect and potential in developing nations across the world. In particular, the class will focus on the following three components: * "Media" ICTs, specifically the dramatic rise in use of the Internet over the past twenty years, have "globalized" the world and created opportunities where very few have been available in the past. We are entering a phase where an individual can significantly improve his or her own economical, political, and social circumstances with just a computer and Internet connection. This course investigate these profound developments through current research and case studies. * "Education" With projects such as MIT's OpenCourseWare, the major players in the world are beginning to understand the true power of ICTs in development. Throughout this class, we examine projects that harness the benefits of ICTs to create positive social change around the world. * "Marketplace" The focus is on the developing regions of the world. Specifically, the term "digital divide" is tossed around in everyday language, but what does it really mean? Is there an international digital divide, a national digital divide, or both? Should we try to bridge this divide, and how have past attempts succeeded and (for the most part) failed? Why? These are all questions that are asked throughout this course.This course has a very unique pedagogy, which is discussed in more detail in the syllabus section.
This course explores the international trade in television text, considering the ways in which 'foreign' programs find places within 'domestic' schedules. Looking at the life television texts maintain outside of their home market, this course examines questions of globalization and national cultures of production and reception. Students will be introduced to a range of positions about the nature of international textual trade, including economic arguments about the structuring of international markets and ethnographic studies about the role imported content plays in the formation of hybrid national identities. Students will be encouraged to consider the role American content is made to play in non-American markets.
What is the history of popular reading in the Western world? How does widespread access to print relate to distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow culture, between good taste and bad judgment, and between men and women readers? This course will introduce students to the broad history of popular reading and to controversies about taste and gender that have characterized its development. Our grounding in historical material will help make sense of our main focus: recent developments in the theory and practice of reading, including fan-fiction, Oprah's book club, comics, hypertext, mass-market romance fiction, mega-chain bookstores, and reader response theory.
This course centers on historical eras in which the form and function of media technologies were radically transformed. It includes consideration of the "Gutenberg Revolution," the rise of modern mass media, and the "digital revolution," among other case studies of media transformation and cultural change. Readings are in cultural and social history and historiographic method.
This course examines the interplay of art, science, and commerce shaping the production, marketing, distribution, and consumption of contemporary media. It combines perspectives on media industries and systems with an awareness of the creative process, the audience, and trends shaping content. There will be invited discussions with industry experts in various subject areas. Class projects will encourage students to think through the challenges of producing media in an industry context. CMS.610 is for undergraduate credit, whereas CMS.922 is for graduate credit. Though the requirements for graduates are more stringent, the course is intended for both undergraduate and graduate students.
This year the course will examine what it means to be an urban designer/planner and how to create a digital teaching tool (using digital storytelling) that supports others in learning about the relationship between design and planning professionals, on the one hand, and members of the communities they serve, on the other. What is the nature of the knowledge that resides in a community and how can designers and planners learn about, tap, and use that knowledge? What is the relationship between community organizing and urban design and planning? What are the relationships between you as a professional, the place(s) in which you work, and the values and care you bring to that work? We will explore these themes in the context of Camfield Estates in Lower Roxbury, MA and its participation in the US Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) Demonstration Disposition Project. There have been many stories written about Camfield Estates' participation in the Demonstration Disposition project, for it has been widely regarded as a model of success. There are two stories that have not yet been told, however: the story of the residents who organized the community and the story of the architects and planners who participated in the project. This course will use digital storytelling to reconstruct and connect these two stories.
This workshop explores the potential of media technology and the Internet to enhance communication and transform city design and community development in inner-city neighborhoods. The class introduces a variety of methods for describing or representing a place and its residents, for simulating actions and changes, for presenting visions of the future, and for engaging multiple actors in the process of envisioning change and guiding action. Students will engage two neighborhoods: the Mill Creek neighborhood of West Philadelphia, PA, and the Brightwood/Northend neighborhood of Springfield, MA. Students will meet real people working on real projects, put theory into practice, and reflect on insights gained in the process. Our hope is that student work will contribute to new initiatives in both communities. The class Web site can be found here: Media Technology and City Design and Development. It is sponsored by the West Philadelphia Landscape Project and the Center for Reflective Community Practice.
How can we harness the emerging forms of interactive media to enhance the learning process? Professor Miyagawa and prominent guest speakers will explore a broad range of issues on new media and learning - technical, social, and business. Concrete examples of use of media will be presented as case studies. One major theme, though not the only one, is that today's youth, influenced by video games and other emerging interactive media forms, are acquiring a fundamentally different attitude towards media. Media is, for them, not something to be consumed, but also to be created. This has broad consequences for how we design media, how the young are taught in schools, and how mass media markets will need to adjust.
This class provides an introduction to modern art and theories of modernism and postmodernism. It focuses on the way artists use the tension between fine art and mass culture to mobilize a critique of both. We will examine objects of visual art, including painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, prints, performance and video. These objects will be viewed in their interaction with advertising, caricature, comics, graffiti, television, fashion, folk art, and "primitive" art.
This course analyzes major modern plays featuring works by Shaw, Pirandello, Beckett, Brecht, Williams, Soyinka, Hwang, Churchill, Wilson, Frayn, Stoppard, Deveare Smith, and Kushner. The class particularly considers performance, sociopolitical and aesthetic contexts, and the role of theater in the world of modern multimedia.
This subject covers a specific branch of music history: Western concert music of first sixty years of the twentieth century. Although we will be listening to and studying many pieces (most of the highest caliber) the goal of the course is not solely to build up a repertory of works in our memory (though that is indeed a goal). We will be most concerned with larger questions of continuity and change in music. We will also consider questions of reception, or historiography - that is, the creation of history and our perception of it. Why do we perceive much of this music, so much closer in time to us than Mozart or Beethoven, to be so foreign? Is this music aloof and separate from popular music of the twentieth century or is there a real connection (perhaps hidden)? The subject will continue to follow some topics of central interest to music before 1960, such as serialism and aleatory, beyond the 1960 cutoff. Conversely a few topics which get their start just before 1960 but which flourish later (minimalism, computer music) will be covered only in 21M.263.
This course presents a rational basis for the preliminary design of motion-sensitive structures. Topics covered include: analytical and numerical techniques for establishing the optimal stiffness distribution, the role of damping in controlling motion, tuned mass dampers, base isolation systems, and active structural control. Examples illustrating the application of the motion-based design paradigm to building structures subjected to seismic excitation are discussed.
This course is an investigation into the history and aesthetics of music and technology as deployed in experimental and popular musics from the 19th century to the present. Through original research, creative hands-on projects, readings, and lectures, the following topics will be explored. The history of radio, audio recording, and the recording studio, as well as the development of musique concrte and early electronic instruments. The creation and extension of musical interfaces by composers such as Harry Partch, John Cage, Conlon Nancarrow, and others. The exploration of electromagnetic technologies in pickups, and the development of dub, hip-hop, and turntablism. The history and application of the analog synthesizer, from the Moog modular to the Roland TR-808. The history of computer music, including music synthesis and representation languages. Contemporary practices in circuit bending, live electronics, and electro-acoustic music, as well as issues in copyright and intellectual property, will also be examined. No prerequisites.
This course examines the history, techniques, and aesthetics of mechanical and computer-aided approaches to algorithmic music composition and generative music systems. Through creative hands-on projects, readings, listening assignments, and lectures, students will explore a variety of historical and contemporary approaches. Diverse tools and systems will be employed, including applications in Python, MIDI, Csound, SuperCollider, and Pure Data.
This course is a creative, hands-on exploration of contemporary and historical approaches to live electronics performance and improvisation, including basic analog instrument design, computer synthesis programming, and hardware and software interface design.
This course covers foundations, practices, and creative techniques in audio recording and music production, including microphone selection and placement, mixing, mastering, signal processing, automation, and digital audio workstations.
