It’s an old adage that journalists write the first draft of history, and historians compose the second. But what happens after that? Now in its second year, “Mistakes Were Made” proposes that getting history wrong is the inevitable precondition of historical research, as each generation of writers explores that gaps and ghosts left by the previous. Turning these insights on the swiftly obsolescing world of computer history, this event gathers emerging scholars challenging traditional technology narratives, and pairs them with creative coders, new media artists, tech innovators, and other members of computer culture’s past and present “fringe.”

SPEAKERS

Eden Medina [Keynote]
Associate Professor of Informatics and Computing, Director of the Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics, Indiana University

Marisa Bowe
Editor-in-Chief of WORD, Executive Producer of Sissyfight

Tega Brain
Artist and environmental engineer, SUNY-Purchase

Peter Sachs Collopy
Media historian and postdoctoral researcher, University of Southern California

Martha Poon
Research Fellow, Data & Society

SCHEDULE

1:30-3:00 pm Marisa Bowe + Peter Sachs Collopy
3:00-4:30 pm Tega Brain + Martha Poon
4:30-5:30 pm Eden Medina, Keynote “The Promise and Peril of Computer Technology in the Area of Human Rights”
5:30-6:00 pm Reception

Moderated by Finn Brunton, author of Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet

Hosted by the NYU Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and co-sponsored by the NYU Center for the Humanities. Event designed and produced by Laine Nooney, Erica Robles-Anderson, and Shari Wolk.

SPEAKER BIOS

Marisa Bowe was a teenage user of PLATO, the first networked online social environment, in the mid-1970s; and went on to become the first Conference Manager of the Echo virtual community, the founding editor of the pioneering multimedia webzine Word.com, and the Executive Producer of the groundbreaking multi-user online game, Sissyfight.com. For several years she was a television producer for entities ranging from PBS to Paper Tiger Television and Deep Dish TV, and was a producer on the documentary Everybody’s Channel, a history of public access television. She co-edited the oral history GIG: Americans Talk About Their Jobs, and her written work has been published in the New York Times and The New Yorker magazine. From 2002 - 2007, she was the Economic Development coordinator for NAG, a community planning and economic justice nonprofit in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Since 2011, she has worked for UncommonGoods, a Brooklyn-based online retailer and a founding B Corp.

Peter Sachs Collopy is a media historian and Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Digital Humanities Program at the University of Southern California, where he is also affiliated with the Department of History and the Visual Studies Research Institute. Peter hold a Ph.D. in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania. His research brings together the histories of science, technology, media, and the social movements that have made use of them, particularly in the context of the Cold War. Peter’s current project concerns how artists, scientists, and political activists used the new technology of videotape in the 1960s and 1970s, interpreting it as both a political weapon and a medium of collective human consciousness.

Tega Brain is an Australian born artist and environmental engineer whose eccentric engineering intersects art, ecology & engineering. Eccentric engineering reimagines technologies to address their scope and politics, with a focus on systems that enact more-than-only-human agendas. Her work takes the form of site specific installations, dysfunctional devices, experimental infrastructures and information systems. She recently exhibited work at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, the Science Gallery, Dublin, Eyebeam, New York City and at the Australian Centre for Design, Sydney. Tega is a 2016 fellow with the Processing Foundation and is contributing to the p5js project. She is an Assistant Professor of New Media at SUNY Purchase and also works with the School for Poetic Computation, NYC. She has been an artist in residence at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in New York City and at the Environmental Health Clinic at New York University. In 2013 she was awarded a Creative Australia Fellowship for early career artists from the Australia Council for the Arts.

Martha Poon is a social scientist interested in how data-intensive systems are changing the public’s relationship to finance. She researches and writes about the impact of credit scoring technology on consumer access to credit. As a Fellow at the Data & Society Research Institute, she develops strategies for investigating, explaining, and communicating the role of information systems in financial innovation. She earned a doctoral degree from the Science Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego in 2012.

Eden Medina is Associate Professor of Informatics and Computing, Director of the Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics, Affiliated Associate Professor of Law, and Adjunct Associate Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research and teaching address the social, historical, and legal dimensions of our increasingly data-driven world, including the relationship of technology to human rights and free expression, the relationship of political innovation and technological innovation, and the ways that human and political values shape technological design. Medina's writings also use science and technology as a way to broaden understandings of Latin American history and the geography of innovation. She is the author of the prizewinning book Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile and the co-editor of Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology and Society in Latin America. Medina is a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Engineering Education. She received her Ph.D. from MIT in the History and Social Study of Science and Technology. She also holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University and a Master in Studies of Law from Yale Law School.