February 28, 7pm, Bordy Theater, 216 Tremont Street: Ulises Mejias: "Networked participation: Wisdom of Crowds or Stupidity of Masses?" Trebor Scholz: "The Participatory Challenge" Watch video online >>

March 28, 7pm, Bordy Theater, 216 Tremont Street: McKenzie Wark: "Gamer Theory from Screen to Page" David Weinberger: "Everything is Miscellaneous"

April 25, 7pm Museum of Science, Cahners (A Boston Cyberarts Festival event):
"The Art of Living a Second Life": a panel discussion with Wagner James Au (aka Hamlet Linden), John Lester (aka Pathfinder Linden), and John (Craig) Freeman (aka JC Freemont); moderated by Eric Gordon (aka Boston Borst).

Watch video online >>

Emerson College and New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (NRPA) present OurFloatingPoints 4: Participatory Media, a speaker series that addresses the recent emergence of inexpensive, worldwide, and many-to-many publishing and communication media. Built on Internet and wireless communication technologies, these media have transformed the relationship between cultural producers and consumers.This is the fourth in an ongoing series of lectures and discussions planned with NRPA and its world-renowned website, Turbulence.org. FP4 will consist of three events: two evenings will feature two presentations each, and the third will consist of a moderated panel discussion. Emerson College’s Bill Bordy Theatre, 216 Tremont Street, will host the first two events on Wednesday, February 28 and Wednesday, March 28, both at 7 p.m. The panel discussion will take place at the Museum of Science in Cahners ComputerPlace on Wednesday, April 25 at 7 p.m. during the Boston Cyberarts Festival.

Participants gather around specific interests and build communities -- for instance, Flickr and MySpace -- and new worlds such as Second Life,” says Helen Thorington, co-director of Turbulence.org. “In the ethos of Do-it-Yourself (DIY), these communities are also contributing ideas, tools, sounds, moving and still images, texts and code to create encyclopedias, open source software, bookmarking sites, listservs, peer-to-peer networks, wikis, and blogs.”

Far from utopian, participatory media raise issues of privacy, agency, autonomy, and ownership.” says Brooke A. Knight, Assistant Professor of Interactive Media at Emerson College. “For instance, participants in MySpace volunteer their ‘content’ to the social networking site. Fox News, the owner of the platform, is at liberty to profit from that content and mine it for personal data. A few months ago, Google bought YouTube and began censoring content. How ‘open’ are these environments? How ‘equal’ are their participants?”

Speakers will include some of the top practitioners and thinkers in this area. Dates and presenters are:

Event 1 (2/28, Bordy Theatre, 216 Tremont Street, Emerson College): educator and technocultural theorist Ulises Mejias, a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, will assess whether sociable web media can live up to their promise of reinvigorating the public sphere in Networked participation: Wisdom of crowds or stupidity of masses?; media theorist, artist, and activist Trebor Scholz, founder of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC), will investigate the affordances of sociable web media by looking at examples of the different intensities and motivations for participation and their effects in The Participatory Challenge.

Event 2 (3/28 Bordy Theatre, 216 Tremont Street, Emerson College): author and theorist, McKenzie Wark, Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York City, will discuss “Gamer Theory,” an experiment in the collaborative writing of theory in Gamer Theory from screen to page; author David Weinberger, a Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society fellow, will examine how we are overturning the old assumptions about who is an authority, who is an expert, and who gets to decide what's worth knowing in Everything is miscellaneous.

Event 3 (4/25 Cahners ComputerPlace, Museum of Science): Wagner James Au (an embedded journalist in Second Life) ,John Lester (aka Pathfinder Linden, Community Manager for Linden Lab), and John (Craig) Freeman, (Second Life artist) will discuss The Art of Living a Second Life. Called "the biggest digital art installation in the world" (Warren Ellis), Second Life is a highly imaginative, online, 3-D rendered environment populated with avatars (graphic representations of people). Spanning more than 42,000 acres in real-world scale--larger than metropolitan Boston--Second Life is second home to over 2 million "residents," many of whom collaboratively create its content.

Floating Points is co-presented by Emerson College and New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (NRPA), a not-for-profit media organization with offices in Boston and New York. Turbulence.org, a project of NRPA, has commissioned over 110 works by both emerging and established artists who explore the creative potential of the Internet and wireless networks. Emerson College, located in downtown Boston, is the only comprehensive college or university in America dedicated exclusively to communication and the arts in a liberal arts context. Founded in 1880, Emerson College enrolls 3000 undergraduate and 1000 graduate students, and is committed to bringing innovation to communication and the arts. All lectures are free and open to the public.