This course features directed composition of larger forms of original writing involving voices and/or instruments. It includes a weekly seminar in composition for the presentation and discussion of work in progress. Students are expected to produce at least one substantive work, performed in public, by the end of the term. Contemporary compositions and major works from 20th-century music literature are studied.
This course is an introduction to selected musical traditions of West Africa. A variety of musical practices and their cultural contexts will be explored through listening, reading, and written assignments, with an emphasis on class discussion. The course includes in-class instruction in West African drumming, song and dance, as well as lecture-demonstrations by guest artists. After an introductory unit, the course will be organized around four main geographical areas: Senegal, Mali, Ghana, and Nigeria. An in-depth study of music from these countries will be interspersed with brief overviews of Southern, Central, and East Africa.
This course focuses on Hindustani classical music of North India, and also involves learning about the ancient foundations of the rich classical traditions of music and dance of all Indian art and culture. Students explore the practice the ragas and talas through learning songs, dance, and drumming compositions, and develop insights through listening, readings, and concert attendance.
This course begins with the premise that the 1960s mark a great dividing point in the history of 20th century Western musical culture, and explores the ways in which various social and artistic concerns of composers, performers, and listeners have evolved since that decade. It focuses on works by classical composers from around the world. Topics include the impact of rock, as it developed during the 1960s - 70s; the concurrent emergence of post serial, neotonal, minimalist, and new age styles; the globalization of Western musical traditions; the impact of new technologies; and the significance of music video, video games, and other versions of multimedia. The course interweaves discussion of these topics with close study of seminal musical works, evenly distributed across the four decades since 1960; works by MIT composers are included.
This class is an introduction to the analysis of tonal music. Students develop analytical techniques based upon concepts learned in 21M.301-21M.302. Students study rhythm and form, harmony, line and motivic relationships at local and large scale levels of musical structure. Three papers (totaling 20 pages, one to be revised) and one oral presentation are required.
Today, computer-based simulations are becoming increasingly popular, especially when daylighting and energy conservation are amongst the key goals for a project. This two-week workshop will expose participants to the current daylighting simulation models and beyond, by introducing realistic and dynamic assessment methods through hands-on exercises and application to a design project. Open to students and practitioners. This course is offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month.
Networks are a ubiquitous way to represent complex systems, including those in the social and economic sciences. The goal of the course is to equip students with conceptual tools that can help them understand complex systems that emerge in both nature and social systems. This is a course intended for a general audience and will discuss applications of networks and complexity to diverse systems, including epidemic spreading, social networks and the evolution of economic development.
The course draws on faculty members from the Center for Real Estate, the City Design and Development Group (Department of Urban Studies and Planning), and the Media Lab to explore extraordinary projects that challenge conventional approaches to real estate development, urban design, and advanced digital technology.
This course addresses the place of contemporary queer identities in French discourse and discusses the new generation of queer authors and their principal concerns. Class discussions and readings will introduce students to the main classical references of queer subcultures, from Proust and Vivien to Hocquenghem and Wittig. Throughout the course, students will examines current debates on post-colonial and globalized queer identities through essays, songs, movies, and novels. Authors covered include Didier Eribon, Anne Garrta, Abdellah Taa, Anne Scott, and Nina Bouraoui. This class is taught in French.
This course serves as an in-depth look at literacy theory in media contexts, from its origins in ancient Greece to its functions and changes in the current age of digital media, participatory cultures, and technologized learning environments. Students will move quickly through traditional historical accounts of print literacies; the majority of the semester will focus on treating literacy as more than a functional skill (i.e., one's ability to read and write) and instead as a sophisticated set of meaning-making activities situated in specific social spaces. These new media literacies include the practices and concepts of: fan fiction writing, online social networking, videogaming, appropriation and remixing, transmedia navigation, multitasking, performance, distributed cognition, and collective intelligence. Assignments include weekly reading and writing assignments and an original research project. Readings will include Plato, Goody and Watt, Scribner and Cole, Graff, Brandt, Heath, Lemke, Gee, Alvermann, Jenkins, Hobbs, Pratt, Leander, Dyson, Levy, Kress, and Lankshear and Knobel.
Can you make a cellphone change the world? NextLab is a hands-on year-long design course in which students research, develop and deploy mobile technologies for the next billion mobile users in developing countries. Guided by real-world needs as observed by local partners, students work in multidisciplinary teams on term-long projects, closely collaborating with NGOs and communities at the local level, field practitioners, and experts in relevant fields. Students are expected to leverage technical ingenuity in both mobile and internet technologies together with social insight in order to address social challenges in areas such as health, microfinance, entrepreneurship, education, and civic activism. Students with technically and socially viable prototypes may obtain funding for travel to their target communities, in order to obtain the first-hand feedback necessary to prepare their technologies for full fledged deployment into the real world (subject to guidelines and limitations).
The aim of the students from the Numeric Photography class at the MIT Media Laboratory was to present an exhibition of digital artworks which blend photography and computation, in the context of scene capture, image play, and interaction. Equipped with low end digital cameras, students created weekly software projects to explore aesthetic issues in signal processing and interaction design. The results are more than a hundred Java applets, many of which are interactive, that suggest new avenues for image play on the computer. These weekly exercises led to the final product, an exhibition of the student work.
This course examines works of film in relation to thematic issues of philosophical importance that also occur in other arts, particularly literature and opera. Emphasis is put on film's ability to represent and express feeling as well as cognition. Both written and cinematic works by Sturges, Shaw, Cocteau, Hitchcock, Joyce, and Bergman, among others, are considered. There are no tests or quizzes, however students write two major papers on media/philosophical research topics of their choosing.
This course is a seminar on the philosophical analysis of film art, with an emphasis on the ways in which it creates meaning through techniques that define a formal structure. There is a particular focus on aesthetic problems about appearance and reality, literary and visual effects, communication and alienation through film technology.
Subject combines practical instruction, readings, lectures, field trips, visiting artists, group discussions, and individual reviews. Fosters a critical awareness of how images in our culture are produced and constructed. Student-initiated term project at the core of exploration. Special consideration given to the relationship of space and the photographic image. Practical instruction in basic black and white techniques, digital imaging, fundamentals of camera operation, lighting, film exposure, development, and printing. Open to beginning and advanced students. Lab fee. Enrollment limited with preference given to current Master of Architecture students.
Still photography, a practice and form of expression that has worked its way into every facet of social life and every culture in the world, is considered here from the perspectives of history and social science. We will discuss the uses and functions of pictures; how they are to be understood and interpreted; whether they have clear-cut content and meanings; how they shape and are shaped by politics, economics, and social life.
This course provides continued work in the development of play scripts for the theater. Writers work on sustained pieces in weekly workshop meetings, individual consultation with the instructor, and in collaboration with student actors, directors, and designers. Fully developed scripts are eligible for inclusion in the Playwrights' Workshop Production.
This class introduces the craft of writing for the theater. Through weekly assignments, in class writing exercises, and work on a sustained piece, students explore scene structure, action, events, voice, and dialogue. We examine produced playscripts and discuss student work. This class's emphasis is on process, risk-taking, and finding one's own voice and vision.
This course focuses on popular music, i.e. music created for and transmitted by mass media. Various popular music genres from around the world will be studied through listening, reading and written assignments, with an emphasis on class discussion. In particular, we will consider issues of musical change, syncretism, Westernization, globalization, the impact of recording industries, and the post-colonial era. Case studies will include Afro-pop, reggae, bhangra, rave, and global hip-hop.
Our purpose is to consider some of the most elaborate and thoughtful efforts to define and delineate "all-mastering," and to consider some of the delineations of "all-mastering the intellect" in various guises - from magicians to master spies to detectives to scientists (mad and otherwise). The major written work of the term will be an ongoing reading journal, which you will circulate to your classmates using an e-mail mailing list. The use of that list is fundamental - it is my intention to generate a sort of ongoing cyberconversation.
