apologies for xposting

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From: Brad Seawell [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tue 25/07/2006 5:51 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: MiT5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age
CALL FOR PAPERS 


Sorry if you receive this more than once. Please feel free to pass it on: 

media in transition 5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the
digital age
an international conference 

April 27-29, 2007 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Online: http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit5
<http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit5> 

CALL FOR PAPERS (submission deadline: Jan. 5, 2007) 

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. We hope this event will appeal widely across
disciplines and scholarly and professional boundaries. For example, we hope
this conference will bring together such figures as: 

*	anthropologists of oral and folk cultures 

*	historians of the book and reading publics 

*	political scientists and legal scholars interested in alternative
approaches to intellectual property 

*	media educators who aim to help students think about their ethical
responsibilities in this new participatory culture 

*	artists ready to discuss appropriation and collaboration in their
own work 

*	economists and business leaders interested in the new relationships
that are emerging between media producers and consumers 

*	activists and netizens interested in the ways new technologies
democratize who has the right to be an author 

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 [log in to unmask] 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

This will be our fifth media in transition conference. The previous
conferences were the inaugural Media in
<http://web.mit.edu/m-i-t/conferences/m-i-t/index_agenda.html> Transition
conference, MiT2:  <http://web.mit.edu/cms/Events/mit2/>
<http://web.mit.edu/cms/Events/mit2/> globalization and convergence, MiT3:
<http://web.mit.edu/cms/mit3/>  <http://web.mit.edu/cms/mit3/> television
and MiT4:  <http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit4/index.html>
<http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit4/index.html> the work of stories. 

**********
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