New Media RoundTable: Prof. Yehuda Kalay - Virtual Experience Learning Model

Cultural heritage is one of the most important�if not the most important�asset of individuals and nations. It is what grounds us as human beings, as families, as ethnic groups, and as nations. Cultural heritage can be a source of pride and self assurance, but often also a source of conflict (between groups not sharing the same heritage). Teaching students about their own heritage can bolster their sense of identity and �pride of place.� Teaching them about the cultural heritage of others can help them understand cultural differences, reduce conflicts, and promote cooperation.

Cultural heritage manifests itself in many forms: physical sites, texts, images, oral histories, and even ethnic music and foods. However, it can be hard to study, especially when it is the cultural heritage of �others.� Tangible heritage sites are hard to get to and face rapid decline due to modernization, globalization, aggressive urban expansion, speculative development, wars, and general neglect. Intangible heritage�in form of the vibrant life of the society that inhabited the site�is even more difficult to preserve and to communicate. As a result, examples of living heritage, such as buildings in use, traditional everyday life and special ceremonies, are difficult to communicate and are at high risk of becoming lost or re-interpreted according to the beliefs of the communicators.

A technology-driven alternative to preserving cultural heritage has emerged through the advent of digital media. Individual researchers, professional societies, museums, universities, and governments have embraced the representation and visualization abilities afforded by computers to create reconstructions and databases of threatened or altogether lost cultural heritage. These efforts have typically focused on the sites themselves, in the form of models of buildings and other structures, and the documents and artifacts found therein. But the new technology has the potential to move the state of the art of preservation and communication beyond static displays, capturing in cinematic or interactive form the social, cultural, and human aspects of the sites and the societies who inhabited them.

We have been developing cultural heritage MUVEs for sites in the USA and elsewhere (see links below). This talk will present our work, and speculate about the efficacy of MUVEs in support of education.

http://steel.ced.berkeley.edu/research/sambor/

http://7thstreet.org/

Biography:

Yehuda Kalay is a professor of Architecture and former Director of the Center for New Media at UC Ber-keley. He holds B.Arch (professional) and MSc (research) degrees in Architecture from the Technion (Is-rael), and PhD in Architecture from Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA). Prior to his tenure at Berkeley, Professor Kalay taught in the departments of architecture and computer science at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is a founding member and past president of ACADIA (Association for Computer Aided Design In Architecture), and former Editor-in-Chief of Automation in Construction, an international refereed journal (Elsevier, UK).

Kalay�s research focuses on digital and collaborative design. He has published over 100 scholarly papers and seven books, the most recent of which are New Heritage: Cultural Heritage and New Media (Rout-ledge, 2008), and Architecture�s New Media (MIT, 2004).

Workshop: Chiptune Marching Band

CHIPTUNE MARCHING BAND

DIY sound making with Kazuhiro Jo, Jamie Allen

(Culture Lab, Newcastle University @NK)

DATE: Thursday 29 October 1pm - 3pm

LOCATION: Berkeley Center for New Media Commons Room

CITY: Berkeley, California, USA

FEE: $5 USD

REGISTER AT: http://chiptunecc.eventbrite.com/

COME ALONG AND MAKE SOME NOISE OUTSIDE!

�Chiptune Marching Band� is a participatory DIY workshop/performance. CMB is a public workshop and actual public performance where participants make a sensor driven sound instruments, self-powered by a kinetic power source, and perform with their instrument with the band. With instruments at the ready, the group heads outside, bringing an event to the streets as the Chiptune Marching Band! The course invites any members of the general public, offering them the opportunity to explore localized resource communities, sound making circuitry, and collective sound performance through their realization.

