Distinguished Lecture

Michael Hawley (Kodak Director, Founder of Friendly Planet)

December 17, 2007

A show-and-tell talk in two parts: The first is the story of the creation of the world's largest book, Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Last Himalayan Kingdom. The book itself is a 5x7 foot tome and was an early experiment in large-format fine art imaging. But the story is rich in dimensions beyond X and Y: the work was done in the early days of the film-to-digital transition, requiring innovations in GPS photography, web archiving of expeditionary imagery over several years, stimulating educational charity, and so on. We sought in a small way to capture and convey a record of life and culture in this most extraordinary kingdom. In the process, we made a dent in an important picture-archiving problem that is still poorly dealt with in commercial software. The second is a work in very early progress: 19-20-21 is a thrust to map, in the broadest sense, what is perhaps the single most profound megatrend reshaping the world today: the rise of supercities. We've drawn up a blitz plan to canvass 19 cities that will have populations of 20 million or more in the 21st century. This is the story of our world's intensely urban future: world culture is morphing rapidly from a bloody patchwork of countries and becoming a network of supercities. Urban agglomeration is going to continue, so we had better get good at it. But what sorts of comparative and useful pictures can be made to better understand what is happening? What new methods and systems are needed?

Presenter Bio

Michael Hawley, Kodak Director, Founder of Friendly Planet

Michael Hawley has largely led a research and academic life. He is a pioneer of all things digital, with a career history including research work at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, IRCAM in Paris, and Lucasfilm in Marin County; industrial work with Steve Jobs at NeXT (for which he created among the first digital books and libraries); and nearly three decades of academic work at Yale and MIT (where he served on the faculty of the MIT Media Lab for many years). He serves or has served on a number of corporate and nonprofit boards, including Kodak, Color Kinetics, the Rutgers Jazz Institute, and is the founder of a small and impecunious 501(c)-3 educational charity called Friendly Planet. Michael's first love is music. He plays the piano, and in an emergency, can move it. He won the 2002 edition of the Van Cliburn competition and has performed with a handful of orchestras and as recitalist in many cities around the world, but he isn't making a living at that. Last year, he quietly lobbed his personal trove of over 14,000 PDF'ed piano scores — centuries of gorgeous keyboard music — out into various internet archives. Bet you can't find it.

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