Glorianna Davenport - Biography

Biography

A graduate of Mount Holyoke College in 1966, Davenport made documentary films in New York and Maine before becoming a lecturer at M.I.T's Film Section directed by cinema verite pioneer Richard Leacock in 1977.

In 1985, Davenport along with Richard Leacock facilitated the transition of M.I.T.s Film/Video Section into the Weisner Building as part of the new MIT Media Lab. With the retirement of Leacock in 1987, Davenport joined the faculty and founded the Interactive cinema group. At the time she wrote: "Interactive cinema reflects the longing of cinema to become something new, something more complex, something more intimate, as if in conversation with an audience."

In these years before the web, the challenge was to envision a computational form that was scalable and that bound compelling content with human interaction. Davenport writes: "As cinema frees itself from the constraints of the inherently linear celluloid base, a new meta-cinema explodes the myth of the heroic by projecting itself into our everyday environments. The creation and sharing of cinema can happen anywhere, any time. As an improvisational learning partner, meta-cinema invites us to articulate new hypotheses, to sensorially augment our dialogs, to share multi-point of view stories, and to engage in sociable interchange between all people."

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