BCNM faculty engage with communities and conduct community-based research and projects. Find out more about some of the projects below.
Rematriating the Map
2021-ongoing
Clancy Wilmott
Before You Are Here is creating an innovative Indigenous web map of the San Francisco Bay Area, designed for educational and museum contexts. It seeks to convey Ohlone history and contemporary realities through a spatial lens rather than a purely historical one and represents the latest and most ambitious phase of an ongoing, multi-year collaboration between the Sogorea Te Land Trust—an urban, Indigenous, women-led land trust in the San Francisco Bay Area—and studio.geo-?, Wilmott's geographic research studio. The work has been funded by the Berkeley Center for New Media, Geography, a Hellman Grant, and UCHRI in the past.
The Psychosocial Foundation
2021-ongoing
Hannah Zeavin
Home to multiple persuasions within psychoanalysis—the tradition inaugurated by Sigmund Freud— the Foundation's products and programming illuminate the psychogenic dimensions of culture and society, mental health and medicine, and political life. The Foundation is committed to the radical horizon of political emancipation, and is a resource for clinics, universities, and the public alike. The Foundation offers short courses, a twice-annual Parapraxis seminar, lectures, and more.The Pyschosocial Foundation magazine is funded by the Open Society Foundation.
0 ⏎ remake
Spring 2025
Lisa Wymore
From 2015-2017, Lisa's dance company Disappearing Acts, an artistic collective of dance makers, performers, and intermedia artists, created a new work entitled 0 ⏎. The performance was a computer augmented improvisational score with the goal of creating a new mode of improvisational performance that would allow the computer to be a co-choreographer in the artistic work. For 0 ⏎ remake, Lisa revisits 0 ⏎ now that Generative AI and LLM’s are so easily accessible. The project is slated for Spring 2025 and will be designed to be an interactive installation piece that is mobile. The goal of the work is to bring the installation to local communities in order to prompt the system to make something in collaboration together. Using AI generated text, visual, and auditory outputs from human created prompts, participants will see what it feels like to make an embodied creation with AI's. What might feel challenging, strange, creative, or inspiring working within this multi-dimensional space?
Past into the Future: Afrofuturism and Ancient Egypt
Ongoing
Rita Lucarelli
This program explores the reception and cultural imagining of Ancient Egypt and of its monuments, arts, writing and religion in the Black visual arts, music and literature through the lens of scholars and artists inspired by Afrofuturism. This project aims at creating a channel and platform of communication and collaboration among egyptologists, scholars of African and African-American studies, artists and musicians from the African Diaspora inspired by the ancient Egyptian and Nubian culture. The project is supported by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
Teaching Maat in Prison
Ongoing
Rita Lucarelli
This project teaches about ancient Egypt in San Quentin State Prison. The program shares the ancient Egyptian religion and the concept of Maat (“what is right”) with incarcerated students. You can see a video presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl21Mo2WfQo
Grown Right - A California Regenerative Agriculture Campaign
Ongoing
Nicole Starosielski
A regenerative agriculture media campaign aimed at incentivizing farmers and consumers in California to adopt and promote regenerative transition. Find out more at www.grownright.org