The UC New Media Directory provides a guide to new media researchers and programs in the University of California system, which has invested strategically in this area. (This site is currently under construction. It is managed by the Transliteracies Project, a UC Multi-campus Research Group.)

UC Berkeley Center for New Media starts up

“Our Goal: To understand the full philosophical, aesthetic, practical and historical significance of the information-age transformations in which we are now immersed, and to place our institution of liberal education at the center of this cultural and technological revolution so we can inform and help direct the design of future media.”

Transliteracies Project’s History of Reading Group holds workshop/colloquium.

Presenters include Giles Bergel, Robin Chin, Lisa Gitelman, Mark Goble, James Kearney, Alan Liu, Paula McDowell, Joshua Neves, Carol Braun Pasternack, Clifford Siskin, Lisa Swanstrom, Alison Walker, William Warner.

Paul Nadal is a doctoral student in the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkeley working on Asia-Pacific cultural studies, literature, and film. Paul holds a B.A. in English and Ethnic Studies from the University of Washington, an M.A. in Asian American Studies from UCLA, and has studied at the University of the Philippines and Duke University’s Literature Program. One of his current projects includes research on queer aesthetics within the digital filmmaking movement in contemporary Philippine cinema, which is part of his broader concerns around sexuality, postcoloniality, and globalization

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Renee Hudson received her BA in English at Stanford University and is currently a PhD student in English at UCLA. She specializes in twentieth century American literature. Her research interests include media theory, terrorism, and political violence.

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Todd Presner is Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Jewish Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. His research focuses on European intellectual history, the history of media, visual culture, digital humanities, and cultural geography. He is the author of two books: The first, Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (Columbia University Press, 2007), maps German-Jewish intellectual history onto the development of the railway system; the second, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (Routledge, 2007), analyzes the aesthetic dimensions of the strong Jewish body. His recent articles have appeared in PMLA, Modernism/Modernity, German Politics and Society, Telos, and Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch.

He is the founder and director of two digital mapping projects that utilize GIS to explore the layered cultural histories of city spaces: Hypermedia Berlin (an interactive, web-based research tool and collaborative authoring environment for analyzing the cultural, architectural, and urban history of Berlin) and HyperCities, a dynamic platform for linking physical space with geo-temporal information. His current research focus on the development of the geo-spatial web, augmented reality, issues of temporality and GIS, and the technical media that enable visualizations of complex city spaces.

At UCLA, he directs an initiative called “Media, Technology, and Culture,” which is charged with creating new intellectual tools, pedagogical and curricular practices, research methodologies, and disciplinary paradigms for the humanities in the 21st century. He is also the Chair of the Center for Digital Humanities Faculty Advisory Committee.
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Sven Spieker is the editor of ARTMargins, an online journal devoted to the visual arts and aesthetic theory in Eastern and Central Europe. At UCSB he specializes in European modernism, with an emphasis on the Eastern European avant-gardes, postwar and contemporary literature and art (especially in Eastern and Central Europe), and media history. Spieker’s recent graduate seminars have included a seminar on the digital image at the intersection of art and science. In 2005, Spieker organized a two-day conference devoted to the same issue at UCSB’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. Spieker is the editor of a collection of essays on the uses of the administrative bureaucracy and its media in art and literature (Leidenschaften der Bürokratie: Kultur- und Mediengeschichte im Archiv. Berlin, 2004). His most recent publication is The Big Archive. The Birth of Modernism from the Spirit of the Bureaucracy (forthcoming from the MIT Press, 2008). The book deals with analogue archives in art and science, mapping a conceptual field that allows us to say with greater precision where the boundary between analogue and digital archives might fall. For more information, visit Spieker’s web page. (more…)

Seth Forrest is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of California, Davis where he teaches courses in literature and composition. His research interests cover: poetry and poetics from the British Romantics to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers; sound studies; modern and contemporary music; and media-assisted pedagogy. Seth’s dissertation engages new theories and methodologies of prosody by analyzing the poetry of Black Mountain writers Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Paul Blackburn and Larry Eigner. To that end, his dissertation considers tape recordings, especially the collections of UCSD’s Archive for New Poetry and the PennSound archives, as primary audiotexts. The project locates the Black Mountain School in a crucial moment in the history of sound and in the history of sound technology. It explores the distinction between orality and aurality and theorizes new approaches to “old media” such as typewriters, portable tape recorders and mimeography and the role of technologies on poetic style. He is also working on a series of essays on recorded poetry, acousmatics and the notion of “secondary orality”.

Seth has taught numerous courses for the Department of English, from lower-division and advanced composition to a seminar on sound in American poetry. His courses frequently experiment with new media tools such as hypertext, collaborative wiki assignments and podcasts along with good old fashioned close reading.

Seth also writes poetry and makes sound collages from samples and field recordings. He is an active volunteer at KDVS, the freeform community radio station located on the UC Davis campus. When he is not working, he is playing outside with his two boys, Leo and Miles. (more…)

A former web designer and programmer, David Shepard’s interests center around code as art form and gaming, but he has also done work on early radio. With Alison Walker and Jessica Pressman, he has published Media-Specific Analysis: Analyzing the Specificities of Digital Texts, a web project that explores the specificity of presenting information in various digital platforms. He is currently writing on games and authorship.

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Andrew Hageman is a doctoral student in the English Department at the University of California, Davis, pursuing his degree with a designated emphasis in Critical Theory, and he is a member of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). His current research focuses on re-envisioning ecocriticism in a posthumanities context by analyzing the intersections of ecology, technology, and ideology in literature and cinema. Of particular interest are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, cyberpunk and cybernetic fiction, Bruce Sterling and his “dot-green future,” and the films of David Lynch; and ever on the periphery, Chinese film & culture with an affinity for contemporary Shanghai. Recent conference presentations include “Floating Consciousness: Lou Ye’s Suzhou River as Posthumanist Tributary of Mainland Chinese Cinema” at the ACSS Conference in Shanghai 2005 (forthcoming in a volume on Chinese Eco-Cinema) and “Herzog and Treadwell Lost in the Grizzly Gaze: Grizzly Man and Eco-Cinema” at the 2006 Film & History Conference in Dallas. (more…)

Antoinette LaFarge has a particular interest in constructed realities, including computer-mediated performance, net-based improvisation, online role-playing games, avatar performance, playable media, nonlinear narrative, fictive art, and geofiction. Recent mixed-reality and intermedia performance works include Demotic (2003/2006), The Roman Forum Project (2003), Reading Frankenstein (2003), Virtual Live (2002), and The Roman Forum (2000). She has co-curated two groundbreaking exhibitions on computer games and art: “ALT+CTRL: A Festival of Independent and Alternative Games” (2003) and “SHIFT-CTRL: Computers, Games, and Art” (2000) at UCI’s Beall Center for Art and Technology. She is the founder and artistic director of the Plaintext Players, a pioneering online Internet performance troupe that has appeared at numerous international venues, including the 1997 Venice Biennale and documenta X. She is also the founder and director of the Museum of Forgery, a virtual institution dedicated to opening up the cultural dialogue around forgery and related practices such as appropriation. She is associate editor of the anthology Searching for Sebald (2007), and her critical writing and fiction have appeared in several books, including Benjamin’s Blind Spot (2001). Recent publications include “Media Commedia” (Leonardo, 2005), “25 Propositions on the Art of Networlds” (Anthology of Art, 2002), and “Marcel Duchamp and the Museum of Forgery” (Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, 2002). From 1995 to 1998 she served as Guest Editor of the annual Digital Salon issue of Leonardo. (more…)