Recent Highlights

News

05/27/2008	BCNM Co-sponsors New York Panel on BioArt Date: Thursday, May 29, 2008, 7-9pm Location: Eyebeam, 540 W. 21st Street, New York, NY Steven Kurtz - the artist accused of bioterrorism in federal court-will make his first public appearance following the dismissal of his case. In collaboration with the 2008 World Science Festival and the Berkeley Center for New Media, Eyebeam announces a very special panel on the ethics of scientific and creative research featuring Critical Art Ensemble's Dr. Steven Kurtz alongside science writer Carl Zimmer, bioethicist George Annas and author Eugene Thacker at 7PM on May 29 at Eyebeam. The panel discussion- Kurtz's first public appearance since the US government's controversial case against him was dropped on April 21, 2008, four years after he was first detained-is co-organized with the 2008 World Science Festival and the Berkeley Center for New Media. The Visual Art and Science Advisory Board, World Science Festival members are: Ken Goldberg, Co-Chair, UC Berkeley William Haseltine, Co-Chair, Human Genome Sciences Amanda McDonald Crowley, Eyebeam Zhang Ga, Parsons Peter Galison, Harvard John G. Hanhardt, Smithsonian Caroline Jones, MIT Roger Malina, Berkeley Leonard Shlain, Author Tiffany Shlain, Moxie Institute
05/25/2008	Free Association: A Q&A With BAM's Richard Rinehart What role do museums play in a world where the public can easily access art online? Why should we care about museums when technology allows many of us to be able to copy, disseminate, play with and alter artworks in fun ways that museums usually have prevented? Richard Rinehart, Berkeley Art Museum (BAM) Digital Media Director, adjunct curator of the digital art collection, and BCNM Associate Director for Public Programs and Outreach is trying to answer these questions and others.
05/24/2008	BCNM Designated Emphasis Student Jeremy Hunt completes his PhD in Music TITLE: In_videophone_surround: a Hyper-Prismatic Realtime Audiovisual Performance System for Improvising Pianist In_videophone_surround is essentially hybrid media art—a mix of sound and image. Often the visual component of audiovisual performance art begins with abstract materials and forces an uneasy metaphor between sound and image. in_videophone_surround critiques this practice by offering a new musical aesthetic—one which I call musique concrete visuelle. The physical movements of musicians are considered musical material, and, therefore, they provide the basis for all the musical images of in_videophone_surround. In_videophone_surround makes an equation between the microphone and the video camera. The microphone, used initially as an instrument of documentation and amplification, in the hands of Stockhausen and Grisey became an instrument of magnification—a way to enter not only a new world of sound, but a new dimension of time and music. In like manner, in_videophone_surround makes the video camera a musical instrument of magnification—one that allows a new experience of music and time. However, this magnification comes through multiplication. Several webcams and microphones are used to create a digitally expansive performance space. The musical actions of the performer and their results are captured, manipulated, and re-projected in multiplication back into the performance space in realtime. This is done through simple dataflow algorithms implemented in a custom software application.
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.