Registration is recommended for this workshop and can be done via email. Please register early to ensure a place (places are limited to 15). REGISTER ON: http://chiptunecc.eventbrite.com/

Images from prior Chiptune Marching Band workshops:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/heavyside/sets/72157617048731025/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/heavyside/sets/72157614882231230/

Directions to the Berkeley Centre for New Media Commons Room: http://bcnm.berkeley.edu/commons/moffitt

Chiptune Marching Band is part of the Creativity and Cognition 09 Conference taking place from October 28th-30th at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and UC Berkeley. Participants in the Chiptune Marching Band can choose to perform on UC Berkeley Art Museum stage as part of the C&C09 Art Exhibition and Live Performances happening in the evening after the workshop. For more information, see: http://www.creativityandcognition09.org/acceptedperformances.htm

QUESTIONS?

CHIPTUNE CONTACT: chiptunemarchingband [AT] googlemail.com

LOCAL CONTACT: Daniela Rosner - daniela [AT] ischool.berkeley.edu

Co-sponsored with the Berkeley Center for New Media.

ACM creativity and cognition 2009

The 7th Creativity and Cognition Conference (CC09) embraces the broad theme of Everyday Creativity. This year the conference will be held at the Berkeley Art Museum (CA, USA), and asks: How do we enable everyone to enjoy their creative potential? How do our creative activities differ? What do they have in common? What languages can we use to talk to each other? How do shared languages support collective action? How can we incubate innovation? How do we enrich the creative experience? What encourages participation in everyday creativity?

Visit the website for more details

ATC Lecture: From A to B and Back Again, Candice Brietz

"From A to B and Back Again"

Candice Breitz

Should an art audience be suspicious of works of art that open themselves up to popular cultural content? Do explorations of screen life affirm or undermine the commodity structure of mainstream entertainment? Are copyleft strategies legitimate or objectionable? How is the artist's relationship with the subjects that she kidnaps as found footage or those she films herself in studio settings mediated by the technological display formats?

Candice Breitz will field such questions and speak about recent works, including 'Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon)' and 'Mother,' two multi-channel video installations that are currently on view in a monographic exhibition of her work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The artist will have video footage on hand from most of the installations that she has made over the last decade. The open format will allow participants to steer Breitz towards talking about particular works that they would like to discuss.

www.candicebreitz.net

BIO:

Candice Breitz was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1972 and is currently based in Berlin. She holds degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), the University of Chicago and Columbia University (NYC). She has participated in the Whitney Museum's Independent Studio Programme and ran the Palais de Tokyo's Le Pavillon residency as a visiting artist during the year 2005-2006. She has been a tenured Professor of Fine Art at the University of Fine Arts in Braunschweig since 2007.

In recent years solo exhibitions of her work have been hosted by the Kunsthalle Berlin, the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, De Appel in Amsterdam, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, the Collection Lambert in Avignon, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humleb�k, White Cube in London, Yvon Lambert in New York and the Bawag Foundation in Vienna.

A museum-scale survey of her work is currently running at The Power Plant in Toronto until late 2009. The catalogue published parallel to the exhibition contains an essay by Berkeley scholar Anne Wagner. An exhibition of her work showcasing multi-channel installations 'Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon' and 'Mother' can currently be seen at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Breitz will participate in the Performa Biennale in New York in November 2009. Additionally her work can currently be experienced on group exhibitions including the Gothenburg Biennial in Sweden and at the Tate Liverpool in the United Kingdom.

Co-presented with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Lecture: New Media Documentary: Digital Art and Activism, Sharon Daniel and Erik Loyer

Sharon Daniel is a Professor of Film and Digital Media and Chair of the Digital Arts and New Media MFA program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Erik Loyer is an interactive media artist whose internationally-exhibited award-winning work uses tactile and performative interface in the service of audiovisual storytelling.

