Fall 2009 Schedule / Next Meeting 10/7

Thanks to all of you who have helped to identify speakers to bring to our working group, books to purchase for our library, and topics for future sessions! Amazingly, the fall semester's meetings have largely fallen into place and we're already spilling over with ideas for Spring. Special thanks to David Holstius and Ryan Shaw for bringing Carl and Dilan into our orbit.

Our next meeting will be October 7th. All meetings will take place in the BCNM Commons (340 Moffitt).

Wednesday 10/7, 3-4:30
Discuss McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto (2004) and Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967). Wark is Chair of Culture and Media at the Eugene Lang College of The New School and part of The New School for Social Research. In A Hacker Manifesto, Wark wields both Deleuze and Debord in relation to the issues of property, production, and information commodification in our era of globalized digital media. Championing the rise of a new hacker class, Wark takes on by now well-rehearsed debates over intellectual property and digital divides using Debord's aphoristic, French Marxist style.

From the Debord, we'll read sections I, II, and VIII ("Separation Perfected," "The Commodity as Spectacle," and "Negation and Consumption in the Cultural Sphere"). From the Wark, we'll read "Abstraction," "Class," "Education," "Hacking," "Information," "Revolt," and "Vector." Chapters will be scanned and posted at http://nmwg.notlong.com within the next couple of days.

Thursday 10/29, 4-5:30 (subject to change)
Guest Speaker: Carl DiSalvo
DiSalvo has worked at the intersection of design, technology and politics since 2000. From 2000 – 2005 he was a member of the tactical media collective Carbon Defense League, which engaged in designing software for activists, hacking electronics and information systems, and orchestrating oppositional media events to prompt public debate. In 2006 he received a Ph.D. in Design from Carnegie Mellon University. From 2006 – 2007 he was a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University with joint appointments in the Studio for Creative Inquiry and the Center for the Arts in Society, where he conducted scholarly and applied research into the use of robotics and sensing technologies in community contexts. In 2006 he also co-founded DeepLocal, a software and design consultancy that provides information design and location-based services to advocacy, journalism and municipal organizations. Since 2007 he has been an assistant professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Wednesday 11/4, 3-4:30
**Our FIRST NMWG Tech Seminar**
Web Architecture Basics
Ryan Shaw, Ph.D. candidate, School of Information

Ryan will offer a conveniently condensed portion of his iSchool 190 course on Web Architecture and Information Management. That course focuses on understanding the Web as an information system, and how to use it for information management for personal and shared information. The Web is an open and constantly evolving system which can make it hard to understand how the different parts of the landscape fit together. This session will provide an overview of the Web as a whole, and how the individual parts fit together.

Wednesday 11/18, 3-4:30
TBA

Wednesday 12/2, 3-4:30
Guest Speaker: Dilan Mahendran, Ph.D. candidate, School of Information
Race and Computation

Dilan Mahendran is a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley's School of Information and a BCNM DE student. His academic areas of interest lie in Race Critical Theory, Postcolonial Studies, Philosophy of Technology, Philosophical Anthropology, and Phenomenology. He is also interested in the methodological problems of positivism and naturalism in technology studies and issues of constructivism in the social study of science and technology. Dilan's research areas are centered around the impact of digital technology in hip-hop music making. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork at the DJ Project, a hip-hop music production after-school program in the Mission district of San Francisco and in East Oakland, California. Dilan received his BA in Anthropology from Northeastern University and his MS from the School of Information, UC Berkeley.

For next semester, we're looking at basing sessions around the work of and visits by Erin Manning (Relationscapes; Concordia University, Montreal) and Frances Dyson (Sounding New Media:Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture; UC Davis Technocultural Studies). More to come!

http://ucbnewmedia.blogspot.com/
http://nmwg.notlong.com/