Berkeley Center for New Media Recommended Courses, Spring 2010
Note: This list of Recommended Courses offered at UC Berkeley is based upon available information and is not intended to be comprehensive. To suggest changes or additions, please contact:BCNM Graduate Affairs Officer
Sharon Mueller
smueller (at) berkeley.edu
Graduate Courses
NWMEDIA 200, 4 units
(Also Theater, Dance, and
Performance Studies 266)
"History and Theory of New Media"
Gail De Kosnik
This seminar will encourage students to consider the historical context of the production, distribution, and use of technological objects and tools, focusing on digital technologies. Topics will include: the military origins of computing (Bletchley Park's codebreakers and the German Enigma, Vannevar Bush's Manhattan Project and the memex, ARPANET and Engelbart's SRI work); Marshall McLuhan, sixties counter-culture, and techno-utopianism; the relations between gaming, war, and the "hacker ethic"; deconstruction / poststructuralism and intertextuality; the Cyborg Manifesto and the GNU Manifesto; Human-Computer Interaction and digital remix culture; hypertext/electronic literature; the connection of cyberpunk, steampunk, and other forms of sci-fi to the rise of mass digital culture; and contemporary discourses of viral/spreadable media.
NWMEDIA 201, 3 units
(Also IEOR 298-03)
"Questioning New Media"
Ken Goldberg
NWMEDIA 201 meets weekly and is held in conjunction with the Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium, a monthly lecture series which brings internationally-known speakers to campus to present their work on advanced topics in new media. Students will enhance skills in how to think critically about advanced topics in new media, how to formulate incisive questions about new media, and how to evaluate and create effective presentations on topics in new media.
NWMEDIA 290-03, 4 units
(Also Architecture 227)
"Virtual Worlds Design Workshop"
Yehuda Kalay
Internet-accessible Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) are a new type of ‘place,’ made possible through Web 2.0 technologies: an alternative to physical places, where people shop, learn, are entertained, and socialize. They provide unprecedented opportunities to architects, social scientists, archeologists, historians, journalists, computer scientists, game designers, film-makers, and other professionals, to create and inhabit web-accessible virtual worlds. This course examines both the theoretical and technical aspects of creating virtual places, and allows students to design and experience virtual places. The course combines architectural place-making theory, on-line games technology, and cultural/social issues into a comprehensive and innovative whole. It provides students with the opportunity to learn how to create web-accessible, immersive, interactive, inhabitable places that can accommodate many visitors, and respond to some aspects of their lives, such as cultural heritage, education, commerce, or entertainment.
NWMEDIA 290-04, 3 units
(Also Architectures 229)
"The Nature of PLACE"
Yehuda Kalay
This course investigates the nature of Place: What is place? How does place differ from mere space? What is the relationship between place and activity? What makes places memorable? The course looks at place both as a physical phenomenon as well as psychological and social phenomena. As such, it examines ancient (physical) Great Places, like Stonehenge in England, the Pyramids in Egypt, and contemporary Great Places like the Piazza Del Campidoglio in Rome and Times Square in New York, as well as closer places, like Sproul Plaza, Café Strada, and Memorial Glade on the Berkeley campus. At the same time, it examines how artists, authors, movie makers and others have described places and the activities that ‘take place’ in them, through paintings, stories, and movies.
NWMEDIA 290-05, 4 units
"Mobile City Chronicles"
Greg Niemeyer
The Mobile City Chronicles (MCC) research team will chronicle a contemporary city using mobile media. To do so, the team will construct and playtest mobile "detection games" that engage new systems of monitoring urban life. These games will relate online data to local real-world experiences through locative media (cell phones, GPS, laptops). The goal of the MCC team is to develop games to expose and manipulate the premises of surveillance chronicles and to produce alternatives. These detective games will be played on a mobile computer interface such as a smart phone or laptop. Through alternative quests, the games will both resignify existing data about cities and produce new data about them that reveal previously undetected patterns. Both kinds of detection will expand the notion of urban ethnography, art, and alternate reality games. The research team will design and playtest diverse game ideas and develop game specifications for longer-term game design projects.
NWMEDIA 299, 1-4 units
"Individual Study or Research"
New Media Affiliated Faculty
Individual study or research with Berkeley Center for New Media affiliated faculty. This course provides the opportunity to search out and study in detail subjects unavailable in the ordinary course offerings. Unit credit will reflect comparable work per unit as regular courses, and will include both meetings with faculty sponsor and independent work.
