Fellow, Open Documentary Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
During 2022-24, Lori is pursuing the experimental project Moving Realities: Motion and Emotion in Immersive Environments as a Fellow in the MIT Open Documentary Lab.
EMPLOYMENT
Professor, Cultural Studies: Visual Culture + New Media
Liberal Arts and Sciences Department, Berklee College of Music
Associate Professor, Cultural Studies: Visual Culture + New Media
Liberal Arts and Sciences Department, Berklee College of Music
Assistant Professor, Cultural Studies
Liberal Arts and Sciences Department, Berklee College of Music
Visiting Scholar
Institute for Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies, Emerson College
Assistant Professor
Department of English and Journalism, Western Illinois University
PUBLICATIONS & PRESENTATIONS
Books
I Love Lucy
TV Milestones. Wayne State University Press, 2010.
Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: The Female Trickster in American Culture
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.
Selected Essays, Articles and Chapters
"Risks and Opportunities of Open-Source Generative AI."
In Collaboration with Open Innovation Research Group. Eiras, Francisco, et al. arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.08597, 2024.
"Interactivity."
In The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, 2nd ed. Edited by Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron. Routledge, 2023. 43-254.
"Minecraft, 2009"
In Fifty Key Video Games. Edited by Dominic Arsenault, Kelly Boudreau, Bernard Perron and Mark J.P. Wolf. Routledge, 2022.
“Where Reality Ends and Capture Begins.”
Immerse, 2019. https://immerse.news/where-reality-ends-and-capture-begins-7e10f0d918ea
“The Moviola and Other Analog Film Editing Machines”
In The Routledge Companion to Media Technology and Obsolescence. Edited by Mark J.P. Wolf. Routledge, 2018.
“Persson’s Minecraft”
In The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds. Edited by Mark J.P. Wolf. Routledge, 2017.
“Lucille Ball and the Lucy Character: Familiarity, Female Friendship, and the Anxiety of Competence”
In Hysterical! Women in American Comedy. Edited by Linda Mizejewski and Victoria Sturtevant. University of Texas Press, 2017.
“Minecraft: Transitional Objects and Transformational Experiences in an Imaginary World.”
In Revisiting Imaginary Worlds. Edited by Mark J.P. Wolf. New York and London: Routledge, 2017, 127-147.
"Myth Blocks: How LEGO Transmedia Configures & Remixes Mythic Structures in the Ninjago and Chima Themes"
In LEGO Studies: Examining the Building Blocks of a Transmedial Phenomenon. Edited by Mark J.P. Wolf. New York and London: Routledge, 2014:55-80.
"Interactivity"
In The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies Edited by Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2014: 173-184.
"The Mirror of Performance: Kinaesthetics, Subjectivity & the Body in Film, Television, & Virtual Worlds."
Cinema Journal 51, no. 3 (2012): 129-136. PDF.
"Rethinking Virtual Commodification, or The Virtual Kitchen Sink"
Journal Of Virtual Worlds Research, 2(4)(2010). Machinima video & Written Commentary.
"Millions Love Lucy: Commodification and the Lucy Phenomenon"
Reprinted in Being and Becoming Visible: Women, Performance, and Visual Culture. Edited by Olga M. Mesropova and Stacey Weber-Fève. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
"Virtual KinoEye: Kinetic Camera, Machinima, and Virtual Subjectivity in Second Life"
The Journal of e-MediaStudies 2 (1) (2009).
"Having But Not Holding: Consumerism & Commodification in Second Life"
Journal of Virtual WorldsResearch, 1(2)(2008)
"I Love Lucy, Television, and Gender in Postwar Domestic Ideology"
In America Viewed and Skewed: Television Situation Comedies. Edited by Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linder. Albany: SUNY Press, 2005.
"The Flapper Film: Comedy, Dance, and Jazz Age Kinaesthetics"
In A Feminist Reader in Silent Film. Edited by Jennifer Bean and Diane Negra. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 2002: 221-248.
"Digital Transformations: The Media Is the Mix"
M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4.2 (April 2001).
"Millions Love Lucy: Commodification and the Lucy Phenomenon"
National Women's Studies Association Journal 11.2 (Summer 1999): 25-47.
Selected Conference Papers and Other Presentations
"Virtual Subjectivity: Designing Immersive + Interactive Experience."
Guest Lecture, 2.177/MP216 Designing Virtual Worlds, MIT, October 11, 2024.