Artist/activist/scholar Sharon Daniel and interactive media designer Erik Loyer will present two database-driven interactive documentaries, "Public Secrets" [publicsecrets.net], and Blood Sugar [bloodsugararchives.net] as case studies of alternative media activism. In "Public Secrets" incarcerated women reveal the secret injustices of the Criminal Justice System and the Prison Industrial Complex. "Blood Sugar" examines the social and political construction of poverty, alienation, addiction and insanity in American society through the eyes of those who live it. The online interfaces and extensive audio databases compiled for these two projects emerge out of the a hybrid public art practice in which information and communication technologies are employed in the service of social justice and social inclusion. This talk will address both how these two interactive documentaries were created, and how they transcend the boundaries between art and political activism by engaging the question, �what can art do?� in relation to some of our most troubling social problems.

Organized by Gender and Women's Studies, cosponsored by Blum Center for Developing Economies and Center for New Media, Li Ka Shing and the Berkeley Center for New Media.

ATC Lecture: Luscious Complexity - Transcending the Doohickey, Camille Utterback

How can an interactive artwork incorporate complexity without incurring frustration in participants? How can it be both clear enough to engage participants, and complex enough to reward continued interaction? Where is the sweet spot where complexity doesn't confuse but enthralls? Finally, why create interactive art anyway? Is the whole field of interactive art just an exploration of the doohickey? Or, is there something richly satisfying and culturally relevant to be found here?

Artist Camille Utterback will explore these questions as she discusses the evolution of her own interactive art practice.

Biography:

Camille Utterback is a pioneering digital artist whose interactive installations and reactive sculptures engage participants in a dynamic process of kinesthetic discovery and play. Utterback's work explores the aesthetic and experiential possibilities of linking computational systems to human movement and gesture in layered and often humorous ways. Her work focuses attention on the continued relevance and richness of the body in our increasingly mediated world.

Her exhibit history cites more than fifty shows on four continents. Awards include an IBM Innovation Merit Award (2007), a Transmediale International Media Art Festival Award (2005), a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship (2002), and a US Patent (2004). Her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum, Hewlett Packard, and La Caixa Foundation, among others.

Utterback holds a BA in Art from Williams College, and a Masters degree from The Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She lives and works in San Francisco.

Design Futures Lecture: Reading Ahead: Considering The Book's Future in the iPod Era, Steve Portigal, Dan Soltzberg (Portigal Consulting)

Steve Portigal and Dan Soltzberg will share findings from the Reading Ahead project, an exploration the evolution of reading and books from a consumer perspective � what it means to be a reader, how artifacts from traditional books to devices like Amazon�s Kindle affect the experience, and what the future might hold for readers, product developers, and others.

Portigal Consulting is a bite-sized firm that bring together user research, design and business strategy to help innovative companies discover and act on new insights about themselves and their customers. We've conducted in-depth contextual research with telecommuters, musicians, bankers, new mothers, students, and dozens of others. We've worked with companies like Belkin, Bosch, Chevron, France Telecom-Orange, Hewlett-Packard, Nestle, Plantronics, and Sony to guide the development of new products and services.

Co-sponsored by UC's School of Information and the Berkeley Center for New Media

Special Event: One Web Day

ONE WEB DAY COMES TO UC BERKELEY

12- 1pm, Tuesday, September 22, 2009

BCNM Commons, 340 Moffit Library - Next to the Free Speech Movement Cafe

Join Media Alliance and the Berkeley Center for New Media on One Web Day to discuss global Internet access and policies.

* Mitchell Kapor - Co-Founder of Electronic Frontier Foundation

* Steven Weber - Prof. of Political Science, Author of The Success of Open Source

* Shel Waggener - UC- Berkeley Chief Information Officer

* Jay Walsh - Head of Communications, Wikimedia Foundation

* Nicholas de Monchaux - Professor, College of Environmental Design

* David Glover- Director, Oakland Citizens Committee for Urban

Renewal (OCCUR)

* Tracy Rosenberg - Executive Director of Media Alliance

OneWebDay (www.onewebday.org) was envisioned by Obama Technology advisor and open technology advocate Susan Crawford as the Internet's "Earth Day" - a celebration of the Internet with a serious purpose - to protect a free and democratic Internet. The goal of celebrating One Web Day each year is to make visible a global constituency that cares about the future of the Internet.

