April 9, 2007
Remediating Event
From the UC French Dept. email list:
My name is Minh-Khue Bui and I am part of the BAM/PFA Student Committee.
This Wednesday, April 11, the Committee is presenting their last event of
the school year, Cine/Spin. It is a performance that fuses french cinema
with live music and if you think it would interest those in the French
Department (faculty and students), I would greatly appreciate it if you
could forward this email to them. The details of the event are as
follows:On Wednesday, April 11, at 8 p.m., join us for an entirely new event where
we invite Cal student DJs to mix live to classic film from the early
twentieth-century.The film is Jean Vigo’s “Zero for Conduct” (Zero de Conduite), an
irreverant story of student rebellion at an oppressive boarding school.
The DJs are four Cal students we’ve invited to spin the film a whole new
contemporary soundtrack.Stick around after the screening for our After School Special, with food,
DJs, and prizes for best prep school get-up.Cine/Spin
Wednesday, April 11, 8 p.m.
Pacific Film Archive Theater
2575 Bancroft Way (up the stairs opposite Urban Outfitters)Admission:
General $8
Cal students $4Stick around for our After School Special
* Picture Day * Snack Time * DJsDress:
Prizes for best PREP SCHOOL CHIC (think blazers, knee socks, oxfords, ties
… )Brought to you by the BAM/PFA Student Committee, the Pacific Film Archive,
and KALX FM. With special guests UC Berkeley Jazz Ambassadorial Quintet.Sponsored by Bows & Arrows
February 18, 2007
Anthropologist Does Web 2.0 on YouTube
Anthropologist Michael Wesch and his Digital Ethnography lab have made an interesting video on Web 2.0. I count it among the “avant gardist” commentary out there about information technology: everything is new. But watch it. It’s worth the four minutes and 31 seconds, and has gotten a good bit of attention.
February 17, 2007
Disciplining Debt
An article today in the New York Times about people using blogs as a means to economic discipline. I found it fascinating on many levels… reactions?
February 14, 2007
Across Media at the de Young
A few days ago, I visited the de Young in San Francisco to see “Charles Sheeler: Across Media,” a new exhibition of Sheeler’s work. “Across Media” is not a traditional retrospective. Instead, it focuses on the relationships between the different media central to Sheeler’s art—photography, film, drawing, printmaking, and painting. I find the exhibition fascinating not only because it offers an exciting approach to Sheeler’s art, but also because it constitutes an interesting starting-point for thinking about the contemporary.
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A 290 Lecture Worth the Catering
The 290 series earned back a bit of respect this week with the lecture on Monday by Julian Richards, who is a specialist on digital archaeology (the subject of his talk) at Archaeology Data Service (ADS). ADS is a service in the UK that makes available, in various forms and via various portals, archaeological data on the Web. OK, it might sound boring, but the guy struck me as exceptionally knowledgeable, and he’s thoughtfully engaged in one aspect of what I would call the institutionalization of digital knowledge production. A specific intellectual. So I asked him if he thought these new digitial resources and capabilities were doing more than making life easier for archaeological researchers: Were they also allowing them to ask different questions? He gave me his “short answer”: Yes, because graduate students would save so much time being able to reuse previous data, and wouldn’t have to spend so much time laboriously amassing new data, they would be freed up to take on different questions. Now, Richards didn’t give me the long answer, but this much made me reflect back on fieldwork in socio-cultural. If we could reuse earlier researchers fieldnotes, where would that get us? If our time were freed up–whether the time we’d spend getting access or learning a language, what would that free us to do? Could we even imagine anthropologists sharing fieldnotes? Digital technology invites collaborations but, again, does contemporary knowledge production invite collaboration? Read more »
February 8, 2007
BAM: Measure of Time
The rain today made me melancholy, so I decided to walk down to the Berkeley Art Museum in search of some color (I was hoping for orange). I came across an exhibit that I wish I had known about during our collaboration on “the contemporary” last semester, Measure of Time (I hadn’t been to BAM in quite a while, I guess this exhibit has been there since 2/2006). I was particularly struck by the disaccord between two pieces: Sol LeWitt’s “A sphere lit from the top, four sides, and all their combinations” (2004) and Shirley Shor’s “Landslide” (2004).
Matmos on the Re-Dematerialization of the Art Object
Continuing our discussion from last semester, thinking about both textual and musical form, Matmos, a local (SF) post-rock band will be “speaking” as part of the 10th Anniversary Bash for the Art, Technology and Culture Colloquium
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January 22, 2007
Take a look at “The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age”
It is the title of an online draft of a MacArthur Foundation Occasional Paper on Digital Media and Learning, posted by Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg. They are requesting comments, but actually going a step farther by presenting it as the start of a piece of collaborative writing. I know them from the intensive seminar on new ways of think about and with technology that I took this summer though UCHRI. I think they are making a very genuine effort to think in new ways, and that what they are doing connects with what we are doing. Anyone can comment individually of course, or we could collaboratively draft some feedback if there’s group interest.