Announcing BCNM's Fall 2024 Conference Grant Recipients
The Berkeley Center for New Media is thrilled to provide small grants to our graduate students to help them share their innovative research at the premiere conferences in their field. We look forward to seeing the work of these students spread across the globe!
Caleb Murray-Bozeman
Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP)
The Failure of Participation in Aram Bartholl's Dead Drops
My paper examines the mobilization of audience participation in interactive digital art. I focus on Aram Bartholl’s Dead Drops, an ongoing work that began in 2010 when Bartholl installed five USB flash drives in outdoor public locations across New York City. Each contained a .txt file exhorting audiences to use the drive to exchange files, as well as a short manifesto that encouraged users to mount their own USB sticks in accessible outdoor locations. With these installations, Bartholl launched an ongoing project that now includes thousands of flash drives installed in public places across the world. I argue that the temporal progression of Dead Drops reveals the shifting status of audience participation under conditions of neoliberalism and information capitalism. Dead Drops initially garnered attention because it seemed to epitomize the democratizing potential of interactive art and so-called participatory culture alike. But few people actually engaged with the work; while the project continues to expand with the installation of new drives, the vast majority of the dead drops that comprise the artwork are missing, broken, or otherwise defunct. Dead Drops thus stages the withering of the promise of participation; it offers an interactive experience, but it simultaneously forecloses the possibility of audience engagement. Through a close reading of Dead Drops, I trace how the participation promised by digital media has lost its allure because it involves the subjection of participants to the surveillance, exploitation, profiling, and targeting associated with the neoliberal information economy.
Jaclyn Zhou
Modern Language Association
Media Diversity Scores: Challenges and Opportunities in Metadata Tagging
Since 2020, our Media Education Research Lab (MERL) at UC Berkeley has worked to develop a robust method for assigning metadata tags to U.S. films and television series based on the texts’ representations of diverse identities and orientations. Our method consists of three types of tagging: 1) We assign “bias tags” for general shortcomings in the texts with respect to diverse representation (for example, we tag a text with “B” if it fails the Bechdel Test). 2) We research critics’ and audiences’ reviews of the text’s representations of women and minorities and assign “umbrella” reception tags, indicating if the text upholds or breaks with prevalent stereotypes about those groups. 3) We tag the ethnicities, genders, sexualities, ages, and nationalities of the text’s top eight characters. Based on our metadata tags, we calculate quantitative and qualitative diversity scores for the text, and write our own reviews of the text’s successes and failures in depicting diversity.
In this paper, we will explain the challenges we encountered in creating our diversity scoring method, which may be pertinent and informative for other researchers interested in using metadata tagging to assess diversity in corpuses (including citation lists). For example, we will address the insufficiency of methods based purely on “counting” diversity (e.g., ascertaining the numbers of POC vs. white individuals included), and the difficulties of sourcing and summarizing audience reception.
We will also propose ways that the MERL Diversity Scores method might be applied to citational practices, by tagging and scoring several scholarly bibliographies. We will conclude by suggesting how academics and other textual producers and consumers might employ our method to understand the relative diversity of the texts they use and make, and to evaluate how well or poorly journals, publishers, studios, networks, channels, or platforms perform with regards to diversity metrics.
Alexis Wood
(NACIS) North American Cartographic Information Society
For mapping in folds: space is not a grid
This presentation asks if the limitations of contemporary mapping can be traced to our tools or to limitations in our cartographic theory. Using an approach informed by the Deluzian fold and the Benjaminian constellation, I question cartographic scale and conceptions of spacetime through various material investigations.
Tonya Nguyen
ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW)
Definitions of Fairness Differ Across Socioeconomic Groups & Shape Perceptions of Algorithmic Decisions
Understanding how people perceive algorithmic decision-making is remains critical, as these systems are increasingly integrated into areas such as education, healthcare, and criminal justice. These perceptions can shape trust in, compliance with, and the perceived legitimacy of automated systems. Focusing on San Francisco’s decade-long policy of algorithmic school assignments, we draw on procedural and distributive justice theory to investigate parents’ fairness perceptions of San Francisco’s school assignment system. We find that key differences in parents’ definitions of fairness shape their preferences for what constitutes a fair school assignment system, while also controlling for parents’ school assignment outcomes. Moreover, parents’ definitions and perceptions of fairness differ across socioeconomic and racial groups. For instance, among white respondents, the most used definition of fairness was “proximity” to their assigned school, whereas, among Hispanic or Latino parents, the most popular definition of fairness was that the “same rules” are applied to everyone. It is crucial for computational system designers and policymakers to consider these differences when deciding on the goals and values embedded in decision-making systems and who those goals and values reflect.
Eda Er
Frequency Series
'woulda shoulda coulda' and 'Storytelling as a Compositional Tool: Building Multidisciplinary Narratives in Music Composition and Performance'
In recent years, I have been exploring storytelling as a core compositional tool in my work, where narratives function not just as themes but as integral elements that shape the very structure of the music. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, I investigate how narratives are formed and expressed across different artistic practices, including electronic music, visual arts, installation, classical composition, and theater. I have composed a piece that has multimedia elements that will premiere on September 25 at Constellation,Chicago, followed by a discussion in which I will focus on the processes of constructing and deconstructing narratives, showing how these diverse practices interact to create cohesive, immersive experiences. Through examples from my work, I will demonstrate how storytelling can connect these varied artistic forms, offering new perspectives on the role of narrative in contemporary composition.