Computer Science 288, 3 units
"Artificial Intelligence Approach to Natural Language Processing"
Dan Klein
Representation of conceptual structures, language analysis and production, models of inference and memory, high-level text structures, question answering and conversation, machine translation.
Engineering 290-03, 3 units
"Decisions, Games, and Strategies"
T. A. Marschak
Engineering 290-04, 2 units
"Innovation/Entrepreneurship in Telecommunications & Media"
Reza Moazzami
Engineering 290A, 3 units
"Introduction to Management of Technology"
D. R. Proctor
This course is designed to give students a broad overview of the main topics encompassed by management of technology. It includes the full chain of innovative activities beginning with research and development and extending through production and marketing. Why do many existing firms fail to incorporate new technology in a timely manner? At each stage of innovation, we examine key factors determining successful management of technology. What constitutes a successful technology strategy? The integrating course focus will be on the emergence of the knowledge economy and technology as a key knowledge asset and will involve both general readings and cases. The course also introduces students to Haas and COE faculty working in the relevant areas.
Gender and Women's Studies 237, 4 units
Transnational Science, Technology, and New Media"
C. M. Thompson
This is a core class of the new Ph.D in Transnational Gender and Women's Studies. It will expose students to critical thinking about science, technology, and new media. The class explores intersections of gender and women's studies with science, technology, engineering, medicine, and new media around the world; including women in science; transnational feminist science and technology studies; technologies of reproduction, production and destruction; divisions of scientific and technical labor; embodiment and subjectivity; digital divides, digital consumption, embodiment, and circulation; modernist projects of categorization; and the making and breaking of gendered bodies. It mixes secondary sources with primary sources, and among the primary sources, mixes scientific and technical documents with new media and the arts.
Information 205, 2 units
"Information Law and Policy"
D. K. Mulligan
Law is one of a number of policies that mediates the tension between free flow and restrictions on the flow of information. This course introduces students to copyright and other forms of legal protection for databases, licensing of information, consumer protection, liability for insecure systems and defective information, privacy, and national and international information policy.
Information 213, 4 units
"User Interface Design and Development"
J. Nichols
User interface design and human-computer interaction. Examination of alternative design. Tools and methods for design and development. Human- computer interaction. Methods for measuring and evaluating interface quality.
Information 235, 3 units
"Cyberlaw"
B. W. Carver
Introduction to legal issues in information management, antitrust, contract management, international law including intellectual property, trans-border data flow, privacy, libel, and constitutional rights.
Information 290-05, 3 units
"Mixing and Remixing Information"
Raymond Yee
This course focuses on employing XML and web services to reuse or ""remix"" digital content and services. Students will learn practical tools and techniques to recombine personal information through hands-on explorations and projects. Topics include: weblogs, wikis, and their underlying technologies; content syndication via RSS; building applications on top of Flickr, the image sharing site, and delicious, and other social bookmarking sites; incorporating content from libraries via new digital library technologies; sending content to the campus' new learning management system, bSpace; exploiting the XML of OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office to create and manipulate "smart documents"; incorporating geospatial services into the mix of services. Students are expected to have some basic knowledge of XML. No experience with web services is expected.
Music 207, 4 units
"Advanced Projects in Computer Music"
Edmund Campion
TDesigned for graduate students in music composition, but open to graduate students in related disciplines who can demonstrate thorough knowledge of the history of electro-acoustic music as well as significant experience with computer music practice and research. All projects are subject to approval of the instructor. Course may be repeated for credit. Prerequisite: Consent of instructor. Syllabus and sample projects list In the beginning weeks of the semester, students present their project ideas and receive critical feedback from the group. With significant one on one interaction with the instructor, semester-length projects are defined. The seminar convenes each week for group interaction and exchange focusing on aesthetic and technical issues raised by active computer music projects. The Research staff at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) will provide technical support as needed throughout the semester. Students will have access to the CNMAT recording and production studio, the CNMAT media lab and the CNMAT eight-channel sound diffusion concert space. Students who are creating new music employing digital technologies are required to present their work in a public concert setting. Students involved in Computer Music research projects will present their findings to the seminar at the end of the semester.
Psychology 210E, 3 units
"Proseminar: Cognition, Brain,
and Behavior"
T. Lombrozo
A survey of the field of biological psychology. Areas covered are (a) cognitive neuroscience; (b) biological bases of behavior; (c) sensation and perception (d) learning and memory, (e) thought and language.
