Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive - Podcast

Les Blank in Person --

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:47:06 PST

This podcast is a compilation of the audio recordings made during Les Blank's in person appearances at the Pacific Film Archive theater for the Summer 2012 series Always for Pleasure: The Films of Les Blank. In the following clips, Les Blank discusses his film career and several of his films including The Blues According to Lightnin Hopkins, A Well Spent Life, and Sprout Wings and Fly; as well as his transition to digital cinema with All in this Tea.
Duration: 0:20:00

Afterimage: The Films of Nicolas Pereda -- In Conversation: Nicolas Pereda and Robert Koehler

Tue, 4 Dec 2012 15:01:28 PST

Duration: 0:21:00

David Littlejohn on Burning Man -- Special Event

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 10:25:06 PST

Join journalist David Littlejohn, an avid and long-standing Burning Man attendee, for an illustrated exploration of the many artistic facets of the festival, which Littlejohn calls “one of the most imaginative and creative artistic resources in the country.”

Littlejohn, who taught journalism at UC Berkeley for thirty-five years, is the West Coast cultural correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. He has written and broadcast for KQED and PBS, and has written or edited fourteen books, ranging from Dr. Johnson: His Life in Letters (1965) to The Big One: A Story of San Francisco, published last year. Duration: 1:12:00

Barry McGee -- Graffiti: A History in Photographs with Jim Prigoff

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 10:23:25 PST

While the modern era of graffiti started in 1969 in Philadelphia and New York, writing on walls is as old as human existence. Join photographer Jim Prigoff, who has been documenting murals, graffiti, and street art for the past forty years, to learn about graffiti artists from the Bay Area and beyond—including Dream (RIP), Raevyn, NME, Katch One, Brett Cook, Chor Boogie, and SEEN—as well as the early work of Barry McGee. Duration: 1:04:00

Louise Mozingo and Richard Walker in Conversation -- 1991: The Oakland-Berkeley Fire Aftermath Photographs by Richard Misrach

Fri, 5 Oct 2012 14:27:58 PST

In the first of several public conversations inspired by the exhibition 1991: The Oakland-Berkeley Fire Aftermath, Photographs by Richard Misrach, UC Berkeley professors Louise Mozingo (Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning) and Richard Walker (Geography) consider the social-historical, economic, ecological, and environmental contexts of the 1991 Oakland-Berkeley fire.

Louise Mozingo’s research focuses on ecological and social processes in public landscapes, integrating work from many fields to produce a synthetic critical perspective of landscape architecture as a complex cultural artifact. Her articles and reviews have appeared in numerous journals and her most recent book is Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes. Richard Walker’s longtime focus on the geography of California incorporates economic geography, regional development, contemporary urbanism, environmental studies, and racial and class perspectives. He is currently working on his fifth book, The City at Bay: The Making of the San Francisco-Oakland Metropolis. Duration: 1:22:00

Desirée Holman: Heterotopias / MATRIX 238 -- Desirée Holman in Conversation with Sherry Turkle

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:26:33 PST

In a real-time face-to-face conversation, Desirée Holman and Sherry Turkle, founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and the Self and an expert on sociable robotics, consider the meanings and possibilities of virtual existence.

Sherry Turkle is a professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. She is the author of Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995, 1997) and Simulation and Its Discontents (2009), among other titles. As a pioneering thinker on the social and psychological effects of technology, she is a featured media commentator and has appeared on Nightline, Frontline, 20/20, and The Colbert Report. Duration: 1:17:00

17. Alfred Young -- Coil, Yellow Cab, Oil

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:13:11 PST

State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970 is supported by a grant from the Getty Foundation as part of the unprecedented collaborative initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980.

Additional support for State of Mind has been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. Support from Ms. Robin Wright and Mr. Ian Reeves has made possible the presentation of the pressured air work of Michael Asher. The catalog is supported in part by the Getty Foundation and by Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund.

State of Mind is co-organized by the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) and the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA). The exhibition is co-curated by Constance M. Lewallen, adjunct curator at BAM/PFA, and Karen Moss, adjunct curator at OCMA.

Significant funding for the OCMA presentation of State of Mind is provided by Dr. Rosalyn M. Laudati and Dr. James Pick.

The presentation of State of Mind at BAM/PFA is made possible in part by the continued support of the BAM/PFA Trustees. Duration: 0:06:00

16. Barbara T. Smith -- Field Piece, Light Watch, The Fisherman IS the Fish, Feed Me

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:10:16 PST

15. Martha Rosler -- Bringing the War Home, Body Beautiful, Budding Gourmet

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:07:53 PST

14. Linda Montano -- Chicken Dance: The Streets of San Francisco

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:05:07 PST

13. Tom Marioni -- One Second Sculpture, The Trip, Process Piece

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:00:59 PST

12. Fred Lonidier -- 29 Arrests

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:58:14 PST

11. Stephen Laub -- Relations

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:55:21 PST

10. Suzanne Lacy -- Anatomy Lessons

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:51:34 PST

9. Paul Kos -- Sound of Ice Melting

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:48:43 PST

8. Lynn Hershman -- Dante Hotel

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:45:55 PST

7. Doug Hall -- T.R. Uthco, 8 Gestures

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:42:58 PST

6. Charles Gaines -- Regression Series Drawings

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:39:48 PST

5. Lowell Darling -- Get Your MFA Friday

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:35:55 PST

4. Nancy Buchanan -- Hair Transplant

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:32:26 PST

3. Eleanor Antin -- 100 Boots, Representational Painting

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:26:39 PST

2. Adam II (the late Paul Cotton) -- Rex-Erection of the Mystical Body

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:21:30 PST

1. Constance M. Lewallen -- Curator’s Introduction

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:13:27 PST

Artist's Talk: Robert Warner -- Tables of Content: Ray Johnson and Robert Warner Bob Box Archive / MATRIX 241

Wed, 1 Feb 2012 17:37:16 PST

In conjunction with Bob Box Archive / MATRIX 241, collage artist Robert Warner illuminates the intriguing contents of the “Bob Boxes,” gifts to him from artist Ray Johnson. Duration: 0:11:00

Artist's Talk: Richard Misrach -- 1991: The Oakland-Berkeley Fire Aftermath Photographs by Richard Misrach

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 16:00:42 PST

Photographer Richard Misrach discusses the work on view in 1991: The Oakland-Berkeley Fire Aftermath, Photographs by Richard Misrach.

The Oakland-Berkeley Fire Aftermath photographs have shifted in their meaning over the past twenty years, from journalistic reportage to historical record. Visitors to the museum can participate in this recording of history by contributing their own recollections and reflections to a handmade book in the galleries, what Misrach calls an “elegy ledger,” that will join the photographs as part of the community’s collective memory of the 1991 firestorm and its aftermath.

Lucinda Barnes
Chief Curator and Director of Programs and Collections

The Oakland Museum of California’s presentation of 1991: The Oakland-Berkeley Fire Aftermath, Photographs by Richard Misrach is on view from October 15, 2011 through February 12, 2012. BAM/PFA members may view their presentation at no charge with proof of membership.

1991: The Oakland-Berkeley Fire Aftermath, Photographs by Richard Misrach is made possible by the generous support of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation and BAM/PFA members. Duration: 0:43:00

L@TE: Evangelista --

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 13:13:00 PST

Come out for an all-too-rare musical performance by the legendary Carla Bozulich. Bozulich has traveled the road of the working musician since being a teenage noise rocker in bands such as Neon Veins and Ethyl Meatplow. In the 1990s, she was the lead singer of and songwriter for (alongside guitarist and Scarnella bandmate Nels Cline) the popular Los Angeles alternative rock band Geraldine Fibbers. Meanwhile, she continued to collaborate with the likes of Mike Watt, Thurston Moore, Lydia Lunch, Christian Marclay, and even Willie Nelson. Since 2006, her project Evangelista, featuring a rotating cast of international musicians, has released three staggering albums on Constellation Records. The core Bay Area band will be gracing L@TE for the entirety of the night.
Programmed by George Chen
Photo by LissaIvy Tiegel
Video by Lisette Worster Duration: 0:00:00

L@TE: Sir Richard Bishop / Gerritt Wittmer and Paul Knowles --

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 13:03:16 PST

Tonight’s L@TE runs the gamut from electric guitar music to heavily noise-centered performance art. As Sun City Girls, Sir Richard Bishop, along with brother Alan Bishop and drummer Charles Gocher, traversed the punk- rock, world-music, and absurdist-theater scenes from the early 1980s until Gocher’s death in 2007. As a solo performer, Bishop’s exploratory and transcendent guitar playing has been documented on releases from Locust, Revenant, and Drag City. The Bay Area duo Gerritt Wittmer and Paul Knowles, who since 2009 have been making pieces together that combine elements of movement, sound, and light, will create a site-specific performance for L@TE. Their 2010 album Selfish was released on Wittmer’s Misanthropic Agenda label and the duo recently performed Illusion of Relevance at Les Urbaines festival in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Programmed by George Chen
Photo by Mark Sullo/Mike Shifle
Video by Lisette Worster
Duration: 0:04:00

L@TE: C. Spencer Yeh / David Horvitz --

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 12:53:59 PST

Join us for an evening of sonic exploration and social engagement with East Coast artists C. Spencer Yeh and David Horvitz. Brooklyn-based Yeh (who also performs under the long-running identity Burning Star Core) is a solo artist and improviser who uses violin, voice, and electronics. He has collaborated with Tony Conrad, New Humans with Vito Acconci, Thurston Moore, and Jandek, among many others. Yeh will be performing solo improvisations on violin and voice utilizing the open space of BAM/PFA’s Gallery B. Horvitz, also based in Brooklyn, is a photographer and performance artist whose activities include the 241543903 project, A Wikipedia Reader, and guided food tours. In the prankster tradition, he stages surprising interactions that replicate the online experience. His absurdist social-practice approach to art making will take full advantage of BAM/PFA and the L@TE audience.
Programmed by George Chen Duration: 0:02:00

L@TE: Rova Saxophone Quartet -- Larry Ochs, Jon Raskin, Bruce Ackley, and Steve Adams

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 14:58:31 PST

Rova Saxophone Quartet—Larry Ochs, Jon Raskin, Bruce Ackley, and Steve Adams—explores the synthesis of composition and collective improvisation, creating exciting, genre-bending music that challenges and inspires its audiences. Rova is one of the longest-standing groups in the new music movement, with roots in post-bop, free jazz, avant-rock, and twentieth-century new music, and draws inspiration from the visual arts and from the traditional and popular music styles of Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States. Rova will work with Gallery B’s intriguing acoustic properties to create a fascinating event exploring the concept of sound in space.
Duration: 0:02:00

Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage
Curators' Gallery Talk --

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 9:58:49 PST

Exhibition co-curators Josef Helfenstein and Isabel Schulz lead an insightful discussion of Schwitters’s groundbreaking and influential collages, assemblages, and sculptures as well as the full-scale reconstruction of the extraordinary Merzbau. Helfenstein, an expert on Paul Klee, is the director of the Menil Collection; Schulz, the co-editor of Schwitters’s catalog raisonné, is curator of the Kurt Schwitters Archive at the Sprengel Museum, Hannover. Duration: 0:04:00

Artist’s Talk: Desirée Holman with Dena Beard -- Desirée Holman: Heterotopias / MATRIX 238

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 12:52:08 PST

Artist Desirée Holman and Curatorial Assistant Dena Beard discuss the work of Desirée Holman and the exhibit Heterotopias, on view from June 26, 2011 to September 18, 2011 Duration: 0:46:00

Create; Artists' Panel -- Andres Cisneros-Galindo, Paul Moshammer, and Tara Tucker with Matthew Higgs and Lawrence Rinder

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 12:25:53 PST

In a discussion moderated by Create curator and BAM/PFA director Lawrence Rinder, staff artists Andres Cisneros-Galindo (NIAD Art Center), Paul Moshammer (Creativity Explored) and Tara Tucker (Creative Growth)—all of whom practice and exhibit professionally in the Bay Area and beyond—talk about the dynamic of mutual influence in these studios and its effect on their own work. Matthew Higgs, director and chief curator of White Columns in New York and longtime collaborator with Creative Growth, addresses the wider artistic influence of NIAD Art Center, Creativity Explored, and Creative Growth artists. Duration: 1:28:00

Create -- Create; Community Open House

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 14:14:42 PST

On May 17th, BAM/PFA hosted an open house celebrating Create artists and staff from Creativity Explored, Creative Growth Art Center, and NIAD Art Center.

About the exhibition:
Open from May 11, 2011 through September 25, 2011, Create presents work made at three pioneering centers for artists with developmental disabilities, Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, San Francisco's Creativity Explored, and NIAD Art Center in Richmond. The artists in this exhibition possess the level of talent, independence, and depth of feeling that makes the most powerful art possible.

More information can be found about this exhibition here:
http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/create Duration: 0:02:00

Lisa Iwamoto -- Adaptations

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 15:57:29 PST

In architecture practice, "research" is conducted as a form of applied design. It is not fixed, scientific or determinative, but experimental and multivalent. At the same time, a building or architectural project must stand alone. This talk describes our work as open ended research into conditions of architecture including geometry, fabrication technology, structure, material and environment through "case studies" of our design projects. Work at two distinct scales are discussed - one-to-one scale material exploration, and larger building and city scale hypothetical designs. Duration: 1:06:00

Jose Alvarez -- Surfaces of Constant Simultaneity

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 15:07:11 PST

Jose Alvarez guides us through his own personal journey of investigation into the realms of consciousness, mysticism, spirituality, magic, shamanism, space exploration, and paranormal phenomena. Utilizing the concept in theoretical astrophysics of parallel universes and space as a continuum membrane with no beginning or end, Alvarez places his cast of characters as a stand-in for the strong human desire for knowledge and transformation and his continued visual inquiry into the realms of the fantastic and the philosophical. Duration: 0:17:00

Leo Villareal -- Complex Simplicity: Investigating the Medium of Light

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 13:30:29 PST

Leo Villareal discusses the unique journey that has taken him from a childhood in West Texas, to frankenstinean experiments in the industrial wastelands of late 80's New Haven, to work in virtual reality at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. A summer internship at Interval Research in Palo Alto in 1994 brought Villareal to the west coast and introduced him to pioneers in the fields of technology and art. Experiences in the Black Rock Desert shifted his practice completely, revealing to the artist the power and potency of small amounts of information and introducing him to his primary medium, sequenced light. Villareal continues to bring the inanimate to life and find beauty in simple things.

In this talk, Villareal questions the constant race for more megapixels and higher resolution we find ourselves in, asking: Is more better? What strategies can be used to repurpose media technologies? What happens when you add computation to minimalism and abstraction? Duration: 0:51:00

Anne Walsh and Chris Kubick -- Conversing, Considering, Condensing, Conjuring: 7 Years of Collaboration

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 13:24:19 PST

Concatenating, Condensing, Conflating, Confounding, Considering, Contaminating, Contemplating, Conversing, and Conjuring: these are some of the means and ways we employ in our art work. Often, but not always, these technologies employ language, pictures, and sound. Computers are sometimes involved. So are cameras, psychics, magicians, librarians, film sound effects designers and balloon sculptors. Our art practice begins from a shared love of the spoken word, the recorded human voice, unreliable witnesses, true believers, eccentric craftspeople, libraries and museums of all kinds. We are interested in translation, particularly the questions which arise when different systems of knowing and understanding collide. These collisions are the substance and subject of our work. In our lecture, we present examples from three projects created over the past 7 years: Art After Death, The Sound Library, and (the new project which is as yet untitled but which could be called History Lessons). Duration: 1:14:00

Jeffrey Inaba -- Architectural Communication in the Knowledge Economy

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 13:17:10 PST

As cities become knowledge-intensive economies, urban planning requires them to weigh the importance of inherently dissimilar activities, such as digital vs physical and economic vs non-economic. Architectural plans with annotated drawings, renderings, animations, and photographs can provide insight into urban conditions. These plans are a valuable medium for assessing and conceptualizing knowledge-based urban development – perhaps all the more so because of its rhetorical potential.

Of course, representing the city isn’t an exercise in objective analysis; it’s one of architectural communication where a point of view is expressed through graphic arguments, and which hopefully makes its case using effective rhetorical means to communicate its public consequences. The presentation will include studies of contemporary urban relationships with projects such as: DIY power kits, patterns of philanthropic giving, the weather, gum, war treaties, and the urbanism of banks. Duration: 0:52:00

Mark Tribe -- Mediation, Performance, and the Public Sphere

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 13:12:07 PST

In 1968, protesters outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago chanted “The whole world is watching,” and shortly thereafter their images appeared on the evening news. These days, protesters bring their own cameras and post their clips on YouTube. Has participatory media effected a structural transformation of the public sphere? How have media technologies and practices changed the roles of public space, performance, and the human body in politics? How have new forms of mediation and distribution altered the ways in which history is produced and experienced?

Mark Tribe discusses recent work and current projects, including a video archive of police surveillance of activists, a performance/installation in which guitarists play covers of "Sweet Child O' Mine," and reenactments of Vietnam-era protest speeches. Duration: 0:51:00

Joe McKay -- Something Besides Super Monkey Ball

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 12:59:28 PST

This talk features artworks that question our culture's love affair with technology. Central to this is a presentation of BigTime, a new time keeping system that uses an iPhone app and a website to reconnect us with the planet and the true nature of time. Far from a productivity tool, living by BigTime can be an annoying pain in the butt, yet, (like a booster shot) it's an important one. BigTime is currently hosted by the Berkeley Art Museum (http://openmuseum.berkeley.edu/media/files/Joe_McKay/50). Duration: 0:20:00

Natalie Jeremijenko -- Redesigning our relationship to natural systems, wrestling rhinoceros beetles, launching the Urban Space Station and other Cross(x)Species Adventures

Wed, 9 Feb 2011 15:00:02 PST

* This lecture is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Stephen Wilson, media artist and professor SFSU, who spoke in the series in 2002 and passed away last week. *

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. Duration: 0:58:00

Eva Hesse: Studiowork -- Lecture by Briony Fer

Tue, 1 Feb 2011 13:51:14 PST

Exhibition co-curator Briony Fer is Professor of History of Art at University College London and has published extensively on twentieth-century and contemporary art. She is the author of The Infinite Line: Re-making Art After Modernism and On Abstract Art. In this lecture she addresses Eva Hesse’s studioworks in relation to the artist’s overall body of work and contemporary sculpture. Duration: 0:56:00

Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area -- Book Launch Event

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 14:59:06 PST

To celebrate the publication of the Pacific Film Archive's first book, Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000, presented an evening of light shows, multiple projection pieces, and film loops by Craig Baldwin, Gibbs Chapman, Scott Stark and the Overdub Club (Thad Povey, Lucio Menegon, Suki' O'Kane, and Alfonso Alvarez), as well as other cinema psychedelica. Film and videomakers discussed in the book, as well as writers who contributed to it, joined the festivities, which continued throughout the weekend with screenings at the PFA Theater. Duration: 0:04:00

Hauntology -- Hallowen L@TE Event

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 14:47:37 PST

At BAM/PFA's October 29th L@TE event, we started off the Halloween weekend with an evening of hauntological sounds, spirited discussions, and phantasmagorical projections. The spectral sounds of Portland-based Indignant Senility, and Bay-area based artists Barn Owl, Jim Haynes, and Marielle Jakobsons provide a haunting sonic backdrop for multiple film, slide, and video projections, many from the PFA Collection, plus a ghostly procession by the Theater for Charity, and other tricks and treats.

