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 present 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 joins the Center for Information Technology in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM), and the Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program (DANM) at UC Santa Cruz in hosting a series of special lectures and workshops. This series has been generously sponsored by CITRIS, the BCNM, and the Office of the Dean of the Arts of UC Santa Cruz.
These lectures and workshops are free and open to the Public.
Parking:
Enter the Main Entrance to campus. Proceed directly to the parking kiosk on the right. Purchase a day permit. Ask for directions to the Music Recital Hall or Media Theater near the Performing and Studio Arts complex closest to the West campus entrance. The Digital Arts Research Center shares the parking lot with the Music Recital Hall. Map: UCSC campus: http://maps.ucsc.edu/
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Christine Van Assche
Digital Arts Research Center, The Dark Lab (Room 108)
4:00pm-6:00pm
Present Continuous Past(s): The Centre Pompidou New Media Collection
Christine Van Assche, Chief Curator and Curator of New Media at the Centre Georges Pompidou, will speak on the topic of contemporary art and new media. The Centre Pompidou New Media Collection was started 35 years ago and has since become one of the most important and internationally renowned collections of New Media works. The definition of New Media, its history, research, conservation, current trends, and presentation in France and around the world will be the subject of this lecture.
Bio: As Chief Curator and Curator of New Media at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Christine Van Assche has assembled a renowned collection of video works and multimedia installations that comprises more than 1,700 pieces. She has organized influential thematic exhibitions, including Passages de l’image (1990), with Catherine David and Raymond Bellour, and Sonic Process (2002), and a number of shows accompanied by monographic catalogues, on such artists as Thierry Kuntzel, Marcel Odenbach, Tony Oursler, Gary Hill, Stan Douglas, Mona Hatoum, Pierre Huyghe and Bruce Nauman. She is the author of Vidéo et après. La Collection du Musée national d’art moderne (1996), among other publications, and helped conceive the Web-based New Media Encyclopedia (www.newmedia-art.org).
Sponsors: We add special thanks to the Consulate General of France in San Francisco (Cultural Services) and ATC@Berkeley and the Office of the Dean of the UCSC Arts Division for their sponsorship of this talk.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Mary Flanagan
Digital Arts Research Center, The Dark Lab (Room 108)
4:00pm-6:00pm
Propositions from a Critical Play Perspective
If games always hold within them cultural beliefs, norms, and human values, how are designers to tackle the vexing responsibility of designing digital games? In this talk, Flanagan examines the topics of games and values, games and art, the history of technology and games, and motivation. How does art practice inform designing for values? What pitfalls might designers face when making games for social change? Flanagan takes the audience through a number of propositions that uncover strengths and weakness of games as a medium for social change and revolutionary play.
Bio: Known for her theories on playculture, activist design, and critical play, Flanagan has achieved international acclaim for her novel interdisciplinary games, artwork, and theoretical writing, her commitment to theory/practice research, and contributions to social justice design arenas. She is particularly interested in issues of equity and authorship in technological environments, and reworking commonly understood paradigms to provide collective strategies for social change. This talk draws primarily on her work in the Values at Play project and in her 2009 book, Critical Play (MIT Press). Flanagan is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College.
http://www.maryflanagan.com/
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Anne Burdick
Digital Arts Research Center, The Dark Lab (Room 108)
4:00pm-6:00pm
Micro Mega Meta
Anne Burdick will present Micro Mega Meta, a design-driven inquiry into the future of humanities research and scholarly production. Through the creation of speculative environments and interfaces, her project aims to provide an alternative to the information environments envisioned through popular media and corporate promotions that tend to emphasize military, scientific, and business applications. This talk will share the first phase of this work which includes a future forecasting exercise for the Digital Humanities and Trina, part 1, a design fiction in the form of a pecha-kucha, co-created with author Janet Sarbanes.
Bio: Anne Burdick is the Chair of the Graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design. She is a regular participant in the international dialogue regarding the role of research in design and the role of design in the Digital Humanities. Burdick designs experimental text projects in diverse media, for which she has garnered recognition, from winning the prestigious Leipzig Award for book design to being nominated for a Webby Award for her work with interactive texts and electronic literature. For ten years she has been design editor of Electronic Book Review. She is currently developing electronic corpora with the Austrian Academy of Sciences and working on the book "Digital_Humanities" with Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Pressner and Jeffrey Schnapp for MIT Press. Burdick has designed books of literary/media criticism by authors such as Marshall McLuhan and N. Katherine Hayles. Her writing and design can be found in the Los Angeles Times, Eye Magazine and Electronic Book Review, among others, and her work is held in the permanent collections of both SFMOMA and MoMA. Burdick studied graphic design at both Art Center College of Design and San Diego State University prior to receiving a B.F.A. and M.F.A. in graphic design at California Institute of the Arts.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Douglas Repetto
Digital Arts Research Center, The Light Lab (Room 306)
4:00pm-6:00pm
Nearly Human
Much of my work involves puzzling over questions about human perception and knowledge, particularly as they relate to the creative activities of humans, animals, and machines. I will present four works that are representative of these questions: "Nearly Human (one billionth of a human brain)," "Fly Away (Not Going Very Far)," "foals," and "Molto Lento (with plant conductor)."