According to Ms. Crawford, "Earth Day was the model when I founded One Web Day in 2006. In 1969, Gaylord Nelson asked the people to do what their elected representatives would not: take the future of the environment into their own hands. Peoples' lives now are as dependent on the Internet as they are on roads, energy supplies and running water. We can no longer take that for granted, and we must advocate for the Internet politically and support its vitality personally."

Now chaired by Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder Mitchell Kapor, One Web Day is in its fourth year and marked by volunteer-driven efforts in over 35 cities across the country and across the globe. This event marks the first One Web Day activity on the UC Berkeley campus.

Join the Berkeley Center for New Media and Media Alliance to hear about the growing phenomenon of One Web Day, celebrate the power of the Web for positive change, and how to take action to protect it.

This event will feature the release of the Media and Democracy Coalition's position paper "A Public Interest Internet Agenda",

http://www.media-democracy.net/node/510

ATC Lecture: Adventures in Art at the Edge of the Law, Mark Hosler

Even if you've never heard of Negativland, this talk will be of interest if you want to learn about: pranks, media hoaxes, media literacy, the art of collage, creative activism in a media-saturated multi-national world, file sharing, intellectual property, evolving notions of art and ownership and law in a digital age, artistic critiques of mass media and culture, so-called "culture jamming" (a term coined by Negativland way back in 1984)....

Widely known for being sued for their "U2" single, Negativland have for many years been a thorn in the side of corporations. They've released many CDs, gone on tours, and were the subject of San Francisco filmmaker Craig Baldwin's 1995 feature film "SONIC OUTLAWS". "Negativland isn't just some group of merry pranksters; its art is about tearing apart and reassembling found images to create new ones, in an attempt to make social, political and artistic statements. Hilarious and chilling." - The Onion.

Mark Hosler is a founding member of the group Negativland, which since 1980 has created records, video, radio and live performance using appropriated sound, image and text. Mark has been aggressively and publicly involved in advocating a significant reform of copyright laws, publishing on these issues for Billboard Magazine, Keyboard Magazine, College Music Journal, NYU Law Commentator and others. He has lectured at the Universities of Arizona, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, and Chapel Hill, as well as at MIT, Yale, NYU, Seattle University School of Law, Cranbrook Academy of Art, and at various venues in Washington D.C, New York City, London, Berlin, Barcelona, Toronto, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Melbourne Australia and more. He was the keynote speaker at the 2004 Allied Media Conference, spoke at the Regional Conference to End Corporate Dominance in Portland Oregon, at the Conference On The Public Domain at Duke University, as part of alternative events during the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, and at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in 2008.

http://www.negativland.com

http://www.myspace.com/officialnegativland

Conference: 090909 Neutral!=Bland: Neutrality, Transparency, and Novel Mediated Experiences

Reception: 5 - 7 pm

4th Floor, Sutardja Dai Hall

UC Berkeley, Entrance off Hearst Avenue

Neutrality is essential yet elusive, fundamental, yet fragile. Neutrality appeals to our innate sense of fairness, but where is neutrality located? In a country, an objective reporter, an unbiased judge? Where is the neutral medium, the one that does not distort, judge, exclude, repress or omit? What happens in the absence of neutrality?

At UC Berkeley's 090909 conference, leaders and thinkers in business, politics, art, and new media explore these questions in a dynamic format of short presentations. 090909 is a (hopefully) neutral forum to discuss ideas of neutrality in theory, creative practice, politics, energy management, and business.

Sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media and Swissnex.

Admission is free. Registration begins September 1. For information visit studio.berkeley.edu/090909 or email 090909.bcnm@berkeley.edu."