This event was programmed in conjunction with the exhibition Hauntology. The L@TE event is preceded at 6 p.m. by an interdisciplinary introduction to the exhibition, also in Gallery B. Poet and writer David Brazil, Stanford professor of English Terry Castle, and artist and web designer Josh On explore the implications of hauntology—how the past is haunted by both the present and the future—for visual art and beyond. Duration: 0:02:00

Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area -- Procession of the Image Processors

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 16:40:19 PST

Artists in Person
Live Video Synthesis Performances by Skip Sweeney (Feedback), and Warner Jepson and Robert Pacelli (Templeton Mixer)

Advances in the media arts occur when the challenge of realizing an image requires another medium’s uncanny capabilities: film chains bollixed, optical printers nudged, the merger of chemistry and electronics. Hy Hirsh, an early adopter, wedded buoyant optical printing with sensuous oscilloscope waveforms; the shimmering result was Divertissement Rococo. Loren Sears, a remarkable tinkerer, has an equal interest in 24 frames and 60 hertz. Loops is an unrelenting barrage of pulsing color, transferred from 16mm and reconstituted as video. Scott Bartlett (with an able assist from Tom DeWitt) took a bounty of film loops and ran them through video colorizers and keyers to achieve the legendary Offon, a spiritual journey centered on the body. Philip Greene’s Golden Gate (1968) takes a similar tack, decentering film-based images through a film chain, for a painterly portrait with a decidedly anti-war theme. With Illuminated Music #1, Stephen Beck shows off the well-modulated movements possible with a synthesizer that needs no external image source. Later, Beck would collaborate with Jordan Belson on the “videofilm” Cycles, using his Direct Video Synthesizer. This alchemical allegory follows particles as they rise up through cyclical transformations, suggesting the sustaining elements, earth, air, fire, water.

To bracket the evening, we’ll have two performances, the first by Skip Sweeney, feedback fanatic from the pioneering Video Free America. Sweeney will show excerpts from early seventies feedback tapes such as Koto Feedback and Moog Vidium, then demonstrate a brand of feedback coaxed from digital tools. To close the evening, composer/imagemaker Warner Jepson will perform with syntho-sorcerer Robert Pacelli on the Templeton Mixer, an early image manipulator that will bathe you in showers of sinuous shape-shifting.

—Steve Seid
Duration: 0:11:00

Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area -- Stories Untold

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 16:35:58 PST

George Kuchar, Chip Lord, and Anne McGuire in Person

The satiric, sensual, and striking stories in this program represent some of the ways in which the tale can commingle with the telling to produce oddly original offspring. James Broughton’s allegorical romp features the eponymous enchanted “Bed” as a staging area for life’s cycles. Curt McDowell is not so enchanted with his return home in A Visit to Indiana. Home movies from the heartland play off his droll disappointment. Ever pent-up, George Kuchar’s prodigiously purple A Reason to Live pits meteorological excess against the swelling desires of a man in heat and his numerous love objects. The pressure to perform is at the base of Max Almy’s Deadline, a concise yet effects-laden lamentation. Easy Living never is in Chip Lord’s horrifically serene look at suburbia, using miniature toys to create a landscape of false tranquility. Scott Stark’s wryly postured I’ll Walk with God deploys airline emergency information cards to show how stewardesses have unwittingly ascended to a higher spiritual plane. Anne McGuire has the last word with All Smiles and Sadness, an unfolding soap opera in which its black-and-white characters jabber on in airy cliché until George Kuchar arrives to superheat the atmosphere.

—Steve Seid Duration: 1:16:00

Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area -- 1961-71

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 16:28:47 PST

Introduced by Peter Hutton and Other Artists in person.

Avant-garde, experimental film flourished during the sixties in the Bay Area, and scores of filmmakers relished freedom of expression. Often brazenly anti-establishment and always joyfully self-expressive, these films channeled the zeitgeist and expanded the possibilities of film as art. This program is a journey through these revelatory and rebellious years. Robert Nelson’s Oh Dem Watermelons lampoons racial stereotypes and revels in San Francisco’s anarchic spirit; Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley’s Schmeerguntz is a two-fisted assault on stereotypes of women. Lawrence Jordan’s Duo Concertantes uses old illustrations to create an elegant and wistful vision of longing; I Change I Am the Same by Alice Anne Parker Severson is an amusing contemplation on gender, while Bruce Baillie’s Valentin de las Sierras portrays small town Mexico, lovingly rendered through lush and finely orchestrated detail. Lenny Lipton’s Doggie Diner and Return of Doggie Diner satirizes and excels in formal, conceptual filmmaking and Peter Hutton’s July ’71 in San Francisco conveys sixties’ ideals through a series of beautiful, haunting tableaux.

—Steve Anker Duration: 0:47:00

Marjolijn Dijkman / MATRIX 234 -- Conversation: Michael Dear and Marjolijn Dijkman

Fri, 8 Oct 2010 14:46:23 PST

Exploring their overlapping interests in human geographies, emergent urbanisms, subjective mapping and expressive representations of place, urbanist Michael Dear and artist Marjolijn Dijkman chart an improvisational conversational course through this mutually compelling terrain.

Michael Dear is professor of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design. His current research in comparative urbanism includes consideration of the future of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Dear's books include From Chicago to L.A.: Making Sense of Urban Theory; Postborder City: Cultural Spaces of Bajalta California; and The Postmodern Urban Condition. His latest co-edited volume, entitled GeoHumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place, is forthcoming from Routledge. Duration: 1:24:00

Flowers of the Four Seasons: Ten Centuries of Art from the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture -- Conversation: Willa and George Tanabe on Japanese Religious Art

Fri, 8 Oct 2010 14:38:16 PST

Two noted scholars examine significant pieces of Japanese Buddhist art featured in the exhibition through the lens of both religious studies and art history. Engaging each other in discussion about diverse works—including painted and sculptural images of the bodhisattva Jizo, a humorous Zen monk in a tree, and an exquisite Nyoirin Kannon—George and Willa Tanabe plan a complementary, occasionally contentious, disquisition on the backgrounds, styles, and meanings of Japanese religious art.

George Tanabe is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Religion at the University of Hawai’i. He has written widely on Japanese religion, including co-authoring, with Ian Reader, Practically Religious: Worldly Benefits and the Common Religion of Japan. He also edits several important series on Japanese tradition and Buddhism.

Willa Tanabe, former Dean of the School of Hawaiian, Asian and Pacific Studies, is Professor Emerita in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Hawai’i. She has published extensively on images connected to the Lotus Sutra and has also curated exhibitions of woodblock prints, Japanese embroidery, and the sacred art of Mt. Kōya. The Tanabes are currently working on a guidebook to all of the Japanese Buddhist temples in Hawai’i. Duration: 1:26:00

Hauntology -- Hauntology, Curators' Tour

Thu, 7 Oct 2010 16:56:28 PST

Artist and musician Scott Hewicker and Director of the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive Lawrence Rinder in conversation with Kevin Killian, guest programmer.

This exhibition marks the first time that a museum has presented works of visual art within the framework of hauntology. Works by Luc Tuymans, Paul Sietsema, Carrie Mae Weems, Bruce Conner, Robert Gutierrez, Diane Arbus, Travis Collinson, Paul Schiek, Arnold Kemp, and others form loose groups in which one can discern various thematic concentrations: the enigma of place and placelessness, memorial and longing, transitional beings, displacement and disappearance, demonic manifestations, auras, elegies of nature, and the translucency of the psyche.

Scott and Lawrence are co-curators of the exhibition, Hauntology. On display at BAM/PFA though December 5, 2010. Duration: 0:41:00

Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area -- 1946-53 - Introduced by David Meltzer with Wilder Bentley II in Person

Thu, 7 Oct 2010 16:36:22 PST

David Meltzer is a San Francisco poet and author. Recent books include
David's Copy: Selected Poems; San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets; and the forthcoming When I Was a Poet.

The artist and poet Wilder Bentley II is featured in one of the portaits in Christopher Maclaine’s The End.

The first period of Bay Area experimental filmmaking coincided with Frank Stauffacher’s heavily influential Art in Cinema series, which between 1946 and 1953 focused on avant-garde film. Beginning with The Potted Psalm (1947), James Broughton and Sidney Peterson made several dramatic films that extended earlier surrealistic tendencies into new directions, and soon young artists such as Stauffacher himself, Harry Smith, and Sara Kathryn Arledge tried their hand at filmmaking. Working with minimal budgets and little tradition, each made extraordinary work that was infused with and reflected the moods and culture of the time. This program includes a sampling of Arledge’s rarely seen, pigment-applied abstract glass slides; Smith’s first painstaking abstract animations, #1-3, which used various processes directly onto 16mm film; Stauffacher’s ZigZag, a playful rhapsody on the rhythms and shapes of night lights in mid-century San Francisco; Sidney Peterson’s classroom-produced The Lead Shoes, a dark and witty retelling of classic tales of incest and patricide; and Beat visionary Christopher Maclaine’s manic and entirely original first film, The End, a series of intimate portraits that is also a chilling but hilarious social commentary.

—Steve Anker Duration: 0:47:00

Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area -- Landscape as Expression – Ernie Gehr and Lawrence Jordan in Person

Thu, 7 Oct 2010 16:28:46 PST

San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area offer an astonishing landscape that combines shifting and surprising natural visual qualities with a teeming urban culture. Crystalline light, undulating hills, mesmerizing fog, and a rugged shoreline captivate and become expressive parts of life. The area is a magnet for wanderers and those seeking something new and unexpected. Filmmakers, fascinated by the phenomena and energy of the place, have been drawn here almost since the inception of the medium. This program explores and reflects the wonder of this urban landscape, and includes A Trip Down Market Street, a time capsule that also presents a different consciousness than experienced on movie screens today; Dion Vigne’s ebullient North Beach, which revels in the colors and rhythms of Beat-era North Beach; and Chris Marker’s Junkopia, a contemplation of renegade sculptures erected off shore between cities. Michael Glawogger’s Street Noise tours Oakland’s San Pablo Avenue while Ernie Gehr’s Side/Walk/Shuttle provides a startling experience of San Francisco’s unpredictable skyline. Films by Lawrence Jordan, Bruce Baillie, Scott Stark, and Lynn Marie Kirby further explore the Bay Area’s cinematic character.
Duration: 1:11:00

Brent Green Performance --

Wed, 19 May 2010 15:40:15 PST

Artist Brent Green performs with Brendan Canty of Fugazi and Donna K on the opening evening of his MATRIX installation, Brent Green: Perpetual and furious refrain. The performance featured animated short films with live narration and improvised soundtracks. Duration: 0:42:00

Brent Green Interview --

Wed, 19 May 2010 15:29:59 PST

Sculptor and filmmaker Brent Green is perhaps one of the ultimate DIY practitioners. Green produces his own stop-motion animated movies; sculpts, draws, and paints the characters and backdrops; and often provides live narration and musical scores to accompany screenings. For his first feature-length film and his first film with live actors, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then, the artist built an entire house based on the home of a Louisville hardware clerk by the name of Leonard Wood. In this video Green talks about Gravity and describes the process of building the monolithic wax cylinder recorder that is the centerpiece of his MATRIX installation, Brent Green: Perpetual and furious refrain. Duration: 0:04:00

Lucinda Barnes on James Castle: A Retrospective -- (Closed-Captioned for the Hearing Impaired)

Thu, 13 May 2010 12:59:49 PST

BAM/PFA’s Chief Curator and Director of Programs and Collections Lucinda Barnes discusses the exhibition James Castle: A Retrospective. Her discussion is closed-captioned for the hearing impaired.

James Castle (1899–1977) was a prodigious artist who, without formal training, created a remarkable and vast body of work over the course of his life in rural Idaho. He was born profoundly deaf, and although as a child he attended the Idaho School for the Deaf and Blind, Castle did not learn to read, write, speak, sign, or lip-read, perhaps by choice. Other than his five years away at school, Castle lived within the circle of his immediate family, making artworks based on the scenes, surroundings, and imaginings of his daily life. Duration: 0:05:00

Lecture by Robert Storr on James Castle -- (Closed-Captioned for the Hearing Impaired)

Thu, 13 May 2010 12:26:42 PST

Professor Robert Storr has commented on many facets of James Castle’s work—its formal strength, material fragility, visual syntax, and abiding sense of place—as well as its location in the history of modern art. As an artist himself, he has a special regard for creative practice. In this major illustrated lecture, Storr considers multiple dimensions of Castle’s artistic production. The lecture is closed-captioned for the hearing-impaired.

Storr’s accomplishments span the art world; he is a painter, art historian, and critic as well as a prodigious writer about the theory and practice of art. As curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, he organized major exhibitions on the work of Elizabeth Murray, Max Beckmann, and Gerhard Richter, among others. He was the commissioner of the 2007 Venice Biennale, the first American invited to assume this role, and is currently dean of the Yale School of Art.

Cosponsored by the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley. Duration: 0:58:00

Ben Rubin, Artist, Ear Studio, New York -- What’s That Ticking Sound?

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:32:48 PST

Long-established forms of writing (and reading) are being radically transformed. The economics of transmission and distribution that have constrained and shaped journalism, fiction, and letters home from camp are being rescaled and inverted, recasting the role of text in our lives. Ben Rubin’s work inserts itself between authors and readers, obsessively pulverizing and re-synthesizing all manner of texts (Internet chat, The New York Times, novels, application source code, cosmic background noise, Shakespeare) to form new messages. Rubin presents current and recent projects, including Shakespeare Machine, Moveable Type, Listening Post, Dark Source, Terre Natale, and San José Semaphore. He also presents his latest project, a theatrical performance in collaboration with statistician Mark Hansen and Elevator Repair Service, a New York theater company. Duration: 1:13:00

¡Presente! Daniel Alarcón and Carlos Motta: Next-Generation Latin American Art and Literature -- Fernando Botero: The Abu Ghraib Series

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:10:04 PST

The social consequences of global and internal imbalances of power have long influenced the creative work of many Latin American artists and writers. How do contemporary practitioners relate to legacies of repression, resistance, and protest, and how do they consider social and political alternatives for the future in their work? Peruvian-born writer Daniel Alarcón and Colombian-born artist Carlos Motta discuss their recent and current projects with these questions in mind.

Daniel Alarcón won the 2008 Literary Award for Fiction from PEN USA for his novel Lost City Radio, and was a 2006 PEN/Hemingway Award Finalist for his collection War by Candlelight. He is associate editor of Etiqueta Negra, a magazine published in Lima, Peru, and has been a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for Latin American Studies. He is currently working on his first graphic novel.

Carlos Motta uses strategies from documentary film, journalism, and sociology to consider the effects of specific political events in photography, video, and installation projects. Recent works include The Immigrant Files: Democracy Is Not Dead, It Just Smells Funny and La Buena Vida (The Good Life). Motta was a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow and some of his current work is included in the Lyon Biennale. Duration: 1:37:00

Conversation: Gretchen Daily and Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle -- Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:16:21 PST

In this public conversation, Stanford-based ecologist Gretchen Daily and Human/Nature artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle share their ideas about value, ownership, biodiversity, the art world, and political economies of participation.

Gretchen Daily cofounded the Natural Capital Project in 2006. With projects in California, Hawaii, Tanzania, and China (so far), NCP works with governments and organizations to make environmental conservation economically attractive and commonplace worldwide.

For Human/Nature, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle made a film featuring the Mitsubishi saltworks, adjacent to the northern end of the El Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve in Mexico (also known as the Whale Sanctuary of El Vizcaíno). The film presents the tension between the ecological fragility of this site and the industrial development that threatens it. In his artistic practice, Manglano-Ovalle investigates diverse subjects such as technology, climate, and the global impact of social, political, environmental, and scientific systems, often working in partnership with technical experts across multiple disciplines. Duration: 1:45:00

Candice Breitz, Artist, Berlin -- From A to B and Back Again

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:20:42 PST

Should an art audience be suspicious of works of art that open themselves up to popular cultural content? Do explorations of screen life affirm or undermine the commodity structure of mainstream entertainment? Are copyleft strategies legitimate or objectionable? How is the artist’s relationship with the subjects that she kidnaps as found footage or those she films herself in studio settings mediated by the technological display formats? Candice Breitz fields such questions and speaks about her recent works, including Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon) and Mother, two multi-channel video installations featured in a monographic exhibition of her work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Duration: 1:45:00

Camille Utterback, Artist, San Francisco -- Luscious Complexity: Transcending the Doohickey

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:13:30 PST

How can an interactive artwork incorporate complexity without incurring frustration in participants? How can it be both clear enough to engage participants, and complex enough to reward continued interaction? Where is the sweet spot where complexity doesn’t confuse, but enthralls? Finally, why create interactive art anyway? Is the whole field of interactive art just an exploration of the doohickey? Or, is there something richly satisfying and culturally relevant to be found here? Artist and recent MacArthur Fellow Camille Utterback explores these questions as she discusses the evolution of her own interactive art practice. Duration: 1:22:00

Mark Hosler, Artist, Negativland -- Adventures in Art at the Edge of the Law

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:52:56 PST

Mark Hosler is a founding member of the group Negativland, which since 1980 has created records, video, radio, and live performance using appropriated sound, image, and text. Widely known for being sued for their U2 single, Negativland has released many CDs, gone on tours, and was the subject of San Francisco filmmaker Craig Baldwin’s 1995 feature film Sonic Outlaws. Hosler has been aggressively and publicly involved in advocating a significant reform of copyright laws. “Negativland isn’t just some group of merry pranksters; its art is about tearing apart and reassembling found images to create new ones, in an attempt to make social, political, and artistic statements. Hilarious and chilling” (The Onion).
Duration: 1:39:00

Gallery Talk by Peter Selz on Fernando Botero -- Fernando Botero: The Abu Ghraib Series

Mon, 5 Oct 2009 16:34:31 PST

Distinguished art historian Peter Selz, founding director emeritus of the UC Berkeley Art Museum, discusses Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib paintings in this informal presentation.

