HTNM Revisited: Peter Lunenfeld
For those unable to make the HTNM lecture on Thursday, September 19th, we’ve brought you a brief recap of the highlights!
Last Thursday evening in Dwinelle 370 of Dwinelle Hall at UC Berkeley Professor Peter Lunenfeld inaugurated the 2013-2014 History & Theory of New Media (HTNM) lecture series with his provocative talk “Mia Laboro: Maker’s Envy and the Generative Humanities”. Lunenfeld is a professor in the Design|Media Arts department at UCLA, director of the Institute for Technology and Aesthetics (ITA), and founder of mediawork: The Southern California New Media Group.
He began his talk with an admission of his own guilt: he suffers from maker’s envy. With that in mind, Mia Labora (or the Esperanto translation of “my work”) framed his academic work through an aesthetic lens (artists, after all, always get to talk about their ‘work’). In highlighting four of his recent or on-going projects, Lunenfeld’s focus throughout his lecture emphasized design elements as a key part of his academic work—from layout to interaction to materialized meaning-making. This strong interface with design in what Lunenfeld referred to as “print plus culture” has lead him to close collaborations with an interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners in order to think about the relation between knowledge and visualization, between knowing and making.
We hope you can join us for Eyal Weizmann’s lecture “Forensic Architecture” in the second installation of the HTNM lecture series on Monday, October 28th in the Townsend Center’s Geballe Room.