Recent Highlights

News

05/19/2008	BCNM Designated Emphasis Student Trevor Paglen completes his PhD in Geography TITLE: Blank Spots on a Map In "Blank Spots on a Map," Trevor Paglen examines the geography of American state secrecy, a landscape of secret military bases, secure intelligence facilities, classified projects, hidden budgets, and people who "don't exist," a landscape that Pentagon and intelligence insiders call the "black world." Through a series of contemporary and historical case studies, he shows how the United States produced, reproduced, and expanded a secret state within the state, and along the way developed the power to "disappear" budgets, places, and even people. His argument is that a traditional Weberian account of secrecy is insufficient to explain the dynamics of American secrecy. Instead, he adopts a spatial approach to the question, showing how state secrecy is constituted by an array of dialectical relationships between bureaucracies, economies, the law, built environments, and human bodies. Over the course of the dissertation, he shows how attempts to manage secrecy's spatial and political contradictions have led to a fundamental restructuring of the American state. he shows how state secrecy has entailed a significant shift of power towards the executive branch, transformed juridical and constitutional norms, and inaugurated new regimes of "informal" violence. Moreover, he shows how a spatial account of secrecy provides a robust explanation of secrecy's well-known tendency to reproduce itself and grow, and helps to explain why legislative attempts to check secrecy have largely proved inadequate. He concludes by suggesting that if state secrecy is constituted through the production of space, then it can only be countered through the production of counter-spaces.
05/03/2008	CITRIS funded BCNM faculty CITRIS funded the revised Game-Based Learning Seed Grant that Kimiko Ryokai (BCNM affiliated faculty), Dr. Randi Hagerman and Greg Niemeyer (BCNM affiliated faculty) wrote with $75,000 to develop Cellphone-based games for very young kids in Oakland. The funded proposal is a revised version of a proposal co-authored with Yehuda Kalay (BCNM affiliated faculty) as well.
05/02/2008	Maker Faire For many of us, the county fair conjures up images of carnival rides, the sweet taste of cotton candy and the earthy smells of farm animals. San Mateo County offers a different twist on the tradition. The attractions at this weekend's Maker Faire aren't objects that you'd find on store shelves. The fair is a celebration of creativity and imagination -- and that's why mainstream manufacturers are among those checking it out.
04/22/2008	Donation Dashboard Donation Dashboard is an experimental website from the Berkeley Center for New Media that uses machine-learning techniques to recommend a portfolio of good causes based on each visitor's ratings of sample nonprofit organizations. Try Donation Dashboard at: http://dd.berkeley.edu
04/01/2008	Inside the Black Budget Skulls. Black cats. A naked woman riding a killer whale. Grim reapers. Snakes. Swords. Occult symbols. A wizard with a staff that shoots lightning bolts. Moons. Stars. A dragon holding the Earth in its claws. No, this is not the fantasy world of a 12-year-old boy. Berkeley PhD candidate and BCNM Designated Emphasis student Trevor Paglen's book is the subject of this article in the New York Times...
03/30/2008	Reviving Oakland's Jazz and Blues Scene, Virtually The corner of 7th Street in West Oakland, California is bleak and deserted, with a windowless liquor store and a job counseling service on one side of the street. But it wasn't always so rundown; in the 1940s and 50s, the street was home to a thriving music scene, with scores of big blues artists such as Lowel Fulson, Ivory Joe Herner and T-Bone Walker passing through. Now, with the creation of a historical video game, a group of journalism and architecture students at the University of California, Berkeley, is hoping to revive some of 7th Street's faded glory — at least in the virtual world.
02/22/2008	Greg Niemeyer's environmental studies game wins grant from MacArthur Foundation The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation said Thursday it awarded 17 teams a total of $2 million for contest entries to develop technologies for kids' education and digital media. One winner was Greg Niemeyer of the Center for New Media at UC Berkeley. His team, which won $238,000, developed Black Cloud, an environmental studies game that's designed to encourage high school students in Los Angeles and Cairo, Egypt, to interact virtually and physically in their respective cities.
01/23/2008	Craigslist to establish first endowed faculty chair in New Media at BCNM BERKELEY: The University of California, Berkeley, today (Thursday, Jan. 17) announced plans to establish the first endowed faculty chair at the Berkeley Center for New Media with a donation of $1.6 million from craigslist, one of the most popular Web sites in the world. The donation, which will support research, symposia and lectures, will be matched with $1.5 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for a total of $3.1 million.
01/22/2008	New Media Old Values Berkeley Center for New Media Announces Endowment Last year Craigslist founder Craig Newmark placed a camera that allowed thousands of people, collaboratively controlling it online, to capture images of birds from the deck of his home on the edge of the Sutro Forest in San Francisco. It was project developed by Ken Goldberg, now the Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media and Texas A & M University. The Berkeley Center for New Media has just announced an endowment of $1.6 million from Craigslist, matched by $1.5 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for a total of $3.1 million.
01/22/2008	Media Center Receives Over $3 Milllion Vincent Quan, Daily Californian, 22 Jan 2008 This donation conveys that new media, as a subject, is analogous to biology, geology ... that it is a timeless, very important and rigorous field.... Craigslist chief executive officer Jim Buckmaster said the campus' technical innovations and history of counterculture motivated him to donate to the center. "It's hard for me to think of any single entity to which Craigslist and the Internet at large, or the Bay Area and the world at large owes more," he said in an e-mail. "Our top public universities are the best things we have for us, and supporting them is always important, but especially so at a time when private universities are using their unprecedented wealth in a predatory manner."