Demonstration Culture

The next session of the Critical Media Lab Colloquium will take place, Wednesday, 22. April 2015 at the Critical Media Lab (D 3.05) from 9:15 to 10:45 AM.

For the fourth session of this term’s Critical Media Lab colloquium series — Rendering Research — we host a session with Andreas Simon on Demonstrations:

Demos have been used for teaching, to use examples and experiments to show, explain or make things clear in prepared laboratory settings. This process has been extended to communicate early working research developments in a controlled environment. The concept of the MIT media lab was partially constructed around demos as a mode to develop and show research. The text below is not overly scientific and gets a little excited about the media lab, which was very new then:

Suggested reading is chapter 1 “demo or die” from: Stewart Brand. The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at M. I. T. (1988), pp. 3-16.

It is worth watching the “mother of all demos”, demonstrated by Engelbart on NLS at the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY