Andrew Whitacre
Arthur and Marilouise Kroker—writers and lecturers about technology and culture and editors of the influential electronic review CTheory—included Fox Harrell in their ARTFORUM Top 10. Fox is Associate Professor of Digital Media at CMS and MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and leads the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab, one of CMS’s research groups, also paired with CSAIL…
4. RICARDO DOMINGUEZ AND D. FOX HARRELL have created brilliant counter-strategies within and through the culture of simulation. Cocreator of the Transborder Immigrant Tool, 2008, Dominguez, an artist and University of California, San Diego, professor, has retrofitted basic flip phones with mobile technology that helps migrants find water and shelter in austere border zones. Likewise, D. Fox Harrell, an MIT research professor working at the interface of the humanities and artificial intelligence, has rewritten the codes of computer gaming to combat social stigma, bias, and prejudice, as well as to reveal biographies yet untold–those still unwritten stories about the disappearance of identity in the digital haze of network culture.
Meanwhile, Harrell visited the Krokers’ own Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture at the University of Victoria to deliver “Digital Inflections: Visions for the Posthuman Future”…
Dr. Fox Harrell, Associate Professor of Digital Media in the Comparative Media Studies Program and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT.
Focusing on questions of social identity, empowerment and computation, Fox Harrell explores the emerging world of “phantasmal identities,” that moment when the meaning of social identity is complicated by its intersection with computing technologies including social networking, gaming, virtual worlds and more. Here, social identities are not addressed only through persistent issues of class, gender, sex, race, and ethnicity, but also through dynamic construction of social categories, body language, discourse, metaphorical thought, gesture, fashion, and so on. When these “real” identities meet their counterparts in the virtual world, the results are identities that are a sudden blend of cultural ideas and sensory imagination, namely the increasing development of “phantasmal identities.”