This workshop provides an introduction to urban environmental design and explores the potential of information technology and the Internet to transform public education, city design, and community development in inner-city neighborhoods. Integration of comprehensive ("top-down") and grassroots ("bottom-up") approaches to design and planning is a major theme. Students will work in a real neighborhood with real people on a real project, putting theory into practice and reflecting on insights gained in the process. We will study environmental and community history and devise designs for vacant land near a middle school in West Philadelphia within the context of planning for the larger community and watershed. The class website can be found here: Power of Place: Media Technology, Youth, and City Design and Development.
This course provides students with the opportunity to develop a map of contemporary architectural practice and discourse. The seminar examines six themes in terms of their recent history: city and global economy, urban plan and map of operations, program and performance, drawing and scripting, image and surface, and utopia and projection. Students will study buildings and read relevant texts in order to place recent architectural projects in disciplinary and cultural context.
This course helps in developing skills as science communicators through projects and analysis of theoretical principles. Case studies explore the emergence of popular science communication over the past two centuries and consider the relationships among authors, audiences and media. Project topics are identified early in the term and students work with MIT Museum staff. Projects may include physical exhibits, practical demonstrations, or scripts for public programs.
This course deals with advanced design theories and textual analysis. Emphasis is placed on script analysis in general, as well as the investigation of design principles from a designer's perspective. Students also refine technical skills in rendering and presentation, historical research, and analysis. Class sessions include interaction with student/faculty directors and other staff designers. The goal of this course is for students to approach text with a fresh vision and translate that vision into design for performance.
This course examines the issues, principles, and challenges toward building relational machines through a combination of studio-style design and critique along with lecture, lively discussion of course readings, and assignments. Insights from social psychology, human-computer interaction, and design will be examined, as well as how these ideas are manifest in a broad range of applications for software agents and robots.
This course introduces the history of Islamic cultures through their most vibrant material signs: the religious architecture that spans fourteen centuries and three continents Asia, Africa, and Europe. The course presents Islamic architecture both as a historical tradition and as a cultural catalyst that influenced and was influenced by the civilizations with which it came in contact.
In this seminar, students will design and perfect a digital environment to house the activities of large-scale organizations of people making bottom-up decisions, such as with citizen-government affairs, voting corporate shareholders or voting members of global non-profits and labor unions. A working Open Source prototype created last semester will be used as the starting point, featuring collaborative filtering and electronic agent technology pioneered at the Media Lab. This course focuses on development of online spaces as part of an interdependent human environment, including physical architectures, mapped work processes and social/political dimensions. A cross-disciplinary approach will be taken; students with background in architecture, urban planning, law, cognition, business, digital media and computer science are encouraged to participate. No prior technical knowledge is necessary, though a rudimentary understanding of web page creation is helpful.
Revitalizing Urban Main Streets focuses on the physical and economic renewal of urban neighborhood Main Streets by combining classroom work with an applied class project. The course content covers three broad areas: 1. an overview of the causes for urban business district decline, the challenges faced in revitalization and the type of revitalization strategies employed; 2. the physical and economic development planning tools used to understand and assess urban Main Streets from physical design and economic development perspectives; and 3. the policies, interventions, and investments used to foster urban commercial revitalization. The course has dual goals: to explore the integration of economic and physical development interventions in ways that reinforce commercial district revitalization efforts, and to apply this knowledge through the development of a formal neighborhood commercial revitalization plan for a client business district.
This course focuses on the physical and economic renewal of urban neighborhood Main Streets by combining classroom work with an applied class project. The course content covers four broad areas: 1. An overview of the causes for urban business district decline, the challenges faced in revitalization and the type of revitalization strategies employed; 2. The physical and economic development planning tools used to understand and assess urban Main Streets from physical design and economic development perspectives; 3. The policies, interventions, and investments used to foster urban commercial revitalization; and 4. The formulation of a revitalization plan for an urban commercial district.
This course is a survey of developments in Western musical style, 1815-1915. Students will study works by 35 composers, including the romantics: Schubert, Chopin, and Schumann; the post-romantics: Wagner, Verdi, and Brahms; the turn-of-the-centurians: Mahler, Debussy, and Ravel; and the Americans: Gottschalk, Beach, and Joplin. Score-reading ability is beneficial.
This course introduces writing, graphics, meetings, oral presentation, collaboration, and design as tools for product development. The communication instruction is embedded in design projects that require students to work in teams to conceive, design, prototype and evaluate energy related products. The communication instruction focuses on the communication tasks that are integral to this design process, ranging, across design notebooks, email communications, informal oral presentations, meeting etiquette, literature searches, white papers reports, and formal presentations. In addition to the assignments specific to product development, a few assignments, especially reading and reflection, will address the cultural situation of engineers and engineering in the world at large.
This class focuses on reading a script theatrically with a view to mounting a coherent production. Through careful, intensive reading of a variety of plays from different periods and different aesthetics, a pattern emerges for discerning what options exist for interpretating a script. Students discuss the consequences of those options for production.
This course focuses on reading a script theatrically with a view to mounting a coherent production. Through careful, intensive reading of a variety of plays from different periods and different aesthetics, a pattern emerges for discerning what options exist for interpretating a script. The Fall 2005 version of this course contains alternate readings and assignments sections.
This class is a general study of modern architecture as a response to important technological, cultural, environmental, aesthetic, and theoretical challenges after the European Enlightenment. It focuses on the theoretical, historiographic, and design approaches to architectural problems encountered in the age of industrial and post-industrial expansion across the globe, with specific attention to the dominance of European modernism in setting the agenda for the discourse of a global modernity at large. It explores modern architectural history through thematic exposition rather than as a simple chronological succession of ideas.
Innovation in expression, as realized in media, tangible objects, performance and more, generates new questions and new potentials for human engagement. When and how does expression engage us deeply? Many personal stories confirm the hypothesis that once we experience deep engagement, it is a state we long for, remember, and want to repeat. This class will explore what underlying principles and innovative methods can ensure the development of higher-quality "deep engagement" products (artifacts, experiences, environments, performances, etc.) that appeal to a broad audience and that have lasting value over the long term.
This course explores photography as a disciplined way of seeing, of investigating landscapes and expressing ideas. Readings, observations, and photographs form the basis of discussions on landscape, light, significant detail, place, poetics, narrative, and how photography can inform design and planning, among other issues. The class Web site can be found here: Sensing Place: Photography as Inquiry.
This course introduces scholarly debates about sexual identities, gender identities and expressions, and sexual orientation and its representation in film and literature. We begin with a contemporary debate about biology and gender identity, considering its relationship to the historical understanding of sex, gender, and sexual identity. Our investigation continues with the theoretical underpinnings of the emerging field of queer studies, from the nineteenth century to the present day, and considers how subsequent work in transgender studies continues to challenge traditional understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality.
Filmed Shakespeare began in 1899, with Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree performing the death scene from King John for the camera. Sarah Bernhardt, who had played Hamlet a number of times in her long career, filmed the duel scene for the Paris Exposition of 1900. In the era of silent film (1895-1929) several hundred Shakespeare films were made in England, France Germany and the United States, Even without the spoken word, Shakespeare was popular in the new medium. The first half-century of sound included many of the most highly regarded Shakespeare films, among them -- Laurence Olivier's Hamlet and Henry V, Orson Welles' Othello and Chimes at Midnight, Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, Polanski's Macbeth and Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. We are now in the midst of an extremely rich and varied period for Shakespeare on film which began with the release of Kenneth Branagh's Henry V in 1989 and includes such films as Richard Loncraine's Richard III, Julie Taymor's Titus, Zeffirelli and Almereyda's Hamlet films, Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, and Shakespeare in Love. The phenomenon of filmed Shakespeare raises many questions for literary and media studies about adaptation, authorship, the status of "classic" texts and their variant forms, the role of Shakespeare in youth and popular culture, and the transition from manuscript, book and stage to the modern medium of film and its recent digitally inflected forms. Most of our work will involve individual and group analysis of the "film text" -- that is, of specific sequences in the films, aided by videotape, DVD, the Shakespeare Electronic Archive, and some of the software tools for video annoatation developed by the MIT Shakespeare Project under the MIT-Microsoft iCampus Initiative. We will study the films as works of art in their own right, and try to understand the means -- literary, dramatic, performative, cinematic -- by which they engage audiences and create meaning. With Shakespeare film as example, we will discuss how stories cross time, culture and media, and reflect on the benefits as well as the limitations of such migration. The class will be conducted as a structured discussion, punctuated by student presentations and "mini-lectures" by the instructor. Students will introduce discussions, prepare clips and examples, and the major "written" work will take the form of presentations to the class and multimedia annotations as well as conventional short essays. The methodological bias of the class is close "reading" of both text and film. This is a class in which your insights will form a major part of the work and will be the basis of a large fraction of class discussion. You will need to read carefully, to watch and listen to the films carefully, and develop effective ways of conveying your ideas to the class.
