Announcing BCNM's Spring 2026 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!
Zina Wang
Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Conference
The Skin of Silicon: Photolithography and Plastic Projection
Film producing film. This is the idea behind the first prototypes of integrated circuit produced in late-1940s from a trinocular microscope. Though often compared to photography, the photolithographic process resembles more closely a projector than a camera. Projecting the filmic image onto another through a growingly complicated lens system, it channels a modulating movement across refractive surfaces, literally touching them, forming a planar constellation pf light. Matter processes matter in an automatism that escapes an external visuality or “reality” (as in photography). Projection, in Film Studies, tends to fall on the immaterial side of abstracted experience rather than concrete material processes. But as Élie Faure readily put it in the 1920s, the cinema apparatus always already involves a “material automatism that brings to light from the interior of these images the new universe that it imposes little by little on our intellectual automatism.” In this paper, I will show that the silicon automatism of thought (what Stiegler theorized as the digital tertiary retention) was precisely founded upon this cinematic automatism (what Faure calls Cineplastics). The transition from film to chip marks an intensification of the logic of projection as a material process of in-formation, rising sharply against the copy-simulacrum logic that has haunted the understanding of projected and (digitally) processed images. I will trace the genealogical entanglements between cinema and computation from the mid-century origins of optical circuit production in the U.S. military research, to the first projection type photolithography machine by USHIO, whose design emerged directly from cinematic projection systems. Aiming for an amplified modulation with no information loss, ad hoc constellations of electric arc lamps, aligned lens groups, and optical aberration tools became instruments for the abstraction of light into what Gilber Simondon called a spatial modulation. The ideal of cinema as an architecture in motion is realized in its afterlife, when the seemingly specialized apparatus of projection becomes plastic and plastics.
Eric Rawn
Association for Computing Machinery CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Programming By Scaffolded Demonstration with Perpend
Output-centric programming paradigms such as Direct Manipulation Programming, Programming By Demonstration, and Programming By Example enable users to author programs by constructing an intended output. However, sometimes the purpose of a programming interaction is to discover an “intended output” in the first place (e.g., exploratory data analysis, improvisational creative coding, early-stage prototyping). We argue that one role for output-centric programming here is scaffolding the user in demonstrating their next program editing step by selecting among possible modifications to their current program. We call this Programming By Scaffolded Demonstration (PBSD). To explore PBSD, we built Perpend, a programming environment for p5.js. In a user study with nine artists, we juxtapose Perpend with an existing Direct Manipulation editor, exploring how participants used Perpend to situate themselves within a space of possible programs, shift focus between program text and visual output, and shape their exploration by modifying their program structure.
Chloé Mauvais
Latin American Studies Association: Republic & Revolution
When the Long Trees Are Gone: Filmic Mapmaking in Nũhũ Yãg Mũ Yõg Hãm: Essa Terra É Nossa!
A man gestures at bright and distant trees, groaning: “They planted these eucalyptus trees here, these long trees, but they are not real trees!” In their 2020 work, Nũhũ Yãg Mũ Yõg Hãm (Essa Terra É Nossa), Tikmũ’ũn filmmakers Sueli and Isael Maxakali not only contest the borders confining their community in an open-air prison of Brazilian design: they wield their cameras as world-building instruments. Even the trees are subject to contestation as the film draws the boundaries—territorial and ecological—of their world.
The stated purpose of the film, one community member offers, is “to make a document for the government to see and return our lands,” but the effect is far greater. In this paper, I argue episodes such as the encounter with the eucalyptus trees move the film beyond the contestatory or the fabulatory and into a mode of creation. Tikmũ’ũn narrative here forms a foundational counter to Luso-Brazilian colonial visuality; botany, particularly the contrast between “fake” and “real” plants, becomes a medium for ecological resistance; and the “walking camera,” becomes a visual strategy that creates the boundaries of a Tikmũ’ũn territory in constant motion. I situate this practice between the history of the flâneur and the mechanics of video game point-of-view, while analyzing it in relation to Tikmũ’ũn traditions of movement.
This encounter of narrative, archive, ecology, and the digital camera cracks open the possibility of imagining a world beyond the Brazilian state. The result is a living map, which asserts sovereignty beyond territory and toward spirituality.