Organization:
Media Lab's Computing Culture group
Chris Csikszentmihályi directs the Media Lab's Computing Culture group, which works to create unique media technologies for cultural applications. He also co-directs the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, dedicated to developing technologies that strengthen communities. Trained as an artist, he has worked in the intersection of new technologies, media and the arts for 16 years, lecturing, showing new media work and presenting installations on five continents and one subcontinent. He was a 2005 Rockefeller New Media Fellow, a 2007-08 fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and has taught at the University of California at San Diego, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and at Turku University.
Csikszentmihályi’s Computing Culture research group is known for developing political technologies that rebalance power between citizens, corporations and governments. Their efforts include the Afghan Explorer, a tele-operated robot journalist designed to bypass Pentagon and Taliban press censorship, and txtMob, a mobile phone based activist system that enabled highly effective protests at the 2004 Republican and Democratic National Conventions. He is currently working on extrAct, which will bring software-based tools for collective action to communities affected by oil and natural gas drilling.
[The phonetic pronunciation of his last name is something close to "cheeks-sent-me-high" -- Editor]