Selz has a longstanding commitment to the art of social and political protest, which took form most recently in his landmark publication Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond. The book traces the confluence of political agitation and passionately engaged art from the mid-twentieth century through responses to September 11 and the war in Iraq, and gave rise to the exhibition Visual Politics: The Art of Engagement, presented at the San Jose Museum of Art and at American University Museum in Washington, D.C.

A longtime admirer of Botero, Selz shares his singular breadth and depth of perspective as it illuminates the various meanings of Botero’s art of protest. Duration: 0:53:00

Fernando Botero and Lawrence Rinder in Conversation -- Fernando Botero: The Abu Ghraib Series

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 20:01:37 PST

In conversation with BAM/PFA Director Lawrence Rinder, Fernando Botero discusses the trajectory of his artistic practice, his aesthetics and influences, and the social and political role of art in Colombia, Latin America, and internationally. Duration: 1:06:00

Angelo Plessas -- NetArt: Three-Minute Artist Interview

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:34:07 PST

Artist Angelo Plessas discusses his art and inspiration for his NetArt exhibition on view at http://netart.berkeley.edu. Duration: 0:03:00

Conversation: Kurt Cuffey and Dario Robleto -- Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:32:11 PST

Reflecting on geologic time, human life, and the life of the planet, UC Berkeley glaciologist Kurt Cuffey and Human/Nature artist Dario Robleto share their observations about glaciers and their meanings, and consider intersections between artistic and scientific practice.

Kurt Cuffey, who teaches in UC Berkeley’s geography department, speaks in compelling terms about the earth’s great ice sheets, and how environmental change in the polar regions offers insights into a very deep past and a far-reaching future.

In his project for Human/Nature, Dario Robleto combined sound recordings of melting glaciers with sculptural elements reflecting human loss and mourning to focus on the glaciers’ inevitable disappearance. He has often incorporated the physical residue of sound recordings—vinyl records, audiotape—into sculptural forms that explore history, memory, nostalgia, and loss. With this project, Robleto has begun to contemplate “last sounds,” for example those of an extinct species or a dying language. Duration: 1:49:00

Galaxy: A Hundred or So Stars Visible to the Naked Eye -- Curator’s Tour

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:45:43 PST

Join BAM/PFA Director and Curator Lawrence Rinder on a special guided tour of
Galaxy: A Hundred or So Stars Visible to the Naked Eye. The constellation of works in Galaxy illuminates the Berkeley Art Museum collection and reflects its evolution. Included in the exhibition are pieces by major stars from Dürer and Rembrandt to Pollock and Warhol, as well as many less familiar lights. Duration: 0:08:00

Neighborhood Public Radio, Oakland / Chicago / San Diego -- 1/4 Watt of Pure Power: Experiments in the Dark Transmission Arts

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:33:01 PST

Neighborhood Public Radio (NPR) was founded in 2004 by multimedia artists and educators LeE Montgomery, Jon Brumit, and Michael Trigilio. Over the past five years, they have been dedicated to access in excess and a critique of the limited public radio options available in the United States. Since their first broadcast in January of 2004, they have acted as a traveling band of guerilla broadcasters and developed programming with communities around the world, taught people to build their own transmitters, experimented very publicly with transmission as an artistic medium in the Bay Area, and most recently managed to bring their original critique of National Public Radio to National Public Radio’s board members and airwaves. Recent experiments have included workshops on television transmitter building, and circuit bending with an ecological concern, as well as a four-month residency in a storefront on Madison Avenue in New York as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial. After a presentation of their history and some of their recent projects, in keeping with their collaborative process, they will ask the audience: What next?

Technical Note:
Due to sound recording issues, the first five minutes of the presentation and approximately ten minutes of the question-and-answer session have been edited out. Duration: 0:43:00

Joseph DeLappe, Artist, Reno, Nevada -- You’ll Never Walk Alone: Protest, Memory, and Reenactment

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:45:44 PST

In 2001 media artist Joseph DeLappe began a series of protests, interventions, and reenactments⎯hacktivist performances within computer games and online communities. Included in these is the controversial project “dead-in-iraq,” which he created to intervene in the highly popular, taxpayer-funded first-person shooter game produced by the Defense Department as a recruiting and marketing tool. DeLappe enters the America’s Army game with the moniker “dead-in-iraq,” drops his weapon, and in the ensuing virtual mayhem, is killed; hovering over his dead avatar, he proceeds to type the name, age, service branch, and date of death of each American military casualty from the war in Iraq. In this ongoing act of “memorial and protest” he has, to date, input more than 4,000 names of the 4,221 reported killed. The project has garnered both intense support and criticism from dedicated gamers, veterans, soldiers’ relatives, and others, while also receiving a level of media scrutiny that has propelled the ideas behind the project into the popular imagination.

Does this type of artistic intervention affect change? How does one creatively navigate the inherent conflicts between art and activism? How do creative individuals who seek to dissent, demonstrate, or otherwise participate in oppositional actions choose to function in our present media-saturated environment? DeLappe presents his ideas regarding art and activism in a discussion of “dead-in-iraq” and other recent works that creatively engage our contemporary geopolitical and technological context through interventionist strategies. Duration: 1:04:00

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Artists, NYC -- I’ll Replace You: Outsourcing Everyday Life

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:41:31 PST

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy’s multimedia artworks examine the genres and conventions of filmmaking, memory, and language. They are well known for constructing subjective databases of existing material and making fragmentary miniature film sets with lights, video cameras, and moving sculptural elements to create live cinematic events. Recently they have begun to include autobiographical references in their projects.

“We’ve been thinking a lot about social roles, stereotypes, typecasting, categorization, and genres. We wonder how meaning is put together at all and how memories are formed in the first place. We collaborate, but mostly to figure out what it means to speak together, two as one. We think that we’re always operating within at-hand, prescribed categories, but that these categories are fundamentally unable to accommodate the experiences they are meant to frame. As our own lives become more and more fragmented, each role is fulfilled by an increasingly abstract approximation. Soon there may be nothing there at all. We’ve gotten to this point after trying many different strategies: exhaustive categorization, recreation and reenactment, automation, miniaturization, and most recently full outsourcing and personal replacement. What follows is a report on our progress.”

Duration: 0:59:00

Marcia Tanner, Curator, Berkeley, California -- Where the Girls Are: Women Artists Working With Technology

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 10:34:24 PST

Marcia Tanner is an independent curator and writer based in Berkeley, California. Her talk investigates the ways in which contemporary female artists, such as Kathy High, Nina Katchadourian, Rachel Mayeri, Patricia Piccinnini, Sabrina Raaf, Gail Wight, Diane Willow, and others, employ digital and electronic technology to explore scientific themes and issues. Tanner looks at their uses of interactivity and humor, their interpretations of “relational aesthetics,” and their morphing of traditional feminist concerns into often subtle yet powerful critiques of patriarchal structures, gender politics, and established assumptions in technology and science. Tanner also examines their approaches to the biological sciences. Duration: 0:46:00

Ray Beldner, Artist, San Francisco -- Flickr, Flarfing and Babelfish: The Internet and Art Practice

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 9:30:43 PST

“The fact that everything is possible on the Internet reveals mankind’s true essence, the aspiration towards freedom.”
—Pierre Lévy, “Collective Intelligence: A Civilization”

The ubiquity of computers and access to the Internet has put the greatest libraries, image databases, and interactive tools at the fingertips of most artists working today. As a result, traditional artistic practice is exploding as artists explore the potential of these new technologies and incorporate them into their working methodologies.

In his talk, sculptor Ray Beldner describes the vital role the Internet plays in his own creative process. He presents examples of work in which he has mined porn websites, looking for “fine art,” and used online language translation programs like a game of telephone, to remake some of JFK’s greatest speeches to hilarious and ironic effect. He has even dabbled in the poetry of Google searches to create “Flarf” verse, which he reads. These everyday uses of the Internet are only a few examples of how the web has liberated artists’ understanding of “found” materials and is leading to the greatest expansion and democratization of creative practice in our history. Duration: 0:51:00

Artist’s Talk: Mario García Torres -- Je ne sais si c’en est la cause, What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger, and Some Reference Materials / MATRIX 227

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 9:56:59 PST

Mario García Torres discusses Je ne sais si c’en est la cause, What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger, and Some Reference Materials / MATRIX 227.

For his MATRIX exhibition, García Torres created a new work concerning the conceptual artist Daniel Buren, famous for his stripe paintings. As the story goes, Buren undertook a series of murals at the Grapetree Bay Hotel in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, at the invitation of one of the resort’s original owners. He made several works during a residency in 1960, and returned again in 1965 to complete a second set of mosaic murals. Occurring early in his career, and evincing important shifts in style, these works have taken on the status of lore within his oeuvre. Buren acknowledges that the remote location of the resort hotel provided the context for him to “virginize” himself, purging outside influences. Because of the remoteness and strangeness of the murals’ location, the discussion surrounding them is derived from documentation, by people who have likely never seen the work in person—not unlike other ephemeral or performative conceptual works whose position in history is anecdotally achieved.

García Torres narrates the history of the project through the reframing of fragments—objects culled during his research, a tropically inflected pop song composed of one of Buren’s letters, slideshows of the murals in situ, now in ruins. His project supplants certainty about the facts of the work’s existence, based on static documentation, with the complexity of a larger narrative, concerning the artist’s doubt and frustration in the making of the work and the aftermath as the hotel’s failure and the entropy of nature conspire in the murals’ eventual undoing. García Torres’s subjective documentary approach presents this work not as an isolated instance in Buren’s career, but as inextricably tied to questions about European influence in the Americas, and how the context of landscape and tourism informs these proto-conceptual works. Duration: 1:09:00

Artist and Curator in Conversation: Paul Chan and Elizabeth Thomas -- MATRIX 30th Anniversary Event

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 9:10:01 PST

Paul Chan has produced some of the most iconic and politically charged art of this decade. His practice is formally and materially diverse, but evinces a unifying interest in themes of human motivation—power, perversion, transgression, empathy, and redemption. He looks to politics, history, philosophy, spirituality, and common culture as both inspiration and fodder. Chan’s interest in politics is intimated in his work as an artist and expressed more explicitly through activist efforts and a parallel practice in experimental documentaries.

Among Chan’s recent works was a production of Waiting for Godot performed in the streets of New Orleans in 2007, amidst a landscape still scarred by fallout from Hurricane Katrina—echoing, amplifying, and transforming the themes of nothingness and nonarrival in the play. This was a large-scale collaborative act that also involved a wide range of related activities including workshops, community meetings, and other forms of engaged participation.

Elizabeth Thomas has served as Phyllis Wattis MATRIX Curator since 2007. This is the last in a series of conversations bringing together artists and curators from the past and present of the MATRIX program in celebration of its thirtieth year. Paul Chan’s MATRIX project, a new commission originally planned for 2009, has been rescheduled for 2010. Duration: 0:44:00

Anne Pasternak, Director, Creative Time, New York -- Public Art and Media: From Spectacle to Political

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 16:08:28 PST

For the past 14 years, Anne Pasternak has been president and artistic director of Creative Time, the New York City arts organization that creates unconventional opportunities for artists to activate and engage urban spaces.

Recent Creative Time new media projects include screenings of Mark Tribe’s “Port Huron Project” in Times Square, David Byrne’s “Playing the Building,” and Jenny Holzer’s “For the City” light projections at Rockefeller Center. Other Creative Time projects have included exhibitions and performances in the historic Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage, sculptural installations at Grand Central Station, sign paintings on Coney Island, skywriting over Manhattan, as well as the twin beacons of light that illuminated the former World Trade Center site six months after 9/11. Over the past decade, Pasternak has also worked closely with artists Christo and Jean-Claude, Doug Aitken, Laurie Anderson, Gary Hume, Vik Muniz, Takashi Murakami, Shirin Neshat, Steve Powers, and Cai Guo Qiang. Pasternak will describe current trends in public art practice and Creative Time’s curatorial strategies. Duration: 1:13:00

R. Luke DuBois, Composer/Artist, New York -- How to Type Fast and Influence People

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 8:26:17 PST

There are people in every culture who will strive to utilize the maximum level of technology available to them to make art. If you repeat this to yourself enough every day, then genres of new media, computer art, algorithmic composition, interactive performance, etc., reveal themselves as the conceptual prisons they truly are, and the artist finds the freedom to be sui generis. If we define artistic and compositional practice historically as an evolution of new ways of seeing and hearing, then it’s no surprise that in an information age artists find themselves preoccupied with the informatics behind our cultural discourse, and take command of the tools necessary to grasp the data that surrounds us.

This talk looked at the practice of making art that comments on our cultural capital in a world in which we are bombarded by information. To look at modern life is to gaze upon the interaction of subjectively charged messages; finding the metaphors linking data and art, sight and sound, music and architecture, urban fabrics and mediatized romance, intimacy and improvisation, is all about filtering, mapping, transcoding, and interpreting what goes on around us everyday . . . in other words, the kinds of things artists have always done. Duration: 1:03:00

Artist and Curator in Conversation: Susan Rothenberg and Michael Auping -- MATRIX 30th Anniversary Event

Thu, 6 Nov 2008 16:43:25 PST

This conversation was part of a series of public programs celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the MATRIX Program.

Michael Auping, inaugural curator of the MATRIX Program at BAM/PFA, once described MATRIX as “a process of inquiry, a space to question, learn, and establish value within the ‘new.’” Susan Rothenberg, one of the first artists exhibited in MATRIX (in 1978), embraced a similar experimental attitude when she employed the figure of a horse to explore the essence of painting.

Fifteen years after painting her first horse, Rothenberg moved from her native New York to a ranch in New Mexico where she still lives and works. Drawing on a wealth of associations and using imagery from daily life, she continues to examine the meaning and mechanics of painting. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally, and is held in collections in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

Michael Auping is chief curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Across his thirty-year career at museums in California, Florida, New York, and Texas, he has organized important exhibitions and publications of the work of artists including Philip Guston, Anselm Kiefer, Louise Bourgeois, Francesco Clemente, Jess, Robert Bechtle, and Bruce Nauman, and a major mid-career survey of Susan Rothenberg’s paintings and drawings. Duration: 1:01:00

Hasan Elahi, Artist, San Jose -- Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project

Mon, 3 Nov 2008 8:47:24 PST

Artist Hasan Elahi describes his experiences with FBI interrogation and his subsequent art project in a public lecture, as part of UC Berkeley's ongoing Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium.

After an erroneous tip called into law enforcement authorities in 2002, Elahi was subjected to an intensive post-September 11 investigation by the FBI. After undergoing months of interrogations and nine lie detector tests, he was cleared of suspicions. After this harrowing experience, Elahi conceived “Tracking Transience” (http://trackingtransience.net), a self-tracking system that constantly and publicly presents his exact location, activities, and other personal data. This self-surveillance project is a critique of contemporary investigative techniques and provides an ongoing “alibi” for Elahi in the event of future accusations. Duration: 1:17:00

Artist and Curator in Conversation: Nayland Blake and Lawrence Rinder -- MATRIX 30th Anniversary Event

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 13:39:12 PST

Our yearlong celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the MATRIX Program continued with a public conversation between artist Nayland Blake, who was featured in the program in 1989, and Lawrence Rinder, who was MATRIX curator from 1988 to 1998 and is the current director of BAM/PFA.

Throughout his career, Nayland Blake’s work has explored the complexities of identity, race, relationships, and representation, and has revealed a diverse set of interests and concerns—from popular culture and Camp to the queer body in the age of AIDS and the legacy of racism in America. His early work was twice exhibited in MATRIX, in his psychoanalytically inspired solo installation The Schreber Suite and as part of the artist collective Group Material’s project The AIDS Timeline. In 1995, Blake and Lawrence Rinder co-curated In a Different Light, a landmark BAM exhibition that considered the cultural resonances of gay, lesbian, and queer experience in a cross-generational context. Duration: 1:29:00

Steve Kurtz, Artist, Critical Art Ensemble, Buffalo, New York -- Art and Discipline

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:43:52 PST

In May 2004, artist Steve Kurtz was detained by the FBI and subject to a four-year federal investigation for alleged links to bioterrorism, an ordeal widely covered in the press and the subject of a documentary film by Lynn Hershman Leeson. This was his first West Coast public lecture since his acquittal in May 2008.

My lecture will be built upon the following premises: First, any action within the cultural landscape performed from a minoritarian political position will be perceived by authority as a ‘contestational’ act. Second, once challenged, any or all of a variety of disciplinary agents will be sent to re-stabilize the discourses of the status quo through the managing or silencing of resistant cultural production.

Over the past two decades, Critical Art Ensemble has encountered many of these agents. Police, FBI, Department of Justice prosecutors, corporate lawyers, politicians, and church officials have attacked, threatened, or denounced CAE for acting against the authoritarian tendencies of Western societies. This lecture chronicles the reasons why our work has elicited such responses, and how and why the violence against cultural resistance has escalated and intensified over the past five years.

—Steve Kurtz, Critical Art Ensemble

Steve Kurtz is a professor of Visual Studies at SUNY Buffalo and a founding member of Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), a collective of tactical media practitioners of various specializations, including computer graphics and web design, wetware, film and video, text art, book art, and interventionist performance. Formed in 1987, CAE’s focus has been on the exploration of the intersections between art, critical theory, technology, and political activism. The collective has performed and produced a wide variety of projects at diverse venues ranging from the street to the museum to the Internet. Critical Art Ensemble has also written six books on various aspects of cultural resistance. Duration: 0:56:00

Artists and Curator in Conversation: Mike Mandel, Larry Sultan, and Jim Goldberg with Constance Lewallen -- MATRIX 30th Anniversary Event

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 11:56:56 PST

Part of a series of public programs celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art, this conversation featured former MATRIX artists Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan, Jim Goldberg, and former MATRIX Curator Constance Lewallen.

Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan showed strong photographic and photography-based work in their 1983 MATRIX 61 exhibition Newsroom. Sultan continues to work in photography and teaches in the Bay Area. Mandel, currently based in Massachusetts, makes innovative public art projects inspired by photography. Goldberg’s 1987 MATRIX 106 exhibition, The Nursing Home Series, comprised day-to-day photographs of his subjects accompanied by their own comments and reflections on the images. Goldberg currently lives and works in the Bay Area, continuing his photographic practice as well as teaching.