Meg Everett
Online Learning Consortium: Accelerating Online Learning Worldwide
Fostering Connection and Community in an Innovative Virtual Classroom: Strategies for Engagement and Belonging
Despite the growing demand for online education, pervasive skepticism about its quality and efficacy still exists. A prevalent bias against online courses is the assumption that meaningful connections among students and faculty can only be fostered through in-person classroom settings (Reimagining Online Education in California: A Roadmap for Advancing Access and Quality, n.d.). However, when instructors take advantage of ever evolving technology and tools and strive equally as much to be pedagogically inventive and ethically alert, online courses can be effective, participatory, and even lively! Based on this premise that high quality and inclusive teaching and learning can happen online, we installed the state-of-the-art Immersive Virtual Classroom (IVC) to create an impactful learning experience for remote undergraduate students at a large public university. Join this session for a discussion on the ways in which instructors coupled technological advancements in the IVC with purposeful pedagogy to cultivate engagement, promote collaboration and critical thinking, and design for a sense of belonging.
Arianna Khmelniuk
American Society for Theatre Research 2024 Annual Conference
The Monstrous Frontier
The Monstrous Frontier is an experimental, speculative, and adventurous threshold exploration based on my fan archive (@movieolfaction) of movie scenes that mention smells, stench, and fragrance in a particular racialized and gendered context/s. I discovered these massive clusters of meanings unintentionally. In my ongoing investigation, I am broadly concentrating on a smell and its verbal meanings in cultural and social architecture that is reflected and re-produced in/through cinema due to my novel collection of movie scenes that I published online back in 2020. This artistic mixed-media research draws insights from my own art practice, cinema and new media, sensory ethnography, art history, gender, race, social studies, and more. In positioning smell as a cultural utility, I invite us to meditate on the politics and limits of smelling, sublime, otherness, and alienation, and from whose senses this storytelling is re-produced. One of the socio-cultural aspects of this proposition is surveying the cultivation of otherness, alienation, and making monsters, specifically through olfactory storytelling that weaponizes smell references to dehumanize, humiliate, and degrade the opponent. My approach is to purposefully think with the archive and its messy findings on how this specific olfactory storytelling could be linked to the RE-production of the monstrous, the wild, and uncanny in our imagination, human territoriality, shared sensorium, and biopolitics.
Xinwei Zhuang
Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture 2024: Designing Change
Across scales: Hierarchical Urban Graph for Neighborhoods Partition and Energy End-use Stability
Extreme weather events and dense urban growth have increased energy demands in urban environments, necessitating sustainable energy solutions. This study introduces Hierarchical Urban Graph, a multi-layered network-based method for reconfiguring urban neighborhood partitions across multiple scales to achieve energy autonomy. By modeling the existing urban fabric as a hierarchical graph, the proposed approach facilitates neighborhood partitioning to optimize energy demand and supply balance within the urban structure, enhancing urban energy resilience through a decentralized energy-sharing network. We present a case study in San Francisco to demonstrate the utility of the hierarchical urban graph. The urban graph partitions the neighborhood into synergistic clusters with complementary energy profiles, prioritizing energy autonomy by optimizing the balance between on-site renewable generation and consumption patterns. The resulting neighborhood structure reduces dependency on centralized power grids and improves ramping flexibility. The proposed methodology provides the potential to aid long-term resilient energy planning.
Evan [NAMI] Sakuma
American Studies Association
Good Shot, Babe!-- Guns n’ Glamour Reimagining Asian American Womanhood
The Asian body in America is already, always feminized. It follows, then, that the image of the Asian American woman is one mired in submissive imaginaries and bounded stereotypes. This hyper-feminized, fetishized image dawns "nonsense" when juxtaposed against historical and contemporary depictions of Asian women wielding guns. In this presentation, I examine how the image of the "strong Asian woman" complicates dominant narratives of Asian American femininity by exploring popular digital visual culture with the guns as weapon, as prop, as political performance—such as circulating photos during the Vietnam War, the 1992 LA Riots, and even VP Kamala Harris claiming gun ownership in the 2024 Presidential Debate. Similarly, I find this "strong Asian woman" in the aesthetic prosthetics of the Asian Baby Girl (ABG) subculture, characterized often by 1990s-inspired heavy makeup, acrylic nails, and a blonde balayage. As part of my research practice, I will also be showcasing my video art project, "Augmenting the Oriental," which dresses trans, queer, and cis Asian women in this makeup style. I argue both the gun and ABG glamour become prosthetic extensions of unregulated agency, flirtations with an undeniable presence that extends the flesh and claims stake in the nonsensical for an unscripted Asian woman.
Vincente Perez
Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association 2024
life is like a party shawty: Teezo Touchdown on respectability, Quality control, and representation
Teezo Touchdown is a rapper, singer, songwriter, and record producer born and raised in Beaumont, TX. For his 2021 “Rid the Mid” campaign, Teezo relied on an eccentric persona and elements of afro surrealism. I will pair a close reading of the lyrics of “Mid” with performance and video analysis of “Mid” and “Rid the Mid” campaign to argue that Teezo Touchdown is engaged in structural analysis of the state of Hip-Hop and its fan base. Taking Teezo Touchdown’s use of “strategic negativity” seriously requires understanding how he intentionally disturbs the notion of “the Real” by promoting his absurdist work through seemingly serious channels.