Film 240, 4 units
Political Modernism and Beyond:
Radical Formalism in Avant/Garde Film and New Media.
Jeffrey Skoller
This seminar will explore the radical aspiration of the political avant-garde in film and new media and the ways what is radical has shifted over the course of the last century. Central to the tenets of an earlier political Modernism is the concept of "praxis," in which theoretical questions of radical form and content are explored within the practice of creative filmmaking. At issue is the commitment to formal experimentation, the invention of new aesthetic forms of representation and new modes of perception that could challenge dominant ideologies and their forms of production. Such a politics contends that cinema's role in the transformation of consciousness necessary for radical social change can only be engaged through equally radical aesthetic practices, "Not to make political films, rather to make films politically," insisted Jean-Luc Godard.
In connecting these debates to the present, what does it mean to make politically effective media art in the current moment? In the age of transnational media and "convergence culture," where medium specificity has faded into an overlapping multiplicity of platforms and technologies, do the politics of form matter any longer in the creation of politically effective film and media art?
The first part of the seminar traces the history of the major works of the political avant-garde, in which the films themselves can be seen as at once theory and practice. We will look at a range of film, video and performance practices from the North American and European contexts-futurist, underground, structural / materialist, Brechtian/Godardian, feminist, queer, grassroots media as well as from other cultural contexts such as post-colonial and so-called Third Cinema of Latin America, Africa and Asia. At the same time we will read some of the theoretical debates that surround these works that include classic and contemporary writings on the subject.
We will go on to look at contemporary work in New Media and other "post-cinema" forms to explore what constitutes radical New Media practice. In what ways does the question of a radical form still apply to contemporary media? Is it any longer possible (or necessary) to make media that challenges dominant forms or even to create a counter hegemonic media culture? What is the relationship of newer practices--video installation, web-based forms such as Second Life, culture jamming, social media, tactical media, media piracy, open source--to these questions of the politics of media form?
Undergraduate Courses:
NWMEDIA 190-02, 4 units
(Also Architecture 127)
"Virtual Worlds Design Workshop"
Yehuda Kalay
Internet-accessible Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) are a new type of ‘place,’ made possible through Web 2.0 technologies: an alternative to physical places, where people shop, learn, are entertained, and socialize. They provide unprecedented opportunities to architects, social scientists, archeologists, historians, journalists, computer scientists, game designers, film-makers, and other professionals, to create and inhabit web-accessible virtual worlds. This course examines both the theoretical and technical aspects of creating virtual places, and allows students to design and experience virtual places. The course combines architectural place-making theory, on-line games technology, and cultural/social issues into a comprehensive and innovative whole. It provides students with the opportunity to learn how to create web-accessible, immersive, interactive, inhabitable places that can accommodate many visitors, and respond to some aspects of their lives, such as cultural heritage, education, commerce, or entertainment.
NWMEDIA 190-03, 3 units
(Also Architecture 129)
"The Nature of PLACE"
Yehuda Kalay
This course investigates the nature of Place: What is place? How does place differ from mere space? What is the relationship between place and activity? What makes places memorable? The course looks at place both as a physical phenomenon as well as psychological and a social phenomena. As such, it examines ancient (physical) Great Places, like Stonehenge in England, the Pyramids in Egypt, and contemporary Great Places like the Piazza Del Campidoglio in Rome and Times Square in New York, as well as closer places, like Sproul Plaza, Café Strada, and Memorial Glade on the Berkeley campus. At the same time, it examines how artists, authors, movie makers and others have described places and the activities that ‘take place’ in them, through paintings, stories, and movies.
NWMEDIA 190-04, 4 units
"Game Design Methods:
Mobile City Chronicles"
Greg Niemeyer
The Mobile City Chronicles (MCC) research team will chronicle a contemporary city using mobile media. To do so, the team will construct and playtest mobile "detection games" that engage new systems of monitoring urban life. These games will relate online data to local real-world experiences through locative media (cell phones, GPS, laptops). The goal of the MCC team is to develop games to expose and manipulate the premises of surveillance chronicles and to produce alternatives. These detective games will be played on a mobile computer interface such as a smart phone or laptop. Through alternative quests, the games will both resignify existing data about cities and produce new data about them that reveal previously undetected patterns. Both kinds of detection will expand the notion of urban ethnography, art, and alternate reality games. The research team will design and playtest diverse game ideas and develop game specifications for longer-term game design projects.
