Critical Praxis for the Emerging Culture

*A Collaborative Investigation Into the Nature of Cultural Transformation Brought About by Technology and Media*

Principal Participants

Krzysztof Wodiczko has taught at MIT since 1991 and is director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies. Wodiczko’s work has been exhibited internationally — at Documenta, the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Vienna — and has also been the subject of several retrospectives: at the Fundacio Tapies, Barcelona; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Centrum Szutiki, Warsaw; and De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam. In 1999 he represented Poland in the Venice Biennale of Architecture.

Wodiczko received the Hiroshima Art Prize from the city of Hiroshima, Japan. This prize, which is awarded only every three years, recognizes Prof. Wodiczko’s public art pieces, which incorporate a range of interactive and video elements alongside more traditional elements. They are particularly concerned with social change that contributes to world peace.

Carol Strohecker is a member of the Steering Group and principal investigator of the Everyday Learning research group at Media Lab Europe, the European research partner of the MIT Media Lab. She is concerned with how people think and learn, and how objects, artifacts, and technologies can facilitate these processes. A particular focus is on understanding the extent and range of diversity in human thinking and learning. Accordingly her designs for computational media support cognition and expression while enabling studies of these processes. Research interests include mobile computing, interactive narrative forms, construction kits modeling principles of math and science, and environments supporting playful experimentation in complementary physical and virtual domains.

Prior to joining MLE as a Senior Research Scientist, Strohecker worked in MERL – Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories and in the Human Interface Group of Sun Microsystems. She earned the Ph.D. of Media Arts and Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991, and the Master of Science in Visual Studies from MIT in 1986. She contributed to early efforts in interactive video and has worked extensively in publishing and print media.

Strohecker is on the editorial board of the MIT Press journal, Presence, and is Vice-Chair of the International Conference on Design Computing and Cognition. She has served as a Presidential Nominee on the MIT Corporation Visiting Committee for the Department of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences, and as Lecturer for the MAS Programme. She has held Fellowships at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, the Massachusetts Council for the Arts and Humanities, and the US National Endowment for the Arts.

Philip Walsh teaches courses in nineteenth- and twentieth- century art, contemporary art and the history of photography at Northeastern University in Boston. He was educated at Oberlin College and received a Ph.D. in art history at Harvard University in 1995. He has been a Helena Rubinstein Foundation Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, a David E. Finley fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and has been awarded a Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation Fellowship. He has curated exhibitions in the United States and abroad, and he is currently completing a book on art students in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Sung Ho Kim is an assistant professor and directs the digital media and design curricular at Washington University in St. Louis School of Architecture. He was the researcher for Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Interrogative Design Group at MIT from 1997-2001. He was an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Rhode Island School of Design and Assistant Professor at Northeastern University. He is a design principal of Axi:Ome llc of St. Louis, an architectural office currently working on multiple scale international projects. He has exhibited his own work and works of his students in London, Boston, Providence and St. Louis. He also has been published in various international design Journals: AA Files, AA Reviews, Thresholds, and SOMA Magazine. He published his own books Pandora’s Box, Projective Chronometry, and Re-Representing the Object Series I and II. He is currently working on his office publication Works By Axi: Ome llc through Admotiv Corporation and is writing a textbook on digital design for Laurance King Publishing.