BCNM Around the Web July 2021
Check out the amazing work of our faculty, students, and alumni around the web this July!
Kevin Lo
Kevin's Return the Eye - retrospective and futures featured in Browser, a festival presenting web-based music through VR festival grounds, an open gallery, and livestream.
From the program notes:
Kevin will summarize Return the Eye, an online exhibit presented by Cloaca Projects (SF) that ran December 2020 through February 2021. This work telematically joined viewers in controlling three cameras to view in situ art pieces, which considered visibility, the elastic ontology of virtual images, and the weaponization of optical technologies. Viewers' user data and interaction with the website collaboratively shaped the long form generative composition. This was a way to make music together during the pandemic.
Check out the event here!
Abigail De Kosnik
Abigail spoke at the University of Edinburgh's Queer Representation: Pasts, Presents, Futures Conference.
From the event description:
This conference examines how LGBTQ representation has changed through time, continues to evolve in the present, and what role it might play in the future. It draws on recent developments in queer representation in order to trace how LGBTQ media comments on both the current state of queer rights, as well as the possibility of queer futurity. The conference seeks to represent a multiplicity of queer experiences, spanning divergent historical and geographical areas of representation, as well as the plurality of ideas of what it means to identify as queer today, and what this identification might look like in the future. With our inclusive focus on transmedia representations of queerness, we aim to examine narratives of sex, identity, politics, family and gender across a broad range of contexts, mediums and artforms.
Learn more about the event here!
Jacob Gaboury
Jacob recently featured in The Atlantic's Screenshots Are the Gremlins of the Internet to discuss how screenshot culture has changed since the start of the internet.
From the article:
Until the mid-’90s, Gaboury explains, most other people who were trying to preserve something from a computer screen were interested in “screen dumps,” which is to say they wanted to copy whatever happened to be onscreen into a text file for practical reasons, and didn’t care to freeze it in a static, documentary image. “The action here is not the photographic capture or the weaponized shot,” Gaboury writes, “but the emptying of content or data.”
Read the entire article here!
Jacob was a keynote speaker for 2D/3D. producing illusion, a conference discussing perspectives and epistemology, uses of perspective illusion, illusion and new technologies, and more!
Learn more about the event here!
Ken Goldberg
Ken spoke on the potential for robotics in e-commerce in RoboGlobal's webinar Opportunities & Obstacles for Robots in the E-Commerce Supply Chain.
From the webinar description:
The pandemic permanently accelerated the shift to digital shopping by about five years. This growth trajectory would be unsustainable without the addition of technology to take the weight off of its human counterparts. Thankfully, robots are coming to the rescue. Please join our Director of Research Jeremie Capron for a discussion with ROBO Global strategic advisor Ken Goldberg, Prof. of Engineering at UC Berkeley and Chief Scientist of Ambi Robotics, and Jim Liefer, CEO of Ambi Robotics on the tremendous potential for robotics across the e-commerce supply chain.
Learn more about the webinar here!
Ken recently featured in 7X7's Art on the Blockchain: Are NFTs a game changer for the San Francisco art market? In the article, Ken discusses how NFTs have changed the way that creatives sell digital art.
From the article:
In 2011, when Goldberg decided to sell his installation "Mori: an internet-based earthwork," which had shown at the Whitney Biennial, there was no established method to effectively sell a piece of art that lived on the Internet. "NFTs provide a very clear way of recognizing ownership. That's the beauty of blockchain," Goldberg says. "You have a confidence that if you purchase something, you get what you pay for. No one can steal it from you."
Read the entire article here!
Ken's work on robotic grasping was featured in COSMOS' The surprisingly complicated technology that goes into picking winners.
From the article:
Goldberg and his graduate students recently revealed a solution that greatly speeds the training of picking robots: put the robot inside a simulation. Like some weird inversion of The Matrix, Goldberg’s research team sent their machines into the artificial world of Dex-Net 4.0, and, within that environment, where they controlled every element, they could run the robot through simulations far faster than would be possible in the real world. Ten thousand times faster.
Beth Piaote
Beth's retelling of the Greek tragedy Antigone, Antikoni, was covered in Harlem World Magazine's West Harlem Art Fund and NY Classical Theatre Bring a Greek Tragedy to Governors Island. Antikoni tells the story of a Native American family torn apart over the fate of ancestral remains held by a museum.
Learn more about Beth's work here!
