Media Tech Tonic #15: Simulation and Its Discontents, Sherry Turkle, Wednesday, April 14

Our next event will be the Dynamic Media Institute Annual Lecture with Sherry Turkle, author of the recent book, Simulation and Its Discontents. She is Professor of the Social Studies of Science in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Abstract
In a design seminar, the master architect Louis I. Kahn once famously asked, “What does a brick want?” It was the right question to open a discussion on the built environment. Here, I borrow the spirit of this question to ask, “What does simulation want?” Simulation wants, even demand immersion. Immersion has proved its benefits. Architects create buildings that would not have been imagined before they were designed on screens. Immersed in simulation, we feel exhilarated by possibility. We dream of such things as Bilbao, iconic for what can happen to buildings when the hand and eye are joined by the computer. But immersed in simulation, we are also vulnerable. Sometimes it can be hard to remember all that lies beyond it or even acknowledge that everything is not captured in it. This talk explores “discontents” about simulation in design, not in the service of putting it down, but of remembering to use it better by taking its limitations into account.

Event Details
Free and and open to the public.
Location: MassArt, 621 Huntington Avenue, Boston
Room: Kennedy Building, Room 406 (on the corner of Huntington and Longwood Avenues))
Date: Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Time: 6:30 P.M. to 8:00 P.M.
RSVP: Not required for this event.
Directions: By car | By T | Campus map (PDF)
Parking Information: at the end of this post

Speaker Biography
Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, a center of research and reflection on the evolving connections between people and artifacts. Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist.

Professor Turkle is the author of numerous books, including the landmark titles The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit and Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. Seminars and workshops at the Initiative on Technology and Self in recent years have led to four edited collections: Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, Falling for Science: Objects in Mind, and The Inner History of Devices, and Simulation and Its Discontents. These four books share a set of themes important to thinking about our relationships, emotional and intellectual, with digital culture and the world of objects beyond. And most importantly, at how the payoff is to look at the cognitive and the emotional together.

Professor Turkle has written numerous articles on psychoanalysis and culture and on the “subjective side” of people’s relationships with technology, especially computers. She is engaged in active study of robots, digital pets, and simulated creatures, particularly those designed for children and the elderly as well as in a study of mobile cellular technologies. Profiles of Professor Turkle have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Scientific American, and Wired Magazine. She has been a featured media commentator on the effects of technology on a wide range of media outlets.

Parking and Driving Directions
Parking will be available to attendees who drive in the Ward Street lot if you enter the lot between 5:30pm and 6:30pm. If you’re driving, take a close look at a Google Map of the area, finding the Ward Street Lot can be tricky the first time.

If you’re traveling west on Huntington Avenue from Downtown, as you pass the main campus on your right, take a left at the light at the Longwood Avenue intersection, crossing over the trolley tracks. Go straight to the stop sign and turn left, then immediately turn right onto Ward Street. MassArt’s parking lot is short distance ahead on the left.

If you’re traveling east on Huntington Avenue from Bringham Circle, take a right at the light at the Longwood Avenue intersection, then a quick left at the stop sign and right on Ward Street. MassArt’s parking lot is short distance ahead on the left.

The gate should be open for this event. If it is not, ring the emergency button on the guard house and security will answer. Tell them you’re here for Media Tech Tonic, they should have it on their list of events for the evening.