Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Friday, Dec. 8th: The Resonance Project performance

For December, the NEW MEDIA WORKING GROUP will attend the tele-immersive dance performance "Reception" by The Resonance Project, and follow it up with a discussion of a chapter from Mark Hansen's book Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media.

***
THIS FRIDAY December 8th, 6pm;
Hearst Memorial Mining Building front lobby, UC Berkeley.
Attend free performance of "Reception" by The Resonance Project
http://www.citris-uc.org/Dec8-2006-Dance

The Resonance Project is a team of choreographers, computer engineers, and visual and sound artists who are investigating concepts of presence/remote presence and corporeal and code interactivity within live and media based performance. Unique to the project is the use of a 'performance as research' model, within which scientists and artists collaborate to explore a re-visioning of cyber culture and corporeal presence.

***
Wednesday, Dec. 13th, 5:00 to 6:30 pm;
226 Dwinelle, UC Berkeley.
Meet to discuss the Introduction and Chapter 1 excerpt from Mark Hansen's book Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (Routledge, 2006). Copies will be made available this week.

Mark Hansen teaches cultural theory and comparative media studies at the University of Chicago. He is author of Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing (Michigan 2000), New Philosophy for New Media (MIT 2004), and Bodies in Code, as well as numerous essays on cultural theory, contemporary literature, and media. His essay, The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life appeared in Critical Inquiry in Spring 2004. He has co-edited (with Taylor Carman) The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty and is currently co-editing two volumes: Critical Terms for Media Studies (with W.J.T. Mitchell) and Neocybernetic Emergence (with Bruce Clarke). He is currently at work on three projects: The Politics of Presence, a study of embodied human agency in the context of realtime media and computing, Becoming-Human,
an ethics of the posthuman, and Fiction After Television, a study of the novel in the age of digital convergence.

Saturday, December 02, 2006

Tues, Nov 28th: Radical Software exhibition opening

This Tuesday, the NEW MEDIA WORKING GROUP will visit the exhibition opening of "Radical Software: Art, Technology and the Bay Area Underground" at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco.

Tuesday, Nov. 28th, 7:30 to 9:00 pm;
California College of the Arts, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, SF;
1111 Eighth Street (at 16th and Wisconsin), 2nd Floor.
Attend opening of "Radical Software" exhibition:
http://www.wattis.org/exhibitions/2006/
Map/directions:
http://www.cca.edu/about/directions.php
The space is relatively small, so let's just find each other in the gallery.

*****
Radical Software: Art, Technology, and the Bay Area Underground

At the first Hackers' Conference in 1984, Stewart Brand—former Merry Prankster, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation—made his often-quoted claim that "information wants to be free."

Radical Software, which is cosponsored by Wired, will combine artworks, experimental film and video, documentary material, and artifacts that trace the (counter)cultural discourse that made Brand's assertion possible: from its early manifestations in the postwar bohemian underground to its adoption as a basic principle by a new generation of artists, hackers, and activists.

Charting previously unexplored connections between art, technology, radical politics, and the psychedelic underground, the exhibition will bring together radical and experimental work by internationally known and emerging artists, plus commissioned projects, public works, historical artifacts, and new research.
*****

Fri, Nov 17th: Wendy Chun on Software

For November, the NEW MEDIA WORKING GROUP will be meeting with Wendy Chun and discussing her article, "On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge," as a framework for visiting the new exhibition "Radical Software: Art, Technology and the Bay Area Underground" at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco.

