The Art Technology & Culture Colloquium at UCSC has been established as a partner to the ATC at UC Berkeley, an internationally known forum for presenting new ideas that challenge conventional wisdom about technology and culture. The ATC at UCSC will presents artists, writers, curators, and scholars who consider contemporary issues at the intersection of aesthetic expression, emerging technologies, and cultural history, from a critical perspective.

ATC@UCSC lectures, Winter 2008

ATC@UCSC joins the Department of Art and the Digital Arts and New Media MFA program in hosting a series of special lectures by artists Pamela Z (tuesday, Feb. 5), Jim Campbell (tuesday, Feb 26), and Golan Levin (thursday, March 6).

All winter series lectures are held at 6:15PM
at Oakes College, Room 105.

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ATC@UCSC lectures, Fall 2007
Tuesdays at 7:30 pm
Communications Building, Studio C
Free and open to the Public

ATC at UCSC will launch its Tuesday night lecture series in Fall 07 with talks by Geert Lovink (October 30) and Erkki Hutamo (November 6).

October 30, 2007
Geert Lovink
New Media Arts at the Crossroads
The emerging new media arts genre is in a crisis. Not that 'new media' are on their way out. What we're talking about here is a 'luxury' problem: in what direction should this emerging art form grow futher? After an initial period in which time and again the question "what is new media" was raised, we have now moved to a second phase, in which large parts of the population have become familiar with multimedia, cell phones and the Internet. However, new media arts still operates in a self-referential ghetto, dominated by techno-fetishism. In the meanwhile, the world at large has moved from utopian promises about virtual reality and cyberspace to a culture of massive use. Taking this 'democratization' of new technologies in mind, what are the implications of this shift for the 'electronic arts' branch? Should new media artists and their (few) institutions seek collaboration and integration with the museum and gallery art? The 'contemporary arts' market is booming, but new media seems not to be part of it. Should new media remain a seperate category, with its own festivals and exhibitions, or be integrated into the broader 'contemporary arts'? Or should we rather further institutionalize the new media discipline?

Geert Lovink (NL/AUS) is a media theorist and activist, Internet critic and author of Dark Fiber, Uncanny Networks, My First Recession and Zero Comments. He worked on various media projects in Eastern Europe and India. He is a member of the Adilkno collective and co-founder of Internet projects such as The Digital City, Nettime, Fibreculture and Incommunicado. He is founder and director of the Institute of Network Cultures, and professor at Interactive Media (Hogeschool van Amsterdam). In 2005-2006 he was a fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study.


November 6, 2007
Erkki Huhtamo
Urban Gigantology: An Archaeology of the Public Screen
This lecture develops a media-archaeology of the large screen, contributing to our understanding of the formation and underpinnings of the society of spectacle. The current discussion about giant screens in public places often bypasses the simple fact that such displays have not always been with us. Where did they come from, when, and under what kind of cultural conditions? This lecture extends Huhtamo’s ideas about screenology into an archaeology of large public screens. It focuses mainly on their incubation era in the nineteenth century, identifying cultural formations and parallels that contributed to their emergence, taking both material and discursive factors into consideration. The discussion also goes beyond the frame, so to speak, to include phenomena like public fireworks, son et lumière presentations and sky signs, i.e. displays created for the skies by hot-air balloons, light cannons and eventually by airplanes. Even before the nineteenth century, fireworks were used for political, informational and recreational purposes that anticipated some of the future roles of giant screens, as well as their inter-relations.

Erkki Huhtamo is a media archaeologist, writer, and exhibition curator. Born in Helsinki, Finland in 1958, he works currently as Professor of Media History and Theory at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Department of Design | Media Arts. He has published extensively on media archaeology and media arts, lectured worldwide, created television programs and curated media art exhibitions. In the past few years, his research has dealt with topics like peep media, Marcel Duchamp’s optical experiments, the archaeology of the screen, and the emergence of mobile media. He is currently working on two books, one about the 19th century moving panorama (University of California Press), and the other on the archaeology of interactivity.