Berkeley Big Bang 08

Join us for Embodiment, a symposium on new media and the body developed by the Berkeley Center for New Media and Berkeley Art Museum, featuring a keynote lecture by Philosopher Hubert Dreyfus. Dreyfus analyzes Second Life from a philosophical perspective, exploring how thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger would respond to the virtual embodiment enabled by such systems.

BCNM-WSF Visual Arts Event with Steve Kurtz

Join Dr. Steven Kurtz, the artist accused by the US Department of Justice of "bioterrorism" stemming from his use of scientific materials in his award-winning art practice, and science writer Carl Zimmer for a panel discussion on the ethics of scientific and creative research and freedom of speech.

This month's Upgrade! New York is a collaboration between Eyebeam and the World Science Festival, with additional support from the Berkeley Center for New Media.

Is the Web a Threat to Our Culture?

Jointly sponsored by the UC Berkeley Center for New Media, School of Information, Mass Communications Dept, and the UC Berkeley Library

A debate between Andrew Keen and Paul Duguid, moderated by Geoffrey Nunberg

Time Magazine named YOU as their 2006 Person of the Year to highlight what has been deemed the "democratization of the media". The term Web 2.0 was coined to describe this transformation on the internet, where individual volunteers, not institutions, control its content. But few agree about what's significant, what's trivial, and what's irrelevant. Critics such as Andrew Keen believe that the Web threatens our economy, our culture, and our values.

Find bios and more information about this debate at
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/about/events/dls20080319

CITRIS Holiday Gala: Tin Can Carousel performance

Members of the Tin Can Carousel Project will give a performance involving five carousels from all-recycled materials that will combine the time-honored technique of puppeteering with the recent digital control technology to create a novel narrative experience. This performance is in association with the Berkeley Center for New Media and is led by Greg Niemeyer and Lydia Greer. Details about this performance will be available soon.

We look forward to seeing you on December 7th!

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium of the Berkeley Center for New Media announces: "New Media Art: In Search of the Cool Obscure": Geert Lovink, Amsterdam, Netherlands

The emerging new media arts genre is in a crisis. Not that 'new media' are on their way out. What we're talking about here is a "luxury" problem: in what direction to grow futher. After an initial period in which time and again the question "what is new media?" was raised, we have now moved to a second phase, in which large parts of the population have become familiar with multimedia, cell phones and the Internet. However, new media arts still operate in a self-referential ghetto, dominated by techno-fetishism. In the meanwhile, the world at large has moved from utopian promises about virtual reality and cyberspace to a culture of massive use. Taking this 'democratization' of new technologies in mind, what are the implications of this shift for the 'electronic arts' branch? Should new media artists and their (few) institutions seek collaboration and integration with the museum and gallery art? Should new media remain a separate category, with its own festivals and exhibitions, or be integrated into the broader 'contemporary arts'? Or should we rather further institutionalize the new media discipline?

Geert Lovink (NL/AUS) is a media theorist and activist, Internet critic and author of Dark Fiber, Uncanny Networks, and My First Recession. He worked on various media projects in Eastern Europe and India. He is a member of the Adilkno collective and co-founder of Internet projects such as The Digital City, Nettime, Fibreculture and Incommunicado. He is founder and director of the Institute of Network Cultures, professor at Interactive Media (Hogeschool van Amsterdam) and associate professor at the Media & Culture department, University of Amsterdam. In 2005-2006 he was a fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study.

http://laudanum.net/geert/

Rip.MIx.BUrn Exhibit: Opening Reception and Performances Re-Mixer

A one-night live music mash-up and art performance featuring Berkeley remix artists and DJs Ripley and Kid Kameleon, this event celebrates the opening of RIP.MIX.BURN.BAM.PFA and presents live performance works that complete that exhibition. Also appearing will be the do-it-yourself DJ machine created by the Improbable Orchestra group. This event is co-hosted by Creative Commons.

RIP.MIX.BURN.BAM.PFA celebrates the cultural and artistic practice of remix, inviting guest artists to "rip, mix, and burn" elements from two digital-media works in the museum's collection—Ken Goldberg's Ouija 2000 and Valéry Grancher's 24h00 (both 1999)—resulting in new artistic creations. Drawing from the open-source software tradition, with the permission of artists Goldberg and Grancher, the remix artists may alter or revise original code or media files from the source works, or they may choose to take a more conceptual route, remixing some of the methods or behaviors of the originals into their own new works. Ouija 2000 and 24h00 will be exhibited along with new works by Michael Joaquin Grey, Alison Sant, Jonathon Keats, and Nathaniel Wojtalik and Iris Piers. On view in BAM's Bancroft lobby and stairwell gallery, the artworks will also be available via the exhibition website at bampfa.berkeley.edu/ripmixburn for the public to download and remix.

