Announcing our 2018-2019 Faculty Seed Grant Recipients
This year the Berkeley Center for New Media was thrilled to support two junior faculty in their scholarship through seed grants that will help catalyze their research in new media. We are excited to congratulate these amazing scholars as they engage in Film and Media and Near Eastern Studies!
Jacob Gaboury
Regimes of Identification: Queer Computing and Digital History seeks to understand how queer identity has been so radically transformed by contemporary digital technologies, examining the queer history of computer science and proposing a queer theory of computing through an investigation of non-binary figures in the early history of mathematics and computation. Extending Alan Turing's early writing on uncomputability, Gaboury looks to articulate a queer externality to so-called “universal computation” through an investigation of queer sites and practices in media art, philosophy, and computer science. In doing so, his goal is to parse the relationship between these two disparate regimes of identification and their broad influence on our contemporary digital culture.
Rita Lucarelli
From Papyrus to Coffins in 3D: The New Media of the Book of the Dead is aimed primarily at building up a new platform for an in-depth study of the materiality of the Book of the Dead texts and images through the 3D visualizations of inscribed, anthropoid coffins produced in the First Millennium BCE, when magical texts and iconography were particularly en vogue on mortuary objects in Egypt. The main outcome of this project is to allow the scholarly community to work on the translation and on other metadata (transcription and translation of the hieroglyphic text, iconographic analysis, coffin typology, origin and whereabouts of the coffins’ owner, etc.), having as a basis this new media – the 3D model of the coffin.