May 17, 2006TheSecond Five Year Planof theComputing Culture Groupwith presentations of historicalProductions for Useand a publicReaffirmation of Purpose.The Computing Culture Group at MIT was founded in 2001 as a space for artists, activists, and engineers to create alternative technologie s for social progress. Our second Five Year Plan involves extending principles and techniques we’ve learned to a broader community, with the goal of corrupting engineers internationally.

“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your hands on the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to rearrange them all! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be remade to ensure your freedom!”

Chris Csikszentmihalyi is the Fukutake Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and directs the Computing Culture Group at the MIT Media Lab, a group that creates uniq ue media technologies for cultural applications. For the past 12 years, he has lectured and shown new media work in both Europe and North America. Interested in cultural narratives, Csikszentmihalyi’s work typically creates a new technology to embody a particular social agenda. For instance the “Afghan Explorer,” a tele-operated robot reporter, the “Natural Language Processor” that commissioned by the KIASMA Museum in Helsinki, Finland and “DJ I, Robot.” His website is http://web.media.mit.edu/~csik/