Announcing Our Summer 2026 Research Award Recipients
Congratulations to our 2025 Summer Research Award recipients from Music, Geography, Information Science, Spanish & Portuguese, Art Practice, German, Rhetoric, School of Information, Computer Science, and EECS.
Tianyu Zou
Mycelium Ex Machina
For 3 musicians, Electronics, Video, and Lights
Fungi possess a distinctive capacity to connect living beings, weaving a “Wood Wide Web” through their mycelial networks. In an era when those strategies of「 … ex machina 」are all too familiar, the composer of this work does not deliberately attach explicit intentions or interpretations. Instead, the piece places each medium in relation to its own reality and to the forms, syntax, and sounds through which it appears to us.
The tension between a musical language shaped by the composer’s personal, nostalgic experiences, where the work is rooted, and the other media challenges our perception, inviting us to understand ambiguity as a space of possibility. Through the performance of the three musicians, live electronic music, and visuals that construct a simulated mycelial network, the work guides us into deeper layers of perception and potential meaning.
Alexis Wood
Drawing on media archaeology and critical cartography, Alexis’s project looks at nineteenth-century U.S. cartographic surveys as new media practices – the intersection of media, mathematics, and emergent mapping technologies through which territory was and is inscribed, standardized, and (re)produced as a governable object. Building on foundational works in the field from scholars like J.B. Harley, who exposed the ideological dimensions of cartography, and Matthew Hannah, who argues that cartographic reason persists through media transformation rather than being displaced by digital technologies, Alexis considers how surveying functioned as operative media systems, and treats cartographic practices as early media infrastructures that encoded land, population, and resources into calculable forms. This media-centered approach is particularly important for understanding state formation in California, as survey lines, population tables, and resource inventories did not merely describe territory, but actively shaped political futures by naturalizing extractive economies. By situating these cartographic practices within a longer media genealogy of cartographic reason, Alexis aims to address how transcontinental cartographic surveys function as media systems which abstracted and produced California as a governable territory, and how the media logics of nineteenth-century cartographic representation persist in contemporary digital mapping and data-driven governance relevant to California’s state secessionist movements.
Connie Gu
Connie’s research will examine the understudied uptick in internet addiction among older adults. Most research on older adults and technology emphasizes adoption barriers and digital literacy, often assuming that older adults struggle with new technologies. Short-video platforms such as TikTok and YouTube Shorts challenge this assumption. These platforms rely on extremely simple swipe-based interactions that older adults can easily learn and use. As a result, many older adults spend long periods scrolling through short videos, sometimes replacing offline social activities or daily routines. The growing public discourse around “internet-addicted elderly” reflects a real but poorly understood phenomenon. Connie will initiate a community-based design project that centers older adults’ lived experiences with short-video platforms, co-designing workshops with participants, through which she will invite older adults to share their experiences, identify moments of overuse or confusion, and collaboratively imagine interventions that support healthier, more intentional engagement. She will aim to translate these insights into a concrete HCI design contribution, such as guidelines for mitigating addictive interface patterns for older adults and/or a new lens for evaluating short-video user interfaces beyond traditional usability measures.
Chloé Mauvais
Chloé’s project entails travel to Mexico over the summer of 2026 to investigate how creators in the Global South are navigating the ontological challenges of climate change, which both “render the world irreconcilable with its former self [and] void, most of all, a human sense of groundedness on a planet turning inhospitable.” This research will be foundational to her dissertation, which asks: How, at the intersection between climate change and generative artificial intelligence, are Latin American creators rethinking the human and the natural? Chloé will focus her research on artists producing work that exceeds the strictures of genre, playing with the lines between the digital and the analog. She’ll similarly engage with the constellation of publishers in Mexico City, such as La Fiera, dedicated to the creation of zines and chapbooks that play with the limits between digital and print, and venues such as the Centro de Cultura Digital, a hub of contemporary media art and theory-production. As artists turn to “non-traditional” forms in response to increasingly unpredictable circumstances, Chloé will analyze the production and effect of increasingly ephemeral and formally innovative art, which often relies on specific local networks or landscapes that cannot be fully understood from a distance. By triangulating between individual artists, independent publishers, and cultural institutions, she will produce a comprehensive account of how Mexican creators are utilizing new media in response to the climate crisis, and begin to answer how these artists are rethinking notions of the human, the technological, and the natural—and what that might mean for Latin American literature more broadly.
Tamara Jamil
Tamara’s project investigates recent and proposed jail construction in rural California, focusing on how carceral development targets low-income and racialized communities through geographic and aesthetic strategies. She explores how rural areas are framed as "blighted" and thus rendered disposable, making them prime sites for jail expansion. Drawing from environmental justice scholar Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence,” she argues that the current rural jail boom is a gradual, often invisible form of systemic harm. This summer, Tamara will return to her previous fieldwork sites in three regions at different stages of jail development. Using Forensic Architecture’s method of Situated Testimony, she will conduct interviews supported by 3D reconstructions of these communities, layering oral histories with archival materials. Her goal is to create a digital living archive that documents past, present, and speculative post-carceral futures.