This class teaches the fundamentals of signals and information theory with emphasis on modeling audio/visual messages and physiologically derived signals, and the human source or recipient. Topics include linear systems, difference equations, Z-transforms, sampling and sampling rate conversion, convolution, filtering, modulation, Fourier analysis, entropy, noise, and Shannon's fundamental theorems. Additional topics may include data compression, filter design, and feature detection. The undergraduate subject MAS.160 meets with the two half-semester graduate subjects MAS.510 and MAS.511, but assignments differ.
This course is a client-based land analysis and site planning project. The primary focus of the course changes from year to year. This year the focus is on Japan's New Towns. Students will review land inventory, analysis, and planning of sites and the infrastructure systems that serve them. They will also examine spatial organization of uses, parcelization, design of roadways, grading, utility systems, stormwater runoff, parking, traffic and off-site impacts, as well as landscaping. Lectures will cover analytical techniques and examples of good site-planning practice. Requirements include a series of assignments and a client-based project.
This course explores photography as a disciplined way of seeing, of investigating landscapes and expressing ideas. Readings, observations, and photographs form the basis of discussions on landscape, light, significant detail, place, poetics, narrative, and how photography can inform design and planning, among other issues. The class website can be found here: Sites in Sight: Photography as Inquiry.
The "small wonders" to which our course will attend are moments of present time, depicted in the verbal and visual media of the modern age: newspapers, novels and stories, poems, photographs, films, etc. We will move between visual and verbal media across a considerable span of time, from eighteenth-century poetry and prose fiction to twenty-first century social networking and microblogging sites, and from sculpture to photography, film, and digital visual media. With help from philosophers, contemporary cultural historians, and others, we will begin to think about a media practice largely taken for granted in our own moment.
This course closely examines a coherent set of short texts and/or visual works. The selections may be the shorter works of one or more authors (poems, short stories or novellas), or short films and other visual media. Additionally, we will focus on formal issues and thematic meditations around the title of the course "Staying Alive." Content varies from semester to semester.
Millions of people are on-line today and the number is rapidly growing - yet this virtual crowd is often invisible. In this course we will examine ways of visualizing people, their activities and their interactions. Students will study the cognitive and cultural basis for social visualization through readings drawn from sociology, psychology and interface design and they will explore new ways of depicting virtual crowds and mapping electronic spaces through a series of design exercises.
6.171 is a course for students who already have some programming and software engineering experience. The goal is to give students some experience in dealing with those challenges that are unique to Internet applications, such as: * concurrency; * unpredictable load; * security risks; * opportunity for wide-area distributed computing; * creating a reliable and stateful user experience on top of unreliable connections and stateless protocols; * extreme requirements and absurd development schedules; * requirements that change mid-way through a project, sometimes because of experience gained from testing with users; * user demands for a multi-modal interface.
This class focuses on representation tools used by architects during the design process and attempts to discuss the relationship they develop with the object of design. Representation plays a key role in architectural design, not only as a medium of conveying and narrating a determined meaning or a preconceived idea, but also as a code of creating new meaning, while the medium seeks to establish a relationship with itself. In this sense, mediums of representation, as external parameters to the design process, are not neutral tools of translating an idea into its concrete form. They are neither authentic means of creativity, nor vapid carriers of an idea. Therefore, an important aspect in issues of meaning is how the architect manipulates the play of translating a concept to its concrete version, through the use of a medium of representation. The course is a continuation of the equivalent course taught in the fall semester and specifically focuses on digital media. The course is intended to establish a reciprocal relationship with the design studio, feeding from and contributing to its content.
The course investigates e-Learning systems from a business, policy, technical and legal perspective. The issues presented will be tackled by discussion of the design and structure of the various example systems. The connection between information architectures and the physical workplace of the users will also be examined. The course will be comprised of readings, discussions, guest speakers and group design sessions. Laboratory sessions will be focused on implementation tools and opportunities to create one's own working prototypes. Students will learn to describe information architectures using the Unified Modeling Language (used to specify, design and structure web applications) and XML (to designate meaningful content).
This landscape and environmental planning workshop investigates and propose a framework for the enhancement, development and preservation of the natural and cultural landscape of the Cardener River Corridor in Catalunya, Spain. The workshop is carried out in conjunction with the Polytechnic University of Catalunya, and the Barcelona Provincial Council (Diputaci de Barcelona).
This class explores the development of Hollywood Film Noir. There will be a focus on migr directors who moved to Hollywood when the Nazis rose to power. Assignments will include short response papers about three of the films in the series, and reports by students on examples of "neo-noir" films from recent decades.This course is offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month.
This seminar explores approaches to representation for distributed cinematic storytelling. The relationship between story creation and story appreciation is analyzed. Readings are drawn from literary and cinematic criticism, as well as from descriptions of interactive, distributed works. Students analyze a range of storytelling techniques; they develop a proposal using visualization techniques; and they prototype a working story experience, culminating in a final project displayed at the end of the semester.
How do words get their meanings? How can word meanings be represented and used by machines? We will explore three families of approaches to these questions from a computational perspective. Relational / structural methods such as semantic networks represent the meaning of words in terms of their relations to other words. Knowledge of the world through perception and action leads to the notion of external grounding, a process by which word meanings are 'attached' to the world. How an agent theorizes about, and conceptualizes its world provides yet another foundation for word meanings. We will examine each of these perspectives, and consider ways to integrate them.
This course examines the issues, principles, and challenges toward building machines that cooperate with humans and with other machines. Philosophical, scientific, and theoretical insights into this subject will be covered, as well as how these ideas are manifest in both natural and artificial systems (e.g. software agents and robots).
This class deals with interactive art. Visiting artists will discuss their work from a theoretical and practical perspective. Discussions of the history of interactive digital art and contemporary issues in the field will take place. Students will develop an interactive art project for a final exhibition or submit a short paper.
This project-based course explores new design strategies for social interaction in the computer mediated world. Through weekly readings and design assignments we will examine topics such as: Data-based portraiture, Depicting growth, change and the passage of time, Visualizing conversations, crowds, and networks, Interfaces for the connected city, Mobile social technologies. The course emphasizes developing visual and interactive literacy.
This project-based course will explore the future of textiles, focusing particularly on blending rich crafting traditions with new technologies. Topics will include textile-based electronics, textile fabrication, algorithmic pattern design, and composites. We will experiment with a wide range of fibers, yarns, and fabrics including traditional materials like wool and cotton as well as metal fibers and yarns, fusible plastics, papers, and resins. We will also explore techniques like felting, laser cutting, CNC knitting, digital printing, and CNC embroidery. Students will complete weekly hands-on assignments and a final project.
