Profile
Michael Roper got his start in media when he was eleven years old, working with his father, Dean Roper, who was a well-known radio broadcaster in his boyhood home of Lancaster, California. He helped his father cover the county fair, sports, and other local events. He started working with video while studying history and philosophy at Pitzer College, and spent eight months in Appalachia producing documentaries on the culture and politics of the region for Broadside Television in Norton, Virginia.
After returning to Pitzer he made two autobiographical documentaries about his hometown: Palmdale and Fairtime in the Antelope Valley. Palmdale focused on a high school homecoming game at Palmdale High School and the subsequent death of its homecoming queen. Fairtime traced his relationship with his father and the sights and sounds of a county fair.
After graduating from Pitzer and earning a BA in social philosophy and intellectual history, Michael got a job at Television Associates in Mountain View, California. He started in the duplication department, but went on to work as a cameraman and editor at the firm. One evening he went to the Pacific Film Archive in San Francisco to see a program of cinema verite documentaries from MIT’s Film/Video Section. He was so moved by the work of the students there he decided to enter the program himself.
He was accepted into the program based on his earlier work and a recommendation from George Stoney, a well-know documentary filmmaker and champion of public access television. At MIT Michael studied with Richard Leacock, one of the founders of the cinema verite movement. He studied interactive media at MIT’s Architecture Machine Group (a forerunner of the Media Lab), and the Visual Language Workshop. He also collaborated with visual and performance artists at the Center For Advance Visuals Studies, including Aldo Tambellini, Vin Grabill, and Otto Piene.
After earning a Masters Degree in Visual Studies from MIT, he was invited to work as an interactive producer at the Athena Language Learning Project. Working with MIT faculty and the Laboratory for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, he created a series of interactive documentaries on specific neighborhoods of Paris, Boston, and Hiratsuka, Japan. The idea was to combine cinema verite filming techniques with interactivity to create portraits of these communities that could be explored by the user. Two of these projects, Dans un quartier de Paris and Tanabata: The Star Festival won major awards and were distributed via laser disc, CD-ROM, and broadband.
In the mid-1990’s Michael's work in interactive documentaries was spun off into an independent company when he cofounded Botticelli Interactive with Shigeru Miyagawa and Ellen Sebring. The Star Festival project was expanded into a full-blown broadband offering called Star Festival Network. This new version added an autobiographical layer to the documentary, telling the story of a Japanese professor, played by George Takei, who returns to his hometown and uses his PDA to record his thoughts and experiences in his hometown. Star Festival Network won a Distinguished Award at the Multimedia Grandpix in Japan in 2001. It was also the first multimedia curriculum to be adopted by the Boston Public School System.
During this same period Michael developed a groundbreaking interactive media exhibit for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Called the Titian Kiosk, this project was the first to combine full screen motion video with with interactivity to create an electronic analog of one of Titian's greatest works, Europa. Visitors could touch any part of the painting to trigger visual narratives delving into Ovid's Metamorphosis, Titian's painting techniques, and the biographies of Titian and Isabella Stewart Gardner.
After 2001 Michael’s focus shifted toward producing interactive media for museums, non-profits, and corporations. In 2001 he joined Krent/Paffett/Carney, now known as Experience Design—a leading design firm based in Boston and Providence. Under the moniker of Experience Media Group, he developed interactive media for a large number of clients, including the Mary Baker Eddy Library, DuPont, the New-York Historical Society, the Boston Children's Museum, MetLife, the National Constitution Center, and the Denver Art Museum. Michael won three AAM MUSE awards during this period.
Some of Michael’s best know media installations include The Well for the Slavery in New York exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, the Trade Canoe for Don Quixote installation at the Denver Art Museum, and the Interactive Media Timeline for What’s Going On? Newark and the Legacy of the Sixties.
In 2013, Michael moved to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he is Manager of Interactive Media.