** Note new date/time/location! **
THIS FRIDAY November 17th
12:00 to 1:00 pm -- meet to discuss essay by Wendy Chun, linked below
1:00 to 2:30 pm -- meet Wendy Chun
Rhetoric Lounge, 7th floor (F/G) Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley

Wendy Chun is Associate Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She has studied both systems design engineering and English literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. The NMWG will convene to discuss "On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge" by Wendy Chun (grey room 18,
winter 2005, 27-52) preceding a grad student meeting with her:

http://www.brown.edu/Departments/MCM/people/chun/papers/software.pdf

Tuesday, Nov. 28th, 7:30 to 9:00 pm;
California College of the Arts, Wattis Institute for Contemporary
Arts, SF. Attend opening of "Radical Software" exhibition:
http://www.wattis.org/exhibitions/2006/software/

Fri, Oct 20: SFAI talk by Beth Coleman

October 20, 5pm

The New Media Working Group will attend a talk by media artist and scholar Beth Coleman at San Francisco Art Institute:
http://www.sfai.edu/Event/Event.aspx?eventID=1638&navID=261&sectionID=7

* * *

about Beth Coleman, from her faculty page at MIT:
(http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/coleman.html)


Beth Coleman is Assistant Professor of Writing and New Media in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and Comparative Media Studies. She is faculty director of the C3 game culture and mobile media initiative. Her fields of research interest include new media, contemporary aesthetics, electronic music, critical theory and literature, and race theory. Under the name M. Singe, she co-founded the SoundLab Cultural Alchemy project, established in 1995.

Her scholarly and literary writings have been published by the British pavilion for the Venice Bienale, 2003; Broadway/Random House; Gagosian Gallery; Sammlung Goetz Collection; and New York University Press, as well as in journals including Artforum, Artbyte, and Nka: Journal for African Art. Coleman is a 2003-4 Rockefeller New Media Fellow and a 2004 Ford
Foundation fellow. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally at P.S.1 Museum of Contemporary Art, Mirror's Edge exhibition, ARC/Musee d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Massachusetts Institute of Technology List Gallery, among other venues. She has been working internationally as a sound artist since 1997, with her music appearing on various electronic music labels including SoundLab Records.

Coleman received the BA from Yale University in 1991, and the Ph.D. in comparative literature from NYU in 2004. Before arriving at MIT, she was a 2004 artist-in-residence at the Waag Society for Old and New Media, Amsterdam where she completed the art and architectural installation, Music Box. She is currently working on a mongraph entitled Difference Engines:
Race as Technology.

Tues, Oct 3rd: First Meeting

This year's New Media Working Group will meet twice each month--once to discuss readings and share work, and once to attend an event or exhibition in the Bay Area. For October we have chosen Jay Bolter's "Windows and Mirrors" and a talk by Beth Coleman in San Francisco (see below). At our first meeting we will set a course for the rest of the fall, so please bring your ideas for events and readings. Overall, our theme this year is "Temporality"--chosen to coordinate with the year-long Measure of Time exhibitions and screenings. We hope such a broad theme will allow graduate students from multiple departments to collaborate around a shared interest in the social, political, aesthetic, and philosophical implications of digital media. Our work together over the year will be geared toward hosting a New Media conference and art exhibition at Berkeley in Fall 2007.

First Meeting:
Tuesday October 3rd, 6pm, Rhetoric Library

First Reading:
At our first meeting on October 3rd we will discuss the Introduction and Chapter 1 of "Windows and Mirrors," a book by Jay Bolter and Diane Gromala published in MIT's New Media series. You can download these excerpts here:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=9906&mode=toc

First Event:
Friday October 20th, 5pm, SFAI Lecture Hall, 800 Chestnut Street
Talk by media artist and scholar Beth Coleman at San Francisco Art Institute:
http://www.sfai.edu/Event/Event.aspx?eventID=1638&navID=261&sectionID=7

Welcome to the UC Berkeley New Media Working Group

Welcome to the UC Berkeley New Media Working Group blog. This is the place where we will document and reflect on each semester's meetings and events.

The NEW MEDIA WORKING GROUP invites graduate students and faculty from multiple departments to collaborate around a shared interest in the social, political, aesthetic, and philosophical implications of digital media. We will meet twice each month--once to discuss readings and share work, and once to attend an event or exhibition in the Bay Area.

Organizers: Irene Chien (Film & New Media), Brooke Belisle (Rhetoric & Film)
Sponsored by the UC Berkeley Townsend Center for the Humanities