“InSite: Collaborating on a Pedagogical, Creative, and Technological Project.”
Presentation, Annual Berklee Faculty Development Conference, January 2024.
Moving Realities & Emotion Design: Capturing Motion + Emotion in Interactive 3D Environments
Guest Lecture, 2.S972 MIT/MP216 Designing Virtual Worlds November 2023
“Beyond ChatGPT: Why AI Matters to You.”
Presentation, Faculty Development Session, Berklee College of Music. October 2023. Attended by faculty in person and online from ProArts Consortium institutions (Berklee College of Music and Boston Conservatory at Berklee, Emerson College, Boston Architectural Center, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, New England Conservatory, and School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University).
“Reality Shifts: Changing the Narrative in an Almost-Virtual Era.”
Research Presentation, Liberal Arts and Sciences Department, Berklee College of Music, May 2022.
"Moving Realities: Designing Immersive + Interactive Experience."
Guest Lecture, 2.S972 Music in the Metaverse, MIT, September 2022.
“Storytelling in Virtual Worlds: Who Does What, Where?”
Guest Lecture, MIT 2.S972/MP-216: Making VR Experiences, MIT, September 2021.
“Networking and Virtual Spaces.”
Presentation, Women in the Next Realities Meetup. AltSpaceVR. April 2021.
“The State of the Art of AR (Augmented Reality).”
Closing keynote presentation, 6th edition of the International Congress on Business Innovation, Thinknovation 2020, hosted online by UPC, Lima, Peru, November 2020.
“Storytelling in Virtual Worlds: Performance and Interactive Narrative on Virtual Platforms.”
Guest Lecture, MIT 2.S972/MP-216: Making VR Experiences, MIT, September 2020.
“Complementing Face-to-Face Instruction with Various Forms of Immersive Learning.”
Presentation and Tour of Virtual Spaces, Higher Ed Technology Professionals Meetup, July 2020.
"PIVOT: Mixed Reality Live Performance — Online!"
Guest Speaker, Open Documentary Lab, MIT, 21 April, 2020.
"Mixed-Media Live Performance with VR"
Speaker, Boston VR Meetup, 10 December, 2019.
“Practical Online Virtual Reality in Higher Education”
Workshop, Brookline Interactive Group/Public VR Lab, 2019.
“Captured: How XR Is Revolutionizing the Entertainment Industry”
VR/AR/MR Mixer, HUBWeek, 2018.
“Dialed-Down Design: Insights from Developing VR for People with Autism”
Presentation, VRDC@GDC, San Francisco, 2018.
"Cognitive Accessibility, Design Choices, And Music Education For Autism” ”
Presentation, Game Accessibility conference of the International Game Developers Association, San Francisco, 2018.
“A Conversation with High Fidelity Co-Founders Philip Rosedale and Ryan Downe Karpf"
Session, BerkleeXR Summit, Berklee College of Music, February 7, 2018.
“XR in Higher Education"
Presentation in Alt-Space-VR, Women in the Next Realities Meet-Up, 2018.
“"Producing & Performing Selfhood: Women's TV Comedy & the Pursuit of 'Money, Dick, Power'"
Paper, Society for Cinema Studies Annual Conference, Chicago, 2017.
“Spawn This: Minecraft as a Virtual World”
Paper, Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference, Montreal, 2015.
“The Age of Ilinx: Aesthetics of Movement, Virtual KinoEye, & Perceptions of Public & Private Space in Digital Cinema, Virtual Worlds & Video Games”
Paper, Media in Transition 8: MIT, Cambridge, 2013.
“Sound, Embodiment, & the Experience of Interactivity in Video Games & Virtual Environments”
Paper, Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference, Chicago, IL, 2013
“What’s the Big Idea? Flipping the Classroom, MOOCs, and Other Recent Tech Developments”
Workshop. Berklee Teachers on Teaching, Berklee College of Music, 2013.
"Virtually There: Presence, Agency, Spectatorship, & Performance in Interactive Media"
Paper, Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference, Boston, 2012.
"Digital Transformations and Conversions in Art-Web 2.0 & Beyond”
Keynote Presentation, NMC (New Media Consortium) Symposium on New Media & Learning in Second Life, 2009.
“The Future of Virtual Subjectivity, a Virtual Art Installation.”
Virtual art talk shown live at Utopics Swiss Sculpture Exhibition, Biel/Bienne, Switzerland, August 2009.
