Biography Anna van Someren

Anna van Someren is Creative Manager for the New Media Literacies project at MIT's Comparative Media Studies, where she leads the development of innovative educational materials. Prior to working at MIT, Anna developed new media curriculum and taught multimedia production at after school programs and at the college level. She was formerly a creative offline editor with commercial clients such as The Discovery Channel and HGTV. An independent video artist, Anna has shown her experimental shorts in festivals internationally. She received her B.A. magna cum laude in Art & Art History from Colgate University, and her MFA in Film & Video from Massachusetts College of Art

11.25 Summary Keynote
Project New Media Literacies (NML) is an educational research project at MIT funded by the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative. NML creates innovative educational materials that allow youth to cultivate the social skills and cultural competencies required to become full participants in the new media environment. Young people are already practicing the skill of collective intelligence when they contribute to Wikipedia. They are already learning about the difficulties and potentials of appropriation when they write fan fiction or create a remix video. However, these competencies have yet to be recognized or introduced into formal education in a consistent, cohesive way.

In order to assess the educational potential of activities ranging from social networking to game modification, NML organizes participatory culture into four forms: expressions, affiliations, circulations, and collaborative problem solving. It is useful to apply these categories to analyze the current role of the artist. As circulations like podcasting and blogging allow us to shape the flow of personalized media streams, how do filmmakers re-negotiate their relationships with viewers? What can the artist gain from the new working models being developed in the area of collaborative problem solving? This talk will address these kinds of questions, exploring specific challenges and promises that face media-makers today.

14.00 Summary Panel (second session)
The morphing media ecology promises nearly incomprehensible potential for artists to work in innovative ways, but the speed and complexity of change can truly feel violent.  Seismic shifts in the media landscape are causing traditional production and delivery systems to crumble before new systems can be put into place.  Falling production costs contribute to an increasingly crowded media environment – how are audiences finding work that is meaningful to them?  
Growing broadband access moves us closer to a fully networked world – what are the affordances for filmmakers?  With a focus on social response to technology, this talk will explore how participatory culture can benefit artists by looking at some successful media experiments."