Bio: Douglas Irving Repetto is an artist and teacher. His work, including sculpture, installation, performance, recordings, and software is presented internationally. He is the founder of a number of art/community-oriented groups including dorkbot: people doing strange things with electricity, ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show, organism: making art with living systems, and the music-dsp mailing list and website. Douglas is Director of Research at the Columbia University Computer Music Center and lives in New York City with his wife, writer Amy Benson, and their young son Beals; two cute/bad cats, Pokey and Sneezy; and many plants.
http://music.columbia.edu/~douglas/portfolio/index.shtml
Friday, May 6, 2011
Steve Dietz
Digital Arts Research Center, The Dark Lab (Room 108)
Between Media and Architecture
What are new capabilities for a responsive environment on an urban scale, which are neither media affixed to architecture nor architecture with built-in media but a new hybrid, "in-between," connecting the limitless topography of the virtual and the site specificity of the physical?
http://danm.ucsc.edu/news_events/2011/05/may-6-atc-steve-dietz
This talk will be immediately followed by a reception as part of the 2011 DANM MFA Exhibition, Permutations
Bio: Steve Dietz is a serial platform creator. He is the Founder, President, and Artistic Director of Northern Lights.mn. He was the Founding Director of the 01SJ Biennial in 2006 and served as Artistic Director again in 2008 and 2010. He is the former Curator of New Media at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he founded the New Media Initiatives department in 1996, the online art Gallery 9 and digital art study collection. He also co-founded, with the Minneapolis Institute of Arts the award-winning educational site ArtsConnectEd, and the artist community site mnartists.org with the McKnight Foundation. Dietz founded one of the earliest, museum-based, independent new media programs at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1992, where he was founding Chief of Publications and New Media Initiatives and editor of the scholarly journal, American Art.
Dietz has organized and curated numerous contemporary and new media art exhibitions. He is editor of Public Address and speaks and writes extensively about new media. His interviews and writings have appeared in journals, exhibition catalogs and book publications. Many of his writings are online at http://www.yproductions.com/writing/. He has also taught about curating and digital art at California College of the Arts, Carleton College, the University of Minnesota, and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He is currently serving as artistic director for the inaugural Twin Cities Northern Spark nuit blanche in 2011, and for ReGeneration, to be presented by the New York Hall of Science in the summer of 2012.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Nicholas de Monchaux
Media Theater, 6:00pm-7:30pm
Fashioning Apollo: Spacesuits, Cities, and How to Dress for Tomorrow
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in July of 1969, they wore spacesuits made by Playtex: twenty-one layers of fabric, each with a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn for them by seamstresses whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles. This talk is the story of those spacesuits. It is a story of the Playtex Corporation's triumph over the military-industrial complex -- a victory of elegant softness over engineered hardness, of adaptation over cybernetics.
ATC@UCSC, in conjunction with the Art Technology and Culture Colloquium of the Berkeley Center for New Media, presents as part of the UCSC Division of the Arts Dean's Lecture Series on Creativity and Innovation.
Bio: Nicholas de Monchaux is an architect, urbanist, writer, and Assistant Professor of Architecture & Urban Design. de Monchaux received his B.A. in Architecture, from Yale University, and his Professional Degree (M.Arch.) from Princeton University in 1999. He has worked as a designer in noted architectural practices, including Michael Hopkins & Partners in London, and, until 2001, Diller + Scofidio in New York. From 2002 to the present he has been active as a visiting researcher at the Santa Fe Institute. And in 2005-2006, he was the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, National Air and Space Museum.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Natalie Jeremijenko
Digital Arts Research Center, Room 306, 4:00pm-5:30pm
Redesigning our Relationship to Natural Systems, Wrestling Rhinoceros Beetles, Launching the Urban Space Station, and Other Cross(x)Species Adventures
The Climate crisis has revealed a more insidious and widespread crisis: the crisis of agency, aka: what to do in the face of shared, uncertain threat and challenging our political agency, our cultural imagination and our scientific and economic understanding. This talk asks if we might respond, not only with serious concern, but if and how our pleasures and fascinations might become a force of social and environmental transformation.
Recent public experiments, including the Cross(x)Species Adventure club, exploring possible foods and food systems that not only lessen our collective negative effect, but (exquisite) foods that improve environmental health and augment biodiversity; xAirport: re-imagining flight and flight systems to reclaim the wonder of flight and explore a form of urban mobility that reconstructs natural systems; and other projects selected from a recent survey exhibition called BiodiverCITY, 47: important ideas and technologies for the urban future as they provide adventure, wonder and exploration. The projects posit that the work to re-imagine and redesign our relationship to natural systems, more-ever work that rebuilds urban ecologies, demands participatory platforms and wondrous engagement that are well suited to the irreducible complexity of socio-ecological systems and the challenging environmental issues we face. During the course of the lecture we will make some gentlemanly wagers on the possibilities and strategies for producing a bio-diverse, tasty and healthy urban future.
Bio: Named one of the inaugural top young innovators by MIT Technology Review, Natalie Jeremijenko directs the Environmental Health Clinic, and is an Associate Professor in the Visual Art Department, NYU and affiliated with the Computer Science Dept and Environmental Studies program. Previously she was on the Visual Arts faculty at UCSD, and Faculty of Engineering at Yale University. She came to NYU as a Global Distinguished Professor, was recently a visiting professor at Royal College of Art in London, and as a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Public Understanding of Science at Michigan State University. Her work was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial of American Art (also in 1997) and the Cooper Hewit Smithsonian Design Triennial 2006-7. In 2010 Neuberger Museum produced a solo exhibition surveying recent work, entitled Connected Environments, and another solo exhibition entitled X opened in November, 2010 at the University of Technology Sydney. Current exhibitions include: Alter Nature: Designing Nature, Designing Human Life, Owning Life at Z33 in Hasselt; ; EXPOSED Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870 at SFMOMA/TATE Modern; Certified Copy at the VERBEKE FOUNDATION; Eat Me! at Postmasters Gallery, New York and (Re)designing Nature @ Kuenstlerhaus Vienna in addition to the Mortality exhibition at Australian Center for Contemporary Art.