Admission:

Free

Photos - click here

Monster Ball Clinic

Pirates, come cure your scurvy! Robots, come fix your lights! Monsters, come clear your throats! Humans, come fix your costumes!

Come visit the MONSTER BALL CLINIC:

Oct 23, 6pm to midnight at the crypt formally known as South Hall, room 110. Haunted refreshments served. A Berkeley Center for New Media event brought to you by Information School, Art Practice, and Film Studies.

Contacts:

Kimiko Ryokai (kimiko@ischool.berkeley.edu)

Greg Niemeyer (niemeyer@berkeley.edu)

Dorkbot - sf: "People doing strange things with electricity"

This is a special fundraising dorkbot for Todd Blair who was in an accident in Amsterdam right after the SRL show. Todd is in a coma right now and he and his family need all the help and support they can get. We are trying to raise as much money as we can. Please, consider donations of $10 or more if you can. Many of you know him as a SRL comrade and the sparkling facilitator behind many technology based creative artworks and exhibitions over the years.

CASH BAR 21+ bartended by SRL bartender of many years Pete Macomber!

Auction (still growing list of items and services for auction here!) Please bring cash or your checkbooks (we're not setup for credit card processing)

Catering by Food Hacker Marc Powell

Featuring:

* Ken Goldberg - Robots As Environmentalists: Searching for the Ivory Billed Woodpecker using Robotic Observatories for Natural Environments

* Eric Paulos - Citizen Science

* Mark Pauline - Survival Research Labs

* Joe Grand - Fifteen Art Projects in Fifteen Minutes

* Steven Lassovszky - Airplane GPS/Telemetry Video

* monochrom

CONTINUOUS CITY: Excerpts from a Work-in-Progress by The Builders Association

Created with students from UC Berkeley.

The Builders Association is a New York-based performance and media company that exploits the richness of contemporary technologies to extend the boundaries of theater. The Builders' current project, Continuous City, considers the sense of place within a global context, and how electronic connection contributes to--and complicates--that sense of place. Continuous City is a meditation on how contemporary experiences of location and dislocation stretch us to the maximum as our 'networked' selves occupy multiple locations. The project will extend theater's reach by providing a space for others to step into the project - through a social networking site (www.continuouscity.org) where videos can be uploaded for the performance, and by creating video with local actors around the Bay Area. While on campus this fall through a residency with the Arts Research Center, members of the group, led by Artistic Director Marianne Weems, will develop and present excerpts from this work-in-progress with students from across campus, including the Departments of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, Art Practice, School of Information, and College of Environmental Design. Together, they will examine not only how they see what's happening in the world, but how to deliver that vision to the audience.

October 5, 6, 12, 13 at 8pm

October 7, 14 at 2pm

Zellerbach Playhouse

BUY TICKETS ONLINE

There will be a post-performance discussion with Marianne Weems following each performance.

This project is made possible with generous support from the Arts Research Center, BAM/PFA, Berkeley Center for New Media, Cal Performances, College of Engineering, College of Environmental Design, Department of Anthropology, Department of Art Practice, International & Area Studies, LEF Foundation, L&S Division of Arts & Humanities, School of Information, Townsend Center for Humanities, and UC Institute for Research in the Arts.

The Czar of New Media Noir

BCNM's Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium kicked off the Fall 2007 season with an overflow crowd for Trevor Paglen, whom Ken Goldberg called the 'Czar of New Media Noir'