New Graduate Students Reception

BCNM New Graduate Students Reception

San Francisco Art Institute Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series

Julia Scher

Exploring the dynamics of social control within the public sphere, Julia Scher's research and artwork have issued in interactive installations, reformulated surveillance, site tours, interventions, performances, photography, writing, web work, linear video, and sound. Along with inclusion at the 1995 Venice Biennial and the 1989 Whitney Biennial, her work has been exhibited at such venues as the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus (Ohio, USA), the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (Minnesota, USA), El Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sof�a in Madrid, SFMOMA, Mus�e d?Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, K�nstlerhaus Stuttgart (Germany), and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. She has taught and lectured at such institutions as MIT, the Cooper Union, UCLA, USC, Harvard University, Columbia University, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, and Rutgers University. While teaching in the department of Film and Video at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in the mid-90s, Scher inaugurated the first art surveillance studies class taught in the United States.

Co-sponsored by the Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium at UC Berkeley Center for New Media

* SFAI's exhibitions and public programs, a component of which is the Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series, are supported in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund. The Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series is coordinated by SFAI faculty member Glen Helfand.

Demiurges of the Digital: The Creation and Curation of Virtual Worlds

Henry Lowood
Curator for History of Science & Technology; Film and Media Collections, Stanford University

Otaku Movement: Activism and Fan Media in Japan

Thomas Lamarre, McGill University

In recent years the success of Japanese manga, anime, and games across the world has led to increased government interest in developing public policy to harness and direct a diverse range of media-intensive activities associated with a new kind of fandom loosely captured with the term otaku. What is interesting about government policies, however ineffectual they often prove, is that they largely look at fan media in terms of their productivity and as a model for production. Significantly, as some otaku take to the streets to protest or bypass government intervention, a general association is emerging between fan activities and new ways of thinking about labor and labor activism. Here Lamarre will address what it is about fan media that encourages a blurring of the distinction between consumption and production, and to consider how we might think about the politics of immaterial and affective labor in the context of new media technologies and "fan work."

Presented by
The Department of Rhetoric
The Berkeley Center for New Media

Creativity in the Face of Climate Change: The Role of Humanities in Awakening Societal Change

An exploration of the visual arts in conjunction with the exhibition Human /Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet on view at the UC Berkeley Art Museum through September 27, 2009.

Panelist: Naomi Oreskes, Provost, Sixth College, UC San Diego

Panelist: Greg Niemeyer, Associate Professor, Department of Art Practice, UC Berkeley Associate Director, Berkeley Center for New Media

Panelist: Marko Peljhan, Associate Professor, Department of Art, UC Santa Barbara Co-Director, UC Institute for Research in the Arts

Panelist: Dario Robleto, artist featured in Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet

Isaac Julien in Conversation with Kaja Silverman

Isaac Julien, best known to American audiences for his documentary and feature films and their poetic explorations of race, gender, sexuality, and the history of cinema itself. In recent years, he has also been creating multi-channel video installations that are exhibited in museums and galleries. In conversation with media theorist Kaja Silverman, he will discuss this powerful new work and how it relates to his "traditional" filmmaking practice, his early training in painting, and his interest in breaking down barriers between artistic disciplines.

Kaja Silverman, Professor of Rhetoric and Film at UC Berkeley, and the author of seven books.

Presented by the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley in collaboration with the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, partly supported by the Berkeley Center for New Media

Invisible Earthlings

Speaker: Beatriz da Costa � Associate Professor, Arts, Computation, Engineering Graduate Program, UC Irvine

Introduction: Greg Niemeyer - Associate Professor, Department of Art Practice, UC Berkeley

Commentary: Ilse Ruiz-Mercado - Ph.D. Student, Civil and Environmental Engineering Systems Program and the School of Public Health, UC Berkeley

Beatriz da Costa will present her new work on possibilities of relating between humans and members of the lived non-human worlds that we are least likely to recognize as social actors within urban environments: microbes.

