“I was thinking okay, what if there is a pending Handmaid's Tale kind of period where evolution isn't allowed to be taught. He called his solution The Scopes Beacon (after John Scopes, the Tennessee school teacher who was charged with illegally teaching evolution in his biology class in 1925). “For instance,” he says, “one was 'what if the Christian right came to power,' what would be a technology that would be appropriate for that situation?” It was a strange blend of technology, art, and activism. He thought up disastrous scenarios that could develop from current social trends, and then developed appropriate technological solutions for those scenarios. When Csikszentmihalyi started out, his milieu was the future. His research, he says, is “motivated by who gets to make reality.” Csikszentmihalyi's politically charged experiments are based on philosophical arguments.
According to Csikszentmihalyi, “MIT's got so much momentum that it can do things like the Media Lab, that are pretty darn weird, and it doesn't hurt the credibility of MIT that much.” In an official MIT overview of the lab, potential investors are advised that, “Many sponsors find the Media Lab to be a uniquely valuable resource for conducting research that is too costly or too 'far out.'”įar out is only one way of describing the research that Csikszentmihalyi and his group are involved with - another is “quixotic technologies.” Still another is “subversive.” In fact on the surface many of the projects - be they remote-controlled Afghan war journalists, counter-surveillance measures for everyday folks, or a dynamic public database containing massive amounts of personal information about politicians - just look like pranks played on the Bush administration.īut these projects aren't mere pranks, and they aren't (necessarily) motivated by anger at the U.S.
Students here don't string together theories about the origins of the universe instead they contrive high-tech ways to jolt governments, scientists and ordinary people out of their complacency toward machines. There are no white lab coats, no sterile black countertops, and little of the deafening white noise associated with minus 80-degree freezers or gigantic centrifuges. These aren't the kind of projects that most people envision when they think of a laboratory - especially at the nation's foremost technological institution. Csikszentmihalyi's research is only one of the many projects that the Media Lab supports, which include everything from Robotic Life to Lifelong Kindergarten. MIT's Media Lab, which hosts the CCG in their postmodern playroom, is a bizarre department that blends technology, art and agitprop in idiosyncratic and sometimes nonsensical ways. Chris Csikszentmihalyi, the blue-eyed, sandy-haired principal investigator of the MIT's Computing Culture Group (CCG) remarks that a visitor once described the scene to him as “Montessori for adults.”
Dogs wander around the room, weaving between clusters of comfy chairs and couches where students work or schmooze. A large reproduction of “Guernica,” Picasso's grisly commentary on the Spanish Civil War, screams out from a far corner. Clear plastic drawers filled with brightly colored Lego-like blocks line the walls. The basement of the Visual Arts Center at MIT is a giant rec room for the technologically gifted.
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