Hacking the victual and virtual at USC

This week Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito join forces for a series of presentations at USC organized by Craig Dietrich, Still Water Senior Researcher and co-creator of Scalar.

The week culminates on Friday 2 March at the School of Cinematic Arts with Redesigning Reality, a hands-on session in hacking the “scripts” that govern us to make everyday life more sustaining and sustainable.

Workshop participants redesign their favorite foods and Web sites, looking to nature as a model for the victual and virtual.

Earlier in the week, at USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy, Blais presents How Resilient Systems Think. This class discussion probes the intersection of digital culture, indigenous culture and permaculture, offering network alternatives to hierarchy and broadcast culture.

Ippolito, meanwhile, leads a conversation on digital media production and preservation with IML 400: Dynamic Multimedia for Web Infrastructures. His talk follows a presentation the previous week by Richard Rinehart, his co-author in a book due out next year from MIT Press entitled Re-collection: New Media and Social Memory.

For Redesigning Reality, an event in USC’s Visions and Voices program, Blais applies Permaculture principles to deconstruct the “California burrito,” inviting participants to choose from local ingredients laid out on a table to redesign a more sustainable, and sustaining, meal.

For his part, Ippolito shows participants how to “occupy” their favorite Web sites with Greasemonkey, effectively redesigning the sites with local uses in mind.

These events are organized by Still Water Senior Researcher and USC faculty member Craig Dietrich along with his colleague Steve Anderson, and co-sponsored by iMAP (PhD Program in Media Arts and Practice) and the Institute for Multimedia Literacy.

The outline of the Redesigning Reality presentation can be found here.