Organized by Gender and Women's Studies Li Ka Shing Program in Gender and Science; Co-sponsored by Science, Technology and Society Center and Berkeley Center for New Media

Being Paid To Do A Job, Provide A Service, Or Give A Gift: Egg And Sperm Donors' Perceptions Of Compensation

Rene Almeling
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Scholar, UC Berkeley/UCSF and Assistant Professor of Sociology, Yale University

Lecture Organized by:
Gender and Women's Studies
Li Ka Shing Program in Gender and Science

Co-sponsored by:
Science, Technology and Society Center
Berkeley Center for New Media
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research Program

Rethinking Green: How Can Information Replace Energy and Finesse the Biosphere?

UC Berkeley Regents Lecture Hosted by the Berkeley Center for New Media:

Rethinking Green: How Can Information Replace Energy and Finesse the Biosphere?
Stewart Brand, The Long Now Foundation

Legendary alternative thinker Stewart Brand is President of The Long Now Foundation and co-founder of Global Business Network. He created and edited the Whole Earth Catalog (National Book Award), and co-founded the Hackers Conference and The WELL. His books include The Clock of the Long Now; How Buildings Learn; and The Media Lab. A new book coming out this year is titled WHOLE EARTH DISCIPLINE: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. He graduated in Biology from Stanford and served as an Infantry officer.

Global Disconnects: The Internet & Human Trafficking

As the internet has become more and more a part of the everyday in the U.S. and the global north, questions have arisen: How has the internet used as a tool for violence, for the trafficking and sexual exploitation of people? How has it used as a tool for social change to counter violence? In 2008 the End Internet Trafficking Coalition formed to address the increasing usages of services on the web to exploit people through labor and sex violence. In an effort to further the conversations that began with a national call through emails to collaborate, the coalition recorded an online presentation on the issue. February 20-21, 2009, in a conference meeting titled, "Global Disconnects: The Internet & Human Trafficking" the coalition and collaborators will be meeting at UC Berkeley to address the complexities of human trafficking and the technoscapes of the web, as well as the prospects for countering human trafficking through theory and practice.

The conference is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media

For further details, please see:
http://www.eitcoalition.org/conference2009.html

You'll Never Walk Alone: Protest, Memory and Reenactment - UC Berkeley ATC lectures

You'll Never Walk Alone: Protest, Memory and Reenactment
Joseph DeLappe, Artist, Reno, Nevada

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium of the

Berkeley Center for New Media
Contact: bcnm@berkeley.edu, 510-642-0635.
For updated information, please see: http://atc.berkeley.edu/

Hawking Incorporated

Special Lecture hosted by the Berkeley Center for New Media:

H�l�ne Mialet, Visiting Scholar, Dept of Anthropology, UC Berkeley

Today, there exists a scientist whose neuro-motor functions, such as speech, writing and body movements, have been partly made possible by the mediation of a machine: a computer. People say that he is a genius. His name is Stephen Hawking. The case of Professor Hawking is interesting insofar as it reconciles two contrasting research traditions. On the one hand, he is the incarnation of Cartesian dualism: indeed the very notion of his genius is constructed --through the popular media-- around the mind/body dichotomy. On the other hand, when we describe and understand more fully his way of working, we discover that he validates one of the principal results obtained by anthropologists, sociologists and historians of science, mainly, the profoundly located, material and collective nature of the production of knowledge. Drawing on an extensive and in-depth series of interviews with Hawking, his assistants, and his colleagues, my ethnographic research aims to reconstruct the human, material and machine-based networks that enable him to act. In this talk, I will show how Stephen Hawking can't act without a machine, or without his assistants who work day and night to maintain and stabilize his identity as Stephen Hawking the man and STEPHEN HAWKING the genius-physicist. My focus will be on the collective, material and linguistic mediations implicated in the replication of his identity from the laboratory to the public stage. Indeed, we will see how an affirmative response to the question "Do you want to go to this conference?" will enable him to travel from one end of the earth to the other, and how, with no more than a twitch of an eyebrow, he will be able to perform. The paper will also address larger questions having to do with singularity, identity, agency, intentionality and scientific practice.