Originally hired as the museum’s second MATRIX curator (after Michael Auping), Constance Lewallen organized dozens of shows by then-emerging artists from 1980 through 1988. As senior curator of exhibitions at BAM from 1997 to 2007, she curated many large-scale traveling exhibitions, including major retrospectives of Joe Brainard, Paul Kos, Ant Farm, and Bruce Nauman. Duration: 0:43:00

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- The New Sensuality: Epistemologies of the Very, Very Small: Jennifer Frazier

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:36:14 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 was three days of new media and art hosted by BAM/PFA and the Berkeley Center for New Media, timed to link with 01SJ: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge, a new media art biennial taking place June 4–8, 2008 in San Jose. Occurring together for the first time, these two events combined to create one of the nation’s largest gatherings of new media art, a virtual “big bang” of innovation and creativity.

The Berkeley Big Bang program included a two-day symposium on new media, art, science, and the body in partnership with Berkeley Center for New Media and Leonardo: The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology; a campus media lab demonstration and open house; and an alternate reality game. Berkeley Big Bang was presented in tandem with BAM/PFA exhibitions of work by media artists Trevor Paglen, Jim Campbell, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Scott Snibbe.

Duration: 0:21:00

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- The New Sensuality: Epistemologies of the Very, Very Small: Wayne Lanier

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:35:08 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- Brilliant Noise: How Data Becomes Experience for Artists and for Scientists: Panel

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:33:49 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- Brilliant Noise: How Data Becomes Experience for Artists and for Scientists: Camille Utterback

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:32:46 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- Brilliant Noise: How Data Becomes Experience for Artists and for Scientists: Laura Peticolas

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:30:53 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- Brilliant Noise: How Data Becomes Experience for Artists and for Scientists: Introduction, Tami Spector

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:29:30 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- “Osmosis”: What Can the Arts Do for the Sciences?: Panel

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:28:11 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- “Osmosis”: What Can the Arts Do for the Sciences?: Chris Chafe

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:27:04 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- “Osmosis”: What Can the Arts Do for the Sciences?: Jim Crutchfield

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:26:05 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- “Osmosis”: What Can the Arts Do for the Sciences?: Melinda Rackham

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:24:57 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- “Osmosis”: What Can the Arts Do for the Sciences?: Bronac Ferran

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:23:33 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- Introduction: Steve Wilson

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:21:48 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- Remix: From Science to Art and Back in the Digital Age

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:17:31 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- Beyond Ocularism: Scott Snibbe

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:15:59 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- Beyond Ocularism: Lian Sifuentes, Artist

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:15:19 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- Beyond Ocularism: Bruce Charlesworth

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:13:13 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- Black Cloud / Red Eye: Greg Niemeyer

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:10:57 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- Performing the Body Electric: Kris Paulsen

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:09:45 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- Performing the Body Electric: Shannon Jackson

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:07:04 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- Body Building: Panel

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:06:08 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- Body Building: Yehuda Kalay

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:04:52 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- Body Building: Kimiko Ryokai

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:02:58 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- Sensors and Sensibilities: Panel

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:03:34 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- Sensors and Sensibilities: Nancy Van House, Professor, School of Information, UC Berkeley

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:59:57 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- Sensors and Sensibilities: Eric Paulos

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:57:14 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- Black Cloud / Red Eye: Greg Niemeyer

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:42:28 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- A Body of Film: Brooke Belisle

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:39:19 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- A Body of Film: Kris Fallon

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:37:42 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- Plenary Talk: Panel

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:31:25 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- Plenary Talk: Philip Rosedale

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:28:39 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- Virtual Embodiment and Myths of Meaning in Second Life: Hubert Dreyfus

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:25:52 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- Embodiment: The Body and New Media

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:44:53 PST

Berkeley Big Bang 08 -- Embodiment: The Body and New Media

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 11:11:45 PST

Artist and Curator in Conversation: Peter Doig and Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson -- MATRIX 30th Anniversary Event

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:50:42 PST

Kicking off a yearlong series of public programs celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of MATRIX was this conversation between artist Peter Doig, who was featured in the MATRIX program in 2000, and Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, MATRIX curator from 1999 through 2005.

Peter Doig was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and is currently based in Trinidad, West Indies. MATRIX 183 Echo-Lake was his first one-person museum exhibition in the United States. Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson is currently director and chief curator of the Aspen Art Museum. Duration: 0:41:00

Enrique Chagoya: Borderlandia -- Interdisciplinary Panel: Borderlandia in Mind / Panel interdisciplinario: La frontera en la mente

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:25:10 PST

More than a geopolitical line dividing Mexico and the United States, the border is also a condition, a state of mind, “a world of hybrids and collisions,” in Enrique Chagoya’s words. Contributing perspectives from literature, ethnic studies, and visual culture, UC Berkeley scholars and other practitioners consider a variety of concepts and meanings of the border along with Chagoya.

Más que una división geopolitica que separa a México de los Estados Unidos, la frontera es tambíen una condición, un estado mental, “un mundo de híbridos y colisiones,” en las palabras de Enrique Chagoya. Aportando puntos des vista de la literatura, estudios étnicos, y cultura visual, estudiosos de UC Berkeley y otros considerarán múltiples conceptos y significados de la frontera junto con Enrique Chagoya. Duration: 1:36:00

Naut Humon of Recombinant Media Labs, V. Vale of REsearch Publications, and Mark Pauline of Survival Research Labs, San Francisco -- Attention Depiction Disorders

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 11:18:51 PST

A benefit for Todd Blair, this special event included discussions by Naut Humon of Recombinant Media Labs, V. Vale of REsearch Publications, and Mark Pauline of Survival Research Labs. Duration: 1:28:00

BAM/PFA Podcast - February 2008 -- Enrique Chagoya: Borderlandia

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 14:56:40 PST

Listen to the BAM/PFA podcasts for stimulating conversations about exhibitions and film series. In this second podcast installment, Chief Curator and Director of Programs and Collections Lucinda Barnes talks with artist Enrique Chagoya about his life and work on the occasion of the first major museum retrospective of his work, an exhibition entitled Enrique Chagoya: Borderlandia. Chagoya draws on the European canon, Mexican folk arts, and U.S. pop icons to create paintings, drawings, and prints that are politically charged, formally sophisticated, and often scathingly funny. Duration: 0:28:00

Goya: The Disasters of War -- Lecture by Janis Tomlinson

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 13:42:21 PST

This special talk by art historian and Goya expert Janis Tomlinson contextualizes Goya’s art following the Napoleonic Wars, examining it in relation to that of French artist Théodore Géricault. From 1814 onwards, the work of both artists was part of a unique era of transition. Tomlinson’s lecture considers their individual, yet parallel, attempts to find direction in that changed world, as they experimented with new imagery and new audiences. Their quests, undertaken without knowledge of each other, epitomize the search for meaning in a modern world that would become synonymous with Romanticism.

Janis Tomlinson is director of university museums at the University of Delaware and author of Francisco Goya y Lucientes (1994), as well as many other writings on Goya.

Co-presented by the Spanish Studies Program and Portuguese Studies Program of the Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley. Duration: 1:01:00

Greg Lynn, Architect, Los Angeles/Vienna -- Giant Robot Architecture

Fri, 8 Feb 2008 9:51:32 PST

Greg Lynn is a pioneer at the intersection of computing, design, and architecture. His architectural designs have been exhibited at both architecture and art venues, including the 2000 Venice Biennale of Architecture, where he represented the United States in the American Pavilion. His work is in the permanent collections of the California College of the Arts, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and has has been exhibited at the Pompidou, Beyeler, Cooper Hewitt, MAK, MoCA, NAI, Carnegie, ICA, and Secession museums, among others. In addition to his architectural work, his Alessi “Supple” Mocha Cups and his Vitra “Ravioli” Chair are in production and have been inducted into the Museum of Modern Art’s Permanent Collection. He received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Architecture Award in 2003. In 2002, he left his position as the Professor of Spatial Conception and Exploration at the ETHZ (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich) and became an Ordentlicher University Professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He is studio professor of Architecture at UCLA and the Davenport Visiting Professor at Yale University. Greg Lynn holds degrees in architecture and philosophy and received an honorary doctorate from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. In 2001, Time magazine named him one of the hundred most innovative people in the world. In 2005, Forbes magazine named him one of the ten most influential living architects. Duration: 1:14:00

Kristin Lucas, Artist, San Francisco -- If Lost Then Found

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 12:57:02 PST

A paradoxical and insubstantial explanation of the inherent problem of simplifying a complex set of relevant concerns related to the phenomenon of over-identification with an inanimate object and its consequent animations and manifestations. A lecture that unfolds into a coming-of-age story about the largely undocumented and unfinished work of the artist Kristin Lucas, including documentation of an attempt to embody the digital medium by reversing the popular notion of infusing humanity into machines, and instead applying familiar strategies of electronic media to her own life⎯told by the most current version of herself. The lecture will include the screening and possible live restaging of fragments of video, performance, and difficult-to-categorize works, such as “Whatever Your Mind Can Conceive” (2007) and “Refresh” (2007). Duration: 1:10:00

Performance by Patty Chang -- A Chinoiserie Out of the Old West

Wed, 5 Dec 2007 9:58:27 PST

Known for her mesmerizing performances and video works that blur the boundary between fact and fiction, Patty Chang is inspired by “catalysts for specific situations,” as she calls them. One such catalyst was the 1928 meeting of cultural theorist Walter Benjamin and Hollywood actress Anna May Wong in Berlin. In this program, Chang presents a new performance work-in-progress—part of her long-term investigation of Wong, translation, and transculturation at the advent of sound film. Duration: 0:35:00

Yael Kanarek, Artist, New York -- And I was Both Tongues

Wed, 5 Dec 2007 9:57:03 PST

Yael Kanarek has developed a unique vocabulary of artistic networked interfaces that combine photography, graphics, hypertext, sculpture, and performance. Kanarek generates complex networked “story spaces” that combine multiple media forms with multiple languages, including Hebrew and Arabic. Online visitors move through and explore charged issues of land, space, and language. Recognizing that languages shape space by defining cultural territory and sovereignty, Kanarek explores the question of space on the internet.

Kanarek presents several of her award-winning net art projects, including her most recent net art project, Object of Desire, accessible through the Jewish Museum in New York, and her installation Warm Fields, exhibited at the bitforms gallery, where a dynamic physical space is constructed with formalistic tools of configuration, shape, and shadow. Duration: 1:01:00

BAM/PFA Podcast - October 2007 -- The films of Sergio Leone; Tomás Saraceno; RIP.MIX.BURN.BAM.PFA

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 15:21:19 PST

Listen to the BAM/PFA podcasts for information and news about upcoming exhibitions and film series. In this inaugural edition, Will Viharo and Steve Seid discuss the films of Sergio Leone, Charles Kremer and Liz Thomas look at the work of artist Tomás Saraceno, and Jane Metcalfe and Rick Rinehart talk about the Digital Art exhibition RIP.MIX.BURN.BAM.PFA. Duration: 0:23:00

Will Viharo and Steve Seid -- Once Upon a Time in Widescreen: The Films of Sergio Leone

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 9:09:28 PST

Speakeasy Theaters programmer Will "The Thrill" Viharo and Pacific Film Archive Curator Steve Seid discuss the films of Sergio Leone featured in the PFA film series Once Upon a Time in Widescreen: The Films of Sergio Leone Duration: 0:09:00

MATRIX: Artist's Talk by Rosalind Nashashibi -- MATRIX: Artist's Talk by Rosalind Nashashibi

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 15:49:44 PST

Rosalind Nashashibi makes quiet, deliberate films that luxuriate in incidental details of the everyday. It could be said that nothing much happens in her films, but the same could be said for most days of our lives. What happens in her films is important, but even more important is the way in which she and her camera frame our view of it. As she has said, "All of these things I have filmed go through my filter on the world, and they are very stubbornly from my point of view, look at it like this, from here, collaborate with me on that. That's the position: to get the viewer to collaborate with me on a particular way of seeing things." Nashashibi shoots on 16mm, and she makes use of long takes and static camera angles, involving less an insinuation of action than a purposeful collection of images, and referencing the history of avant-garde structuralist film. Her work Eyeballing (2005), for example, frames details of the built environment that resolve as the most basic suggestion of a human face: two buzzers arrayed above an intercom speaker, or two nail holes and a knot in a worn wooden floor. The images of abstracted faces are intercut with passages observing police outside a precinct station in lower Manhattan, subtly implicating issues of voyeurism and surveillance that are at the core of any observational film and our experience of it. Although the world at large is her frequent subject, Nashashibi implicates the formal within the narrative, so her films are equally poetic and descriptive, allusive and associative. This talk was in conjunction with her exhibition Bachelor Machines Part I, part of the MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art. Duration: 0:22:00

Artist's Talk and Demonstration by Binh Danh -- Artist’s Talk and Demonstration by Binh Danh

Tue, 9 Oct 2007 11:46:42 PST

Exploring personal and public histories of the Vietnam War and his own relationship to both the United States and Vietnam, San Jose–based artist Binh Danh combines photosynthesis and found photographs to make the fragile and evocative artworks he has named "chlorophyll prints." In an interactive program, the artist discusses his works in the exhibition and demonstrates his art-making process. Duration: 1:00:00

Asian American Art Now -- Interdisciplinary Panel

Thu, 4 Oct 2007 10:45:28 PST

An interdisciplinary panel about what it means to make art within, alongside, and against a discourse of shifting interpretations of Asian American identity. With UC Berkeley English professor Colleen Lye; exhibition artists Anna Sew Hoy and Michael Arcega; exhibition co-curators Susette S. Min and Karin Higa; and Intersection for the Arts program director Kevin Chen. Duration: 1:52:00

Trevor Paglen, Artist and Geographer, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA -- Blank Spots on a Map: State Secrecy and the Geography of Nowhere

Thu, 4 Oct 2007 10:38:06 PST

Geographer and artist Trevor Paglen takes us on a road trip through the world of hidden budgets, state secrets, covert military bases, and disappeared people: through a landscape that military and intelligence insiders call the "black world." Over the course of his talk, Paglen leads us from "non-existent" Air Force and CIA installations in the Nevada desert to secret prisons in Afghanistan and to a collection of even more obscure "black sites" startlingly close to home. Using hundreds of images he has produced and collected over the course of his work, Paglen shows how the black world's internal contradictions give rise to a peculiar visual, aesthetic, and epistemological grammar with which to think about the contemporary moment. Duration: 1:02:00

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Thank You

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:32:13 PST

The following .mp3 files can be downloaded individually by right-clicking the icon to save it to your computer for transferring to your iPod or any other MP3 player.
Alternately, you can download the entire 60MB collection by clicking here.

To use the audioguide while visiting the BAM Galleries, look for the iPod icon on the wall labels for selected works in the exhibition. You can view the exhibition website by clicking here. Duration: 0:01:00

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Wasim, Saira - student track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:31:21 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Wasim , Saira - curator track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:30:33 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Tajima, Mika - Extruded Plaid Suicidal Desires - curator track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:29:40 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Som, Indigo - student track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:28:52 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Som, Indigo - curator track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:28:01 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Som, Indigo - artist track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:27:16 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Shin, Jean - Unraveling - curator track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:26:15 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Sew Hoy, Anna - Dreamcatcher - curator track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:25:16 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Oshiro, Kaz - student track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:24:07 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Oshiro, Kaz - curator track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:23:14 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Nakadate, Laurel - curator track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:22:29 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Nakadate, Laurel - curator track_2

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:21:41 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Moon, Jiha - curator track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:20:58 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Lau, Geraldine - student track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:20:08 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Lau, Geraldine - curator track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:17:08 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Kaino, Glenn - Graft - curator track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:16:17 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Ganesh, Chitra - student track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:15:33 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Ebtekar, Ala - Elemental - curator track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:14:19 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Ebtekar, Ala - artist track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:13:23 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Eastman, Mari - curator track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:12:11 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Danh, Binh - curator track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:08:07 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Danh, Binh - artist track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:07:16 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Chang, Patty - curator track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:06:11 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Cha, Xavier - curator track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:05:08 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Arcega, Michael - Eternal Salivation - curator track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:03:52 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Arcega, Michael - Eternal Salivation - artist track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:02:52 PST

Audioguide for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now -- Introduction - curator track

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 13:01:02 PST

University of California's Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA) State of the Arts conference -- Shirley Shor

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 12:48:59 PST

Since its inception, the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts has been dedicated to the promotion and support of the arts and art-centered research system wide. The State of the Arts conferences promote and celebrate the Institute's mission to broaden discussion of the current role and future of the arts in California and beyond.

