Is there life after tenure mapping…
Page 47 is a great starting point to learning and thinking more about the issues of mapping and PGIS.
http://www.iied.org/pubs/pdfs/14507IIED.pdf#page=42
And virtual street corners: http://www.johnewing.org/VirtualCorners/
For a sneak preview of our final review process layout: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=4441373&l=bbf3c77bd1&id=680256570
My City Voice explores recent tools for mapping the urban environment as a way for youth to visit their community in a new way. Working with girls from the Mellon Academy, an after-school program in Roxbury, Boston, and a live feed connection to video filmed with a mobile phone, we become avatars for the girls. We traverse the neighborhood to purchase their afternoon snack guided by text directions that they send us via a website, from which they watch and hear our journey. Before setting off, the girls record three audio snippets onto simple audio devices meant for greeting cards, messages that they wish to share with their community members. We post these on poles along the way to the store, inviting the public to listen to the messages with attached signs.
The project has been a semester-long process of experimenting with the use of mapping techniques to empower youth in under-privileged environments. The parent project, My City, My Future, ultimately will be realized in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with youth from the favela, or slum community of Santa Marta, and will ask youth to map online the past, present, and future of their surroundings.
Along the way, experiments have included traversing the city according to ambient street sounds, mapping multi-dimensional storytelling resources, and introducing the Mellon Academy girls to balloon-mapping and drawing mind maps of their neighborhood.
The young girls, aged between 10 and 17 years-old, are drawn to the computer while wishing they could go with us. The contradictory nature of the institutional after-school program allows them to arrive and depart the program however they wish. However, while there, they are not permitted to even step outside. The live feed brings the outside world to them via the computer, and they are able to vicariously have a presence in that world through the audio recordings that we leave on their behalf.
The decisions that they make on this journey raise many questions, and, we hope, some that the girls may continue to consider.
Where should we put your voice marker?
Shara’s neighborhood
Helium balloon with attached camera helps to make an aerial map of the school site. How does the aerial view change how we see the neighborhood?
Andy Merkin/Kate Balug
Medical Examination Room
MIT, ACT, Course 4.332/4.333 Networked Sensorium
Matej Vakula
“Medical Examination Room” is about quarantine, border regulations and immigration. It deals with the ambiguity between migrant quarantine from the medical point of view and on the other hand quarantine and medical examination regarded as social exclusion in terms of group and individual experience.
Together with immigrant theater group from New England Literacy Resource Center I would like to create a short improvised theater piece which deals with refugees and migrant’s experience while entering a new country. In particular, their experience with medical examination, medical questioning, medical quarantine, feelings of uncertainty about their new life, isolation and language barriers related to entering a new country.
In this project, I am thinking of setting up a stage which will reference medical examination room environments. Within this environment I would like to divide the group into one bigger and one smaller. Each participating immigrant will be able to freely decide on which side will act. Actors within the smaller group will appropriate roles of the medical examination committee and the bigger group will appropriate roles of refugees. These groups will re-imagine situations within the medical examination and reenact them as they see fit.
I think that the act of medical examination also as the Immigration interview is an act of power over the immigrants. In this theater piece the immigrants will create an artificial situation in which this status of power will be reversed or rather dissolved. Instead of the old power relationship they will have a chance to recreate this situation the way they want to.
Because the “Medical Examination Room” is a long term project and is not finished yet, I would like to present instead of it’s final version a performance, which could bring you closer to the ideas and feelings which I am working with.
During the first seven minutes of my fifteen minutes long presentation I would like to introduce my project in form of cooperative performance. I would like you to experience simulated feeling of uncertainty, disempowerment and isolation and also offer them possibility to revert the situation. During the second part of my presentation I would like to talk to the reviewers about structure of my project with the theater group. I would like to show sketches of the performance room and talk about detailed structure of the theater performance in form of printed archive.
In order to present the feeling of disempowerment, would be asked to keep your eyes closed during the whole time of the performance. They will be separately guided by a guide from certain place in the building to a room, where the performance will continue. The collaborators will be also instructed not to talk, only when requested.
The whole performance will be seven minutes long. Each questioned person will spend two minutes in the room.
The second half of my time I would like to dedicate to talking about my project with the immigrant theater group. I would like to show some drawings of the performance stage.
As we approach the final review on Monday, May 10 at 10:30am, the following requirements are due:
Tuesday, May 4
Presentation Sketch
A detailed outlined sketch should be prepared that communicates what your presentation will be, including what media might be used, an outline of the oral presentation, props, resources etc. This should be viewed as a comprehensive document that allows Amber and Tony to comprehend, and possibly provide some feedback, your intentions and ideas for the Final review. It should include text, potential script excerpts, drawings and visual material.