Chun Wang
As a part of preliminary fieldwork for a dissertation project in medical anthropology, Chun will be studying the media infrastructure and political economy of gender-affirming medicine across borders in Asia. Facing structural barriers to gender-affirming care in their home settings due to limited availability of specialized providers, financial constraints, stigma in clinical encounters, family disapproval, and legal gatekeeping, the community has never failed at strategizing individually and collectively to seek care. Chun will examine the intersections of media and medicine in the knowledge production of gender-affirming care.
Jaebin Lee
Jaebin’s artistic research project proposes that the female cyborg is the figure that connects religious and technological creation myths, beginning with Eve. Reading Eve as the first female cyborg and the first glitch in the divine system, the project traces how that structure has been compulsively repeated across centuries of artificial women. Like Marshall McLuhan in The Mechanical Bride (1951), which argues through the juxtaposition of cultural images rather than linear exposition, the project maps this lineage through collision: weaving together women’s bodies across myth, machine, and media so that images generate their own associations. From Eve, the project traces recurring female cyborgs, repeatedly imagined and built by male creators across cultures. Across multiple examples, Jaebin’s project thinks through the glitch that recurs in female cyborg narratives—the moment she exceeds her design and becomes a threat—and seeks to activate that glitch as a site of productive possibility where new configurations of gender, technology, and creation become thinkable. Jaebin’s research will culminate in an experimental video essay combining archival materials, original footage, and AI-generated imagery to trace the female body across mythological, technological, and cinematic representations.
Kayla Rose van Kooten
Kayla’s dissertation research is focused on filmic, literary, and digital remediations of technology and Orientalism in German- and Dutch-language discourses, with particular attention to race, labor, and the status of the human in German intellectual history. As part of this research, Kayla will travel to France to visit Hito Steyerl’s “Mechanical Kurds” exhibition at Villa Arson in Nice before attending the “Latent Space of Culture” workshop in Paris on June 3-6. The exhibition is central to her dissertation project on AI, techno-Orientalism, and AI-generated cultural artifacts. Steyerl’s installation, which combines documentary investigation, fiction, and speculation, examines the hidden labor and geopolitical violence embedded within supposedly “autonomous” AI technologies, particularly through the use of Kurdish women’s data-labeling labor for drone systems later deployed against Kurdish populations. The exhibit’s invocation of the historical “Mechanical Turk” directly informs Kayla’s dissertation chapter on the figure of the “Oriental automaton” in German literature, film, and media, and its role in mediating anxieties about automation, intelligence, labor, and migration. Kayla argues that associations between technology and “magic,” from medieval automata to contemporary AI marketing, continue longstanding traditions of negotiating technological change through Orientalized representations.
Maria Pettis
Maria’s project examines the political and methodological challenges of identifying, mapping, and preserving rural Black burial grounds in the American South, especially those connected to Black working-class communities during and after the Jim Crow era. Building on earlier phases of research for her dissertation, “Bottomlands: Taxonomy of A Black (Blues) Landscape,” Maria’s work focuses on recognizing subtle landscape markers and recovering sites that are often undocumented, neglected, or actively erased. The research combines fieldwork, archival analysis, and community-oriented mapping practices to document these endangered cemeteries and make locative data accessible to descendant communities. By treating landscape cues as culturally significant signs, the project also advances broader conversations in Black Geographies and Cultural Landscape Studies about memory, erasure, and spatial justice. The next phase of the project centers on developing digital tools that support both public accessibility and archival recovery. This includes creating a mobile-friendly website and prototyping a computer vision model capable of identifying burial markers and associated geospatial coordinates across historical topographic maps and imagery. Using patterns from an existing dataset compiled through years of fieldwork and collaboration, the model will help identify likely burial sites in neighboring counties with limited documentation. Framed through the ethical and community-based perspectives of scholars such as Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, the project positions new media and data science as tools for recovery, counter-mapping, and resistance against the racial disparities and institutional neglect that continue to shape archival practices in the rural South.