This conference's focus on the digital arts provides a broad umbrella under which to explore the digital mediation of performance, space, sound, and other embodied experiences; showcase faculty and graduate student research projects that exemplify interdisciplinary and intermedia arts practice; and consider the impact of new media on the research functions and modalities of arts practice. Taken together, the arts practitioners and departments in the UC system represent an invaluable set of resources and a significant investment for the future of our state. We hope this conference demonstrates UCIRA'S potential as a major platform for presenting, discussing, and advocating for the arts and arts-centered research. Duration: 0:45:00

Matrix Artists -- Allison Smith: Notion Nanny
MATRIX 222

Thu, 24 May 2007 9:57:48 PST

Duration: 0:50:00

University of California's Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA) State of the Arts conference -- Conference Wrap-Up [Museum Theater]

Tue, 22 May 2007 13:01:26 PST

University of California's Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA) State of the Arts conference -- UCIRA Funded Projects Showcase and Panel [Museum Theater]

Tue, 22 May 2007 13:00:19 PST

University of California's Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA) State of the Arts conference -- DIY => DIT: New Social Practices and Digital Distribution [PFA Theater]

Tue, 22 May 2007 12:58:04 PST

University of California's Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA) State of the Arts conference -- Music and Aurality: Sounding Across Disciplines [BAM/PFA Museum Theater]

Tue, 22 May 2007 12:56:55 PST

University of California's Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA) State of the Arts conference -- Disrupting Expectations and Provoking Public Art [PFA Theater]

Tue, 22 May 2007 12:55:30 PST

University of California's Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA) State of the Arts conference -- The Body and Performativity: Issues of Performance Across Disciplines [BAM/PFA Museum Theater]

Tue, 22 May 2007 12:52:45 PST

University of California's Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA) State of the Arts conference -- Art As Research: Dean's Panel [BAM/PFA Museum Theater]

Tue, 22 May 2007 12:35:59 PST

University of California's Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA) State of the Arts conference -- State of the Arts [BAM/PFA Museum Theater]

Tue, 22 May 2007 12:33:29 PST

University of California's Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA) State of the Arts conference -- Panel: Activating Space [BAM/PFA Museum Theater]

Tue, 22 May 2007 12:22:04 PST

University of California's Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA) State of the Arts conference -- Panel: Creating Space [BAM/PFA Museum Theater]

Tue, 22 May 2007 12:20:15 PST

University of California's Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA) State of the Arts conference -- Welcome and Opening Remarks [BAM/PFA Museum Theater]

Tue, 22 May 2007 12:15:19 PST

Measure of Time -- Alan Rath

Thu, 10 May 2007 9:12:02 PST

Time is of the essence in American art of the past century. Measure of Time showcases the museum's important 20th-century collection along with some significant loans to explore, over time, how artists have worked with temporality and duration. In two galleries of paintings, sculptures, and media (both analog and digital), time and motion are compressed, fragmented, mechanized, sped up, and slowed down to an almost imperceptible pace. Duration: 1:00:00

Measure of Time -- Jim Campbell

Thu, 10 May 2007 9:11:36 PST

Measure of Time -- Bill Berkson

Thu, 10 May 2007 9:11:07 PST

Measure of Time -- Peter Galison, Physics, Harvard University Pamela Lee, Stanford Art Historian

Thu, 10 May 2007 9:10:26 PST

Measure of Time -- Linda Henderson

Thu, 10 May 2007 9:08:09 PST

Measure of Time -- Albert Pisano and Ken Goldberg

Thu, 10 May 2007 9:05:06 PST

Matrix Artists -- Tobias Rehberger/MATRIX 180

Wed, 2 May 2007 11:48:36 PST

Duration: 0:03:00

Matrix Artists -- Katy Schimert/MATRIX 181

Wed, 2 May 2007 11:35:38 PST

Duration: 0:03:00

Matrix Artists -- Teresita Fernández/MATRIX 182

Wed, 2 May 2007 11:21:48 PST

Duration: 0:03:00

Matrix Artists -- Ken Goldberg/MATRIX 186

Wed, 2 May 2007 11:21:00 PST

Duration: 0:01:00

24h00 -- Theresa Duff

Tue, 1 May 2007 11:49:58 PST

Twenty-four UC Berkeley Students from a variety of departments — from Art Practice and Art History to Molecular and Cell Biology — worked with the artist, the curator, and the museum's Information Systems Manager, Rick Rinehart, to realize 24h00. Every hour of one entire day, the students took a photogographic portrait according to their own criteria for subject, composition, setting, and lighting, asking the subjects to describe in one word their state of mind at that precise moment. All of the images are represented on the screen by a grid of numbers from 1 to 24, each number corresponding to a photograph in the order it was taken. Duration: 0:02:00

24h00 -- Tom Webster

Tue, 1 May 2007 11:48:49 PST

24h00 -- Alice Park

Tue, 1 May 2007 11:47:16 PST

24h00 -- John Choe

Tue, 1 May 2007 11:46:44 PST

24h00 -- Valery Grancher

Tue, 1 May 2007 11:42:16 PST

Rudolf Frieling, Media Arts Curator, SFMOMA, San Francisco -- Stop Making Sense: Contextualizing Media Art

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:24:34 PST

The Google generation now expects to find everything it ever wanted to know online. Undoubtedly, our knowledge society is offering completely new perspectives of learning and connecting, but black holes spoil the overall picture in a dramatic way. 404 Not Found has become a keyword for those searching online. But even the material that is found has to be questioned seriously. Given the lack of a sustained critical scientific discourse for new media, the found material is often a mere replication of uncritical praise of art works. The present is getting richer and richer, yet more and more detached from any notion of context in terms of continuity or disruption. Theories and blogs are mushrooming: but what do we learn about the history of media art?

This talk will exemplify the difficulties and ambiguities in "making sense" of one's findings, and it will discuss artistic but also art historical ways of coping with this dilemma. Curatorial as well as artistic strategies concerning the collection, sorting, linking and distribution of data will be examined within the context of the portal site "Media Art Net

Rudolf Frieling is Curator of Media Arts at SFMOMA, San Francisco. He studied Humanities at the Free University of Berlin and received a Ph.D. from the University of Hildesheim; 1988 to 1994 he was curator of the International VideoFest Berlin (today transmediale) and from 1994 to 2006 curator and researcher at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, where he was until 2001 the Head of the Video Collection; he has lectured internationally on media and art a. o. at the University of Art and Design Zurich and at the Academy of Art Berlin, and he was professor at the media faculty, University of Applied Sciences, Mainz; from 2001 to 2005 he headed the Internet project "Media Art Net" at ZKM and from 2004 to 2006 the restoration and exhibition project "40yearsvideoart.de", funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation; other projects as curator include a.o. the Biennale Sao Paulo 2002 (Net Art section) and "Sound-Image", Laboratoria Arte Alameda, Mexico City 2003; he has published and co-edited with Dieter Daniels for Springer Vienna/New York a series of multimedia and book publications on the history and current context of media art: Media Art Action (1997), Media Art Interaction (2000) and Media Art Net 1/2 (2004/2005).

Duration: 1:02:00

Doug Aitken, Artist, Los Angeles -- Can You Say...2007?

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:20:21 PST

Widely known for his innovative fine art installations, Doug Aitken is at the frontier of 21st century communication. Utilizing a wide array of media and artistic approaches, Aitken’s eye leads us into a world where time, space, and memory are fluid concepts.

Aitken’s work effortlessly slips into our media-saturated cultural unconscious allowing the viewer to experience cinema in a unique way by deconstructing a connection between sound, moving images and the rhythms of our surroundings. Treating the world as his studio, he edits together frenetic and unique models of contemporary experience.

Aitken employs a number of post studio artistic mediums – photography, sculpture, architecture, sound installation, and multi channel video installation. In each of his artworks, Aitken chooses01 the medium or combination that amplifies and visually articulates the subject’s qualities. The scale of the work can vary from a simple photograph to a complex moving sculpture of infinitely reflective automated mirrors. Quasi-narrative films create intricate mazes of open-ended stories told across reinterpreted physical architecture. To this end, his 2007 'sleepwalkers' installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York re-imagines the museum's outdoor walls and façade as a screen onto which a film is projected. Recently, Aitken also produced “Broken Screen”, a book of interviews with 26 artists pushing the limits of linear narrative. The project inspired two “happening” events in New York and Los Angeles.

Aitken lives and works in Los Angeles. His non-stop and extensive explorations inform his work with a modern nomadic existence, where travel and movements are folded into our daily experience. Aitken has had numerous screenings, solo and group exhibitions around the world including the 1999 Venice Biennale, where he won the International Prize for his acclaimed installation “electric earth.” He’s exhibited work in institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Pompidou Center in Paris. Duration: 1:00:00

-- Jim Campbell

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:00:31 PST

Duration: 1:54:00

-- Bill Berkson

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 14:58:17 PST

Duration: 46:51:00

Steve Wilson, San Francisco State University -- Liberating the Lab: Art in a Techno-Scienific Era

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 16:09:51 PST

Duration: 0:06:00

Symposium: Nauman in Context -- Dr. Anne Wagner, Professor of History of Art, UC Berkeley

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 17:25:38 PST

Duration: 1:00:00

Symposium: Nauman in Context -- Part One: Sculpture: Presences and Absences;
Part Two: Mediums and Media

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 17:00:45 PST

Duration: 0:35:00

Matmos, Musicians and Sound Artists, San Francisco -- The Re-Dematerialization of the Art Object

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 16:48:28 PST

Matmos is M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel, aided and abetted by many others. In their recordings and live performances over the last nine years, Matmos have used the sounds of: amplified crayfish nerve tissue, the pages of bibles turning, a bowed five string banjo, slowed down whistles and kisses, water hitting copper plates, the runout groove of a vinyl record, a $5.00 electric guitar, liposuction surgery, cameras and VCRs, chin implant surgery, contact microphones on human hair, violins, rat cages, tanks of helium, violas, human skulls, cellos, peck horns, tubas, cards shuffling, field recordings of conversations in hot tubs, frequency response tests for defective hearing aids, a steel guitar recorded in a sewer, electrical interference generated by laser eye surgery, whoopee cushions and balloons, latex fetish clothing, rhinestones on a dinner plate, Polish trains, insects, ukelele, aspirin tablets hitting a drum kit from across the room, dogs barking, people reading aloud, life support systems and inflatable blankets, records chosen by the roll of dice, an acupuncture point detector conducting electrical current through human skin, rock salt crunching underfoot, solid gold coins spinning on bars of solid silver, the sound of a frozen stream thawing in the sun, a five gallon bucket of oatmeal. Duration: 1:00:00

Pierre Huyghe, Artist, Paris -- Time Score and Timing

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 16:45:21 PST

Beginning with an introduction to the Association of Freed Time, this talk by Pierre Huyghe focuses on time based projects and exhibitions, scripted situations, and the construction of scenarios. While presenting his work, Huyghe discusses a variety of methodologies, taking into consideration the exhibition as a form, the formats of representation as exhibition venues (theater, cinema, books, newspapers, parks...), placement and timing, the 'becoming image' of things, the exhibition versus the show, the principle of equivalence. Representation as a performative means, the activation of space, the rules of the game. Comedy, the recent mainstream attraction, celebration and celebrity. Duration: 1:00:00

Robert Gitt -- Presentation by Robert Gitt, UCLA Film & Television Archive

Wed, 7 Mar 2007 15:18:39 PST

Duration: 1:00:00

Michel Brault -- Workshop with Michel Brault

Wed, 7 Mar 2007 15:16:32 PST

Duration: 0:30:00

Guy Maddin -- The Heart of Guy Maddin, 2006 San Francisco International Film Festival

Wed, 7 Mar 2007 11:49:03 PST

Duration: 0:45:00

Peter Kubelka -- Metric Films and Poetry and Truth

Wed, 7 Mar 2007 11:47:38 PST

The great Austrian avant-garde filmmaker presents his famous lecture on cooking as a communicative art, "the ancestor of physics, chemistry, and philosophy." Duration: 0:40:00

Peter Kubelka -- The Edible Metaphor

Wed, 7 Mar 2007 11:46:29 PST

The great Austrian avant-garde filmmaker presents his famous lecture on cooking as a communicative art, "the ancestor of physics, chemistry, and philosophy." Duration: 0:42:00

Anne Wagner, University of California, Berkeley, Art History -- Video as Messenger

Thu, 1 Mar 2007 17:22:56 PST

Duration: 0:05:00

Debra Solomon, Artist, Art Race in Space Ltd, Amsterdam -- Artist-Astronaut: What the Future Told Us

Thu, 1 Mar 2007 17:20:48 PST

Debra Solomon's project "Artist-Astronaut" was installed in 2000 and 2001 at Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Ferens Gallery in Hull, England. Her mission was to investigate the effects of artist intervention into space exploration. Solomon put out a general call to select participants. During a series of closed sessions, she selected applicants that possessed the Right Stuff to play the role of Artist-Astronaut.

Her goal was to get perspectives on a mythical 50 years of Artist involvement in space exploration. To achieve this, she took the Artist-Astronaut participants on a mission several decades into the future using hypnotic techniques. In her highly suggestive 'holodeck' installation, participants were guided through time to the year 2050 as they were led to believe that they had either witnessed or participated in, a number of Artist missions. Participants were later given time to reflect upon this experience and discuss at length their own contributions to the field with their peers.

In addition to presenting her findings, Solomon will present audio and video from the Artist-Astronaut "future-sessions". She will also discuss future plans and the present spin-off of Artist-Astronaut as manifested in Art Race In Space's Experimental Directorate for the Arts for the European Space Agency and Industry. Duration: 0:15:00

Constance Lewallen on Bruce Nauman -- Constance Lewallen, BAM Senior Curator for Exhibitions

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 15:49:36 PST

During BAM's "Nauman Night" at the San Francisco Art Institute, Senior Curator for Exhibitions Constance Lewallen gave a lively introduction to the work of Bruce Nauman, one of today’s most influential artists. Nauman spent his formative years in Northern California, during which time he created some of his most strikingly innovative works. He began making sculpture in fiberglass, polyester resin, neon, and other nontraditional materials, and creating casts of negative space and parts of his own body. Slides and video clips were shown to help illustrate this fertile period in Nauman’s development as an artist. Duration: 1:00:00

Lucinda Barnes and Lawrence Rinder on Irene Pijoan -- Lucinda Barnes and Lawrence Rinder on Irene Pijoan

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 15:25:54 PST

Composed of intricately designed cutouts on paper and featuring beautiful, organic silhouettes cascading down the wall, Irene Pijoan's Kick Count Chart (1994) immediately impresses the viewer upon entering Gallery 6. This work in the BAM collection was the topic of an informal conversation between Lucinda Barnes, Associate Director for Art, Film, and Programs, and former BAM curator Lawrence Rinder. Pijoan, who died in August 2004, was an internationally exhibited artist known for her striking mixed-media works combining blocks of color, organic shapes, text, and autobiographical imagery. From 1983 to 2004 she taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she was an associate professor of drawing and painting.

Lawrence Rinder is dean of graduate studies at California College of the Arts. He was formerly curator of contemporary art at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and founding director of the CCA Wattis Institute. From 1988 to 1998, Rinder was curator of the MATRIX Program and curator of twentieth-century art at BAM/PFA. Duration: 0:36:00

Louise Bourgeois -- Drawings Slide Show

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 15:22:46 PST

Louise Bourgeois's drawings are a revelation. Known for the boldness and physicality of her sculpture, Bourgeois, in these works, reveals her masterful ability to command emotions even with the most modest means. In her own view, drawings are secondary to sculpture insofar as they "lack the power of exorcism." Yet her work in drawing preceded her professional entry into the field of sculpture in the late 1940s, and the drawings she has continued to produce quite prolifically over the past fifty years comprise an aspect of her oeuvre that is as compelling thematically as it is visually rewarding.

View a video slide show. Duration: 1:08:00

Liza Dalby on Taisho Chic -- "Modern Girls (Unless They're French) Don't Wear Kimono"

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 15:21:29 PST

Liza Dalby On Taisho Chic
September 25, 2005
58:09

Modernity had an impact on the traditional kimono, and vice versa, as cultural anthropologist and author Liza Dalby explains: "The first two decades of the twentieth century in Japan saw the kimono burst forth in a creative last gasp of fashion for the masses. Since this time, its place in Japanese culture has always been linked to the question of modernity. Just at the point where kimono began to lose ground to Western clothing on its home turf, its exotic design and form as seen through Western eyes impacted fashion in Paris, London, and New York."

Dalby's slide-illustrated talk considers historical precedents in Japan for the very notion of fashion, and how the Japanese themselves reincorporated the West's fashion of "japonisme." She also looks at paintings in Taisho Chic from the standpoint of a Taisho-era audience.

Dalby, who received her Ph.D. from Stanford, is the author of several notable books: Geisha; Kimono: Fashioning Culture (a cultural history of Japanese attire); and the novel The Tale of Murasaki. She has the distinction of being the only American ever to have worked as a geisha. Recently, Dalby served as script consultant and on-set advisor for the film adaptation of Arthur Golden's novel Memoirs of a Geisha.

Lecture cosponsored by the UC Berkeley Institute for East Asian Studies.

Duration: 1:00:00

New Media & Social Memory Symposium -- Bruce Sterling

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 9:29:44 PST

On January 18, 2007, the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive presented New Media & Social Memory, a public symposium to discuss strategies for preserving digital art at at time when digital technologies are evolving and becoming obsolete at an astonishingly rapid pace. While focusing on digital art, the symposium also addressed larger concerns about the long-term conservation of our increasingly digital culture, including how we decide what digital content--from websites to video games--are worth saving. The full day included presentations and panel discussions by leading experts in the field of digital preservation. The entire symposium was videotaped and is presented below for your viewing. Duration: 0:50:00

New Media & Social Memory Symposium -- Jeff Rothenberg, Richard Rinehart

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 9:28:48 PST

New Media & Social Memory Symposium -- Marisa Olson, Michael Katchen

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 9:27:09 PST

New Media & Social Memory Symposium -- Alexander Rose, Kurt Bollacker

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 9:19:18 PST

New Media & Social Memory Symposium -- Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Jon Ippolito

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 9:17:30 PST

New Media & Social Memory Symposium -- Stewart Brand, President, Long Now Foundation

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 9:14:46 PST

New Media & Social Memory Symposium -- Richard Rinehart, Jane Metcalfe

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:57:25 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Failing to Levitate in the Studio

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:45:58 PST

The following .mp3 files can be downloaded individually by right-clicking the icon to save it to your computer for transferring to your iPod or any other MP3 player.
Alternatively, you can download the entire 60mb collection by clicking here.

To use the audioguide while visiting the BAM Galleries, look for the iPod icon on the wall
labels for selected works in the exhibition.
Duration: 2:20:00

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Flour Arranging

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:44:46 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Slant Step

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:44:27 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Wax Impressions of the Knees of Five Famous Artists

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:43:24 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Works on paper

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:43:07 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Slow Angle Walk, Stamping in the Studio

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:41:18 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Slow Angle Walk, Stamping in the Studio

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:41:10 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Task-oriented films

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:41:03 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Performance Corridor

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:39:49 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- My Name as Though It Was Written on the Moon

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:39:31 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Playing a Note on the Violin While I Walk Around the Studio

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:38:20 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Dark

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:37:19 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Drawings

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:36:47 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Art Makeup

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:35:42 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Bouncing in the Corner

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:34:25 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Slab Sculptures

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:33:58 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Performance Corridor

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:33:27 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- First Poem Piece

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:30:19 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Wedge Piece

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:29:40 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Studio Aids 2

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:26:23 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Raw War

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:24:54 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Constance Lewallen

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:24:22 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- 16mm film

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:24:03 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Holography

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:23:10 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Neon works

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:22:43 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- A Rose Has No Teeth

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:22:17 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Myself as a Fountain

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:21:36 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Eleven Color Photographs

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:20:59 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Three Silent Films

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:20:05 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Henry Moore Bound to Fail

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:19:35 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Untitled, 1967

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:17:46 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Fishing for Asian Carp

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:16:28 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Negative space sculpture

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:16:03 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Slant Step

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:14:51 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Latex on burlap

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:14:29 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Latex, rubber sculptures

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:13:41 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Sketches on ditto paper

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:13:16 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Neon

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:12:32 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Fiberglass sculpture

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:12:06 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Untitled T-Bar

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:10:05 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Unglazed Ceramic Cups

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:08:52 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Nauman in the studio

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 8:06:50 PST

Audioguide for A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s -- Introductions

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 7:57:11 PST

Alejandro Garcia-Rivera and David Steadman on Peter Paul Rubens --

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 18:37:23 PST

March 16, 2005

The Berkeley Art Museum's own Rubens--the dramatic oil sketch of The Road to Calvary, circa 1632--is the subject of discussion between two professors with expertise in both art history and theology. Alejandro Garcia-Rivera, associate professor at the Jesuit School of Theology and the Graduate Theological Union, has published and taught courses on various aspects of theology and art. He brings a Jesuit perspective to the religious symbolism of the painting and its Counter-Reformation context. David Steadman is an art historian who studied Rubens at UC Berkeley with Professor Emerita Svetlana Alpers. After thirty years as an art museum director, he returned to Berkeley for a degree from the Graduate Theological Union, and was recently ordained as a deacon of the Episcopal Church. Duration: 1:00:00

Svetlana Alpers on Peter Paul Rubens -- Painting Out of Conflict: Velázquez, Rubens, and the Dutch in Time of War

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 18:34:18 PST

Svetlana Alpers
April 3, 2005

The distinguished and influential art historian Svetlana Alpers delivers a major slide-illustrated lecture that looks at the art of Rubens and his contemporaries in the context of war. She asks, "How have artists dealt with war? Has art served to encourage conflict? Should artists be blamed if they don't deal with war?"