Lecture by Dr. Ted Selker: Context Aware Computing

We are now poised to create a world where objects with computers in them can recognize our looks, feelings, and actions to simplify how we work with them. This talk will present examples showing how our intentions can be understood and acted on by computers. Our work reaches across domains to demonstrate the principle of implicit communication as plausible control for systems can be competent. Examples in the home, office, car and even bicycle will be presented. Dr. Ted Selker is an Associate Professor at the MIT Media Laboratory, the Director of the Context Aware Computing Lab, co-director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, and also of the Counter Intelligence/ Design Intelligence special interest group on product design of the future. His work strives to demonstrate that people's intentions can be recognized and respected by the things we design. His work is recognized for creating demonstrations of a world in which people's demonstration of desires causes computers to help them across natural and complex domains, such as kitchens, cars, email and voting. This work uses sensors and artificial intelligence in adaptive models of users' systems and tasks to create keyboardless computers. Ted's work takes the form of prototype concept products supported by cognitive science research. He particularly works to show how this approach helps product design to bridge communication gaps for technology and people. Ted's work is also applied to developing and testing user experience technology and security architectures for recording voter intentions securely and accurately. Prior to joining MIT faculty in November 1999, Ted was an IBM fellow and directed the User Systems Ergonomics Research lab. He has served as a consulting professor at Stanford University, taught at Hampshire, University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Brown Universities and worked at Xerox PARC and Atari Research Labs. Ted's research has contributed to products ranging from notebook computers to operating systems. He is known for the design of the TrackPoint in-keyboard pointing device found in many notebook computers, as well as many other innovations at IBM. Ted's work has resulted in numerous awards, patents, and papers and is often featured by the press. Ted was co-recipient of the Computer Science Policy Leader Award for Scientific American 50 in 2004 and the American Association For People with Disabilities Thomas Paine Award for his work on voting technology in 2006.

CNM Interactive Media Talk with Hanna Rose Shell of Harvard University: Productive Mimesis and the Media of Disappearance: Abbott Thayer's Modeling of Invisibility in Nature, 1890-1918.

This talk examines the work of artist, naturalist and media innovator Abbott Thayer (1849-1921) and, through his work, explores the epistemological origins, and mixed-media foundations of camouflage, a form of subjectivity founded on simultaneous self-effacement and self-analysis in relation to filmic media. Protective coloration in nature was the motivation for Thayer’s media experiments in concealment and revelation, science and illusion. In 1896, he first articulated his laws of “obliterative coloration” and “disruptive patterning,” thereby initiating a debate among natural historians, psychologists, representational artists and militarists. Over the next fifteen years, Thayer attempted proof of his laws through the production, dissemination, and demonstration of three-dimensional models and stencils. Thayer incorporated media (including photographs, films, skins, textiles and paints) into interactive collages and installations. His efforts to articulate a science and practice of protective concealment – epitomized in the figure of the stencil – embodied the convergent epistemologies of representational art, experimental psychology and evolutionary biology.

Thayer’s innovative modeling of the processes by which animals appear to disappear into their backgrounds in nature is analyzed in terms of productive mimesis. Productive mimesis refers a specifically performative – and at the same time generative – role for media building, blending, distribution and demonstration. “Productive Mimesis and the Art of Disappearance” is part of a larger project concerning the emergence of a performative science and subjectivity founded on self-effacement. That larger project articulates how, why and to what effect camouflage emerged in the twentieth century – coined as a word and implemented as set of linked scientific theories, media practices and formulations of identity based on media interactivity and immersion into nature.

CNM Interactive Media Talk with Abigail Derecho, Northwestern University: Dam(n) the Flood of Female Fantasies:

Although the mainstream press has perpetuated stereotypes of women and minorities as having a “belated” relationship to digital technology, the early history of mass digital media was largely shaped by minority discourses. This paper examines the first Usenet group dedicated to the online publication of fan fiction (stories authored by media fans based on their favorite TV or film texts), founded in 1994, which was dominated by women writers, some of whom specialized in erotic narratives.

Almost as soon as female fans’ erotica began to appear on Usenet, fellow fans began deploying censorship tactics against it. The “flame wars” around pornographic writing inspired warning and rating systems that today are conventions in online fan production communities; self-censorship is now characteristic of such websites, which have, over the last dozen years, gained tremendous popularity and mainstream acceptance. I investigate why and how women’s sexually explicit stories constituted one of the first, and most enduring, genres of digital art production; how the 1986 Meese Commission on Pornography has informed women’s censorship discourses for over twenty years; and how digital culture has influenced debates over feminism, femininity, and pornography.

