Media Systems
with Michael Mateas and members of EIS
Founding computational media
About Media Systems
The Media Systems project sought to understand the then-current shape and potential power of projects combining engineering, arts/design, and humanistic work. This project was the first ever jointly sponsored by the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Endowment for the Arts — and it also received important backing from both Microsoft Studios and Microsoft Research. The first stage in this project was a survey of important interdisciplinary work taking place in areas such as media-focused computer science, digital humanities, digital arts, and human-computer interaction. This resulted in invitations to a set of field leaders drawn from different focus areas, geographical regions, disciplinary backgrounds, and so on. This group — together with representatives from the NSF, NEH, NEA, and Microsoft — met at UCSC from August 26th through 29th, 2012. The convening included presentations, participant discussions, and smaller breakout groups. It was made possible by the support of EIS students, the Center for Games and Playable Media, and the Institute for Humanities Research — including Kate Compton, Robin Crough, Chaim Gingold, April Grow, Eric Kaltman, Jane Pinckard, Irena Polic, and Mike Treanor. This was followed by more than a year of further discussion, research, and writing.
The major result was the first significant synthesis and articulation of computational media as a research area, published in March 2014 as Envisioning the Future of Computational Media: The Final Report of the Media Systems Project (with graphic design and communication by EIS members Jacob Garbe and Ben Samuel). The report's publication was announced at a juried session of the Game Developers Conference and received immediate coverage in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle report also revealed that, since the 2012 Media Systems gathering, the three federal agencies had been involved in ongoing conversations about joint funding of interdisciplinary projects, resulting in a memorandum of understanding. The month following the report's release, it was published as an article in the Journal of Digital Humanities and was the subject of a peer-reviewed special session at the Foundations of Digital Games conference.
I have received a large amount of informal feedback about the influence of this project — and I personally saw that it served as part of the intellectual foundation for the creation of UCSC's department of Computational Media.