The Springfield Studio is a practicum design course that focuses on the physical, programmatic, and social renewal of an urban community in Springfield, Massachusetts by combining classroom work with an applied class project. The course content covers the areas of physical design/urban design and the related analysis and planning tools used to understand and assess urban conditions from a design and development perspective. Urban design issues are investigated in the context of social and economic challenges within the community. Thus, the course has dual goals: 1. analyze physical conditions in the community, assess community need, propose physical design interventions; and 2. assess community capacity and programmatic needs. The ultimate goal is to explore the integration of social, programmatic and physical development interventions in ways that reinforce community revitalization efforts, and to apply this knowledge through the development of a formal neighborhood revitalization plan that addresses community needs.
The transition from high school and home to college and a new living environment can be a fascinating and interesting time, made all the more challenging and interesting by being at MIT. More than recording the first semester through a series of snapshots, this freshman seminar will attempt to teach photography as a method of seeing and a tool for better understanding new surroundings. Over the course of the semester, students will develop a body of work through a series of assignments, and then attempt to describe the conditions and emotions of their new environment in a cohesive final presentation.
What is the interplay between an event and its "frames"? What is special and distinctive about stage events? How and why do contemporary dramatists turn back in time for their settings, models, and materials? How do they play with this material to create performance pieces of importance and delight for modern audiences? How do they create distinct, fresh perspectives using the stage in an era of mass and multi-media? What is the implied audience for these plays, and how does that clash or coincide with actual audience expectations and responses? What information do we "need to know," and what do we need to know that is not information? If words circulate, can meaning be stable? What is the relationship between pleasure and responsibility? What are the politics of stagecraft in our time? Is the theater really dead? What '60s pop song includes the previous question?Focusing on two of Britain's most respected and prolific contemporary dramatists, Caryl Churchill and Tom Stoppard, we will explore these and other questions involving literary history, interpretation, and performance. As well as carefully reading and discussing selected plays, the class will create (collectively) an archive of material to enrich our understanding of the texts and their contexts-a sort of "Notes Toward a Supreme OCW Site." (The last phrase is an example of citation la Stoppard; it may be just frivolous-or maybe not.)
This course explores the creation (and creativity) of the modern scientific and cultural world through study of western Europe in the 17th century, the age of Descartes and Newton, Shakespeare, Rembrandt and Molire. The class compares period thinking to present-day debates about the scientific method, art, religion, and society. This team-taught, interdisciplinary subject draws on a wide range of literary, dramatic, historical, and scientific texts and images, and involves theatrical experimentation as well as reading, writing, researching and conversing.
Unlike film, theater in America does not have a ratings board that censors content. So plays have had more freedom to explore and to transgress normative culture. Yet censorship of the theater has been part of American culture from the beginning, and continues today. How and why does this happen, and who decides whether a play is too dangerous to see or to teach? Are plays dangerous? Sinful? Even demonic? In our seminar, we will study plays that have been censored, either legally or extra-legally (i.e. refused production, closed down during production, denied funding, or taken off school reading lists). We'll look at laws, both national and local, relating to the "obscene", as well as unofficial practices, and think about the way censorship operates in American life now. And of course we will study the offending texts, themselves, to find what is really dangerous about them, for ourselves.
This course investigates relationships between two media, film and literature, studying works linked across the two media by genre, topic, and style. It aims to sharpen appreciation of major works of cinema and of literary narrative. The course explores how artworks challenge and cross cultural, political and aesthetic boundaries. It includes some attention to theory of narrative. Films to be studied include works by Akira Kurosawa, John Ford, Francis Ford Coppolla, Clint Eastwood, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, and Federico Fellini, among others. Literary works include texts by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Honor de Balzac, Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
How do literature, philosophy, film and other arts respond to the profound changes in world view and lifestyle that mark the twentieth century? This course considers a broad range of works from different countries, different media, and different genres, in exploring the transition to a decentered "Einsteinian" universe.
The disciplines of music history and music theory have been slow to embrace the digital revolutions that have transformed other fields' text-based scholarship (history and literature in particular). Computational musicology opens the door to the possibility of understandingeven if at a broad leveltrends and norms of behavior of large repertories of music. This class presents the major approaches, results, and challenges of computational musicology through readings in the field, gaining familiarity with datasets, and hands on workshops and assignments on data analysis and "corpus" (i.e., repertory) studies. Class sessions alternate between discussion/lecture and labs on digital tools for studying music. A background in music theory and/or history is required, and experience in computer programming will be extremely helpful. Coursework culminates in an independent research project in quantitative or computational musicology that will be presented to the class as a whole.
How do we define Public Art? This course focuses on the production of projects for public places. Public Art is a concept that is in constant discussion and revision, as much as the evolution and transformation of public spaces and cities are. Monuments are repositories of memory and historical presences with the expectation of being permanent. Public interventions are created not to impose and be temporary, but as forms intended to activate discourse and discussion. Considering the concept of a museum as a public device and how they are searching for new ways of avoiding generic identities, we will deal with the concept of the personal imaginary museum. It should be considered as a point of departure to propose a personal individual construction based on the concept of defining a personal imaginary museum - concept, program, collection, events, architecture, public diffusion, etc.
This workshop investigates the current state of sustainability in regards to architecture, from the level of the tectonic detail to the urban environment. Current research and case studies will be investigated, and students will propose their own solutions as part of the final project.
This course is a survey of significant orchestral masterworks composed during three centuries. Listening assignments include 34 symphonies and 24 concertos, composed from the 1720s to the 1990s. Class discussion and oral presentations focus on the works in 18 miniature scores; prior score-reading experience is helpful. Each of the three written papers reviews a concert attended during the term. Since this is a participatory subject, each student will give oral presentations concerning composers and their symphonies and/or concertos.
This class looks at the special structural and practical needs of theatrical scenery and effects and how they can be constructed. We map the technical design process from initial meetings to realization on stage. The class emphasizes safety, budgeting, and problem solving. Ten 1-3 page Tech notes are required as well as a final project. Work includes actual production assignments as well as paper design projects.
The nature of human identity - how we think of ourselves, how we perceive others - is a mutable concept, changing with the rise and fall of religious beliefs, social mores, philosophical theories. Today, we live in a world in which science and technology are among the most powerful forces reshaping our culture - and thus our definitions and perceptions of identity. In this seminar, we will examine the impact of science and technology on identity. The instructor's course page may be viewed at http://smg.media.mit.edu/classes/IdentitySeminar/
This course explores the properties of non-sequential, multi-linear, and interactive forms of narratives as they have evolved from print to digital media. Works covered in this course range from the Talmud, classics of non-linear novels, experimental literature, early sound and film experiments to recent multi-linear and interactive films and games. The study of the structural properties of narratives that experiment with digression, multiple points of view, disruptions of time, space, and of storyline is complemented by theoretical texts about authorship/readership, plot/story, properties of digital media and hypertext. Questions that will be addressed in this course include: How can we define non-sequentiality/multi-linearity, interactivity, narrative. To what extend are these aspects determined by the text, the reader, the digital format? What are the roles of the reader and the author? What kinds of narratives are especially suited for a non-linear/interactive format? Are there stories that can only be told in a digital format? What can we learn from early non-digital examples of non-linear and interactive story telling?
This course focuses on the archaeology of the Greek and Roman city. It investigates the relationship between urban architecture and the political, social, and economic role of cities in the Greek and Roman world, by analyzing a range of archaeological and literary evidence relevant to the use of space in Greek and Roman cities (e.g. Athens, Paestum, Rome, Pompeii) and a range of theoretical frameworks for the study of ancient urbanism.
This course explores a range of contemporary scholarship oriented to the study of 'cybercultures,' with a focus on research inspired by ethnographic and more broadly anthropological perspectives. Taking anthropology as a resource for cultural critique, the course will be organized through a set of readings chosen to illustrate central topics concerning the cultural and material practices that comprise digital technologies. We'll examine social histories of automata and automation; the trope of the 'cyber' and its origins in the emergence of cybernetics during the last century; cybergeographies and politics; robots, agents and humanlike machines; bioinformatics and artificial life; online sociality and the cyborg imaginary; ubiquitous and mobile computing; ethnographies of research and development; and geeks, gamers and hacktivists. We'll close by considering the implications for all of these topics of emerging reconceptualizations of sociomaterial relations, informed by feminist science and technology studies.