CNM Interactive Media Talk with Jane McGonigal, UC Berkeley: The Limits of Ubiquitous Play

This lecture examines the historical intersection of ubiquitous computing and experimental game design, circa 2001 AD. Ubiquitous computing, or ubicomp, is the emerging field of computer science that seeks to augment everyday objects and physical environments with invisible and networked computing functionality. Experimental game design is the field of interactive arts that seeks to discover new platforms and contexts for digital play. The convergence of these two fields has produced a significant body of games that challenge and expand our notions of where, when, and with whom we can play. In this lecture, I explore how and to what ends playful projects such as International Border Volleyball, Super Columbine Massacre RPG, I Love Bees, and Tombstone Hold ‘Em are reconfiguring the technical, formal and social limits of games in relation to everyday life. I propose that ubiquitous gaming is producing a persistent responsiveness among players to potential ludic interaction, and that this responsiveness represents a new kind of critical gaming literacy. Gamers grow to read the real world as rich with ludic opportunity, carefully testing everyday media, objects, sites, and social situations for the positive and negative consequences of inscribing each within the magic circle of play. I explore the relationship between this new literacy and pre-digital games theory of cultural historian Johann Huizinga and anthropologist Roger Caillois. I argue that as the perceived opportunities for digitally networked play become increasingly ubiquitous, game designers and researchers must attend more carefully to the insights of writers who historically have explored play as an embodied, social and highly consequential ritual, always already grounded in the practices of everyday life.

Winter New Media Lecture Series: Visual Culture as Content and Tool

Featured speakers are Howard Rheingold, "Smart Mobs" author; Travis Fox, Washington Post; Robert Hood, msnbc.com; Al Bonner, Lawrence.com; Seth Gittner, Roanoke Times; Seth Familian, UC Berkeley Haas School of Business; Joe Howry, Bruce McLean, Colleen Casem and Tom Kiska, Ventura County Star.

This event is free and open to the public, and no RSVP is needed.

Citris Distinguished Lecture Series: The Tribe: Outsiders, Insiders, and How Technology is Changing the Rules of Independent Filmmaking

What can the most successful doll on the planet show us about being Jewish today? Narrated by acclaimed actor Peter Coyote, The Tribe mixes old school narration with a new school visual style.

Shlain and Goldberg will screen their 2006 Sundance and Tribeca Film Festival hit, The Tribe, "An unorthodox, unauthorized history of the Jewish people and the Barbie doll...in about 15 minutes." They will initiate a discussion with the audience about how digital technology is transforming the process of creating and distributing independent films and videos.

"...smart, funny..." -The New York Times

"The Tribe is a powerful, universal film that will surprise and challenge anyone who has wrestled with issues of faith, identity and history." -Roberta Munroe, Sundance Film Festival

Produced and Directed by Tiffany Shlain

Written by Tiffany Shlain & Ken Goldberg

Narrated by Peter Coyote

Art Directed by Gil Gershoni

Lecture by Tino Schaedler: Architecture of Film: New Potentials in Digital Time

Tino Schaedler is an architect, digital designer and film artist who has been working at the cutting edge of a new niche within the film industry. As directors began working on larger and more complex productions, the conventional pre-production design techniques of storyboarding became quickly outdated. 3D computer visualization along with real-time animation became an important tool not only as a means to design the sets but also as a vehicle for the director to test out lighting, scene shots, and blocking before the actors even enter the set. It enabled a design process that directly engaged with the dynamic media of film in a virtual context.

Tino has worked side by side with Tim Burton on "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," and on films like "V for Vendetta," as well as the Harry Potter series. At the moment he is working on a book which will bring him to California in November/December for a series of interviews. We thought to take this opportunity to invite him for a lecture at the Architecture Department on campus. He will be speaking about new technologies in architecture and film.

Symposium: From Counterculture to Cyberculture: The Legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog

During the 1960s, student marchers chanted "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate!" as they railed against computers and the Cold War-era military industrial complex they seemed to represent. But within just three decades, computers had become emblems of countercultural revolution. This symposium will feature a conversation with three people who played key roles in that transformation: Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, Kevin Kelly, former executive editor of Wired Magazine and author of Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization and New Rules for the New Economy, and Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. The discussion will be moderated by Fred Turner, assistant professor of communication at Stanford and author of the new book From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.

This event is sponsored by the Stanford University Libraries, the Department of Communication, and the American Studies Program.

It will be introduced by Henry Lowood, of the Stanford University Libraries, and followed by a public reception.

