I’ve always wondered why the MIT Media Lab, which is arguably the nation’s premier academic think tank for technology, has the word “media” in its name. After all, the diversely focused Lab explores everything from Biomechatronics to the Opera of the Future.
Well, I got my answer last week when I attended the Media Lab’s 25th birthday celebration in its shiny new quarters on MIT’s sprawling Cambridge, Mass. campus. Cisco is one the Media Lab’s Consortia and Joint Program Sponsors.
When the Media Lab was founded in 1985, the primary focus was computers, which were largely about computation and communication. The popular Internet was still a decade away so the Lab’s mission was to put a PC on every desktop and “a multimedia network in every room.” Both have become reality.
Back then, the instructors, graduate and doctoral students who worked in the Lab envisioned things like home delivery of movies and new data compression techniques for video. Bits and bytes fueled most of their inventions.
To say the Media Lab has branched out today is an understatement. In addition to Opera of the Future and Biomechatronics, other research groups reflect the Lab’s breadth and how technology permeates every facet of life To name a few, there’s Synthetic Neurobiology; Camera Culture; Molecular Machines; Tangible Media; Music, Mind and Machine; Personal Robots; and New Media Medicine.
You can research these groups and projects online, but the Opera of Future is worth commenting on here because it shows how the Lab has uniquely ventured into the more spiritual and even religious aspects of technology. Its first production, Death and the Powers, examines inventor and businessman Simon Powers late in life: he asks “When I die, what remains? What will I leave behind?”
“This is Media Lab. You can’t say what’s on tap for next 25 years. We’ll continue to have an environment of complete creative freedom. We have 150 of the world’s brightest students creating what they care about each and every year.”
Set in 23rd century with “geometric robots, animatronic walls and shape-shifting chandeliers,” the one act production uses a technique called “Disembodied Performance” which employs sensors and analysis software to translate the main character’s “conscious and unconscious sounds and gestures.”
“The Media Lab brought the computer together with creativity,” says MIT Media Lab Director and MIT media professor Frank Moss, a computer and networking expert in his right. “The word media is a general term and because [the lab] is so well-known, we decided not to change it.”
While diverse, the Lab in its “Top 25 Ideas and Products” takes some of the credit for important advances in networking and networking–dependent technologies: They include wireless mesh networks originally developed by Nortel; the ink technology in the Amazon Kindle, Sony e-Reader and Barnes & Noble Nook; MPEG-4 Structured Audio; 3D holographic printing; IBM WebFountain Internet analytics engine; Intel’s Computer Clubhouse Network; and the Tangible IP Network Designer and Business Process Analyzer developed by NTT Comware.
Asked about the Lab’s next 25 years, Moss’ response bespeaks an environment with few boundaries.
“This is Media Lab. You can’t say what’s on tap for next 25 years. We’ll continue to have an environment of complete creative freedom. We have 150 of the world’s brightest students creating what they care about each and every year.”
