"Imagine you are blazing a trail without a compass -- where will you end up? You'll probably do a random walk, but if you don't start out with a particular goal, I suppose that doesn't really matter... and if it is a nice forest you'll enjoy the scenery... I suppose that describes my career."
I first met Jerry Wiesner in the late 1970's, shortly before he stepped down as President of MIT. Two years later, I visited him in the hospital after he had undergone heart surgery and asked him why he had chosen to retire when he did. He responded by offering a memorable metaphor: he equated the leadership of an institution with a force on a see-saw. Sometimes, he claimed, you tip the see-saw so far in one direction that the institution requires someone else to step in to equalize the situation. I always wanted to have a more specific conversation with JBW about this metaphor.
At the time of my visit, Jerry was still weak from surgery and I did not want to tire him, but I had one other pressing question: Would he continue his efforts to realize a media laboratory at MIT? He responded that sometimes you get into something so far that you cannot pull out.
Jerry's vision of a "media laboratory" began many years ago, during his leadership of MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics. As technology advanced, his vision developed and grew in its sophistication, scope, and clarity of mission. Jerry worked tirelessly and called in many hard-earned favors to help build a unique, first-class facility which brings together the best minds and state-of-the-art equipment. Through my collaborations with Richard Leacock as well as in my faculty position at the Media Laboratory, I have enjoyed the benefits of Jerry's vision of communication and the pro-active ways in which he sought to bring science and the arts into closer harmony.
"I started out thinking I was going to be a mathematician or a physicist or somehow involved in electronics, and I had a lot of trouble making up my mind until I got to thermodynamics in the physics department, and then I decided I was going to be a communications engineer and a mathematician."John Donne wrote, "No man is an island..." As we considered how best to construct a media portrait, we observed that in his work to put the "nuclear beast back in the cage," as well as in his unceasing pursuit to make MIT a more dynamic, intellectually robust and diverse scientific community, Jerry Wiesner built his influence around knowledge. His knowledge was derived as much from a listening ear as it was from a questioning mind.
No one can take a meaningful action in the world without leaving some sort of evidence behind. Jerry Wiesner's actions and achievements have left a trail of many scattered clues which provide glimpses into the mind of this influential man. Our approach to understanding Jerry's story was to gather together many of the scattered sources which describe salient aspects of his life and times, and to shape these story fragments into an information landscape which the curious investigator can navigate and explore.
Rather than laying out our story materials in a single-stream or linear presentation, the "Hyper-Portrait" form allows us to build an understanding of context in various ways. The media pieces and texts which serve as the soul of this portrait are linked into a "structured context." This context becomes visible through an interface which invites our audience to pro-actively explore and select particular elements of interest. The individual explorer is also invited to add to and exchange views with the larger society of audience through our "chat pages."
The primary structure for the Hyper-Portrait, as we discover it in the interface, includes a division of Jerry's life into five periods: "The Early Years," "Up the Ladder at MIT," "The Washington Years," "Governance at MIT" and "The Later Years." These broad categories allow us to access reflections on his activities, knowledge, and influence in a loosely chronological fashion. The interface groups the voices of colleagues and friends in proximity to represented time periods. Finally, the interface provides us with a framework to contemplate specific themes which we associate with Jerry's diverse activities.