Conference: Ubiquitous Computing Conference, (Ubicomp 2006: http://ubicomp.org/ubicomp2006/): Workshop on Pervasive Image Capture and Sharing at Ubicomp 2006

Submissions due 6/16/2006, Acceptances sent 7/24/2006

Call for participation, PICS 2006: Workshop on Pervasive Image Capture and Sharing at Ubicomp 2006

Portable digital cameras continue to enable prolific photo capturing in a variety of settings and to inspire digital photo sharing via an extensive repertoire of mechanisms and modalities, including exchange of physical prints, sharing of digital copies via email, web pages and blogs, or simply showing images on the imaging devices during face-to-face encounters. Camera phones expand sharing activities further through MMS (multimedia messaging), email from phones, and transfer via IR or Bluetooth between phones. All these functions, embedded in a device that is always close at hand, are creating opportunities for pervasive image capture and sharing.

This second workshop on "Pervasive Image Capture and Sharing: New Social Practices and Implications for Technology" will continue ongoing discussions among a diverse, multi-disciplinary group of researchers around these emerging phenomena. The goal is to examine new technical developments and social practices and to understand implications for further research, including design and development of new devices, applications and services.

The number of participants will be limited to 25 people, selected based on their submission and reviewed by the organizers. Participants are asked to submit a position paper describing their interest and experience in this field (about 2-3 pages in the SIGCHI conference publication format). The organizing committee will select participants based on these extended abstracts.

1st Information Dynamics Workshop: Affordances and implications of New Media for scholarly publishing

The plan for the Workshop is:

8:30 - 9:00: coffee, informal meeting of the panelists and audience.

9:00 - 9:30: introductions, framing statements by Elsevier and CNM.

9:30 - 10:30: position statements on Topic 1.

10:30 - 11:45: discussion of Topic 1.

11:45 - 1:15: lunch for panelists.

1:15 - 2:15: position statements on Topic 2.

2:15 - 3:15: discussion of Topic 2.

3:15 - 3:30: coffee break.

3:30 - 4:30: position statements on Topic 3.

4:30 - 5:30: discussion of Topic 3.

5:30 - 5:45: summation.

6:00 - dinner for panelists.

Summer Course: “Social Memory: Documenting ISEA 2006”, “Digital Reconstruction of Historic Sites”

For the first time this summer, UC students and visitors can explore facets of the burgeoning world of New Media close-up through UC Summer Session courses.

The first of the Center for New Media’s inaugural summer offerings is “Social Memory: Documenting ISEA 2006”. Instructor Richard Rinehart, Berkeley Art Museum Director of Digital Media, will introduce enrollees to the Media Art Notation System, a new metadata framework from the museum and art community. The Media Art Notation System uses new media to document, preserve, and “remember” cultural artifacts, such as media art and complex cultural projects, which have heretofore confounded traditional attempts at documentation. Students in this three week class will use and test the Media Art Notation System to document a live, complex cultural event, the ISEA2006/ZeroOne Conference and Electronic Arts Festival in San Jose.

The second course, “Digital Reconstruction of Historic Sites”, melds issues of historic preservation with digital visualization. Instructor Laura Ackley will guide students in proposing, researching and presenting a digital reconstruction of a real world cultural historic site using 3D Studio MAX modeling to produce a 3D model, renderings and animation.

Details and enrollment information may be found at the UC Summer Session website at http://summer.berkeley.edu/.

CNM Talk with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun of Brown University: Programmable Visions: "On the Emergence of Computer and Biological Code-Scripts"

Why are images proliferating at a time when their power to index reality is waning? How and why have non-transparent technologies, such as computers, become conflated with transparency? This talk argues that the answer to these questions lies in the unforeseen emergence of programming languages. Drawing connections between early genetics and computer engineering, this talk argues that digital computing's "programmability"-its return to a "clock-work" universe-encapsulated mid-twentieth century dreams of biological heredity. Rather than foreshadowing DNA, as many have argued, early ruminations on the existence of a genetic code-script that conflated execution and legislation, such as Schrodinger's What is Life?, foreshadowed the emergence of a code-based causality, which software-not DNA-would, and could only, instantiate.

About Wendy Chun:

Wendy Chun is Associate Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author of _Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics_ (MIT, 2006), and co-editor (with Thomas Keenan) of _New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (Routledge, 2005). She has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and a Wriston Fellow at Brown. She will be a visiting scholar and visiting associate professor in the History of Science Department at Harvard (06-07). She is currently working on a monograph entitled _Programmed Visions: Software, DNA, Race_ (forthcoming MIT, 2008).