Hannah Zeavin
Hannah recently featured in Berkshire Eagle's The Bottom Line: Can Woebot ease your pandemic pain? In the article, Hannah discusses the rise and growth of teletherapy in the context of our flawed health care system.
From the article:
Hannah Zeavin, author of “The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy,” contends the health care system is so broken that “it makes sense that there’s space for disruption.” But she considers automated therapy a “fantasy” that is more focused on accessibility and fun than actually helping people get better over the long term.
“We are an extraordinarily confessing animal; we will confess to a bot,” she said. “But is confession the equivalent of mental health care?”
Read the entire article here!
Hannah continued her discussion on virtual medical care in Eminetra's Telemedicine Company Investing in Covid Pandemic Boom.
From the article:
Zeavin said the low-cost approach has the potential for a more volatile direction in medicine.
“This is a dystopian nightmare,” Zeavin said. “This is the first form everyone gets before doing anything. It’s the people who need these additional access and care most because of health care, redlining, and homophobic disability discrimination. Will significantly change the types of care possible. “
Read the entire article here!
Jane Mcgonigal
Jane's app SuperBetter was featured in Young Health Programme's SuperBetter - Applying game-based 'epic wins' to real life scenarios in Zambia.
From the article:
When they ran the initial EPOCH survey to measure the wellbeing of the thirty adolescents who will be the first cohort of the programme, it was clear that it was not just poverty that was an holding them back from thriving. Many children were orphans, ate just one meal a day or had parents with alcohol problems and some were burdened with the full responsibilities for looking after their household. Not surprisingly, some felt unloved and others had lost hope, so when they were encouraged to attend school on Sunday as part of the SuperBetter project you might think that would be too much to ask of them – but it turned out, they had taken it to their hearts and some said that they wished they could be there ‘every day’.
Read the entire article here!
Bo Ruberg
Bo recently spoke at the University of Sydney's Gender and Sexuality in Video Game Live Streaming. In the online event, Bo talked about the interplays between video game live streaming, gender, and sexuality.
From the event description:
Live streaming has become a vital area of contemporary video games and life online, especially in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Gender and sexuality are central to video game live streaming, shaping who streams, has streaming is performing, and the histories that lead up to present-day streaming practices. For example, women streamers regularly face harassment on platforms like Twitch, where the toxic masculinity of reactionary gamer cultures continues to dominate. Meanwhile, much of Twitch's attitude toward sexuality on the platform can be understood as an attempt to disavow obvious connections between video game live streaming and webcam modeling, a form of online sex work. This talk maps out some of the many interplays between video game live streaming, gender, and sexuality, arguing that streaming should be understood as an erotic, intimate, and highly gendered form of video game play and self-presentation online.
Learn more about the event here!
Bo featured in a Washington Post article discussing the origin and evolution of video game convention E3.
From the article:
“There used to be a whole array of gaming magazines, associated with lots of different game companies, and sold at magazine stands, convenience stories, etc. That used to be one of the most important places to learn about new games,” said Bo Ruberg, associate film and media studies professor at the University of California, Irvine. “Now, almost all of those magazines are defunct. Everything is online instead.”
Read the entire article here!
Pablo Paredes
Pablo gave a webinar at Stanford Engineering on pervasive computing with everyday devices to build and sustain stress, resilience, and wellbeing.
From the webinar description:
As society progresses towards increasing pervasive computing levels, I design and build technology-enabled solutions to repurpose everyday devices to help people build resilience and grow wellbeing. I leverage biological and behavioral knowledge to design systems that balance user needs and health outcomes while mitigating surveillance and agency risks. In this talk, I present my research on efficacious and engaging sensors and interventions necessary in the population and public health domains. I share a series of research projects exploring and validating novel ideas on passive sensors - less dependent on subjective surveys or wearables - and subtle interventions that minimize workflow disruption.
Learn more about the event here!
Pablo also spoke at Stanford Medicine Center for Digital Health's The Invisible Future of Health Monitoring.
From the event description:
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen the rise of telemedicine and remote patient monitoring as the paradigm of care delivery has transformed to meet patients where they are: in the home. While these trends are just now emerging to the broader public, the use of algorithms in embedded sensors, passive monitoring, implantables, wearables, and IoT devices in the environment have been used in healthcare applications for decades. But with all of this raw aggregation, how is this data used to inform real world applications beyond research, and what does the future of invisible monitoring look like? As devices become smaller and embedded throughout our environments, how will data be used to provide increasingly precise and personalized care to individual patients?
Learn more about the event here!