NWMEDIA 190-05, 3 units
(Also Information 190-02)
"Web Architecture and Information Management"
Erik Wilde
This course focuses on understanding the Web as an information system, and how to use it for information management for personal and shared information. The Web is an open and constantly evolving system which can make it hard to understand how the different parts of the landscape fit together. This course provides students with an overview of the Web as a whole, and how the individual parts fit together. We briefly look at topics such as Web design and Web programming, but this course is not exclusively designed to teach HTML or JavaScript. Instead, we look at the bigger picture and how and when to use these and other technologies. The Web already is and will remain a central part in many information-related activities for a long time to come, and this course provides students with the understanding and skills to better navigate and use the landscape of Web information (for example, Wikipedia), Web technologies (for example, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript), Web tools (for example, delicious and Yahoo pipes), and common Web patterns (for example, mashups).
Letters and Science 160E, 4 units
"Technology, New Media, and Contemporary Experience"
Ken Goldberg and Hubert Dreyfus
Recent technologies such as Twitter, Google, Facebook, and cell phones are changing our daily lives. Future technologies such as robots,
nanotechnology, and stem cells promise future benefits and suggest potential dangers. This Discovery course explores the question: What
is the 'essence' of technology? What is a technological worldview? The goals of this course are to provide students with skills to understand technology and new media in a broad historical context and to gain insight into their "transformative" characteristics and promises for contemporary experience.
Utilizing Heidegger's 1954 essay, "The Question Concerning Technology," and related essays as a starting point, our inquiry will also include perspectives from Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Roland Barthes. We will establish a theoretical basis for thinking about technology and new media and apply it to a selection of technologies that shape our contemporary experience.
The course has no prerequisites but is geared toward ambitious and mature juniors and seniors who are willing to read carefully, engage in discussions, and think deeply about technology and western values. This course can be used to fulfill the Breadth requirement in Philosophy and Values.
History of Art 186C, 4 units
"Media and Meaning"
Anne Wagner
This course examines a defining characteristic of the art of the past thirty-five years: its abandonment of the time-honored media of painting and sculpture in favor-to give just a few examples-of photography, the performing body, installations in space, earthworks, video, the computer, political activism, verbal texts, even the declarative absence of all of the above. In fact, if there is one point of agreement about the arts since 1970, it is that they need not loyally adhere to any one format or medium. Artists need no longer specialize. Oftentimes the producers of installations presented internationally, they have become quasi-nomads, who adopt whatever material or tactic suits their goals. As a result, the artwork is now everywhere and nowhere: it is frequently temporary, site specific, and/or conceptual; it may inhabit the internet, where its lifespan is short; its archival condition is often photographic, if it takes permanent form at all.
How and why did such a sea change come about? We will take up these crucial questions as a means of coming to terms with recent art in the US and abroad since 1970. Our efforts will go towards understanding the emergence and purposes of the new media, not as ends in themselves, but with an eye to grasping how such works aim to produce meaning: what they have to say, how, and to whom. For ironically enough, the push within contemporary art to elude tradition, to be absorbed back into the fabric of everyday experience, and to critique artistic and social institutions (the museum, the gallery, the unique object, the artist as genius) has been answered by the frequent charge of elitism. The course will look closely at this contradiction: what is the social role that art now plays in our culture? What logics lie behind its changing forms? These are challenging questions; students who elect to take the course should be prepared to tackle some difficult (though not voluminous) readings, to visit local museums and art exhibitions, and to engage actively and thoughtfully with contemporary art.
African American Studies 139, 1-4 units
"Digital Neighborhoods"
Michel Laguerre
This seminar surveys the available sociological and political science literature on ethnic, multicultural, digital, and transnational neighborhoods. It analyzes the transformation of the neighborhood in the US and the European Union as a result of the information technology revolution and the ongoing process of globalization. It discusses the history of the globalization of the neighborhood in tandem with the history of the digitization of the home. A typology of neighborhoods-as communities and as administrative units- will be presented and discussed. The themes covered include ethnic and gendered space, virtual geographical expansions, digital homes, convergence of technologies, digital environment, mobility of interactions, digital diasporas, social networking, transnational relationships, and digital globalization. This seminar locates the discussion of the ethnic and non-ethnic neighborhoods within the context of global metropolitan studies.
