Bio
artist, designer, new media researcher
Ellen Sebring, PhD, has been the Creative Director of the MIT Visualizing Cultures project since its founding in 2002. The project has published more than 50 units by 28 authors. She was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at MIT, and Post-Doctoral Associate at Duke University.
Publications
Sebring’s book—Centerbook: The Center for Advanced Visual Studies and the Evolution of Art-Science-Technology at MIT—was published fall 2019 (SA+P Press and ZKM Karlsruhe), distributed by MIT Press. Her essays on image-driven scholarship and history include Civilization & Barbarism: Cartoon Commentary & the “White Man’s Burden” (1898–1902), for MIT Visualizing Cultures, reprinted in several academic journals.
Research
In her research on visual narrative in global digital archives, Sebring designed a software model and virtual reality project that explore new approaches for enhanced looking especially related to digitized primary sources from the visual record.
Online courses
Sebring was project lead for a series of online courses created in collaboration with the eminent historian, John W. Dower, beginning in 2014 with the award-winning course, Visualizing Japan (1850s–1930s): Westernization, Protest, Modernity, a collaboration between MITx and HarvardX. To date more 32,000 students have enrolled. In 2018, Sebring developed and co-taught Visualizing Imperialism and the Philippines and due to release in 2020, Visualizing the Birth of Modern Tokyo.
Exhibitions
Sebring designed exhibitions based on MIT Visualizing Cultures content that toured the US and Japan, and Shanghai, China.
Botticelli Interactive
From 1995-2002, she was President of Botticelli Interactive, Inc., producing early interactive film and museum designs for nonlinear storytelling. Sebring’s video art work explores deconstructed narrative through image-sound composition.
Education
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), directed by Roy Ascott, at Plymouth University in the UK. She is a classical musician and composer.
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Centerbook
first major book on CAVS
Ellen Sebring and Elizabeth Goldring wrote a visual history of the first center for art, science, and technology founded at MIT by György Kepes in late 1960s. Centerbook: The Center for Advanced Visual Studies and the Evolution of Art-Science-Technology at MIT draws on a newly digitized collection of visual sources to cover CAVS during the years it was directed by Kepes through the tenure of Otto Piene. The book was released at the B3 event at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2019, and is available through MIT Press [link]
Research
digital models for 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 designs treat visual primary sources as narrative objects. 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 that derives from her work with multiple visual data sets for the MIT Visualizing Cultures project (visualizingcultures.mit.edu).
How can the practice of history respond to the vast newly digitized visual record? Visual primary sources carry subtexts often lost in the fixed linear structure of historical writing 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 connects narrative pathways to databases, giving authors the tools to design image relationships that convey history and analysis through the images themselves.
VR project: March 1900
history as immersive visual narrative
Sebring designed 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.
Working on Sebring's "March 1900" VR project at the Harvard Visualization Lab.
Users travel along the army's path, following a number of maps, including military and news illustrations, and embed in visual sources at key locations.
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Photo top: Ellen Sebring at Haystack Observatory 50th Anniversary, taken by Richard Sebring, 2014