Alpers is professor emerita at UC Berkeley, where she taught from 1962 to 1994, and a visiting scholar at New York University. The recipient of countless awards and fellowships, she is the author of, among others, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century and The Making of Rubens. Her latest book, Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others, is forthcoming this year from Yale University Press.
Duration: 0:15:00

Lucinda Barnes and Lawrence Rinder on Irene Pijoan -- Lucinda Barnes and Lawrence Rinder on Irene Pijoan

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 18:31:31 PST

Kathleen Cleaver on the Black Panthers --

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 18:22:21 PST

As part of the public programming for the exhibition The Black Panthers 1968: Photographs by Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones, Kathleen Cleaver, former communications secretary for the Black Panther Party, presented an illustrated lecture from her perspective as an activist during this turbulent period in Bay Area history. Her talk was followed by a discussion with photographer Pirkle Jones and UC Berkeley Professor and Chair of African American Studies Percy Hintzen

blah Duration: 0:25:00

-- Measure of Time: Dr Linda Henderson

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 16:54:23 PST

Duration: 59:21:00

-- Unwinding the clock: Measures of Time and Art

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 16:47:32 PST

Duration: 1:03:00

Sudipto Chatterjee Performs for Edge of Desire -- Edge of Desire: Meeting The Man of The Heart

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 16:43:26 PST

Duration: 0:40:00

Now-Time Venezuela -- Revolutionary Television in Catia

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 13:13:34 PST

Now-Time Venezuela is a yearlong cycle of projects in solidarity with the Bolivarian revolution in today's Venezuela. Since 1998, the year of Hugo Chávez's election to the presidency, Venezuela has been undergoing a profound process of social and political change, reaching to all levels of society. The role of the Now-Time cycle is to support and contribute to this process, while at the same time, as a secondary objective, advancing a theory of art and culture: that cultural products find their creative agency in alignment with broader processes of political and economic transformation. Duration: 1:00:00

Lucinda Barnes and Meg Maggio on Li Jin --

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 15:32:27 PST

September 10, 2005

Associate Director for Art, Film, and Programs Lucinda Barnes and Meg Maggio of the CourtYard Gallery in Beijing discuss the museum's recently acquired painting Harvest II, by Beijing-based artist Li Jin. The painting is a sensuous yet delicate frieze-like composition of figures, fruit, and foliage that exemplifies a favorite theme of the artist: the pleasures of meals taken with family and friends. Duration: 1:00:00

Jonathon Keats, Artist, SF -- Extraterrestrial Aesthetics, Divine Genetics, and Other Thought Experiments

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 12:02:08 PST

Is art a science? Is science an art? In contemporary artistic practice, the studio may be a genetics laboratory, while the theoretical physicist, working years ahead of any plausible experiment, often formulates reality according to mathematical aesthetics. Have these two disciplines lost their bearings in the widening wake of postmodernism? Are we seeing just another breed of mash-up? Or do art and science need one another if either is to remain meaningful in the 21st Century?

Conceptual artist Jonathon Keats will address these questions by describing the role of scientific research in his creative process. He will discuss his attempts to genetically engineer God in a petri dish and to facilitate the intergalactic exchange of art, as well as his efforts to customize the metric system and to apply string theory to real estate development. Thinking of his projects as 'thought experiments', which rigorously misapply practices borrowed from biology, chemistry, and physics (as well as law and economics), Keats strives to take up where natural philosophy left off -- and to enlist others in his interdisciplinary investigation. Duration: 1:04:00

Cory Arcangel, Artist, NYC -- Recent Experiments in Modern Composition, Software, and Stand-Up Comedy

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 11:53:35 PST

Lets say for a second you are an artist. And just for the sake of argument, that you make work which deals with the moving image...maybe,...Video. So you are a video artist. And yeah, its 2006,...and your videos are short, like 2-3 minutes long. So what do you do with them? Do you screen them on public access? Do you upload them to youtube? Do you sell them in limited editions in a gallery? Do you make music videos for bands? Do you enter in them in underground video/film festivals? How can you make sense of it all???? And that's just for video, imagine what a headache you'd have if you made other forms of media art as well....

This lecture proposes different ways artists (not just video artists), can make sense of the internet and the explosion of low cost distribution opportunities that are available today. Given that there is no easy solution, and that distribution interest is often tied in with content --Internet memes, comedy, the "Avant Guarde", "hacking", open source code, MySpace, and Kurt Cobain, will all be discussed in no particular order, with Cory's work serving as the underpinning structure. Duration: 1:00:00

Archiving the Avant-Garde -- Creative Solutions

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 17:18:35 PST

Archiving the Avant-Garde: Preserving Digital / Media Art
A Free Public/Professional Symposium
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
PFA Theater, UC Berkeley

Works of digital and Internet art, performance, installation, conceptual, and other variable media art represent some of the most compelling and significant artistic creations of our time. These works constitute a history of alternative artistic practice, but because of their ephemeral, technical, or otherwise variable natures, they also present significant obstacles to accurate documentation, access, and preservation. Without strategies for preservation many of these vital works - and possibly whole new genres such as early Internet art - will be lost to future generations. Long term strategies must closely examine the nature of ephemeral art and identify core aspects of these works to preserve. Will the future experience these works as physical traces and documentation? Emulated media artifacts? Dynamic cultural events re-performed? All of these? This one-day public symposium is the first west-coast venue in a series of national forums on preserving media art. This symposium will introduce early collaborative efforts and strategies for preserving these art forms, as well as provide a feedback forum combining presentations by leaders in the field with structured audience discussion. Duration: 1:00:00

Archiving the Avant-Garde -- Panel Three

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 17:17:50 PST

Archiving the Avant-Garde -- New Directions

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 17:15:58 PST

Archiving the Avant-Garde -- Documenting and Preserving Digital/Variable Art

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 17:04:39 PST

Pamela Z, Performance Artist, SF -- Making Faces: Theatrical Materiality and Technological Embodiment

Tue, 10 Oct 2006 12:10:54 PST

All artists are influenced by their tools. For contemporary performance artists, digital technologies are evolving so rapidly that their influence on artistic decisions can be greatly magnified. When the artwork, the tools, and the artist fuse into a single inseparable entity, can art maintain its strength and integrity or is it reduced to being a mere product of a culture seduced by new technology?

Pamela Z will explore this question in the context of her extensive experience with tools she considers to be extensions of herself. These include her gesture controllers - which by association make the body itself become the instrument, her two Powerbooks, "Callas" and "Cage", and the vocal instrument - an extremely high-tech tool in and of itself. Duration: 1:00:00

Marianne Weems, Director, The Builders Association, NY -- Mediatic Performance: New Technology for Old Theater

Tue, 10 Oct 2006 12:10:08 PST

The Builders Association is an eclectic group which combines theater practitioners with software designers and new media artists. Under the direction of Marianne Weems, this OBIE award-winning New York-based performance and media company exploits the richness of contemporary technologies to extend the boundaries of theater. Given the 'liveness' of performance, how can theater be an arena for exploring the frictive relationship between 'live' performance and 'live' technologies? How can one stage the impact of technology on human presence? And how can we use technology to talk about technology's embrace? Through viewing excerpts from past Builders Association productions, we will discuss how technology and its stories can be staged as an instrument of control, transgression, and narrative. Duration: 1:00:00

-- Presentation by Robert Gitt

Mon, 17 Jul 2006 14:29:47 PST

Duration: 15:08:00

Student Conversations -- Students on Indian Paintings

Wed, 5 Jul 2006 11:41:01 PST

Duration: 0:02:00

Panel Discussion: Jeanne Dunning: The Unexpected Effect -- Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, Allan Desouza, Alva Noe, Linda Williams

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 10:57:57 PST

Duration: 1:41:00

Okwui Enwezor, Curator & Dean, Art Institute, SF -- Contemporary African Photography and Film

Tue, 23 May 2006 13:58:04 PST

Okwui Enwezor's presentation will draw from four works in progress. Two are books: The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transitions, and Archaeology of the Present: The Postcolonial Archive, Photography and African Modernity. Two are exhibition projects: Snap Judgments: Recent Positions in Contemporary African Photography, and On Governmentality: Techniques and Technologies of Critique, Dissent, Resistance and Solidarity in Contemporary Art. Duration: 1:01:00

Stephen Beck, Artist & Inventor, Berkeley -- Photons, Electrons, Icons and Phonons: Materials and Makings of Pre- and Post-Digital Art

Thu, 13 Apr 2006 17:45:15 PST

This presentation is dedicated to Nam June Paik, who passed on to that great cathode ray tube in the sky on January 30, 2006, at the age of 73.

Steve Beck postulates that we are entering a "post-digital" era in which tools for image making, sound, music, and communications are mature and ubiquitous. How do we use these tools wisely, and what might be their implications and consequences? What becomes of visual language, sensory and optimal perception? Will diffusion of analog motifs result? For Beck, creative necessity propels artistic realizations and explorations via hybrid electronic technologies.

Steve Beck's artistic and technical innovations in luminous, dynamic, emitted light span his transformation from the analog world of the 1960's to today. Beck's work has investigated visual tools and visual language, archetypal modalities, internal imagery, spiritual technology and compositional structures in video, music, animation, light sculptures and games.

Beck will show examples from his body of work, ranging from early electronic neon sculptures with the 1968 charter Chicago chapter of Experiments in Art and Technology, to video compositions such as "Union," an allegorical portrayal of internal bodily energies, and performances of "Illuminated Music" created on his invention, the Beck Direct Video Synthesizer. He'll also present studies of dynamic, magic square color matrix sequencing in Video Weavings, analog video fractals in a music video for Jimi Hendrix, Ambient Video sculptures created in Japan, and recent HDTV "Solaris Series" Videon video painting studies of real time variant, dynamic atmospheric optical colorations of Pacific Coast sunsets and sunrises. Duration: 1:00:00

Shirley Shor, New Media Artist S.F. -- Dynamic Landscapes

Thu, 13 Apr 2006 17:32:32 PST

With dynamic forms, hypnotic movements, and a luminous palette, Shirley Shor creates artworks that seduce and delight. Part of an emerging generation of new-media artists who are redefining how computers can be engaged in the creation of work, Shor makes real-time computer-generated animations and installations that engage the spatial and temporal. In Shor's works, the landscapes are a synthesis between the code and the territory – animated fields of color are in perpetual fluid motion, expanding, merging, collapsing, and reforming with movements and shapes that become metaphors for concepts such as conflict, language, and identity.
Duration: 1:00:00

Michael Rees, Digital Media Art & Sculpture, Rutgers University -- Monsters and Programs and Other Beautiful Fictions

Thu, 6 Apr 2006 10:51:52 PST

Michael Rees' conceptual art defies category, combining sculpture, animation, performance, video, installation, and computer software programs to express his interest in the body and its connection to mind and spirit. Rees' work references surrealism and other movements in art history, as well as western analytic science and eastern metaphysics. Rees is a self described "pataphysician", a maker of imaginary solutions and an investigator of the truth of contradictions and exceptions.

Rees will present recent works and the conceptual framework surrounding his investigation of mind, body and spirit. The "body" refers to his Monster Series and its attendant animations. These are concerned with the manipulated body and with multiple consciousness folded into an animate constructed body. The "mind" refers to his Sculptural User Interface with its parallel attendance to tendencies in conceptual art and computer science (the readymade, an extension of Joseph Beuys' notion of social sculpture and open source software as a "ready made made ready".) And finally the "spirit": Rees' Ajna Series is a conflation of western analytic science and eastern metaphysics with a special blend of surrealism from Bataille's Visions of Excess. Duration: 1:00:00

Mark Pauline, Artist, Survival Research Labs, SF -- Exploiting the Momentum of Self Righteousness

Wed, 5 Apr 2006 17:52:39 PST

Pauline will present an overview of recent SRL shenanigans using video and images, plus a few choice outrages from the past. He will focus on the peculiar† motivational mechanics which underlie and sustain the impractical activities of SRL. Depending on your perspective, Pauline's talk will be a stark warning of the pitfalls facing anyone daring to attempt the genuinely original, or a celebration of the thrills in store for those who actually get away with it. Duration: 1:00:00

Bruno Latour, Professor & Curator, Ecole des Mines, Paris -- From Object to Things: How to Represent the Parliament of Nature?

Tue, 8 Nov 2005 14:00:57 PST

"Things" are controversial assemblages of entangled issues, and not simply objects sitting apart from our political passions. The entanglements of things and politics engage activists, artists, politicians, and intellectuals. To assemble this parliament, rhetoric is not enough and nor is eloquence; it requires the use of all the technologies -- especially information technology -- and the possibility for the arts to re-present anew what are the common stakes. This talk will debrief and discuss "Making Things Public", a recent art show that provided a simulation of these issues. Duration: 1:00:00

Cobi van Tonder, Artist and Musician South Africa -- Ephemeral Gumboots: Dancing the Rhythm of Change

Fri, 7 Oct 2005 12:26:25 PST

The history of Gumboot dance illustrates the potential for culture to transform social aggression. Cobi will present Ephemeral Gumboots, a hybrid media artwork/musical instrument that takes South AfricanGumboot dance and extends it as an interface into an electronic music-making system. How does the music of Ephemeral Gumboots reflect the media age in South Africa? How has the artist or facilitator, responded (or succumbed) to the politics and hegemony of technology?

For Deleuze and Guattari, music "both simulates space and creates it literally, on the dance floor, in headphones, on the Internet" (Andrew Murphy, 2000). The refrains of dance music provide territories for the body and mind to move and travel. Cobi will reflect on the contemporary impact of technology and her personal experience of it as she presents her project from a socio and political perspective. She will also invite composers and dancers to use her system for further creative exploration. Duration: 1:00:00

Jaron Lanier, Artist and Musician, Berkeley -- Can Soulful Music Survive Digital Epistemology?

Fri, 7 Oct 2005 12:22:47 PST

This lecture is dedicated to the memory of Robert Moog.

Lanier claims that many people have the wrong idea about "Digital Information" and how to use it, and that a tough reassessment of computation could get us unstuck so we can have new musical styles and be soulful again. According to Lanier, pop music in America is in a bizarre state. This is the first time since electrification that a new

musical style hasn't appeared with a new generation. Hip Hop, weird attitude rock, and so on, are in many cases the music of the grandparents of today's undergraduates. Meanwhile, the term "Soulful" has been applied to music more frequently since the rise of digital metaphors and computational challenges to the very idea of "Soul." "Soulful" music is typically pre-digital, with old blues recordings being the canonical examples; New music described as "Soulful" is usually nostalgic. Making everything fungible gradually reduces the differences between things. This is what happens when all music is digitized, easily available, and remixable. Shouldn't ideas, including musical ideas, be anti-entropic? Is remixing enough?

Digital objects have more explicit boundaries than other objects. Do we have enough self-knowledge to know where the boundaries of music are? A clarinet is made of matter but a computer is made of ideas, and ideas might never be good enough for music making. Do computers confine us to eternally re-digesting the ideas of programmers, even when we are the programmers? Definitions of music and personhood tend to gain and lose transcendental components together. Does attitude about "Soulfulness" matter? His talk will include brief musical examples and performances. Duration: 1:00:00

Marko Peljhan, Projekt Atol-Pact Systems and UCSB -- From Utopian Determinism to Network-Centric Paradigms

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 11:42:08 PST

Marko Peljhan will present a a critical overview of the aesthetic, political and legal aspects of his MAKROLAB project (1997-2007). The conceptual work on the Makrolab project started in 1994 during the Yugoslav civil wars with the purpose of establishing an independent and self sufficient performance and research structure in isolation as an outpost for Utopian removal, survival and a critical reflection of the extreme and entropic societal conditions in which the author and his collaborators found themselves.

The first phase was realized in 1997 during the Documenta X exhibition in Kassel and it has since evolved in remote and isolated areas of Scotland, Australia, Slovenia, Italy, and Finland, with future setups and developments planned for India, Nunavut, and finally, in 2007, the Antarctic.

The three dynamic zones of research and inquiry that Makrolab is focused on are telecommunications, climate change and migration patterns. The primary thesis is that a unified theory for these fields will emerge from the project's insulation/isolation strategies, a method combining conscious physical, geographical, and political isolation on one hand, and a communications, close proximity and sensor/processor saturation, coupled with energy and biospheric autonomy on the other.

Makrolab is envisioned not only as an architectural and engineering development process, but also as a highly networked sensor/processor and data aggregation and reflection system, with distinct mapping capabilities and future capability projections, such as the use of sensor carrying UAV's, autonomous robotic probes and full spectrum communications capabilities. On the social level, it provides a living and working environment of close proximity, shared knowledge and responsibility among the crew members.

The presentation will discuss the Utopian roots of the project connected to the work of the Russian futurian Velimir Khlebnikov, the development of the architecture and autonomy systems, telecommunications infrastructure, tactical media initiatives related to the project and the plans for the future and final set up of a transnational research facility and base and the corresponding network centric infrastructure in the Dronning Maudland area of Antarctica. One of the main driving principles behind the project, the s.c. CONVERSION (military-civilian-military) will be discussed in detail. Duration: 1:00:00

Jane McGonigal, Department of Performance Studies at UC Berkeley -- Why I Love Bees, or, a Massively-Scaled Ludic Worldview

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 13:43:36 PST

Jane McGonigal will discuss her firsthand experiences designing, directing and performing in the supergaming genre. She proposes that massively scaling digital communities is not only possible, but that scaling leads to the emergence of important changes in our understanding of the network, of the possibility of digital community, and indeed of "community" itself.

The massively-scaled ludic worldview is a design imperative for social software engineers, game developers, network designers and all the other architects of digital community: more, more, more play and players.

Why more? "The more the better" - players experience phenomenological pleasure in being part of a much larger, co-present whole. "More is different" - unexpected things happen when you scale up. "More is needed" - to become exponentially more powerful, to pass the coveted threshold to "super," you need to connect as many individual parts as possible. These three tenets comprise the more, more, massively more connectivity she dreams of for playful network communities in the today's new media landscape. Massively more is a vision of digital social networks designed and deployed to produce more pleasure, more emergence, and more superpower through a massive scaling of gamer communities.

