Fall 2021-Spring 2022 BCNM Events in Review
Thank you so much for joining us for another year of BCNM events, featuring Indigenous Technologies, new media artists and thinkers, and our Media Crease Symposium! We've collected our event transcripts and videos so you can tune in.
Image from the Media Crease Symposium featuring (left to right) Gail De Kosnik, André Brock, Keith Feldman, Rashad Timmons, Karen Tongson, and Ra Malika Imhotep.
Fall 2021
8.30.21 / Commons Conversation
Echolocating the Caribbean Diaspora
Lecture by Cathy Thomas
Dr. Cathy Thomas discussed PoCo Mas, her book in-progress that forges connections across visual art, theory, creative writing, performance, and science. She shared a visual and digital artifact, Footfall Echolation, created for the fictive world of her novel whose plot reverberates into the past and future with the year 2036 being the start of a cataclysmic system of storms that devastate the planet.
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9.13.21 / Arts, Technology, and Culture Colloquium & Indigenous Technologies
How Can a Maori Girl Recolonise the Screen Using Mighty Pixels
Lecture by Lisa Reihana
"Here was an opportunity to colonise the visual language of the time which led to much self questioning: What does it mean to be a first gen urban artist in Auckland, New Zealand - the largest Pacific city in the world ? How does gender affect access to indigenous knowledge, and what is it’s impact on the stories you tell? The resulting strategies has led to a sustained practise that attempts to both normalise and transcend ideas of what it is to be Māori."
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10.04.21 / Arts, Technology, and Culture Colloquium & Indigenous Technologies
Lecture by Maria Thereza Alves
Artist Maria Thereza Alves shared her collaboration with The Valle de Xico Community Museum in the State of Mexico, a local museum of indigenous artificats and culture that was closed by the municipality in 2019. Alves and community members' ongoing project, Son del Pueblo, is an attempt re-make artifacts that are no longer accessible to the community but also to make the collection available beyond Xico through social media.
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10.25.21 / Commons Conversation
Conversation with Eric Rodenbeck and Eric Paulos
Eric Rodenbeck, Founding Partner of Stamen Design in San Francisco and a member of BCNM's Advisory Board, spoke with Eric Paulos about founding a data visualization firm and different currents of creative work in the design field.
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10.25.21 / History and Theory of New Media & Indigenous Techologies
Conversation with Kim TallBear and Marcelo Garzo Montalvo
Professor Kim TallBear discussed how her work in Indigenous science and technology studies recently expanded to a new focus on sexuality. Building on lessons learned with geneticists about how race categories get settled, TallBear is working on a book that interrogates settler-colonial commitments to settlement in place, within disciplines, and within monogamous, state-sanctioned marriage.
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11.08.21 / Commons Conversation
Seeing Is Not Enough: Citizen Videography in Israel-Palestine
Lecture by Liat Berdugo
Writer, Artist and Professor Liat Berdugo discussed her book, The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East, which draws on unprecedented access to the citizen-recorded video archives of B'Tselem, an Israeli NGO that distributes cameras to Palestinians living in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, to offer a contribution to the discourse of human rights work through the documentary form of imagemaking. Berdugo spoke with BCNM Executive Committee Member and Associate Professor Keith Feldman, author of A Shadow over Palestine.
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Spring 2022
2.07.22 / History and Theory of New Media & Indigenous Technologies
Tequiologies: Indigenous Solutions Against Climate Catastrophe
Lecture by Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil
Linguist, writer, translator, language rights activist and researcher ayuujk (mixe) Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil spoke about alternatives to the West's approach to technology. An alternative, offered by Abya Yala, lies in separating economic development and the development of new technologies from consumerism. Technology as tequio; technological creation and innovation as a common good.
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2.14.22 / Commons Conversation
Lecture by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
In Discriminating Data, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Machine learning and data analytics thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible.
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3.07.22 / AAPI in Media
Conversation with actor Daniel Wu and producer Melvin Mar, moderated by Jason Lin and Gail De Kosnik
Internationally acclaimed actor and Berkeley native Daniel Wu and Producer Melvin Mar discussed their experiences breaking into the film industry and their shared vision for AAPI creatives to play key roles in shaping media & entertainment.
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3.14.22 / Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium
Lecture by Margarita Kuleva
Margarita Kuleva presented her research on digital art communities in Russia who defy thegovernment's censorship and conservative understanding of creativity as ‘high culture’ only.
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3.16.22 / Symposium
Lectures by Karen Tongson and André Brock
BCNM and the Color of New Media Working Group held a symposium on the media crease, Abigail De Kosnik’s term for the visible or sensible traces of the repeated use of a media object. The symposium featured senior scholars André Brock (Georgia Tech) and Karen Tongson (USC) presenting lectures on their interpretations of the media crease and how it relates to their work.
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4.13.22 / Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium and Indigenous Technologies
Culture capture, additive defacement, and other tactics towards realizing Indigenous futures
Lecture by Adam and Zack Khalil
Filmmakers Zack and Adam Khalil's presentation shines a light on how the history of science and colonialism form a double helix bind onto Indigenous epistemologies, while also presenting technological tactics for realizing Indigenous futures.
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4.14.22 / Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium
George's Blues: An Investigation of George Washington Carver’s Legacy as an Artist and Cook
Lecture by Seitu Jones
Artist Seitu K Jones shared his explorations into George Washington Carver’s legacy as a visual artist, along with the rich color stains and paints Carver created for the residents of the South’s Black Belt.
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