CFP: Media in Transition 5: Creativity, Ownership and Collaboration in the Digital Age (1/5/07; 4/27/07-4/29/07)
CALL FOR PAPERS (submission deadline: Jan. 5, 2007)
media in transition 5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the
digital age
an international conference
April 27-29, 2007
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Full CFP: http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit5
Our understanding of the technical and social processes by which culture is
made and reproduced is being challenged and enlarged by digital
technologies. An emerging generation of media producers is sampling and
remixing existing materials as core ingredients in their own work.
Networked culture is enabling both small and large collaborations among
artists who may never encounter each other face to face. Readers are
actively reshaping media content as they personalize it for their own use
or customize it for the needs of grassroots and online communities.
Bloggers are appropriating and recontextualizing news stories; fans are
rewriting stories from popular culture; and rappers and techno artists are
sampling and remixing sounds.
These and related cultural practices have generated heated contention and
debate. What constitutes fair use of another's intellectual property? What
ethical issues are posed when sounds, images, and stories move from one
culture or subculture to another? Or when materials created by a community
or religious or ethnic tradition are appropriated by technologically
powerful outsiders? What constitutes creativity and originality in
expressive formats based on sampling and remixing? What obligations do
artists owe to those who have inspired and informed their work and how much
creative freedom should they exercise over their borrowed or shared materials?
One source of answers to such questions lies in the past -- in the ways in
which traditional printed texts -- and films and TV shows as well --
invoke, allude to and define themselves against their rivals and ancestors;
and -- perhaps even more saliently -- in the ways in which folk and popular
cultures may nourish and reward not originality in our modern sense, but
familiarity, repetition, borrowing, collaboration.
This fifth Media in Transition conference, then, aims to generate a
conversation that compares historical forms of cultural expression with
contemporary media practices.
Among topics the conference might explore:
* history of authorship and copyright
* folk practices in traditional and contemporary society
* appropriating materials from other cultures: political and ethical
dilemmas
* poetics and politics of fan culture
* blogging, podcasting, and collective intelligence
* media literacy and the ethics of participatory culture
* artistic collaboration and cultural production, past and present
* fair use and intellectual property
* sampling and remixing in popular music
* cultural production in traditional and developing societies
* Web 2.0 and the "architecture of participation"
* creative industries and user-generated content
* parody, spoofs, and mash-ups as critical commentary
* game mods and machinima
* the workings of genre in different media systems
* law and technological change
Short abstracts of no more than 200 words for papers or panels should be
sent via email to Brad Seawell at seawell_at_mit.edu no later than January 5,
2006. Brad can be reached by phone at 617-253-3521. Email submissions are
preferred, but abstracts can be mailed to:
Brad Seawell
14N-430
MIT
Cambridge , MA 02139
===========================
Brad Seawell, Program Coordinator
MIT Communications Forum
http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum
14N-430
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02139
voice 617-253-3521
fax 617-253-6105
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Received on Mon Jul 31 2006 - 23:16:43 EDT