New Media Working Group 1st Meeting Wednesday Septmber 1st!

Welcome (back) to the 2010-2011 academic year! We'll hold our
first meeting this coming Wednesday, September 1 in the Berkeley Center for
New Media Commons (340 Moffitt, just outside the Free Speech Movement Cafe)
at 10 AM.
This is a chance for all of us to meet up, catch up, introduce
new faces, and plan out what we would like to do with the rest of the
semester.
We will have a short list of ideas for what we could do
throughout the semester, but we hope to start interdisciplinary
conversations that push us in new directions.

Bagels, juice, and vegan(!)
cinnamon rolls will be provided!

Please feel free to contact me at iramos@berkeley.edu with any questions.

New NMWG leadership!

Thanks to everyone who came out to Eugene Thacker's talk on April 26th!  We think it was a fitting end to a productive year of discussion and reflection.

Alas, Kris Trujillo will be away all of next year, doing research at Harvard, and Alenda will be going into somewhat hermetic seclusion to work on her dissertation, but the wonderful news is that Ashley Ferro-Murray (TDPS), Ivan Ramos (TDPS), and David Holstius (Public Health) will be taking over the administration of the group and seeing to it that this wonderful group of people and ideas keeps flourishing.

If you have ideas for next year, please contact Ashley, Ivan, and David!

4/5: Nicolas Provost and Erin Manning

Our next meeting will feature guest Kevin Wynter, a Ph.D. student in Film Studies who is writing a dissertation on horror.  Kevin has obtained a copy of Belgian filmmaker and visual artist Nicolas Provost's new short film, Long Live the New Flesh, which premiered in December 2009 in Antwerp.  According to Kevin: "In Long Live the New Flesh, Nicolas Provost uses fragments of existing horror films to create a new film. The film uses a technique that makes the images seem to eat one other, as slowly the film rises to a visual climax of the horror experience. All ingredients that have made Nicolas Provost’s experimental art films into an international success are again present here."

Kevin will be screening the film, which is approximately 15 minutes long, and we are pairing the screening with a discussion of Chapter 3 from Erin Manning's Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (2007), entitled "Erring Toward Experience: Violence and Touch" (available electronically through our library system).  We might post additional material from Manning's Relationscapes (2009), as well, since Manning is speaking on 4/6 as well.

Date: Monday, April 5th
Time: 2:30-4
Location: 4th floor conference room, Sutardja Dai Hall (CITRIS)

Questions? Contact Alenda or Kris.

Next meeting Monday 3/1: Media Effects and Sociological Approaches to New Media

What are media effects? Do the media influence our attitudes, opinions, and even actions? Or are we active agents who interpret media content on our own terms and based on our existing knowledge and cultural background? How do new media technologies intersect with media effects and with society, in general? Join Jen Schradie, PhD student in the Department of Sociology, to discuss these issues in the context of Elihu Katz's “Lazarsfeld’s Map of Media Effects” and the Preface to the 2010 edition of Manuel Castell’s The Rise of the Network Society.

Date: Monday, March 1st
Time: 2:30 - 4:00
Location: 4th floor conference room, Sutardja Dai Hall (CITRIS building)