Festival: UC Santa Cruz Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program at UC Santa Cruz

UC Santa Cruz Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program is pleased to announce the DANM Festival taking place at UCSC between May 4th and May 7th, 2006. The UCSC DANM MFA Program serves as a center for the development and study of digital media and the cultures they have helped create. The DANM Festival 2006 will showcase the expanding arena in which this new art practice is emerging and it will signal UCSC's presence as a prominent center of activity in digital arts and new media. The DANM Festival 2006 introduces the campus and the public at large to cutting edge experimental work and serves as a bridge to the local community through collaborations with the The Museum of Art & History @ The McPherson Center and the Santa Cruz Film Festival.

CNM Interactive Media Talk with Kimiko Ryokai of IDEO: The World as a Palette

Kimiko's research focuses on building new expressive tools that take advantage of people's familiarity with the physical world, and studying how new media expand the interaction space and the change that could be brought out in the way people perceive this extended interaction space. Kimiko will illustrate this research with her project "The World as a Palette," an ongoing effort to design and develop tools that enable people to turn their world into a color palette consisting not only of colors, but also textures, movements, and sounds. The potential of new interactive media that pushes us to actively expand the way we perceive the world and make new meanings will be discussed.

About Kimiko Ryokai:

Kimiko received her PhD and MS in Media Arts & Sciences from MIT in 1999 and 2005 respectively. At the MIT Media Lab, Kimiko was a member of the Tangible Media Group and the Gesture and Narrative Language Group, where she developed a number of tangible interactive systems to facilitate collaborative and creative learning. Kimiko's work has been presented at CHI, SIGGRAPH, CSCL, IUI, as well as exhibited at international venues such as Ars Electronica, Children's Museum Kyoto, Japan, AIGA, and IDSA (Gold Award). Kimiko is currently at IDEO as an interaction design and human factors specialist.

CNM Interactive Media Talk with Sile O’Modhrain of Queens University: Motion and Action, Gesture and Touch

The concept of body-mediated or embodied interaction, of the coupling of interface and actor, has become increasingly relevant within the domain of HCI. With the reduced size and cost of a wide variety of sensor technologies and the ease with which they can be wirelessly deployed, on the body, in devices we carry with us and in the environment, comes the opportunity to use a wide range of human motion as an integral part of the interaction with all sorts of applications.

In this talk, Sile will present her recent work on body-mediated interaction in the context of two application domains - gestural control of hand-held devices and tangible interfaces for digital musical instruments. Finally she will discuss some of the broader issues which we have tackled such as frames of reference for action and the role of touch in expressive gestural control.

About Sile O'Modhrain:

Sile O'Modhrain's research focuses on human-computer interaction, especially interfaces incorporating haptic and auditory feedback. She earned her master's degree in music technology from the University of York and her PhD from Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). She has also worked as a sound engineer and producer for BBC Network Radio. In 1994, she received a Fulbright scholarship, and went to Stanford to develop a prototype haptic interface augmenting graphical user interfaces for blind computer users. Before taking up her position at SARC, Sile directed the Palpable Machine's group at Media Lab Europe, where her work focussed on new interfaces for hand-held devices that tightly couple gestural input and touch or haptic display.

Lecture by Marina Grzinic, Artist and Writer, Lubiljana: Representing Time in the Absence of Space

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium (ATC)

Lecture and Discussion with Albert Pisano and Ken Goldberg: "Unwinding the Clock: Measures of Time and Art"

Known for his engaging, interdisciplinary lectures, UC Berkeley professor Albert Pisano considers how, from turn-of-the-twentieth-century mechanical timepieces to contemporary chip-scale atomic clocks, technologies of time measurement have influenced our understanding of time. Following Dr. Pisano's lecture, Ken Goldberg joins the conversation to discuss how artists have responded to these technological and conceptual revolutions.

Albert Pisano is chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. In 2002, he co-launched the Integrated Nano-Mechanical Regulated Atomic Clock project. Dr. Pisano holds more than ten patents in Micro-Electrical-Mechanical Systems. Ken Goldberg is an artist and professor of robotics at UC Berkeley, teaching in the Departments of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennale, Ars Electronica, and BAM/PFA, among other venues.

Public programs are included with museum admission.