“Techno-topophilia: Phenomenology, Narrative, & Representations of Virtual Space.”
Paper, Technotopias: Texts, Identities, & Technological Cultures, Glasgow, Scotland, 2002.
“Storm Warnings: The Weather Channel, Digital Narrative, & Techno-Mediated Fantasies of Nature”
Invited Participant, Presentation and Animation, Paideia Retreat on Technology, Globalisation, & Culture, Ontario, Canada, 2001.
BIO
Lori Landay, Ph.D., is an interdisciplinary teacher, scholar, and artist whose creative and critical work explores themes of transformation in audiovisual cultural forms, technology, and perception. As Professor of Cultural Studies at Berklee College of Music, Boston, she directs the interdisciplinary minor in Visual Culture and New Media and contributes to curriculum and programming for Berklee Game and Interactive Media Scoring. She is the Faculty Adviser for the BerkleeXR Student Club.
Lori's recent focus is on XR, an umbrella term for extending reality through emerging technologies including virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, motion capture, AI, automation, and in her model of the “new realities,” social mediations of reality. She teaches courses including “Digital Narrative Theory and Practice,” “The Language of Film,” “Art and Virtual Reality,” “Dream Machine," and in the Dance Division at Boston Conservatory at Berklee, “Dance + Technology Lab” and "Dance on Film and Video."
In the Fall 2018 semester, she was the first professor to teach a course to a group of online and onsite students that met some of the time in the virtual world AltSpaceVR, and collaborates with Power Station/BerkleeNYC on 360 degree video and other XR projects. As a member of the Board of Directors of the Brookline Interactive Group/Public VR Lab, the leading community media organization in the country to advocate for public access to VR and AR, and a founding member of Women in the Next Realities, she connects Berklee students with the wider communities.
Lori plays with theoretical ideas in creative work, using humor and often surprising tactics to question the relationships between the virtual and the actual in our rapidly transforming world. In the academic year 2022-23, Lori will be on sabbatical, working on the project Moving Realities: Capturing and Creating Motion and Emotion in Interactive 3D Environments.
She is the Vice President of the Board of Directors of the community media organization Brookline Interactive Group/The Public VR Lab, a founding member and Steering Committee Member of Women in the Next Realities, part of the Berklee Feminist Faculty Alliance, and an active member of Boston VR.
Dr. Landay is the author of two books, I Love Lucy (TV Milestones Series) and Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: The Female Trickster in American Culture, as well as numerous publications on topics including Minecraft, LEGO, virtual worlds, virtual subjectivity, digital narrative, silent film, and gender and comedy. Her expertise in the cultural history of gender, comedy, and media in American culture has resulted in her appearance in documentaries including Finding Lucy (American Masters, PBS) and recently, The Girl in the Show, premiering at the New York Independent Film Festival May 10, 2018. She has given talks at conferences including VRDC at GDC, SCMS, UFVA, and MLA, events like Boston’s HubWeek and CyberFest, organizations including Linden Lab and MIT OpenDocLab and served as a judge at the MIT Media Lab’s Reality Virtually Hackathon. Lori and Rhoda Bernard, Director of the Berklee Institute for Arts Education and Special Needs, extend their research and development in The Immersive Tools Project for Autism, expanding their 2017-18 Faculty Development FLY (Faculty Led Innovations) project into 2021 and beyond with the generous support from the Marianne JH Witherby Foundation.
Lori's creative work includes virtual art, interactive installation, animation, creative documentary, digital video, and music video. Works have been chosen for the Boston Science Fiction Film Festival, Cyberfest (St. Petersburg, Russia), On the Wall Dance Film Series (Berlin, Germany), and Utopics Swiss Sculpture Exhibition (Biel/Bienne, Switzerland), and won awards such as Best of Show and People's Choice Awards, New Media Consortium (NMC) Summer Conference Art Show; Best Machinimatography Award, International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Conference SIGVE Group; First Prize, University of Western Australia 3D Art Challenge; and the Mejor Obra De Investigación/Open This End Award of Excellence for Investigative Film. Her interactive new media art installation “ShadowLoop” was included in the AVATARS Exhibit at the Nave Gallery in Somerville, April-May 2019 during Open Studios. Throughout 2019-22, Lori is collaborating with Nona Hendryx, Berklee’s Ambassador for Artistry in Education, and the Electronic Production and Design Department, on a multimedia immersive, interactive performance experience for VR and desktop computer, Dream Machine.
