Michael Century
About
Michael Century is Professor of New Media and Music in the Arts Department at Rensselaer, which he joined in 2002. Long associated with The Banff Centre for the Arts, he directed the Centre’s Inter-arts program during the 1980s and was the founding director of the Centre’s Media Arts programs in 1988. As a producer in the field of new media art, he initiated The Art and Virtual Environments project (1991-94), one of the first large-scale and sustained investigations of virtual reality technologies as a new medium for artists.
Acknowledgments & Research
He was program director for cultural research at the Montreal Centre d’innovation en technologies de l’information, served as senior policy advisor for art and new technologies to the federal Department of Canadian Heritage, and taught in the Graduate Program in Communications at McGill University before joining Rensselaer. Century authored the study Pathways to Innovation in Digital Culture for the Rockefeller Foundation, and was panelist and co-author for the U.S. National Academy of Science 2003 report on information technologies and creative practices, Beyond Productivity. A pianist, and of late, accordionist, Century’s scholarly interests are in software cultures and theories of socio-technical innovation.