ATC Lecture: Art and the Utopian Imaginary, Mark Tribe

“What is Utopian becomes… the commitment to imagining possible Utopias as such, in their greatest variety of forms.” - Fredric Jameson, 2005

The world is far from perfect; this we know. Yet dreams of perfection surround us. Why is it that we can’t help dreaming of a world without inequity, a world in which tyrants find themselves transformed into saints and everyone has enough to eat?

The Utopian Spirit animates novels and revolutionary manifestoes, separatist enclaves and cultural gatherings in the high desert. One might even go so far as to say that it is a defining characteristic of modernity. But as the macropolitics of the new world order make it increasingly difficult to imagine radically different futures, we are beginning to see new manifestations of utopian desire: modest eddies of local autonomy in the global flow of hegemonic power.

Mark Tribe is an artist and occasional curator whose interests include art, technology, and politics. His artwork has been exhibited at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Trinity Square Video in Toronto, the Park Avenue Armory in New York City, and the National Center for Contemporary Art in Moscow. He has organized curatorial projects for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, MASS MoCA, and inSite_05. He is the co-author, with Reena Jana, of The Port Huron Project: Reenactments of New Left Protest Speeches (Charta, 2010), and New Media Art (Taschen, 2006). He is Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media Studies at Brown University, where he teaches courses on digital art, curating, open-source culture, radical media, and surveillance. In 1996, he founded Rhizome, an organization that supports the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology. He received a MFA in Visual Art from the University of California, San Diego in 1994 and a BA in Visual Art from Brown University in 1990. He splits his time between Providence and New York City.

http://marktribe.net

UC’s Art, Techonology, and Culture Colloquium is presented by the Berkeley Center for New Media [BCNM].

BCNM Symposium: Future of the Forum

UC Berkeley Announces Day of Dialogue with Social Media Pioneers

The pioneers of Social Media will gather at UC Berkeley on Saturday, December 5th for a day of dialogues with symposium participants on "The Future of the Forum: Internet Communities and the Public Interest".

Public forums are evolving rapidly, producing dramatic changes in politics and social behavior. How will innovations such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google Wave expand participatory democracy and enhance public interest nationally and internationally? As a public research university with a history of activism, UC Berkeley will host a day of panels and opportunities for discussion about the future of the forum.

Participants include:

* Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia

* Jim Buckmaster, CEO of craigslist

* Mitch Kapor, Co-Founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

* Judith Donath, Fellow, Harvard's Berkman Center

* Howard Rheingold, Critic and Author of Smart Mobs

* Dick Costolo, COO of Twitter

* Reid Hoffman, Founder of Linkedin

* Seth Goldstein, CEO of SocialMedia Networks

* Hubert Dreyfus, Professor of Philosophy, UC Berkeley

* Jane McGonigal, Director of Game Research, Institute of the Future

* Laura Sydell, National Public Radio

Saturday, December 5, 2009, 9am-7pm, at UC Berkeley Campus. Presented by the UC Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) with support from craigslist.org and The Institute for the Future.

Seating is limited. Registration is $345/person, $295 through Nov 23. Reduced rates and subsidies available for students, academics, and non-profit employees. Premium Ticket and Sponsorship opportunities also available.

For details and registration: http://bcnm.berkeley.edu/fotf/

For directions and parking: http://www.citris-uc.org/about/visitors

Questions?: info.bcnm@berkeley.edu or 510-459-3505

ATC Lecture: Sonic Immersion - An Experiment of Eclectic and Unusual Sounds and Musics, David Harrington

Through more than three decades of work with the Kronos Quartet, David Harrington has had a major impact on contemporary music. He has imported a wide array of musical and sonic influences into the string quartet repertoire of Western classical music. Kronos commissions works from composers who re-envision what a string quartet is able to do, develops concert experiences that expand the definition of what a string quartet performance can be, and assembles recording projects that challenge established ideas of how a string quartet can sound. For the ATC series, Harrington will play a diverse selection of recordings drawn from his extensive recording collection amassed over three decades. In previous presentations Harrington's selections have ranged from the sounds of Weddell seals in Antarctica to a Tuareg band from Timbuktu.

Biography:

David Harrington is the Artistic Director and founder of San Francisco's Kronos Quartet, which for more than 35 years has pursued a singular artistic vision, combining a spirit of fearless exploration with a commitment to expanding the range and context of the string quartet. In the process, Kronos has become one of the most celebrated and influential ensembles of our time, performing thousands of concerts worldwide, releasing more than 45 recordings, and commissioning more than 650 new works and arrangements for string quartet. Integral to Kronos' work is a series of long-running, in- depth collaborations with many of the world's foremost composers, including Americans Terry

Riley, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich; Azerbaijan's Franghiz Ali-Zadeh; Poland's Henryk Górecki, and Argentina's Osvaldo Golijov. Additional collaborators have included Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man; the legendary Bollywood "playback singer" Asha Bhosle; the renowned American soprano Dawn Upshaw; Mexican rockers Café Tacuba; the Romanian gypsy band Taraf de Haïdouks; and Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq. Kronos' work has garnered many awards, including a Grammy for Best Chamber Music Performance (2004) and "Musicians of the Year" (2003) from Musical America.

http://www.kronosquartet.org/

Co-presented with Cal Performances

Contact, info.bcnm@berkeley.edu