MIT professor Fox Harrell works to enrich the subjective and ethical dimensions of the digital media experience.
Unlike most people, MIT’s Fox Harrell knew what he wanted to do in life from a young age. According to Harrell, an associate professor of digital media who studies self-expression in online media and creates tools to help developers add depth to their work, the impetus for his career came from an epiphany he had one day while doing computer programming as a kid in San Diego.
“You heard a lot about TV turning people into couch potatoes, so I thought, ‘Whatever comes next, I would like to be a voice for the social and ethical dimension of that form,’” Harrell says. “I couldn’t have predicted the exact form it would take, but that [moment] sparked the direction I would go in.”
Or directions, since Harrell occupies an unusual spot in academic research, with an appointment in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory as well as in its program in Comparative Media Studies/Writing. In his research group, the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE), Harrell and his students take formal analyses of thought — developed in cognitive science, psychology, sociology, and other fields — and develop computational programs that can be applied to computer games, social media, and other forms of emergent media.
The idea is to imbue such media with the same opportunities for self-expression and social reflection that are present in literature, film, and other areas of culture. The programs Harrell develops take many forms, but often add layers of nuance to, say, interactions between characters in games, or social media experiences.
“We try to make works that can engender critical thought, conceptual change, or even social change,” Harrell says.
Harrell detailed this approach to enriching digital media, and many of his other research projects, in a recent book, “Phantasmal Media,” published in November by MIT Press. For his research and teaching, Harrell earned tenure at MIT during the last academic year.
Student with a plan
Not long after Harrell had his youthful epiphany about new media, he also knew that he wanted his education to span both computing and the humanities.
“At a pretty early age, I knew I wanted to pursue these interdisciplinary topics,” he recalls. Harrell attended Carnegie Mellon University as an undergraduate because he could study logic and computation, a field in which he received a BS, while simultaneously obtaining a BFA, with a focus in electronic media. Harrell got a master’s degree in interactive telecommunications from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, then a PhD in computer science and cognitive science from the University of California at San Diego.
“At each stage it was not just happenstance, it was [a matter of] coming up with a plan, with as much rigor as I could, to synthesize these things,” Harrell says. He first took a job as an assistant professor at Georgia Tech, then joined MIT in 2010.
(via A new kind of media theory | MIT News Office)
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