Public Art and Media: From Spectacle to Political - UC Berkeley ATC lectures

Public Art and Media: From Spectacle to Political
Anne Pasternak, Director, Creative Time, NYC

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium of the Berkeley Center for New Media
Contact: bcnm@berkeley.edu, 510-642-0635.
For updated information, please see: http://atc.berkeley.edu/

The EyeBeam Roadshow

The Eyebeam Road Show is what you get when you mix a rock 'n' roll tour with the talented fellows and residents of NYC's Eyebeam Art and Technology Center. This year we're visiting venues in Chicago and California to present talks about projects and events underway at Eyebeam. We'll also lead day-long, hands-on workshops on a variety of topics, from "shop-dropping" (reverse shoplifting as activism), to building your own multi-touch display, and lots in between. Check out roadshow.eyebeam.org for a full list of artists and workshops, and get ready to have your mind blown.

Presented by the Berkeley Center for New Media and Berkeley Art Museum.

Takeovers & Makeovers

On November 7 & 8, 2008, the University of California, Berkeley will hold a symposium on appropriation rights in the digital era. This event will bring together artists, lawyers, art historians, and representatives from the information technology community to discuss the changing field of appropriation art in the wake of the emergence of new digital media technologies that have radically altered access to and manipulation of information.

Sponsors:

Berkeley Center for New Media
The College of Letters and Sciences, UC Berkeley
Consortium for the Arts
The Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley Law
Townsend Center for the Humanities

How to Type Fast and Influence People - UC Berkeley ATC lectures

How to Type Fast and Influence People
R. Luke DuBois, Composer/Artist, NYC

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium of the Berkeley Center for New Media
Contact: bcnm@berkeley.edu, 510-642-0635.
For updated information, please see: http://atc.berkeley.edu/

The Conversation: Berkeley Symposium on Digital Cinema and Narrative

BCNM is co-sponsoring a two-day "conversation" at the Pacific Film Archive about the future of cinema, video, games, and telling stories with new media:
http://www.theconversationspot.com/

Co-sponsored by Berkeley Center for New Media

Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project - UC Berkeley ATC lectures

Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project
Hasan Elahi, Artist, SJSU, San Jose

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium of the Berkeley Center for New Media
Contact: bcnm@berkeley.edu, 510-642-0635.
For updated information, please see: http://atc.berkeley.edu/

Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital Of Europe?

Cities and culture have become key to imagining communities in a globalizing word. Istanbul is one of many world cities that turn to culture for a place on the map. It is also part of a unique debate on European integration entwined with the memory of earlier Orientalist representations. "Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe?" suggests that the city may provide a lens onto both the predicaments of contending world cities, and the construction of a European identity that is inclusive to Muslims.

Sponsored by:

Berkeley Center for New Media, UC Berkeley
Center for Middle Eastern Studies, UC Berkeley
Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley
Institute of European Studies, UC Berkeley
Department of German, UC Berkeley
Department of Architecture, UC Berkeley

Art and Discipline - UC Berkeley ATC lectures

Art and Discipline
Steve Kurtz, Artist, Critical Art Ensemble, Buffalo, New York

Note: This presentation will be held on Thurs evening at the Berkeley Art Museum Theater, please enter on Durant Street. Presented in association with San Francisco Art Institute's Division of Graduate Studies.

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium of the Berkeley Center for New Media
Contact: bcnm@berkeley.edu, 510-642-0635.
For updated information, please see: http://atc.berkeley.edu/

New Media, Race, and Minority Discourse

New Media Working Group

Discuss the last chapter from Lisa Nakamura's most recent book, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (2008), entitled "Measuring Race on the Internet: Users, Identity, and Cultural Difference in the United States."

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 Val�ry 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