Announcing Our Fall 2023 Class Grants
We’re thrilled to be able to offer small grants to further support our faculty in their new media classes.
This semester, we were able to support Alex Saum-Pascual in her course NWMEDIA 190/Spanish 135. These funds will help Alex invite the following incredible guest lecturers: Milton Läufer (Shamanic Therapy Bot), Eugenio Tisselli (The Gate), and Élika Ortega (Binding Media. Print-Digital Literature 1980-2010s).
From the NEWMEDIA 190 Course Description:
Recent developments in creative technologies (such as augmented/virtual reality and artificial intelligence programs) have allowed artists to experiment in their studios in novel ways. How do we tell stories, question the status quo, envision alternative futures, or push boundaries using new programs, forms, or spatial understandings? How can new mediums inform the way we understand and produce works of art? How do we critically engage, subvert, and challenge the commercial industry model of new media production?
From the Spanish 135 Course Description:
How have islands been depicted in literature, historical narratives, film, and popular culture? How have empires, from the Spanish conquest to Guantánamo, reinvented the Caribbean islands as tropical paradises or as real prisons? This course will focus on islands in modern Latin American and Caribbean fiction, poetry, and historical accounts. We consider the ways in which utopian ideals, colonialism, piracy, nationhood, revolution, militarization, and tourism have shaped collective memory in the “sugar islands.” Works by Cristóbal Colón, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Gabriela Mistral, Luis Palés Matos, María Zambrano, Antonio S. Pedreira, José Lezama Lima, Guillermo Cabrera-Infante, Antonio Benítez Rojo, Edouard Glissant, among others.
We were also able to support Lisa Wymore in her course "L&S 25 Thinking Through Arts and Design: Art, AI and Robotics, Exploring the Uncanny Valley". These funds will help Lisa invite the following incredible guest lecturer: Stephanie Dinkins (Conversations with Bina48), a transmedia artist who creates experiences that spark dialog about race, gender, aging, and our future histories. Her work in AI and other mediums uses emerging technologies and social collaboration to work toward technological ecosystems based on care and social equity.
From the LS 25 Course Description:
The fall course will revolve around 'Creativity and Practice,' and we will invite campus leaders whose work relates to this theme, along with a few guest speakers, as well. [Pending instructor preference,] the course will be offered in Fall 2021 in conjunction with Berkeley Arts + Design’s highly successful public lecture series A+D Thursdays at BAMPFA. Through a series of public lectures from Creative Discovery grant recipients and other faculty representing a range of departments and disciplines. Speakers will explore intersections amongst the arts, technology, public service, and social enterprise and be introduced to a range of pedagogical practices. Students and audience members alike will learn and engage with a variety of practices. Mixed in with our spectacular faculty guest speakers, we will invite other luminous off-campus thought leaders to share their stories, practices, and pedagogical journeys.
Jacob Gaboury is another class grant recipient who will be using his funds for guest speakers in his "Film & Media 240: Politics of Code" course. Jacob will be inviting the following incredible guest lecturers: Avery Dame Griff (The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet), Laine Nooney (The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal), and Tamara Kneese (Death Glitch).
From the Film & Media 240 Course Description:
This course begins with the twin propositions that all technology is inherently political, and that digital technologies have come to define our contemporary media landscape. Software, hardware, and code shape the practices and discourses of our digital culture, such that in order to understand the present we must take seriously the politics of the digital. This course will primarily focus on the politics and theory of the past thirty years, from the utopian discourses of the early web to the rise of immaterial labor economies and the quantification and management of subjects and populations. Our classes will be structured around broad themes or theories through which we will examine particular technologies, including artificial intelligence, digital platform economies, hardware and materiality, and techniques of opacity and obfuscation. Our ultimate goal will be to identify a political theory of the present age - one that takes seriously the role of computation and digitization.