Ellen Sebring, PhD, is an artist, designer, and new media researcher. Creative Director of the Visualizing Cultures project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since its founding in 2002, Sebring was a Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, and Post-Doctoral Associate at Duke University. In the late 1990s, she was President of Botticelli Interactive, Inc.
Sebring earned the SMVisS degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the PhD at the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Integrative Arts (CAiiA) at Plymouth University in the UK. She is on the Board of the Goldring-Piene Foundation. CV / BIO
Centerbook
Centerbook: The Center for Advanced Visual Studies and the Evolution of Art-Science-Technology at MIT
by Elizabeth Goldring and Ellen Sebring, published by SA+P Press and ZKM Karlsruhe, 2019. Distributed by MIT Press
Centerbook by Elizabeth Goldring and Ellen Sebring is the first history of MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS). Sebring also designed the book, compiling a database of over 30,000 images. The book features an original text on the genome of art and technology by art historian Peter Weibel, and an afterword by Gediminas Urbonas, Professor at ACT/MIT. Launched at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2019, Centerbook was presented at the Goethe Institute Boston and research salon at MIT Art Culture and Technology, October 2023. Images: cover and pages from Centerbook
As Creative Director of the Visualizing Cultures project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sebring designed the framework and collaborated with over 28 scholars on 50 content units. MIT Visualizing Cultures was founded in 2002 by two professors—historian John W. Dower and linguist Shigeru Miyagawa—to explore new forms of history offered by the digitized visual record. VC is a widely-used model and resource for image-driven scholarship on modern Japan and China, co-sponsoring four academic conferences. Sebring’s essays on image-driven scholarship and history include Civilization & Barbarism: Cartoon Commentary & the “White Man’s Burden” (1898–1902).
Three online courses created by Dower and Sebring with prominent scholars are now globally available on the MITx platform. Images: samples from MIT Visualizing Cultures website and exhibitions, and from Sebring’s essay Civilization & Barbarism. MORE
Sebring’s video art work explores deconstructed narrative through image-sound composition, and depicts the symbolic and emotional aspects of stories. Her graduate thesis at MIT, Musical Form in Non-Narrative Video, explores music compositional techniques within the screen space. Her recent works have been featured at the B3 Festival of the Moving Image, Frankfurt am Main.
Images: video art works and collaborations by Ellen Sebring MORE
What kind of history is captured in visual sources in multiple media that can now be broadly seen, juxtaposed and shared? Is there a visual narrative form that can tell the stories embedded in newly available digital archives? Sebring proposes a relational grammar of images that conveys a tactile history differently than traditional text-based forms, maintaining the visual sense.
Sebring’s “March 1900” virtual reality project demonstrates an image-based historiographic approach. Her doctoral research on the multinational visual record of the Boxer Uprising in China ca. 1900 proposes a software design for visual authoring that unites narrative with database. Images: Excerpt from immersive VR prototype, March 1900. At the Harvard Visualization Lab, March 1900 VR project (photos by Rus Gant, lab director) MORE
From 1995-2002, Sebring was President of Botticelli Interactive, Inc., founded with colleagues from MIT to develop nonlinear storytelling at the dawn of personal computing and the web. The company produced award-winning interactive film and museum designs, in partnership with MIT, US Environmental Protection Agency, the Boston Public Schools, Institute for Civil Society, The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Worcester Art Museum, Sybase, Iridium, and more.
Images: samples of Botticelli Interactive projects MORE
Top image: Ellen Sebring, in photo by Richard Sebring at 50th Anniversary of Haystack Observatory where their father was the founding director