This vision flies in the face of one of social software's favorite conventional wisdoms: digital communities don't scale well. But recent San Francisco-based cluster of pervasive play and performance practices - the urban superhero adventure the Go Game, flash mobs, flash mob supercomputing, and the flash mob gaming missions in the massively-multiplayer alternate reality game I Love Bees – suggest otherwise. Together, these experiments in massively-scaled, public collaboration comprise the avant-garde of an emerging constellation of network practices that are both ludic, or game-like, and spectacular - that is, intended to generate an audience. She calls this tactical combination of network-based play and spectacle supergaming. Duration: 1:00:00

Rachel Greene, Rhizome -- The History of Net Art from 1995 to the Google IPO

Wed, 6 Apr 2005 16:39:10 PST

Although the scope of contemporary visual art is enormous, internet art is still being established as a legitimate category. Strong works of internet art are able to speak about the worlds of informational technology, databases, over-saturation, hacking, etc in ways that other mediums cannot. Furthermore, internet art's place in post-Conceptual art and avant-garde genealogies remains largely uncharted. Rachel Greene will argue that the internet may be the best medium for those interested in avant-garde and oppositional art-making.

What is internet art? Is it good? Who makes it? Who buys it? Who shows it? Who cares? Greene will address these and other questions in a talk based in part on her recent book. She will relate the storied history of internet art's premier organization, Rhizome.org, and address the future of new media art in a context informed by Google, blogs, and the heightened trendiness of visual art. Duration: 1:00:00

Katie Salen, Parsons School of Design & Eric Zimmerman, gameLab, NYC -- Making and Breaking Rules: Game Design as Critical Practice

Mon, 7 Mar 2005 10:49:39 PST

Despite their commercial explosion in pop cultural, games remain largely unexplored as a critical practice with social and cultural dimensions. Why are games important? What kinds of games "break the rules" of mainstream computer and video games? How can making, playing, and studying games illuminate larger social and cultural issues?

This talk will focus on a range of projects created by Kate Salen and Eric Zimmerman, including games designed to be played in conferences, offices, and urban spaces. Discussing their ideas, their processes, and the games they make, Katie and Eric will address topics in design, complex systems, emergent complexity, collaboration, competition, social play, and games as interventions into urban spaces and everyday life. Come to their talk prepared to play! Duration: 1:00:00

Rirkrit Tiravanija, New York and Thailand -- The Land

Tue, 30 Nov 2004 9:25:51 PST

The land project was initiated by Rirkrit and Kamin Letchaiprasert as a self-sustaining environment emerging from the artistic community. The land is located in the northern part of Thailand, near the village of Sanpathong, 20 km southwest from the provincial city of Chiang Mai. It is intended to be cultivated as an open space or community free from ownership, with elements favoring discussions and experimentation in the fields of culture. The land is open to the day-to-day activities of local living (i.e. the growing of rice) and to the neighboring community. On the social field of the land, artistic practices are discussed and tested. This project, a hybrid of innovation and traditionalism, contrasts contemporary materials and technologies with ancient forms of agriculture.

While the land is a rice field and a garden, freely accessible to all, it also supports architectural constructions that may be utilized in variety of ways, from shelters for sleeping to kitchens for cooking to platforms from which to deliver lectures or performances. A number of artists and architects are involved in this aspect of the land's potential, though participation is not confined solely to those in the arts. The people who have contributed to the land's structure so far have come from both local and international artistic backgrounds, with artists such as: Kamin Letchaiprasert, Mitr Jai Inn, Tobias Rehberger, Philippe Parreno, Francois Roche, Angkrit Ajchariyasophon, Prachaya Phinthong, the artist group SUPERFLEX and Tiravanija. These small constructions vary from outhouses collecting biogas which is later converted for cooking, to kitchens and a central hall with generator powered by elephants' movements, to living (meditation) huts are designed and built as artistic and architectural experiments, although they also function as spaces which artists, students, and farmers alike can utilize. Because the land is empty of expectation, it is truly open to possibility, and in this openness, science, architecture, art, religion, technology, and the environment all play a part in determining the design and function of the space. In a sense, it is through this complete lack of determination that so many experiments, and discoveries are engendered: emptiness as an incubator, of sorts.

Anyone may build a new structure on the land with the only condition being that the addition remain accessible to all, as is the goal of the land generally. We provide the land and commit to care-taking and repairs of the buildings that are to remain on the land on a permanent basis, but encourage each artist to raise the funding for the actual construction. Rirkrit's own structure, as well as that of Tobias Rehberger, was exhibited as part of the "What If...Art on the Verge of Architecture and Design" curated by Maria Lind at the Moderna Museet Stockholm. Duration: 0:18:00

Sonya Rapoport, Leonardo/ISAST, Artist, Berkeley -- From Homunculus to Golem: Tracking an Alter Avatar

Tue, 30 Nov 2004 9:13:34 PST

In recent years, scientists have advanced our ability to understand and control human sexuality, reproduction, and gender. These developments have been highly controversial and have implications for the constitution of artificially created beings. Berkeley-based media artist Sonya Rapoport draws on alchemy and mysticism to construct multimedia art works that address these dilemmas.

Combining ancient myths with modern technological sophistication, Rapoport will trace the evolution of her artwork through the past four decades, starting from her abstract expressionist paintings of the 60's to net art. Robert Edgar, media artist and historian, summarizes her early interdisciplinary work as a "mix between Marcel Duchamp and the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss." Rapoport will present slides, video, and her recent interactive webworks, REDEEMING THE GENE, and KABBALAH/KABUL, in which she attributes a soul to an artificially created being, the golem Duration: 0:10:00

Gene(sis): Panel Discussion & Lecture Series -- Lecture: Paul Rabinow

Mon, 29 Nov 2004 13:05:45 PST

Why do artists care about the human genome? Why should you? The museum's art/science panel and six-part lecture series offer audiences the chance to think critically about the implications of human genomics for anthropology, art history, history, sociology, and philosophy, as well as to hear from a leader in the field of genomics.
Duration: 0:45:00

Gene(sis): Panel Discussion & Lecture Series -- Lecture: Barbara Stafford

Mon, 22 Nov 2004 9:22:42 PST

Mimi Nguyen, Women's Studies, University of Michigan -- Star Personas and Fan Fictions: Bruce Lee, JJ Chinois, and the Queer Technologies of Celebrity

Wed, 3 Nov 2004 14:03:52 PST

What happens when a Chinese American lesbian performer borrows from the distinctive cinema and styling of international superstar Bruce Lee to create her own Asian (drag) sensation, aspiring celebrity JJ Chinois?

This talk examines the use of video and digital forms and technologies of public celebrity, in concert with queer forms and technologies of the self, for assembling a desirable commodity body in American and transnational popular culture.

JJ Chinois is the creation and alter-ego of New York City artist Lynne Chan. Nguyen will examine Chan's interpretation of Asian masculinities as individuated performance and as reproducible commodity. She will also consider the historical and cultural possibilities (and limitations) for stardom engendered by contemporary transnational circuits of culture, capital, and technology.

Nguyen explores technologies of the self and of the star to reflect upon the specific social histories and material conditions that create a desirable commodity body. Nguyen examines the technological implications of JJ Chinois' "star potential" by focusing on Chan's guerilla music video and "official" website, as well as the layers of his cinematic and stylistic borrowing from Bruce Lee's body of work (both his disciplined, physical body and his films). Nguyen looks at how Chan/Chinois reproduces and critiques the techniques through which these popular cultural forms amplify the illusion of interactivity, intimacy and identification between stars, fans, and wannabes. Duration: 0:10:00

Gene(sis): Panel Discussion & Lecture Series -- Lecture: Troy Duster

Mon, 25 Oct 2004 10:34:36 PST

Sean Kelly, Philosophy, Princeton -- Representing the Real: A Merleau-Pontean Account of Art and Experience from the Renaissance to New Media

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 14:19:01 PST

The Paragone, or Comparison of the Arts, was one of the great debates of the Renaissance. It pitted the sculptors against the painters in a competition over which was the superior art. The leading question of the Paragone was whether sculpture or painting was better at creating realistic representations. But what exactly is a "realistic" representation? Looking at art from the Renaissance to contemporary New Media, Kelly will trace one thread in the evolution of the artistic understanding of the representation of the real. This evolution, Kelly argues, parallels the evolution of the philosophical understanding of the nature of perception: it begins with the Empiricist account of perception as the projection of an image and builds toward the Merleau-Pontean idea of perception as embodied engagement with the world. The digital images of New Media, which are often thought of as the paradigm of disembodied, theoretical entities, are instead, Kelly argues, the culmination of this evolution toward an embodied understanding of perception and the representation of the real. Duration: 0:15:00

Vivian Sobchack, UCLA Film Studies -- A Leg to Stand On: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality

Fri, 7 May 2004 7:53:09 PST

Ten years ago, as the result of a recurrent cancer, my left leg (quite literally by then 'a drag') was amputated high above the knee. Six months or so after this operation, I was ready for my first prosthetic leg and began to learn to walk again. Thus, for me, there is a certain scandal in the recent rush by cultural theorists to embrace 'the prosthetic' as metaphor -- and not because I find such metaphorical usage offensive in some facile sense that privileges "authentic" over 'discursive' experience. Rather, the prosthetic as metaphor is scandalous because it is too often less imaginatively expansive than it is reductive and less complex and productive in use than is the prosthetic in its mundane context. Perhaps, however, the prosthetic metaphor is most scandalous because it far too quickly mobilizes attention to (and fascination with) artificial and 'post-human' body parts in the service of a discourse always located elsewhere-displacing the prosthetic rather than living it first on its own quite extraordinary premises. As a consequence, 'the prosthetic 'has become a fetishized but 'unfleshed out' catchword -- a vague and 'floating signifier' -- for contemporary critical discourse on technoculture.

Since I am, shall we say, particularly 'well equipped' to do so, my talk will both critique and redress this metaphorical displacement of the prosthetic through what might be called a 'phenomenological tropology' -- that is, a thick description of the prosthetic both as it is imaginatively (and rhetorically) 'figured' through representation and as it is imaginatively lived and 'figured' as a material condition of existence. First, I focus on debates around the use and misuse of the prosthetic as metaphor with particular attention to distinctions of relation expressed in the tropological figures of metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche. Then, I turn (autobiographically) to a more materialist, but no less figural, description of the prosthetic as a technological object and a lived experience. Finally, I address the figural and material practice and polymorphous play of Aimee Mullins-a double amputee model, athlete, and actress, whose many prosthetic legs dance both figurally and materially to a complex choreography that oversteps the bounds of the current 'prosthetic imagination.'" Duration: 0:04:00

Peter Selz, Curator Emeritus, UC Berkeley -- Directions in Kinetic Sculpture: From George Rickey to Jean Tinguely

Fri, 7 May 2004 7:49:09 PST

Questions of art as representation have long been challenged by science and technology. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy wrote in "Vision of Motion" (1922), that artists must replace the static principles of classical art with dynamic principles from life. Duchamp and Gabo experimented with new visual forms based on scientific discussions of space and time, and kinetic artists viewed movement itself as a new medium.

The 2004 video of Peter Selz is followed by a brief videoclip from 1966 in which Selz, then director of the University Art Museum, discusses kinetic art. Duration: 0:35:00

Marie Sester,Artist, New York -- Paradise under Surveillance: Transparency, Visibility, and Network Access

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 16:39:19 PST

Marie Sester's work questions the societal perspective of the West and the "New World Order". She works with historical, archeological and artistic documents such as large-scale x-rays, architectural ground plans, elevations, sections, city maps, and aerial views. She creates immersive installations using technologies from the entertainment and surveillance industries. Her work proposes connections between individuals and broader forces, spatial scales, and histories.

Sester explores ways that societies implement forms, focusing primarily on ideas of transparency, visibility, and access: "Transparency, a term used in architecture in the 18th century, has recently reappeared in political, economic, and media discourses. Included in its values are those of information and communication, control and surveillance. The goal of transparency is visibility, but paradoxically transparency may serve to remove the visibility of these environments and promote secrecy. Visibility is also linked to the evolution of Western culture in the 20th century, from the Hollywood star industry to the explosion of advertising". Sester's third interest, access, emerges from the fact that a wired culture increasingly demands regulated forms of entry, from bank cards to code numbers, from passwords to plug-ins. Duration: 0:50:00

Nina Katchadourian, Artist, New York -- Every Single Thing Around You Could Be Trying to Tell You Something:

Tue, 9 Dec 2003 15:04:31 PST

In Nina Katchadourian's work, Technology comes into play in ways that are strongly connected to her processes of dissection, restoration, and translation. The technological realm is conventionally thought of as a place where translation happens seamlessly and without residue, but Katchadourian seeks out places that hold the promise of minor breakdowns and potential misunderstandings. Her diverse practice includes photography, sound, video and sculpture. Katchadourian often locates her subject matter in the colloquial; in recent years she has also looked to "nature" as concept, construct and site. Activities which engage technology, in both low tech and hi tech ways, have included mending broken spider webs; restoring loose, discarded audio and video tape found on the streets of different cities; creating car alarm systems based on bird sounds; and inventing a talking popcorn machine that uses a Morse Code program to translate the sounds of popping popcorn and turn it into spoken language.
Duration: 1:17:00

Jim Campbell, Artist, San Francisco -- Formula Art: Computers as One Dimensional Translators

Tue, 9 Dec 2003 15:02:49 PST

Tracing his work through the last 15 years, Jim Campbell will address some of the more general issues that have come up with computer mediated art. Starting with Interactivity and ending with what could maybe be called Data Aestheticsization, he suggests how some of the current directions of computer based art making practices are heading towards a formulaic approach.

Campbell's work has gone through a progression from film to video to interactive installation to electronic sculpture. Thematically the work has been about human memory and its relationship to time and movement from both psychological and scientific perspectives. His earlier interactive works often are structured as psychological mirrors, where the viewer's response to a work becomes part of the work itself, as in a feedback system. More recent works explore perception at the threshold of recognition of moving images, and postulate what kinds of meaning can be expressed with extremely small amounts of information?

Having spent the last 3 years looking at "the pixel" as one example of an atomic structure of a digital representation, Campbell will discuss how he's come to the conclusion that the pixel as a visual element doesn't really exist except as a media and art based contrivance to give us something to grasp onto (or to see) as "digital". And finally he'll discuss why these "Art by Number" methods that are being used have evolved naturally out of the structure of the computer. Duration: 0:10:00

Gene(sis): Panel Discussion & Lecture Series -- Lecture: Evelyn Fox Keller

Thu, 6 Nov 2003 12:57:49 PST

Gene(sis): Panel Discussion & Lecture Series -- Lecture: Charles Weiner

Thu, 6 Nov 2003 11:24:51 PST

Gene(sis): Panel Discussion & Lecture Series -- Panel Discussion

Thu, 16 Oct 2003 14:31:04 PST

Shawn Brixey, University of Washington DXARTS
Richard Rinehart, University of California, Berkeley, Art Practice -- Navigating the Maze: Collaboration and the Chimera Obscura

Thu, 16 Oct 2003 14:18:46 PST

(Richard Rinehart will lead the presentation and Prof. Brixey will participate remotely from Seattle as advised by his doctors).
Commissioned for the traveling exhibition, "Gene(sis), Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics", "Chimera Obscura" is a net based-telerobotic work inspired by the historical anxieties, eungenic fantasies, and emerging realities evolving from the frontier of contemporary genetics research. The collaborative project between Shawn Brixey and Richard Reinhart is a meta-level discourse on the nature of human discovery and evolution as exemplified by the Human Genome Project. Crossing the boundary between gallery installation and Internet art, the work is constructed around a telerobotic agent that Internet visitors use to navigate, and decode a highly complex maze designed from a human thumbprint. The project employs a mutative game style structure allowing visitors to leave a virtual trail of media memes behind them for others to read, duplicate, or delete in the search for a unique sequence that will decode the maze. The ghost of the Minotaur roams the maze in the form of random mutative forces (a mathematical algorithm), frustrating attempts at easy, linear resolution. Visitors break through by assuming a newer hybrid form - that of telematic cyborgs, simultaneously operating in real space and virtual space, while existing physically in a third removed place. Elastic physicality and collaborative agency integrates technology with basic human functions to extend our discourse about what is organic and evolutionary. Chimera Obscura is on view at the Berkeley Art Museum through Dec. 7, and online at http://chimera.berkeley.edu

Brixey and Rinehart will highlight the performative aspects of creating and presenting interactive, networked artwork. Digital media art provides increased opportunities and demands for collaborative practice. The Chimera Obscura asks visitors to collaborate (or compete) by tracing their own and each others' paths in a complex virtual maze. In this way, the strategy of the work is reflective of the conditions of practice that created it. This work, like many collaborative works, is not only a conscious integration of the collaborator's ideas, but is also an un-self-conscious crossroad of individual paths that stretch back far and long. This joint presentation will trace the paths of each artist leading up to and intersecting at the Chimera Obscura, reflecting on the carefully planned as well as the inherent conditions that formed the work. Like the Minotaur that roams the maze; what forces are at work that upset and enliven our notions about collaborative practice? Duration: 0:06:00

Pamela Lee, Stanford Art History -- Endless Decade: On Time and Technology in the Art of the 1960s

Thu, 16 Oct 2003 14:11:17 PST

Prof. Lee received her B.A from Yale University and her Ph.D in the Department of Fine Arts from Harvard University. She also studied at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Her area is the art, theory and criticism of late modernism with a historical focus on the 1960s and 1970s. Among other journals, her work has appeared in October, Artforum, Assemblage, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, Les Cahiers du Musee national d'arte moderne, Grey Room, Parkett and Texte zur Kunst.

A pre-doctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Washington D.C., and a recipient of a postdoctoral fellowship from the Getty Research Institute, Lee has published two books in addition to journal articles, reviews and catalogue essays. Her books are Object to be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000) and Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004). A French language edition of Object to be Destroyed will be published by Editions Macula. Duration: 0:06:00

Chip Lord, University of California, Santa Cruz & Constance Lewallen, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive -- Iconographic Art Making: The Legacy of Ant Farm

Thu, 16 Oct 2003 14:10:13 PST

Constance Lewallen, Senior Curator for Exhibitions at the BAM and curator of the upcoming exhibition "Ant Farm 1968-1978" will begin the program with a brief historical overview of Ant Farm's ten-year collaboration.