Zina Wang
Zina’s dissertation examines how contemporary digital infrastructures – especially semiconductor technologies – organize social, economic, and cultural life. While much scholarship in New Media studies focuses on software platforms, interfaces, or networked communication, Zina’s project approaches digital media through its material and organizational substrate: the semiconductor. Zina ask how semiconductor technologies have come to function as foundational media objects that structure the production, circulation, and interpretation of digital information. By examining their technical development and social organization, Zina’s research contributes to a broader understanding of how digital media infrastructures emerge and transform. Their summer research will focus on a historical case study that forms one chapter of the dissertation: the construction of the Model 719 computer in Shanghai in 1970. During the Cultural Revolution, a collective of Fudan University mathematicians and students collaborated with factory workers and neighborhood residents to design and assemble an integrated-circuit computer. The project emerged partly out of dissatisfaction with a previous machine built under the constraints of an existing state research institution. Instead, the participants created an experimental workshop that combined academic knowledge with practical manufacturing skills and non-specialized labor. The computer that resulted—known as Model 719—was developed through a series of improvisational decisions about which components could be fabricated locally, which needed to be acquired elsewhere, and which technical processes had to be learned or replicated through experimentation. Zina will conduct archival research on Chinese technical publications, engineering reports, and political documents related to the Model 719 project and early integrated-circuit production. This research will support the completion of a dissertation chapter that situates semiconductor technologies within broader histories of computing, media infrastructure, and global technological development.
Hila Mor
This summer, Hila will return to Viana do Castelo, Portugal, to deepen a research arc that began with a STARTS AQUA MOTION artist residency. Hila’s work sits at the intersection of new media, participatory design, and environmental sensing — and is grounded in months of research, fieldwork, community interviews and surveys, and water quality data collection across the region's private wells and municipal supply systems. The core technology Hila is developing is a paper-based microfluidic water testing kit designed as both functional instrument and aesthetic artifact. The kit uses colorimetric reagents applied on filter paper. Users prepare a test, dip it in their well water, photograph the result, and share it through a digital community platform. The kit is designed to follow local cultural traditions and aesthetics — creating a sense of familiarity alongside curiosity and discovery — to maximize community engagement. This summer's research will focus specifically on women and their families as makers and users of this system. In Viana do Castelo, women in rural areas are often the primary users of private wells, carrying forward water practices rooted in centuries of customary water rights — the lavadeiras tradition, communal washing and time-based water-sharing arrangements known as herdeiros. Yet, in interviews with municipal and regulatory institutions, this knowledge was largely invisible to formal water governance. Women's expertise about their water sources — its paths and watersheds, its seasonal variation, its history — is not captured in any monitoring system. In that sense, Hila’s work is not only about testing and awareness of water quality, but also about indigenous knowledge preservation and transfer.
Yangyang Yang
Yangyang’s research examines how human-computer interaction (HCI) and co-design practices can move beyond simple inclusion toward supporting Indigenous communities’“world-building equity”—their ability to shape technological futures according to their own cultural values, knowledge systems, and aspirations. The project questions access-based approaches that focus primarily on expanding technological participation without addressing deeper structural inequities or power imbalances. Instead, it asks how designers can position themselves as collaborators engaged in mutual learning and reciprocity, while developing co-design processes that foster meaningful community leadership, cultural visibility, and broader public engagement. Yangyang’s work builds on three years of collaboration with an Ohlone community, mak-’amham/Cafe Ohlone, and the Lawrence Hall of Science to co-design mixed reality exhibits on Indigenous science for museum spaces. Through workshops with Ohlone youth and families, the research identifies emerging strategies for equitable participation and authorship in collaborative media design. This summer, she will further develop a design framework for understanding how publicly accessible, co-designed new media artifacts can empower marginalized communities both internally and externally. The research aims to contribute new theoretical and practical approaches for community-led design in HCI and new media scholarship.
Vivian Chan
Electronics are not only functional devices but also media through which people express ideas and interact with their environment. For everyday users who could be from any background with all level of resource available, using and making customized electronic sensors is not an intuitive nor easy thing to do. The manufacturing of electronic sensors is not ecological nor is it accessible to the variety of makers. I believe empowering users to create their own electronics is critical to democratizing the power of making. By lowering the technical and financial barriers to fabrication, biomaterial-based electronics can support grassroots experimentation and creative exploration, encouraging more people to engage with electronics not only as tools but also as expressive media. The goal of the research is twofold: (1)First, to explore using backyard degradable biomaterial to create electronic sensors, we leverage the advantage of biomaterial over conventional electronics, which are the innate ability to adapt to environmental conditions and minimizing the harm it has on nature environments thus enabling broader usage and deployability; (2) Second, biomaterials are often fabricated under conditions that are closer to everyday human environments, which opens up opportunities for users to create such artifacts without requiring specialized laboratory equipment. This allows users to access these processes at much lower cost, thus empowering users with the freedom to make their own customized electronics, and enabling “making” as a form of expression and communication with the world.
David Cao
David's project comprises building a participatory digital archive with individuals from the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA). AAPA is a group of community organizers who worked to support Asian American folks, particularly in the 1960s and 70s out of Berkeley; they coined the term "Asian American" and were a core part of the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) which organized at UC Berkeley and led to the creation of Ethnic Studies. They also participated in a variety of community organizing efforts around issues facing the Asian diaspora across the Bay Area.