Announcing Our Fall 2021 Class Fund Recipients
This year, we’re thrilled to be able to offer small grants to further support our faculty in their new media classes. Check out below how we’re enhancing the student and teaching experience.
Emma Fraser
Emma is teaching BCNM's core class NWMEDIA 200: History and Theory of New Media. As we move back into the classrooms and socially distance (often outside), we're upgrading our teaching set up with a microphone and amplifier to improve the learning experience for our students. History and Theory of New Media provides participants with a foundation in new media studies (major works, authors, historical events, objects, and schools of thought), such that they will be able to compile reading lists for their qualifying exams, bibliographies for their dissertations, and syllabi for their courses on topics related to new media.
Jacob Gaboury
Jacob is teaching a graduate seminar on AI and Machine Learning titled "Adversarial Networks and Network Adversity" and a Senior Seminar on innovation discourse in the tech industry titled "Against Innovation." He'll be inviting the leading lights in these fields to speak to his classes. In "Adversarial Networks," Jacob examines the politics of digital technology with a focus on the growth of machine learning applications and contemporary network architecture. Exploring recent scholarship that looks to new methods for engaging with technical systems that operate at speeds and scales beyond phenomenal experience, they take as their focus so-called “Generative Adversarial Networks” to examine network adversity broadly speaking, tracking the ways that the Internet and neural networks have obfuscated the political claim of contemporary technology. In "Against Innovation," Jacob explores the complex role that maintenance, labor, politics, and culture play in the development of technical systems, and the many harms caused by a culture that focuses exclusively on disruption.
Clancy Wilmott
Clancy is teaching NWMEDIA 205: Locative Media this semester. In addition to upgrading her teaching set up with a microphone and amplifier to improve the student experience, Clancy will be inviting speakers from local Indigenous organizations (including the Sogorea Te' Land Trust) to speak about the locative history of the Bay Area. Locative Media considers the history and future of locative media, as technological, situated and navigational ways of expressing and understanding space, place and mobility. Combining theory and praxis, students partake in a series of of lectures and discussion-based seminars as well as research, design and production workshops where they learn to make a critical locative media project of their own.