Lecture by Shirley Shor, New Media Artist, SF: Dynamic Landscapes

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium (ATC)

Public Talks: Spring New Media Lecture Series at UC Berkeley

The UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism is hosting eight public talks on issues in new media, citizen media and multimedia March 27 - 30. Featured speakers are Craig Newmark of craigslist, Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media, John Battelle, author of "The Search," Jan Schaffer of the Institute for Interactive Journalism, Bob Cauthorn of City Tools, Terisa Estacio of KRON-TV, Regina McCombs of Startribune.com, and a panel of reporters and editors from the Oakland Tribune. Each presentation is free and open to the public, and no RSVP is necessary. The presentations also will be Webcast. The specific schedule for the presentations and other details are here: http://journalism.berkeley.edu/events/details.php?ID=295

Lecture by Michael Rees, Digital Media Art and Sculpture artist of Rutgers University: Monsters and Programs and Other Beautiful Fictions

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium (ATC)

Lecture by Steve Beck, Artist and Designer, UC Berkeley Engineering: From Pre-Digital to Post-Digital: Forty Years of Electronic Art and Music

Sponsored by: Science, Technology, and Society Center, Haas School of Business, CITRIS

Art installation by Paul Grabowicz: Go Back in Time - Virtually

A team at the CNM is developing an Internet program that takes users back 60 years to when Oakland's Seventh Street was a swinging, gambling, thriving district.

Lecture by Tom Marioni, Sculptor and Conceptual Artist, SF: Digital Sound as Sculpture Material

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium (ATC)

Lecture by Lucy Suchman, Professor, Anthropology of Science and Technology, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK: "Reconfiguring Agencies at the Human-Computer Interface"

This talk explores the question of how capacities for action are figured in technoscientific projects dedicated to the design of human-like machines. More specifically, Professor Suchman considers three elements taken to be necessary for effective agency in these projects; embodiment, emotion and sociality. With some exemplary cases in view, she offers a critical consideration of the way in which these aspects of agency are conceptualized in the computing and cognitive sciences, and are realized in associated technological projects. This includes initiatives in robotics and artificial intelligence aimed at the replication of capabilities of mobility or navigation, of so called ‘affective computing’, and of social interaction. Drawing on recent discussions within science and technology studies and feminist theory, Suchman highlights the fetishized figuring of agencies in these projects, and offer some reflections on the implications for both scientific and popular imaginaries. With that critique in mind, she turns to the question of how we might differently conceptualize relations between humans and machines, as irreducibly contingent encounters of specifically situated persons with equally particular, dynamic, and culturally inflected things.

Sponsored by: Townsend Center for the Humanities; Science, Technology, and Society Center; School for Information Management and Systems; Center for New Media; Department of Gender and Women's Studies; Beatrice Bain Research Group.

Lecture by Jaron Lanier, Artist and Musician, Berkeley: "Can Soulful Music Survive Digital Epistemology?"

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium (ATC)

Films: "Artificial Expressionism - The Works of Semiconductor"

$4 UCB students, $5 UCB staff

Systems crash could be seen as the motive force behind the visionary British duo Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt), who have been creating, by hand and by machine, striking sound and image art since the mid-1990s. This crash concept must be thought of in the broadest terms, from the macro-image of architectural structures in disarray, to the appropriation of the minuscule digital glitch as a unit of creative expression. Central to their stunning aesthetic is the primacy of sound, which often directs, undulates, or explodes the image. Though they frequently exploit "broken data," Semiconductor's works are richly composed, drawing on sensuous landscapes, mercurial geometries, and unimaginable cities. Over two evenings, we'll encounter much of Semiconductor's output, an "artificial expressionism" that invests zeroes and ones with the uncertainty of the human pulse.

http://www.semiconductorfilms.org/

WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 7, 7:30pm

Semiconductor: Live Performance and Sound Films

Using self-designed software, Semiconductor will present a vigorous half-hour sound and image performance. Sonic Inc., as they call it, allows the duo to generate distinct and purposeful compositions, modulated by differing aural strategies. Alongside the performance, they'll screen single-channel works, as well as beautifully rendered facsimiles of recent installations.-Steve Seid

Inaudible Cities: Part 1 (2002, 6.5 mins). Earthquake Films (2000, 4.5 mins). Múm-Green Grass of Tunnel (2002, 4.5 mins). New Antics (2000, 4.5 mins). Dat Politics (2000, 4.5 mins). All the Time in the World (2005, 5 mins). Double Adaptor-200 Nanowebbers (2005, 2.5 mins).

