Christopher Csíkszentmihályi: STS Undercover

Bio:

Christopher Csíkszentmihályi is a technologist, humanist, designer, and artist. His work is focused on designing information and communications technologies for political change, and to assist communities in mitigating the negative aspects of globalism. He is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University. His recent work includes human-scale robots for street protests and analysis of technology ecosystems in sub-Saharan Africa. He holds an M.F.A. from the University of California, San Diego, and was a cofounder and director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, and directed the Computing Culture research group at MIT.

Abstract:

Technologies tend to be regressive because they require significant resources. These resources are usually marshaled by entities (like corporations) that have become powerful in the sociopolitical conext that led to the status quo. What would it take to reimagine and reconfigure that status quo? How can technologies be leveraged to serve the strategies and tactics of different agendas? Csíkszentmihályi has been making contributions at the nexus of new technologies, art, and progressive politics for thirty years, and will review some of his projects.