This class examines the ways humans experience the realm of sound and how perceptions and technologies of sound emerge from cultural, economic, and historical worlds. In addition to learning about how environmental, linguistic, and musical sounds are construed cross-culturally, students learn about the rise of telephony, architectural acoustics, and sound recording, as well as about the globalized travel of these technologies. Questions of ownership, property, authorship, and copyright in the age of digital file sharing are also addressed. A major concern will be with how the sound/noise boundary has been imagined, created, and modeled across diverse sociocultural and scientific contexts. Auditory examples sound art, environmental recordings, music will be provided and invited throughout the term.
Cairo is the quintessential Islamic city. Founded in 634 at the strategic head of the Nile Delta, the city evolved from an Islamic military outpost to the seat of the ambitious Fatimid caliphate which flourished between the 10th and 12th century. Its most spectacular age, however, was the Mamluk period (1250-1517), when it became the uncontested center of a resurgent Islam and acquired an architectural character that symbolized the image of the Islamic city for centuries to come.Cairo today still shines as a cultural and political center in its three spheres of influence: the Arab world, Africa, and the Islamic world. Moreover, many of its monuments (456 registered by the 1951 Survey of the Islamic Monuments of Cairo) still stand, although they remain largely unknown to the worlds architectural community and their numbers are dwindling at an exceedingly alarming pace.
This class provides an overview of some of the techniques used in creating costume pieces that are crafted rather than sewn. We will use a variety of materials and techniques to create specific costume pieces while at the same time exploring alternative applications possible for each material/technique.
"Creative activity (isn't) the icing on the cake. Human creativity is the cake." (Jerry Hirschberg) Creativity - "the mastery of information and skills in the service of dreams" (Hirschberg) - is much prized in the arts, science, business and the classroom. What does the creative process look like? Under what conditions does it flourish - what ignites the creative spark? Attempting to answer these questions, this class explores ways creativity has been understood in Western culture: what we prize and fear about creativity and its wellsprings; how writers, artists, scientists and inventors have described their own creative processes; how psychologists and philosophers have theorized it; ways in which creativity has been represented in Western culture, particularly in 20th century films; and creativity in everyday life, including our own lives. Readings include portions of psychologist Rollo May's The Courage To Create, and essays by Joan Didion, John Updike, Alice Walker, Oliver Sacks, and others. In addition, we'll watch video profiles of choreographer Paul Taylor, architect Maya Lin, and jazz musician Dave Brubeck. We'll keep journals in which we note our own observations and reflections on creative process. We will also watch a film together as a class one evening early in the term.
This course concentrates on close analysis and criticism of a wide range of films, including works from the early silent period, documentary and avant-garde films, European art cinema, and contemporary Hollywood fare. Through comparative reading of films from different eras and countries, students develop the skills to turn their in-depth analyses into interpretations and explore theoretical issues related to spectatorship. Syllabus varies from term to term, but usually includes such directors as Coppola, Eisentein, Fellini, Godard, Griffith, Hawks, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Tarantino, Welles, Wiseman, and Zhang.
Focusing on the emperors Augustus and Nero, this course investigates the ways in which Roman emperors used art, architecture, coinage and other media to create and project an image of themselves, the ways in which the surviving literary sources from the Roman period reinforced or subverted that image, and the ways in which both phenomena have contributed to post-classical perceptions of Roman emperors. Material studied will include the art, architecture, and coinage of Augustan and Neronian Rome, the works of Suetonius and Tacitus, and modern representations of the emperors such as those found in I, Claudius and Quo Vadis.
We will explore the mathematical strategies behind popular games, toys, and puzzles. Topics covered will combine basic fundamentals of game theory, probability, group theory, and elementary programming concepts. Each week will consist of a lecture and discussion followed by game play to implement the concepts learned in class.
This seminar engages in the notion of space from various points of departure. The goal is first of all to engage in the term and secondly to examine possibilities of art, architecture within urban settings in order to produce what is your interpretation of space.
This workshop explores how designers might become as sensitive to space as they are to objects. Through a number of projects and precedent studies, architectural design is studied in relation to the Space Between. The design process is studied in reverse, considering space first and objects second. This is not to imply that objects are not important, but rather that space is equally important.
This class explores the relationship between music and the supernatural, focusing on the social history and context of supernatural beliefs as reflected in key literary and musical works from 1600 to the present. Provides a better understanding of the place of ambiguity and the role of interpretation in culture, science and art. Explores great works of art by Shakespeare, Verdi, Goethe (in translation), Gounod, Henry James and Benjamin Britten. Readings will also include selections from the most recent scholarship on magic and the supernatural. Writing assignments will range from web-based projects to analytic essays. No previous experience in music is necessary. Projected guest lectures, musical performances, field trips.
This course explores contemporary American theatrical expression as it may be organized around issues of gender and cultural identity. This exploration will include the analysis of performances, scripts, and video documentation, as well as the invention of original documents of theatrical expression. Class lectures and discussions will analyze samples of Native American, Chicano, African American, and Asian American theater, taking into consideration the historical and political context for the creation of these works. Performance exercises will help students identify theatrical forms and techniques used by these theaters, and how these techniques contribute to the overall goals of specific theatrical expressions.
Directed practice in acting, directing, or design on a sustained theater piece, either one-act or full length, from pre-rehearsal preparation to workshop production.
Directed practice in acting, production, or design on a sustained theater piece, either one-act or full length, from pre-rehearsal preparation to workshop production. Consult Theater Arts Office. Includes directed practice in stagecraft. Dramashop rehearses a production of Eric Bogosian's play "subUrbia" for presentation the first two weekends in February. Visiting artist, David R. Gammons, directs. Approximately 10 roles filled by auditions. Students can receive up to six credits for acting or technical positions. Schedule of rehearsals to be arranged, but actors should be available during the afternoon. Students must be available for performances in early February. This course is offered during the Independent Activities Period (IAP), which is a special 4-week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month.
This seminar is open to graduate students, and is intended to offer a synoptic view of selected methodologies and thinkers in art history (with some implications for architecture). It is a writing-intensive class based on the premise that writing and editing are forms of critical thinking. The syllabus outlines the structure of the course and the readings and assignments for each week. The discipline of art history periodically surges into "crisis." The demise of formalism as a guiding tenet, or connoisseurial appreciation as a general guide, plunged the field into confusion during the 1970s when the battle raged over "social histories of art" or "revisionism;" in the late 1990s the debate was staged between "visual studies" versus "normative art history." The course takes this confusion as itself worthy of study, and seeks to make available some of the new methodologies that have emerged over the past two decades. The ultimate goal is to bring students closer to discovering their own individual methods and voices as writers of art historical prose. In broader terms, we will attempt to understand the historiography of visual art and images more broadly. Our efforts will be predicated on the conviction that art history can serve as a generative discipline for all humanistic disciplines, and even those that style themselves as "Bildwissenschaft" (or "image-science").
This class covers a range of topics including hypertext, interactive cinema, games, installation art, and soundscapes. It examines the potential for dynamic narrative in traditional media like novels and films and as well as in computer-based stories and games. The course focuses on the creation of electronic stories and games using simple authoring systems and multimedia software tools. Students present and constructively critique one another's work in progress in a workshop setting aimed at expanding the representational powers of a new creative medium.
Theories about cities and the form that settlements should take will be discussed. Attempts will be made at a distinction between descriptive and normative theory, by examining examples of various theories of city form over time. The class will concentrate on the origins of the modern city and theories about its emerging form, including the transformation of the nineteenth-century city and its organization. It analyzes current issues of city form in relation to city making, social structure, and physical design. Case studies of several cities will be presented as examples of the theories discussed in the class.