Anthropology 189, 4 units
"Anthropology of Science, Technology
and Medicine"
C. P. Hayden
Architecture 154, 3 units
"Design and Computer Analysis
of Structure"
R. Black
Design and analysis of whole structural building systems with the aid of finite element analytical methods. Advanced structural concepts explored in a laboratory environment.
Art 142, 4 units
"New Genres"
S. Syjuco
A survey intended to expose you to the nature and potential of such non-traditional tools for artmaking as performance, video, and audiotape. Lectures and demonstrations introduce students to techniques and varied applications.
Art 172, 4 units
"CGI Animation Studies"
Art Faculty
Motion is a ubiquitous element of human experience, yet attempts to explain it remain incomplete. The representation of motion with technical means is in continuous development, starting perhaps with sculptural representations of celestial movements in antiquity and leading to dynamic computer graphics simulations of molecular processes today. In this production-intensive studio course, we will study computer graphics for motion simulations, or animations. We will also probe these tools for their use in creative expression and analyze their impact on our own perception of motion. Software used: Maya. Each week will include relevant readings, class discussions, guest speakers, demonstration of examples, and studio time for training and working on student assignments.
Computer Science 160, 4 units
"User Interface Design and Development"
M. Agrawala
The design, implementation, and evaluation of human/computer interfaces. Interface devices (keyboard, pointing, display, audio, etc.), metaphors (desktop, notecards, rooms, ledger sheets, tables, etc.), interaction styles and dialog models, design examples, and user-centered design and task analysis. Interface-development, methodologies, implementation tools, testing, and quality assessment. Students will develop a direct-manipulation interface.
Film C185/Art C171, 4 units
"Digital Video: The Architecture of Time"
J. M. Kopell
This hands-on studio course is designed to present students with a foundation-level introduction to the skills, theories, and concepts used in digital video production. As digital technologies continue to expand our notion of time and space, value and meaning, artists are using these tools to envision the impossible. Nonlinear and nondestructive editing methods used in digital video are defining new "architectures of time" for cinematic creation and experience, and offer new and innovative possibilities for authoring new forms of the moving image. Through direct experimentation, this course will expose students to a broad range of industry-standard equipment, film and video history, theory, terminology, field, and post-production skills. Students will be required to technically master the digital media tools introduced in the course, and personalize the new possibilities digital video brings to time-based art forms.
Film C187, 4 units
"Advanced Digital Video"
G. J. Moses
This advanced studio course is designed for students who have mastered basic skills and concepts involved in digital video production and are interested in further investigating critical, theoretical, and creative research topics in digital video production.
Geography 170, 3 units
"The Cultural Politics of Science
and Technology"
J. Kosek
This course examines how shifting understandings of science and technology have radically remade some of our most basic social and biological categories and concepts. The course explores the field of Science and Technology Studies as a means for better understanding environmental politics as well as other political issues related to science. In particular, we will explore formations and understandings of truth, objectivity, universality of science and technology, and the consequences of these cultural formations in contemporary debates around the world. We will continue by using critical insights of sociologists, anthropologists, historians of science and medicine, feminists, and philosophers to investigate bio-scientific and technological changes and how these changes foment some of today’s most contested social and ethical debates around issues such as genetic engineering, global warming, gender and sexuality, post-9/11 understandings of torture, health, intelligent design, and nuclear weaponry. Discussion of these topics will necessarily raise complex questions around race, gender, class and nation and their relationship to nature. In so doing, this course hopes to underscore the links between abstract theories of nature, culture and power and the specific practices and consequences for our everyday uses of and debates over science and technology. This course is interdisciplinary in its approach and directed at students in the natural and social sciences who are interested in Science and Technology with particular focus on environmental-related topics. The seminar requires considerable reading and a willingness to actively engage in class discussions.
Industrial Engineering and
Operations Research 190E, 1-4 units
"Business Opportunities in Art and Technology"
I. Sidhu
This course explores key entrepreneurial and leadership concepts relevant to the intersection of the high tech and art worlds. Topics include study of successful transfers of art-world-based inventions, processes and methods into economically successful business applications.
Undergraduate Business
Administration 143, 3 units
"Game Theory and Business Decisions"
X. Su
This course provides an introduction to game theory and decision analysis. Game theory is concerned with strategic interactions among players (multi-player games), and decision analysis is concerned with making choices under uncertainty (single-player games). Emphasis is placed on applications.
FOR MORE INFORMATION or to suggest changes or additions, please contact:
BCNM Graduate Affairs Officer
Sharon Mueller:
smueller (at) berkeley.edu