April 23rd: Computer Preservation and Digital Arts Museum Panel
Participate in the founding of a new computer museum in the Boston area. The goal of this museum is to document and preserve this area’s unique contributions to the development of many areas of computing over the last fifty years. This panel will discuss what is possible and worthwhile for the museum in the digital arts and for computer preservation. Come and join the discussion.
When: Wednesday, April 23rd, 7:30pm
Where: Boston Cyberarts Gallery, 141 Green St., Jamaica Plain, MA
Presenters: Terrence Masson, George Fifield, Jeremy Grubman, and Mary Hopper
Free event
RSVP to info@atne.org. Space is limited.
About the Presenters
Currently Executive Professor and Head of Animation at Northeastern University Terrence Masson has had 25 years of production experience, since 1994 running his own consulting company Digital Fauxtography as a Creative Producer and VFX Supervisor. He has worked on about 20 feature films, numerous commercials and video games as well as having Directed several award winning shorts. He is an active member of both the Producers Guild of America and the Visual Effects Society. As an ACM/SIGGRAPH Pioneer Terrence served as the 2006 Computer Animation Festival Chair and 2010 Conference Chair and is currently serving a four year term as Outstanding Service Award Chair. He is also the author of CG101: A Computer Graphics Industry Reference, the industry standard plain language guide to the history and how-to of CG; now online at www.historyofcg.com.
George Fifield is a new media curator, a writer about art and technology, a teacher, and a former video artist. He is the founding director of Boston Cyberarts Inc., a nonprofit arts organization, which has a number of projects in the Boston area including the Boston Cyberarts Gallery and Art on the Marquee, which puts media art on the 80 foot video marquee in front of the Boston Convention Center. He is also an independent curator of New Media with numerous projects here and abroad. His most recent exhibitions were Drawing with Code: Works from the collection of Anne and Michael Spalter at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in January 2011 and Act React: Interactive Installation Art at the Milwaukee Art Museum in October 2008. For thirteen years until 2006, Fifield was Curator of New Media at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA. He is adjunct faculty at Rhode Island of Design’s Digital + Media graduate program and teaches at Massachusetts College of Art. In 2006, Fifield was honored with the First Annual Special Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Boston Arts Community by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) Boston Chapter. In 2007, Boston Cyberarts was honored with the Commonwealth Award by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the category of Creative Economy.
Jeremy Grubman is the Project Archivist for the Center for Advanced Visual Studies Special Collection at MIT’s Program in Art, Culture & Technology. Jeremy has spent five years arranging, describing, preserving and digitizing special collections for MIT, and in 2012 curated the Maihaugen Gallery exhibition, “Glass at MIT: Beauty and Utility.” His current focus at MIT is connecting the CAVS Special Collection’s documentation of MIT’s artistic explorations in emerging technologies to new possibilities in web-based digital humanities applications. He is also the President of Grubman Information Consulting, Inc., which specializes in digital tools and web development.
Mary Hopper is leading an initiative to found a new computer museum in the Boston/Cambridge area. She also serves as the Director of Digital Den which is an organization that creates immersive digital media exhibits and spaces. In the past she has been a Lecturer in the undergraduate Interactive Media and graduate Digital Media programs at Northeastern University, Assistant Professor in the Technology in Education at Lesley University, and Postdoctoral Associate at MIT where she was the Managing Editor of Media in Transition, the flagship project of the MIT Comparative Studies Program.
The New Computer Museum is in the process of becoming. Once it is established, it will collect, preserve and exhibit a wide range of computing systems in their original “living” state for the public to experience and enjoy first-hand. The primary focus will be developments that happened specifically in the New England area.