Spring 2023 Events Review
Thank you so much for joining us for another semester of BCNM events! We've collected our event transcripts and videos so you can tune in to amazing lectures from Digital Artist Nettrice Gaskins, Producer Jason Lin, Visual Arts & Political Science professors Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, Professors and students Greg Niemeyer and Valencia James, artist & professor Osman Khan, and professor Rita Lucarelli.
Image: Osman Khan
Spring 2023
01.30.23 / Art, Tech & Culture
Generative Art and Deep Learning AI
Lecture by Nettrice Gaskins
Emerging AI technology has the potential to replicate some of the processes used by artists when creating their work. Dr. Nettrice Gaskins uses AI-driven software such as deep learning to train machines to identify and process images. Her approach puts the learning bias of race to the forefront by using AI to render her artwork using different source images and image styles.
Watch the recording
Read the transcript
02.13.23 / Special Events
Hollywood Internships for AAPI Students
With Ra Jason Lin, Lacy Lew Nguyen Wright, and Laura Reddy
While the AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) community has helped build America and contributed to culture around the world, until very recently mainstream storytelling from Hollywood has not reflected these contributions or included narratives of the diaspora. We want to change this and create a pipeline of creatives from Cal to Hollywood through our newly launched AAPI Media Creatives fellowships.
03.09.23 / Art, Tech & Culture
Unwalling Citizenship
Lecture by Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman
Cruz and Forman will discuss their work on "citizenship culture" at the United States-Mexico border, and the network of civic spaces they have co-developed with border communities to cultivate regional and global solidarities. They ask, in this increasingly walled world, and with the surge of anti-immigrant sentiment everywhere: can the idea of citizenship be recuperated for more emancipatory and inclusive democratic agendas?
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Read the transcript
03.10.23 / Conference
Hydrocolonialism Symposium
Symposium featuring Craig Cohen, Patrick Owuor, Sera Young, Jessica Corman, Mina Girgis, Greg Niemeyer, Valencia James, Xitlaly Olivera, Anaya Crouch, Rita Lucarelli, and More!
Water is the frontline of climate change, and competition for water resources increases in areas where water is already scarce. In Africa, several current major foreign water infrastructure development projects are displacing local residents and their water heritages in favor of planned cities, industrialized agriculture, and hydroelectric power stations for energy exports. Such developments repeat past colonial legacies and patterns of extraction ranging from Ancient Egypt to Manifest Destiny. If data is the frontline of human consciousness, then it follows that data about water would be a prime tool to measure and change water regimes to support water conservation and security both locally and globally.
03.13.23 / Art, Tech & Culture
Road to Hybridabad
Lecture by Osman Khan
The photograph of the homeland has faded (even its pixelated version), its imaginary horizon blended with the one that lays ahead. The no longer immigrant stands, insisting on place, building a new city on a hill, there will be no Bob or Bing in this number, we will misuse your tools to play our songs. This talk will explore how the artist (and diasporic communities) explore active hybridity as a strategy for disruption and resistance against the dominant power and challenge prevailing aesthetics and logics. The talk will highlight how these strategies challenge the impartiality of technology and expose its explicit (western) cultural impositions.
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Read the transcript
03.17.23 / Conference
The Past into the Future: Afrofuturism and Ancient Egypt
With Rita Lucarelli, Max Jefferson, Ytasha Womack, Vorris Nunley, Darryl Smith, John Jennings, Stanford Carpenter, Claudia Attimonelli, Luciana Parisi, Abu Qadim Haqq, and more.
This two-day conference introduces a new project, which explores the reception and cultural imagining of Ancient Egypt and of its monuments, arts, writing and religion in the Black visual arts, music and literature through the lens of scholars and artists inspired by Afrofuturism. This project aims at creating a channel and platform of communication and collaboration among egyptologists, scholars of African and African-American studies, artists and musicians from the African Diaspora inspired by the ancient Egyptian and Nubian culture.
For more on our lecture series:
2022-2023 History and Theory of New Media Series
2022-2023 Arts, Technology, and Culture Colloquium
BCNM's Indigenous Technologies Initiative
Accessibility
All of BCNM's events are free and open to the public. Our broadcasts will be live-captioned, and our Zoom Webinar experience offers an additional Streamtext window with options to customize caption text size and display. Please contact info.bcnm [at] berkeley.edu with requests or questions.
With the consent of featured speakers, all recorded videos will be available on the BCNM YouTube channel immediately after the event and event transcripts will be posted to this page one month after the event. We strive to meet any additional access and accommodation needs.
BCNM is proud to make conversations with leading scholars, artists, and technologists freely available to the public. Please help us continue this tradition by making a tax-deductible donation today. If you are in the position to support the program, we suggest $5 per event, or $100 a year.