This class will be constructed as a lecture-discussion, the purpose being to engage important theoretical issues while simultaneously studying their continuing historical significance. To enhance discussion, three debates will be held in class. Each student will be required to participate in one of these debates. Each student will also be required to write three short papers. Class participation is essential and will be factored into the final grade. The course will portray the history of theory neither as the history of architectural theory exclusively, nor as a series of prepackaged static pronouncements, but as part of a broader set of issues with an active history that must be continually probed and queried. The sequence of topics will not be absolutely predetermined, but some of the primary issues that will be addressed are: pedagogy, professionalism, nature, modernity and the Enlightenment. Classroom discussions and debates are intended to demonstrate differences of opinion and enhance awareness of the consequences that these differences had in specific historical contexts.
This class will explore the cultural history and media industry surrounding the masculine drama of professional wrestling. Beginning with wrestling's roots in sport and carnival, the class examines how new technologies and changes in the television industry led to evolution for pro wrestling style and promotion and how shifts in wrestling characters demonstrate changes in the depiction of American masculinity. The class will move chronologically in an examination of how wrestling characters and performances have changed, focusing particularly on the 1950s to the present. Students may have previous knowledge of wrestling but are not required to, nor are they required to be a fan (although it is certainly not discouraged, either). Special thanks to the WWE for allowing us to use various materials and for their participation and help with the course.
The concept of globalization fosters the understanding of the interconnectedness of cultures and societies geographically wide apart; America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Subject scans existing debates over globalization around the world. This course explores how globalization impacts everyday life in the First and Third World; how globalization leads to a common cosmopolitan culture; the emergence of a global youth culture; and religious, social, and political movements that challenge globalization. Materials examined include pop music, advertisements, film posters, and political cartoons.
This course considers reggae, or Jamaican popular music more generallyin its various forms (ska, rocksteady, roots, dancehall)as constituted by international movements and exchanges and as a product that circulates globally in complex ways. By reading across the reggae literature, as well as considering reggae texts themselves (songs, films, videos, and images), students will scrutinize the different interpretations of reggae's significance and the implications of different interpretations of the story of Jamaica and its music. Beginning with a consideration of how Jamaica's popular music industry emerged out of transnational exchanges, the course will proceed to focus on reggae's circulation outside of Jamaica via diasporic networks and commercial mediascapes. Among other sites, we will consider reggae's resonance and impact elsewhere in the Anglo Caribbean (e.g., Trinidad, Barbados), the United Kingdom (including British reggae styles but also such progeny as jungle, grime, and dubstep), the United States (both as reggae per se and in hip-hop), Panama and Puerto Rico and other Latin American locales (e.g., Brazil), Japan and Australia, as well as West, South, and East Africa (Cte d'Ivoire, Tanzania, Uganda).
This course aims to provide an overview of Indian popular culture over the last two decades, through a variety of material such as popular fiction, music, television and Bombay cinema. The class will explore major themes and their representations in relation to current social and political issues. In particular, students will examine the elements of the formulaic "masala movie", music and melodrama, the ideas of nostalgia and incumbent change in youth culture, as well as shifting questions of gender and sexuality in popular fiction. During the course, students will look at some journalistic writing, advertising clips and political cartoons to understand the relation between the popular culture and the social imagery of a nation. This course is taught in English.
This subject aims to provide an overview of contemporary texts in regional languages in South Asian Literature and Cinema. We will cover major authors and film makers, writing from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Within India, we will look at authors and directors working in different regional languages and as we examine their different socio-cultural, political and historical contexts we will attempt to understand what it means to study them under the all-unifying category of "South Asian Literature and Culture". Some of the major issues we shall explore include caste, gender, globalization and social change. We will end with exploring some of the newer, younger writers and directors and try to analyze some of the thematic and formal shifts in their work. Authors include Ashapurna Devi, Manto, Vijayan, Premchand, Mohanty, and Nasreen and film makers will include Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Satyajit Ray, Shyam Benegal, Aparna Sen and Rituporno Ghosh.
21F.031 examines the terms "avant garde" and "Kulturindustrie" in French and German culture of the early twentieth century. Considering the origins of these concepts in surrealist and dadaist literature, art, and cinema, the course then expands to engage parallel formations across Europe, particularly in the former Soviet Union. Emphasis on the specific historical conditions that enabled these interventions. Guiding questions are these: What was original about the historical avant-garde? What connections between art and revolution did avant-garde writers and artists imagine? What strategies did they deploy to meet their modernist imperatives? To what extent did their projects maintain a critical stance towards the culture industry?Surveying key interventions in the fields of poetry, painting, sculpture, photography, film, and music, the readings also include signal moments in critical thought of the last century. Figures to be considered are: Adorno, Aragon, Bataille, Beckett, Brecht, Breton, Brger, Duchamp, Eisenstein, Ernst, Jnger, Greenberg, Kandinsky, Malevich, Mayakovsky, and Tzara. Taught in English, but students are encouraged to consult original sources when possible.
This course explores the forms, contents, and context of world traditions in dance that played a crucial role in shaping American concert dance. For example, we will identify dances from an African American vernacular tradition that were transferred from the social space to the concert stage. We will explore the artistic lives of such American dance artists as Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, and Alvin Ailey along with Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, George Balanchine, and Merce Cunningham as American dance innovators. Of particular importance to our investigation will be the construction of gender and autobiography that lie at the heart of concert dance practice, and the ways in which these qualities have been choreographed by American artists.
The subtitle of this course for the spring 2003 term is "American Television: A Cultural History." The class takes a cultural approach to television's evolution as a technology and system of representation, considering television as a system of storytelling and myth-making, and as a cultural practice, studied from anthropological, literary, and cinematic perspectives. The course focuses on prime-time commercial broadcasting, the medium's technological and economic history, and theoretical perspectives. There is much required viewing as well as readings in media theory and cultural interpretation.
For many years, Cambridge, MA, as host to two major research universities, has been the scene of debates as to how best to meet the competing expectations of different stakeholders. Where there has been success, it has frequently been the result, at least in part, of inventive urban design proposals and the design and implementation of new institutional arrangements to accomplish those proposals. Where there has been failure it has often been explained by the inability - or unwillingness - of one stakeholder to accept and accommodate the expectations of another. The two most recent fall Urban Design Studios have examined these issues at a larger scale. In 2001 we looked at the possible patterns for growth and change in Cambridge, UK, as triggered by the plans of Cambridge University. And in 2002 we looked at these same issues along the length of the MIT 'frontier' in Cambridge, MA as they related to the development of MIT and the biotech research industry. In the fall 2003 Urban Design Studio we propose to focus in on an area adjacent to Cambridgeport and the western end of the MIT campus, roughly centered on Fort Washington. Our goal is to discover the ways in which good urban form, an apt mix of activities, and effective institutional mechanisms might all be brought together in ways that respect shared expectations and reconcile competing expectations - perhaps in unexpected and adroit ways.
Governments at every level assume a measure of responsibility for seeking good design. Some of that responsibility is exercised directlythrough the design and construction of government buildings, for example. But most changes to our environments are neither designed nor built by governments. Rather, they are the result of the actions and investments of private individuals, institutions, corporations, joint ventures, or private/public collaborations. Yet, the actions of all of these actors are affected by the design policies of government and the interventions that are undertaken to implement those policies. In this advanced graduate-level seminar we will explore new ways of thinking about urban design policy in an attempt to better understand just what government doesand what it can do effectivelyin the realm of design policy.
In this course we examine the relationship between public policy and urban design through readings, discussions, presentations, and papers. We also analyze the ways in which policies shape cities, and investigate how governments implement urban design. Students gain a critical understanding of both the complex system of governance within which urban design occurs and the effective tools available for creative intervention.
This course is a requirement for completion of the Urban Design Certificate Program. It investigates the complex nature of 'successful' urban design and attempts to identify and evaluate examples of urban design that are at the leading edge of practice, anticipating the future. The seminar will deal with two parallel questions: what are the key trends that will shape the future form and function of cities, and how will these changes affect the role of the urban designer? The first part of the seminar focuses on the present, and the second part of the semester will consider the future. After the course surveys the landscape of contemporary urban design practice, the challenge it will pose to students will be to identify the trajectory of cities and city design from both physical and social perspectives.