Total program: c. 70 mins, Color, DV, From the artists)

WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 14, 7:30pm

Semiconductor: Lecture and Sound Films

Resisting the hygienics of digital art production, Semiconductor advocates "artificial expressionism," a creative approach that encourages plundering the apparatus for its vulnerabilities. This requires finding faults in the machinery that promote unusual corruption of the signal. Alongside a discussion of this aesthetic notion, Semiconductor will screen over a half-dozen single-channel works, as well as their most recent ventures in site-specific media.-Steve Seid

Retropolis (1999, 4.5 mins). A-Z of Noise (1999, 1.5 mins). Yes You Are Right! (1999, 1.5 mins). Puffed Rice (2000, 2.5 mins). Linear (2001, 5.5 mins). QT-Digital Anthrax (2001, 1 min). Aco (2003, 4 mins). Strata (2002, 9.5 mins). Digital Anthrax Live (2002, 5 mins). Mini-Epoch Series (2003, 4.5 mins). The Sound of Microclimates (2004, 8.5 mins). All the Time in the World (2005, 5 mins).

(Total program: c. 70 mins, Color, DV, From the artists)

Symposium: UC Berkeley Center for New Media "050505"

050505 is the fifth in an algorithmically timed series of conferences on emerging themes in New Media organized at UC Berkeley by the Center for New Media. The purpose of the 050505 conference is to explore the transitions users make when they switch from one mode of media interaction to another. The applause before a concert, the opening sequence of a movie, the ring tone of a cell phone, the login for an online game; all are transitions from one mode of interaction to another.

Lecture by David Byrne, Artist, Musician, NYC: "I [heart] PowerPoint"

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium

Lecture by Jan Katie Salen, Parsons School of Design and Eric Zimmerman, gameLab, NYC: "Making and Breaking Rules: Game Design as Critical Practice"

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium

Seminar with Greg Niemeyer, Art Practice and Film Studies: "Sleeping Beauty: New Media and Quantitative Data"

Niemeyer and Gepshtein observe that new media largely mimic the aesthetic conventions of the printing press to visualize quantitative data. They propose to advance aesthetic conventions to leverage the inherent properties of new media. Although there is much research in the area of visualization, most of this work addresses technical concerns rather than cultural, aesthetic and perceptual concerns.

Niemeyer and Gepshtein's focus is to develop new media aesthetics in ways that stimulate human perception optimally. In collaboration between the Department of Film Studies and the School of Optometry, under the auspices of UC Berkeley�s Center for New Media, they propose a series of studies to develop novel dynamic displays and better understand how such displays help humans make better decisions. They base their research on recent advances in research of human perception, specifically of cue integration and perceptual organization. Cue integration allows observers to integrate information from various sensory dimensions. Perceptual organization allows observers to discern hidden structures in complex data spontaneously.

If their research succeeds, Niemeyer and Gepshtein can contribute to the foundation of a theory of new media aesthetics with far-reaching implications. Such a theory might be as relevant to understanding complex data as central perspective was for the understanding of complex habitats from the Quattrocento to the present day.

Symposium: "Distributed Form: Network Practice: Exploring Issues of Connectivity in Contemporary Design"

The symposium will critically explore emerging opportunities for design through networked and distributed models of organization and their connection to architectural design practice by bringing together an international team of architects, engineers, theorists and media artists.

Through presentations and panel discussions, the symposium will examine how design is responding to the demands and potentials of networked thinking and practices, and how environments are being impacted by the logics and organizational thinking behind networked society, specifically through the reconceptualization of design as a distributed practice, along with its larger implications for form-making. The operations of information technology make it possible to apply similar concepts and techniques across many different disciplines; therefore, each session will have papers presented from the separate but related fields of architecture, art and science, addressing topics of mutual concern.

Seminar with Yehuda Kalay, Architecture, CNM Executive Director: "Virtual Learning Environments"

Cyberspace, an information space created through ubiquitously networked computers, has been transformed from fiction to fact in the past decade thanks to the advent of the World Wide Web. Although it can only be experienced through the mediation of computers, it is quickly becoming an alternative 'place' for everyday economic, cultural, and other human activities. As such, there is a potential and a need to design it according to architectural place-making principles, rather than the prevailing document (page) metaphor. This need is most evident in learning environments, which rely on social and contextual attributes as much as they rely on content. This talk describes the underlying theory and our efforts to develop such virtual learning environments, including the software that allows users to access and inhabit them.

Lecture by Mimi Nguyen, Women's Studies, University of Michigan: "Star Personas and Fan Fictions: Bruce Lee, JJ Chinois, and the Queer Technologies of Celebrity"

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium

Lecture by Sean Kelly, Philosophy, Princeton: "Representing the Real: A Merleau-Pontean Account of Art and Experience from the Renaissance to New Media"

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium