News/Research

BCNM Around the Web December

30 Nov, 2020

BCNM Around the Web December

Check out the amazing work of our faculty, students, and alumni around the web this December!

Ra Malika Imhotep

Malika joined film director Cheryl Dunye in a conversation with the Criterion Channel.

For more information, click here!

Ken Goldberg

Ken appeared as a guest speaker for DefHacks, a free hackathon event for high school and college students. The worldwide event invites students of all skill levels to collaborate and create innovative solutions to world problems.

The Goldberg lab has developed software that improves the grasp of the robotic arms often used in warehoused. Using neural network technology, the robots can now work more than 350 times faster. The lab hopes that this robot software will come in handy during this pandemic, where vendors both have high demands to meet and safety guidelines to ensure.

Check out DefHacks here and read more on the work of the Goldberg lab here!

danah boyd

danah boyd featured on a live conversation and Q&A alongside Meredith Broussard, Valerie E. Taylor, Seyi Oloji, and Eden McEwen hosted by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. The livestream accompanies the now available to rent film, Coded Bias, described by Stephanie Bunbury, as "a deep dive into the ways algorithims repeat and reinforce the unconscious prejudices of their original programmers".

Check out the livestream here!

Alenda Chang

In a Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talk, Alenda discusses her book "Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games". Arguing for the significance of video games in the growing ecological crisis, Alenda provides new perpectives on existing game taxonomies and theories of agency and reveals the surprising similarities between gameplay and scientific work.

Check out the talk here!

Trevor Paglen

Trevor features in de Young Museum's new exhibit "Uncanny Valley", a gallery of artificial intelligence subtitled "Being Human in the Age of AI". Trevor's work displays thousands of mugshots of crime suspects from the early 20th century. The exhibit title recalls vintage horror stories: "They Took the Faces from the Accused and the Dead... ."

Read more about the exhibit here!

Trevor introduces his most recent body of work, "Bloom", in the talk "Machine Visions" for Williams College Museum of Art's Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art. On exhibit at Pace Gallery in London, "Bloom" displays Trevor's investigations of technology and machine learning while simultaneously functioning as a symbol of the pandemic experience.

Check out more on the event here!

Trevor's work featured at the tallest residential building on the West Coast, 181 Fremont, and is also joining twenty-seven other artists in the University of Chicago's Smart Museum of Art exhibition "Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40".

Read more about the 181 Fremont here and the Chicago exhibition here!

Trevor discusses his reflective sculpture "Orbital Reflector" in an issue of e-flux with Alessandra Franetovich.

From the issue:

What troubles me about the reality of art and science in the (kind of) postwar era is that science has been intimately and inseparably connected to institutions of power, whether those are corporations, militaries, or industries of science. I see and am wary of what science gets out of the collaboration between art and science. I'm not so sure what art gets out of the deal.

Read the issue here!

Bo Ruberg

Bo introduces their book "The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games" in the Voices in Cultural Studies series at Indiana University Bloomington. Bo presents insight beyond typical conversations about LGBTQ representation in video games as they touch on the politics of queer independent video games, queer aesthetics, and the future of queer video games and technology.

Bo's "The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games" places in Report Door's 10 best video game books of 2020. Report Door praises Bo: "Ruberg's conversations are a reminder of the breath of the medium, and also the steps we must take collectively for a healthier, safe, and more vibrant future."

Check out the event here and the rest of Report Door's listing here!