The course is designed to be an introduction to methods of analyzing, evaluating, and recording the urban environment first hand. Its aim is to supplement existing courses that cover theory and history of city design and planning and to better prepare students without prior design background for the studio sequence.
This studio discusses in great detail the design of urban environments, specifically in Providence, RI. It will propose strategies for change in large areas of cities, to be developed over time, involving different actors. Fitting forms into natural, man-made, historical, and cultural contexts; enabling desirable activity patterns; conceptualizing built form; providing infrastructure and service systems; guiding the sensory character of development: all are topics covered in the studio. The course integrates architecture and planning students in joint work and requires individual designs and planning guidelines as a final product.
6.831/6.813 examines human-computer interaction in the context of graphical user interfaces. The course covers human capabilities, design principles, prototyping techniques, evaluation techniques, and the implementation of graphical user interfaces. Deliverables include short programming assignments and a semester-long group project. Students taking the graduate version also have readings from current literature and additional assignments.
This course will serve as an introduction to the interdisciplinary academic study of videogames, examining their cultural, educational, and social functions in contemporary settings. By playing, analyzing, and reading and writing about videogames, we will examine debates surrounding how they function within socially situated contexts in order to better understand games' influence on and reflections of society. Readings will include contemporary videogame theory and the completion of a contemporary commercial videogame chosen in consultation with the instructor.
This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary study of commercial videogames as texts, examining their cultural, educational, and social functions in contemporary settings. Students play and analyze videogames while examining debates surrounding how games function within socially situated contexts. Readings include contemporary game theory (Gee, Squire, Steinkuehler, Jenkins, Klopfer, Zimmerman and Salen, Juul, Bartle, Taylor, Aarseth) and the completion of a contemporary commercial videogame chosen in consultation with the instructor.
This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary study of commercial videogames as texts, examining their cultural, educational, and social functions in contemporary settings. Students play and analyze videogames while examining debates surrounding how games function within socially situated contexts. Readings include contemporary game theory (Gee, Squire, Steinkuehler, Jenkins, Klopfer, Zimmerman and Salen, Juul, Bartle, Taylor, Aarseth) and the completion of a contemporary commercial videogame chosen in consultation with the instructor.
This course will serve as an introduction to the interdisciplinary academic study of videogames, examining their cultural, educational, and social functions in contemporary settings. By playing, analyzing, and reading and writing about videogames, we will examine debates surrounding how they function within socially situated contexts in order to better understand games' influence on and reflections of society. Readings will include contemporary videogame theory and the completion of a contemporary commercial videogame chosen in consultation with the instructor.
This course is an invitation to German film-making since the end of the Second World War. We investigate how German cinema captured the atmosphere of the immediate post-war years and discuss extensively major works of the "New German Cinema" of the Sixties and Seventies. We also look at examples of East Germany's film production and finally observe the very different roads German cinema has been taking from the 1990's into the present.
The primary focus of this Vocal Repertoire and Performance course is placed upon the works of African American composers and concert artists. Students gather biographical data and explore art songs, operatic arias, ensembles, choral masterpieces, and arrangements employing sacred and secular texts. Additionally, students conduct inquiry into works representative of their own heritage. This course is required for vocalists in the MIT Emerson Music Performance program; others may be admitted by audition.
This course is for the singer and/or pianist interested in collaborative study of solo vocal performance. This term we will focus upon the works of Women Composers. Students will gather biographical data and explore art songs, operatic arias, choral masterpieces, and arrangements employing sacred and secular texts. Additionally, students will conduct inquiry into works indicative of their own heritage.
This course fulfills the first half of the Comparative Media Studies workshop sequence requirement for entering graduate students. The workshop sequence provides an opportunity for a creative, hands-on project development experience and emphasizes intellectual growth as well as the acquisition of technical skills. The course is designed to provide practical, hands-on experience to complement students' theoretical studies.
In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), the great cultural critic W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that "...the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line." A century after Du Bois penned those words, most Americans would agree that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the color line remains one of our most pressing social issues. In this course, we will explore the terrain of race in America by reading the works of writers of color and others concerned with the issue of race, by viewing films that address racial issues, and by writing to explore how the fictions and facts of race condition all our lives, social and civic, private and public. We will consider the complex question of racial identity, test the givens of history by uncovering histories that have been more elusive or more thoroughly suppressed, and explore how writing and reading can both reflect and challenge racial categories, hierarchies, and perceptions. We will read the work of such writers as Suzan-Lori Parks, Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, James Baldwin, Louise Erdrich, Amy Tan, Chang-Rae Lee, Jhumpa Lahiri, and William Faulkner, among others, as we consider the story of race in its peculiarly American dimensions. We will also view films such as Skins, The Long Walk Home, and Crash. Both the reading and the writing of members of the class will be the focus of class discussion and workshops. Students explore race and ethnicity in personal essays, pieces of cultural criticism or analysis, or (with permission of instructor) fiction.
In this course we will read essays, novels, memoirs, and graphic texts, and view documentary and experimental films and videos which explore race from the standpoint of the multiracial. Examining the varied work of multiracial authors and filmmakers such as Danzy Senna, Ruth Ozeki, Kip Fulbeck, James McBride and others, we will focus not on how multiracial people are seen or imagined by the dominant culture, but instead on how they represent themselves. How do these authors approach issues of family, community, nation, language and history? What can their work tell us about the complex interconnections between race, gender, class, sexuality, and citizenship? Is there a relationship between their experiences of multiraciality and a willingness to experiment with form and genre? In addressing these and other questions, we will endeavor to think and write more critically and creatively about race as a social category and a lived experience.
Written and analytic exercises based on 18th- and 19th-century small forms and harmonic practice found in music such as the chorale preludes of Bach; minuets and trios of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven; and the songs and character pieces of Schubert and Schumann. Musicianship laboratory is required.
This course builds on the composition techniques practiced in 21M.303 Writing in Tonal Forms I. Students undertake further written and analytic exercises in tonal music, including a sonata-form movement for string quartet. Students will also have the opportunity to write short works that experiment with the expanded tonal techniques of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Musicianship laboratory is required.
This course is an introduction to writing prose for a public audiencespecifically, prose that is both critical and personal, that features your ideas, your perspective, and your voice to engage readers. The focus of our reading and your writing will be American popular culture, broadly defined. That is, you will write essays that critically engage elements and aspects of contemporary American popular culture and that do so via a vivid personal voice and presence. In the coming weeks we will read a number of pieces that address current issues in popular culture. These readings will address a great many subjects from the contemporary world to launch and elaborate an argument or position or refined observation. And you yourselves will write a great deal, attending always to the ways your purpose in writing and your intended audience shape what and how you write. The end result of our collaborative work will be a new edition, the seventh, of Culture Shock!, an online magazine of writings on American popular culture, which we will post on the Web for the worldwide reading public to enjoy.
Turn-of-the-century eras have historically been times when people are more than usually inclined to scrutinize the present and speculate about the future. Now, the turn not just of a century but of a millennium having recently passed, such scrutiny and speculations inevitably intensify. What will the future that awaits us in this twenty-first century and beyond be like? And how do visions of that future reflect and respond to the world we live in now? In this course we will read and write about how some writers and filmmakers have responded to the present as a way of imaginingand warning aboutpossible worlds to come. Guided by our reading and discussion, we will scrutinize our own present and construct our own visions of the future through close readings of the texts as well as of some aspects of contemporary cultureurban and environmental crises, economic imperialism, sexual and reproductive politics, the ethics of biotechnologies, issues of race and gender, the romance of technology, robotics and cyborg cultures, media saturation, language and representationand the persistent questions they pose about what it means to be human at this start of a new millennium.