If you are planning on presenting outside of the regular room used for class, it must be clearly noted as too seek permission from School channels.
Please email this to Tony at tvanky {at} mit.edu.
Thursday, May 6
One-page Brief
A one page brief, in PDF format, should be uploaded to the blog and contain a title, abstract and a visual representation that you have made (sketch, diagram, photo)
. It should also include links to your online documentation via the blog for reference. This will be used to compile a packet for the reviewers. These elements can be derived from your previous assignments, but must reflect what you will show in the Final review.
Monday, May 10 at 10:00pm
Documentation
An archive of Final presentation work is required for the ACT archives. Please include your final work including photographs, text, and videos, as well as any progress work not submitted during the Midterm review. Files should be high-resolution. Please choose 5-6 representative photographs unless the context calls for it (ex. your final work exists or is composed of collection of several videos and photos).
Be sure to include a text description of your project. This may be your one page brief from Thursday.
Please label your files in the following manner: FirstNameLastnameFileDescription.ext (ex. TonyVankyFinalVideo.mov).
This is due as a CD/DVD due to Tony’s box in 10-485 or, if under 100mb as a single zipped file, to tvanky@mit.edu. You should consider services like yousendit.com or drop.io rather than relying on the MIT email servers if you decide to send it electronically.
Monday, May 17 at 9:00am
Be sure to complete a subject evaluation at http://web.mit.edu/subjectevaluation. If you are not an MIT student, be sure to check your Kerberos or Certificate permissions beforehand at http://web.mit.edu/certificates. If you have any problems with your permissions, please contact MIT IS&T.
Prague, Czech Republic, 31 May, 2003 – its a few minutes before 10 a.m. and there are more than 3000 people jostling on a remote parking place. Many of them are clutching plastic bags in their hands; some of them are armed with trolley bags. Assistants are handing out plastic cups and the moderator on the illuminated stage urges the people to have a drink from the near-by water tankers. The “hyper-anthem” of CZECH DREAM rings out once again from the speakers: “Try to see as a child, many things will seem wild…” Suddenly the managers of the hypermarket rush out on the stage, greet their customers and briskly cut the glittering ribbon. The escort remove the metal barriers and the crowd starts moving. They still have 300 metres to reach the hypermarket. People start running… A moment later, the fastest of them are struck dumb: the hypermarket that they have reached is nothing but a huge film decoration…
Czech Dream (Český sen in Czech) is a documentary film directed by two young Czech directors: Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda. The film was released in February 2004. It recorded a large-scale hoax perpetuated by Klusák and Remunda on the Czech public, culminating in the “opening event” of a fake hypermarket. The film was their final project for film school.
To educate the public about the positive impact of immigrants, it is necessary to not only reach people’s minds but also their hearts. The Immigrant Theater Group is a high level ESL class where students learn English through theater. They write and perform plays about the immigrant experience that vividly portray their hardships and hopes as they learn to navigate the complex systems of this country from learning about the culture to getting and keeping a job to obtaining further education.
One class period a week is spent at Malden Access Television (MATV), the local cable television studio, where students learn how to operate the equipment and videotape their plays. They perform their plays for diverse groups of audiences including high school students, adult students, senior citizens, and the general public. Audiences are deeply moved by these plays and begin to realize there is much more that brings us together than tears us apart. Audiences learn of the sacrifices immigrants make to come to America to create better lives for their children. To date, one play has been taped by MATV and is in national distribution in 11 states. The next play will be taped in 2006.
By Coco Jervis
In July, Congress passed an amendment that lifted the statutory ban on the admission of people with HIV into the United States as part of the reauthorization of PEPFAR, the global AIDS bill now known as the Tom Lantos and Henry J. Hyde U.S. Global Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Reauthorization Act of 2008. Advocates around the world who have worked tirelessly for years on this issue have rightly celebrated this as a significant achievement for people living with HIV/AIDS, immigrant justice and human rights advocates.
Contrary to common perception, however, the ban remains in effect. This win reversed the ban as codified in 1993, but it still lives in regulations promulgated by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). In other words, Congress restored authority to HHS, the administrative agency responsible for public health, to determine whether someone’s HIV status is grounds for denial of entry. As things currently stand, advocates still have a long way to go before all vestiges of this discriminatory policy are truly eliminated.
For decades, U.S. health authorities used noxious, often toxic chemicals to delouse Mexicans seeking to cross the border into the United States. A new book tells the story of what happened when a 17-year-old Mexican maid refused to take a gasoline bath and convinced 30 other trolley passengers in 1917 to do the same.
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