Bio

Ellen Sebring, PhD, is an artist, designer, and new media researcher. She has been the Creative Director of the MIT Visualizing Cultures project since its founding in 2002. She was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at MIT, and Post-Doctoral Associate at Duke University. In the late 1990s, she was President of Botticelli Interactive. 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.

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A visual history

Ellen Sebring and Elizabeth Goldring co-wrote Centerbook: The Center for Advanced Visual Studies and the Evolution of Art-Science-Technology at MIT, a visual history of the first center for art, science, and technology, which was founded at MIT by György Kepes in late 1960s. Sebring also designed the book, drawing on a newly digitized collection of visual sources to cover CAVS under Kepes’ and Otto Piene’s directorships. Peter Weibel contributed an essay on the genome of art and technology. (SA+P Press and ZKM Karlsruhe, 2019)

Available through MIT Press [link]

Visual Narrative

Sebring researches visual narrative in the digitized historical record and global image archives. She is interested in the relational grammar of images, and digital-native authoring tools that break traditional text-based forms. Her doctoral thesis, Visual Narrative, proposed a software design for image-based historiography: the Visual Narrative Field (VNF) model. The model links databases with narrative pathways in a structure based on her work with visual data on the MIT Visualizing Cultures project that investigated how the practice of history can respond to the newly digitized visual record. Visual sources carry subtexts that communicate new aspects of the past. In contrast to written texts, visual data fields sustain a fluid state of unresolved complexity that mirrors the way in which historical events unfold. Sebring’s VNF model gives authors the tools to design image relationships that convey history and analysis through the images themselves. 

March 1900

Sebring designed the VR project, March 1900, as an experiment in immersive historical narrative. It was coded for Oculus Rift by her students at Duke University, and further developed at the Harvard Visualization Lab. The VR prototype uses period maps and images to visualize the ten-day march on Beijing in August 1900 by invading armies—an expeditionary force mounted by eight foreign powers to relieve a protracted siege of the diplomatic quarter by Boxer rebels and Chinese troops. The complexity of the Boxer Uprising would emerge in a larger digital build that would incorporate multiple intersecting thematic pathways. The project reimagines a digital archive as a spatial experience that uses VR to evoke some of the tactile qualities of physical archives. The image “pathway” juxtaposes diverse sources: animated maps; photographs taken along the army’s route that capture the physical conditions and moment-by-moment unfolding of events; and illustrated news that offer an interpretive viewpoint from the outside world. Sebring presented a beta version of the project at the Association for Asian Studies conference in 2019.

Images below: working on the March 1900 VR project at the Harvard Visualization Lab; photos by Rus Gant, lab director.