In the second part of the program, artist Chip Lord, using slides and video, will present Ant Farm's Cadillac Ranch (1974) and Media Burn (1975) projects, two works that achieved popular and wide ranging visibility when they were created and then continued to extend their reach and influence as icons over the next 25 years. Lord will detail this history of appropriation, licensing, and remakes in art and popular media. Duration: 0:06:00

Anne Wagner, University of California, Berkeley, Art History -- Video as Messenger

Thu, 16 Oct 2003 14:08:27 PST

Prof. Wagner's talk will revisit Marshall Mcluhan's understanding of media: in particular, his mythical notion of social change as sensory change. She will consider Mcluhan's anchoring of history to transformations of the media on which western civilization has been progressively dependent. What is particularly interesting in this context is McLuhan's idea that media exact a bodily toll: their transformation both wound and provoke numbness as the relations of the human sensorium undergo what McLuhan (euphemistically) terms "extension." With these ideas in mind, the talk will offer a reconsideration of early video as it understands the abuses that the body and the senses suffer via contemporary mediations, where both the artist's experiences and those of the viewer are clearly in play. Duration: 0:05:00

Robert Atkins, Writer, New York City -- Eye/I Witness: AIDS and Digital Art Activism

Thu, 31 Jul 2003 15:59:04 PST

As the global, anti-war demonstrations of mid-February remind us, progressive political impulses are sometimes most effectively expressed by taking to the streets. This, of course, taps into a central, electronic-era issue; that is, the efficacy and desirability of embodied versus remote action. When it comes to political activism, where do artists fit in? New forms of electronic activism from pioneering groups including RTMark and Electronic Disturbance Theatres have proved both inspiring and problematic--and rarely contextualized within the overlapping realms of mass media, art and activism.

This lecture will analyze the remarkably effective role artists played in ameliorating the AIDS crisis in the US, while advancing innovative forms of art and strategies for distribution that included culture jamming, agitprop and institutional infiltration. The author asserts that a rare confluence of historical factors resulted in the production of the most influential body of public and "private" art in American history. What lessons might be learned from artists'practices of just 10-15 years ago that might be applied today? Or has the Internet so profoundly altered the nature of mass media that they are already irrelevant? The author intends to raise crucial cultural and artistic questions that have been ignored in the rift between discourses separating electronic and non-electronic art, and in the cultural responses to 9/11 at a moment when dissent has been demonized and civil liberties threatened.
Duration: 0:06:00

Louise Bourgeois -- Drawings Slide Show

Tue, 29 Apr 2003 11:05:09 PST

Community Conversations -- Video 5

Fri, 25 Apr 2003 16:38:11 PST

Culture is an exchange of ideas, a conversation between artists, scholars, students, and you. BAM/PFA has created a video conversations kiosk in the lobby of the museum where visitors are invited to record a two-minute video clip of themselves responding to the art they have seen during their visit, discussing an artist's or curator's talk, or talking about any aspect of culture that they feel is important. This is one way in which the voice of community can be heard and folded into larger conversations around art, film, and visual culture. Duration: 0:01:00

Community Conversations -- Video 4

Fri, 25 Apr 2003 16:37:20 PST

Community Conversations -- Video 3

Fri, 25 Apr 2003 16:36:16 PST

Community Conversations -- Video 2

Fri, 25 Apr 2003 16:34:41 PST

Community Conversations -- Video 1

Fri, 25 Apr 2003 16:33:17 PST

-- Ken Goldberg/Matrix 186

Fri, 25 Apr 2003 15:02:17 PST

Duration: 0:31:00

-- Teresita Fernández/Matrix 182

Fri, 25 Apr 2003 15:01:36 PST

Duration: 1:36:00

Matrix Artists -- Peter Doig/Matrix 183

Fri, 25 Apr 2003 11:24:27 PST

Duration: 0:03:00

James Cahill on Chinese Painting -- Video 4

Fri, 25 Apr 2003 11:08:38 PST

The following video clips have been selected from interviews with Professor Cahill conducted by Julia M. White, curator of Asian art at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, during winter 2001. Ms. White interviewed Cahill in preparation for the Berkeley Art Museum exhibition Masterworks of Chinese Painting: In Pursuit of Mists and Clouds, for which Ms. White was guest curator. Duration: 0:03:00

James Cahill on Chinese Painting -- Video 3

Fri, 25 Apr 2003 11:08:24 PST

James Cahill on Chinese Painting -- Video 2

Fri, 25 Apr 2003 11:08:12 PST

James Cahill on Chinese Painting -- Video 1

Fri, 25 Apr 2003 11:07:59 PST

James Cahill on Chinese Painting -- Video 5

Fri, 2 Mar 2007 10:51:09 PST

New Media(tors) -- Video 3

Fri, 25 Apr 2003 11:04:58 PST

Co-organized by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and GEN ART SF (a nonprofit San Francisco organization aimed at emerging artists and new arts audiences), New Media(tors): The Social Life of Digital Art was a forum for discussion among new media artists and audiences about their role in society and the new economy, and the effects of network culture on the creation, interpretation, collection, and preservation of contemporary visual art. New Media(tors) included three interactive components: an e-mail discussion list, a panel event, and a video conversations kiosk.

The panel took place on Sunday, September 23, 2001, and included participants: Shawn Brixey, artist and professor of digital media, Department of Art Practice, UC Berkeley; Alex Galloway, artist and editor/director of technology, Rhizome.org; Lynn Hershman, artist and professor/director, Media Arts Program, UC Davis; Jason Lewis, artist and founder, Arts Alliance Laboratory. The panel was moderated by Richard Rinehart, artist, director of digital media, BAM/PFA, and faculty, Department of Art Practice, UC Berkeley.

The explosion of digital art has created a new social and economic environment within the arts community and culture at large. Increasing numbers of artists as well as presenters, collectors, media and tech industry partners, and audiences are active agents finding their way through this new digital subculture. This event tracked the new modes of operation being used to adapt in this new environment, considering the questions: How are digital artists surviving in a medium that is difficult to sell? Are presenters changing their own economic models? How are the larger artistic and curatorial professions measuring achievement? How are collectors responding to intangible and ephemeral art works? How does the unique relationship to the technology industry affect digital art? Are the audiences for digital art the same or different from traditional art audiences?

After a lively discussion among speakers and audience members, everyone moved to the museum lobby for a wine reception, where the conversations continued in a less formal setting that included audience members using the Video Conversation Kiosk to record video responses to the event.
Duration: 0:55:00

New Media(tors) -- Video 2

Fri, 25 Apr 2003 11:03:43 PST

New Media(tors) -- Video 1

Fri, 25 Apr 2003 11:00:39 PST

Paul Kaiser, Digital Artist, New York -- Haunted: Digital Embodiment and Memory

Thu, 10 Apr 2003 13:42:58 PST

Motion-capture technology facilitates both abstraction and subtraction. The infrared cameras have eyes only for the reflective markers worn by the performing bodies, and not for the bodies themselves. They are blind to all vision of muscle and flesh, and with that all sense of effort as well, since they cannot see the struggle and sweat of the performing body. The face also vanishes, and with it the expressions that signal intention, charisma, and feeling. What can these cameras convey?

Is there beauty in motion seen all on its own, independent of the body that created it? Do the virtuoso performers on stage distract us from a more ineffable beauty that we sense only vaguely when watching them? Can we force such questions into focus by squinting, as it were: peering through new technological lenses?

Can we use these lenses to trace our memories, which are filled with ghostlike movements that we can barely put an appearance to? Or can we use them to create new improvisations, existing only in digital space and time, generated not by human but by artificial intelligence? Or can we multiply individual motions into fluctuating crowds and create a synthetic urban density that we can re-project into the real spaces of our cities? Duration: 0:06:00

Victoria Vesna, University of California, Los Angeles Design and Media Arts -- Mind Shifting and Future Bodies: From Networks to Nanosystems.

Thu, 10 Apr 2003 13:39:16 PST

Since the 1920s when ecologists began studying food chains, recognition of networks became essential to many scholars in different forms. Cyberneticists in particular tried to understand the brain as a neural network and to analyze patterns in the enormously complex structure of the brain, containing about 10 billion nerve cells (neurons), which are interlinked in a vast network through 1,000 billion junctions (synapses). The whole brain can be divided into sub-networks that communicate with each other, resulting in intricate patterns of intertwined webs and networks nesting within larger networks. Comparisons of the human brain to the global interconnected network abound, particularly since the boom of the Internet.

Looking at patterns and geometric forms that appear repeatedly in nature allows for some exciting possibilities for conceptualization of projects that actively involve audiences in social environments. For instance, hexagons appear in beehives, are used in the technological infrastructure of cellular phone systems and are the main shape of the structure of buckyballs, the molecule that has helped launch nano-science. This new science has the potential to change everything around us and pushes the limits of our rational minds - working at the level of atoms and molecules, using the measure of a nanometer -- a billionth of a meter, about 1/80,000 of the diameter of a human hair, or 10 times the diameter of a hydrogen atom. This talk will look at work that addressed some of these ideas and led up to the current collaborative project exploring nano dreams and nightmares. Duration: 0:06:00

Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky, and Friends -- Sound Unbound: Strategies for Reconstructing Media

Thu, 10 Apr 2003 13:35:52 PST

Paul D. Miller's Sound Unbound will be a "live" multi-media audio and visual presentation of the history of digital art and media from the viewpoint of an artist who remixes "found" audio and video using turntables and digital projectors. History itself will be the material for the mix, and the lecture presentation will focus on how dj culture has evolved out of the same technologies that are used for digital media and art.

In the second half of the presentation, Paul will be joined by the new media art collective 47 for a panel on reconstructing media and digital graffiti. The panel will explore strategies for increasing media literacy and responses to a world increasing saturated by imagery and dominated by corporate propaganda. Duration: 0:06:00

Michael Naimark, Artist and Media Researcher, SF -- (Re)Presenting Place

Thu, 10 Apr 2003 13:30:36 PST

Much of the history of representation has concentrated on conveying sense of place. One prominent historical strand is from murals and landscape painting, to panoramas and cycloramas, to wide-screen and 3D cinema. Another strand is from travel writing, to telegraph and radio, to telephone and television. These two strands are converging around the technologies of immersive "virtual reality" and the Internet. With our increasing understanding of psychophysics and cognition, many believe that the dictum "just like being there" may finally be fulfilled. But place runs deep: we "know" we are "here." This knowledge is cultural and political as well as technical and perceptual. It's also deeply personal. Placing cameras everywhere and building 3D computer models have their implications, and it's no surprise that technological enthusiasts and social critics hold differing (and often uninformed) perspectives. The arts community can play an important role both as bridge-builder and provocateur.

Naimark will present his past and current projects in this context. He has "movie mapped" Aspen from the street, Paris from the sidewalk, San Francisco from the air, Karlsruhe from the rail, and Banff from hiking trails, and has filmed panoramic experiments in Jerusalem, Dubrovnik, Angkor, and Timbuktu. He is currently working with webcams and the Internet. Duration: 0:06:00

-- Liberating the Lab: Art in a Techno-Scienific Era

Thu, 10 Apr 2003 13:27:08 PST

Duration: 4:40:00

Sara Diamond, Banff New Media Institute -- Learning from the Animals: Code Zebra

Thu, 10 Apr 2003 13:25:04 PST

CodeZebra is an interactive software and performance environment engaged with current debates in art and science. It enables cross-disciplinary dialogue and exploration using visualization, language games and role play. CodeZebra is predicated on an ongoing and increasingly fertile seduction between the apparently separate, but related species of art and science. CodeZebra explores aesthetics, improvisation, emotion and analysis. It is "site evolutionary": CodeZebra adapts the context, language, and movement grammar of its location.
Duration: 0:05:00

Leonard Shlain, San Francisco -- Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light

Thu, 10 Apr 2003 13:22:30 PST

In this talk, Dr. Shlain will present the compelling thesis of his 1991 monograph. Shlain observes that as visual artists such as Cezanne and Monet moved away from literal representation and realism in the late 19th century, researchers in physics traced a parallel trajectory away from newtonian models of deterministic motion towards far less intuitive models of relativity and statistical quantum physics. Shlain identifies a range of surprising parallels: between Seurat's pointillism and Kirchhoff and Maxwell's specroscopic models of color, between the Braque's Cubist imagery and the multiple simultaneous perspectives in Einstein's Gedanken experiments, between Pollock and Newman's Abstract Expressionism and the non-Euclidean geometry of Lobachevsky, between Duchamp and Cage's investigations of chance and the probabilistic orbital models proposed by Bohr and Heisenberg. Shlain's perspective on art and physics gives him a powerful lens with which to view the progression of innovation in both art and technology.

Shlain will be introduced by Dr. Fritjof Capra, Author of The Tao of Physics and founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley. Duration: 0:07:00

Christine Paul, Whitney Museum -- Context as Moving Target: Mapping the Digital World

Thu, 10 Apr 2003 11:59:02 PST

The networked, digital world is a multi-layered informational system in constant flux that seems to defy systematic arrangement of its constituent elements. Digital media proved a "denatured context," simultaneously enriching context and making the notion of context redundant.

The concepts of recycling, reproduction and continuous flow of information are key issues in networked, digital art. Digital artists face the pressing challenge of inventing new visual models that can represent this dynamic flow of data. Dr. Paul's talk will discuss issues of mapping in relation to the fluctuating contexts of the digital world and the challenges of exhibiting artworks that address these issues.
Duration: 0:05:00

Conversation with the Artist: David Goldblatt and Okwui Enwezor --

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 12:08:21 PST

Joining David Goldblatt for a conversation about his work is Okwui Enwezor, a recognized expert in international contemporary art and a longtime friend of the artist. The two draw on their personal experience of the African context, as well as their mutual expertise in art and photography, to examine Goldblatt's photographs in terms of both their visual and social content.

Okwui Enwezor is dean of academic affairs and senior vice president at the San Francisco Art Institute. He was artistic director of the 2006 Seville Biennial (BIACS2) in Spain; Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany; and the 2nd Johannesburg Biennial. He has curated numerous exhibitions around the world, including Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography and David Goldblatt: Fifty-one Years. Duration: 0:48:00

--

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:11:14 PST

Duration: 1:24:00

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive - Podcast

Les Blank in Person --

Afterimage: The Films of Nicolas Pereda -- In Conversation: Nicolas Pereda and Robert Koehler

David Littlejohn on Burning Man -- Special Event

Barry McGee -- Graffiti: A History in Photographs with Jim Prigoff

Louise Mozingo and Richard Walker in Conversation -- 1991: The Oakland-Berkeley Fire Aftermath Photographs by Richard Misrach

Desirée Holman: Heterotopias / MATRIX 238 -- Desirée Holman in Conversation with Sherry Turkle

17. Alfred Young -- Coil, Yellow Cab, Oil

16. Barbara T. Smith -- Field Piece, Light Watch, The Fisherman IS the Fish, Feed Me

15. Martha Rosler -- Bringing the War Home, Body Beautiful, Budding Gourmet

14. Linda Montano -- Chicken Dance: The Streets of San Francisco

13. Tom Marioni -- One Second Sculpture, The Trip, Process Piece

12. Fred Lonidier -- 29 Arrests

11. Stephen Laub -- Relations

10. Suzanne Lacy -- Anatomy Lessons

9. Paul Kos -- Sound of Ice Melting

8. Lynn Hershman -- Dante Hotel

7. Doug Hall -- T.R. Uthco, 8 Gestures

6. Charles Gaines -- Regression Series Drawings

5. Lowell Darling -- Get Your MFA Friday

4. Nancy Buchanan -- Hair Transplant

3. Eleanor Antin -- 100 Boots, Representational Painting

2. Adam II (the late Paul Cotton) -- Rex-Erection of the Mystical Body

1. Constance M. Lewallen -- Curator’s Introduction

Artist's Talk: Robert Warner -- Tables of Content: Ray Johnson and Robert Warner Bob Box Archive / MATRIX 241

Artist's Talk: Richard Misrach -- 1991: The Oakland-Berkeley Fire Aftermath Photographs by Richard Misrach

L@TE: Evangelista --

L@TE: Sir Richard Bishop / Gerritt Wittmer and Paul Knowles --

L@TE: C. Spencer Yeh / David Horvitz --

L@TE: Rova Saxophone Quartet -- Larry Ochs, Jon Raskin, Bruce Ackley, and Steve Adams

Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage Curators' Gallery Talk --

Artist’s Talk: Desirée Holman with Dena Beard -- Desirée Holman: Heterotopias / MATRIX 238

Create; Artists' Panel -- Andres Cisneros-Galindo, Paul Moshammer, and Tara Tucker with Matthew Higgs and Lawrence Rinder

Create -- Create; Community Open House

Lisa Iwamoto -- Adaptations

Jose Alvarez -- Surfaces of Constant Simultaneity

Leo Villareal -- Complex Simplicity: Investigating the Medium of Light

Anne Walsh and Chris Kubick -- Conversing, Considering, Condensing, Conjuring: 7 Years of Collaboration

Jeffrey Inaba -- Architectural Communication in the Knowledge Economy

Mark Tribe -- Mediation, Performance, and the Public Sphere

Joe McKay -- Something Besides Super Monkey Ball

Natalie Jeremijenko -- Redesigning our relationship to natural systems, wrestling rhinoceros beetles, launching the Urban Space Station and other Cross(x)Species Adventures

Eva Hesse: Studiowork -- Lecture by Briony Fer

Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area -- Book Launch Event

Hauntology -- Hallowen L@TE Event

Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area -- Procession of the Image Processors

Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area -- Stories Untold

Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area -- 1961-71

Marjolijn Dijkman / MATRIX 234 -- Conversation: Michael Dear and Marjolijn Dijkman

Flowers of the Four Seasons: Ten Centuries of Art from the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture -- Conversation: Willa and George Tanabe on Japanese Religious Art

Hauntology -- Hauntology, Curators' Tour

Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area -- 1946-53 - Introduced by David Meltzer with Wilder Bentley II in Person

Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area -- Landscape as Expression – Ernie Gehr and Lawrence Jordan in Person

Brent Green Performance --

Brent Green Interview --

Lucinda Barnes on James Castle: A Retrospective -- (Closed-Captioned for the Hearing Impaired)

Lecture by Robert Storr on James Castle -- (Closed-Captioned for the Hearing Impaired)

Ben Rubin, Artist, Ear Studio, New York -- What’s That Ticking Sound?

¡Presente! Daniel Alarcón and Carlos Motta: Next-Generation Latin American Art and Literature -- Fernando Botero: The Abu Ghraib Series

Conversation: Gretchen Daily and Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle -- Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet

Candice Breitz, Artist, Berlin -- From A to B and Back Again

Camille Utterback, Artist, San Francisco -- Luscious Complexity: Transcending the Doohickey

Mark Hosler, Artist, Negativland -- Adventures in Art at the Edge of the Law

Gallery Talk by Peter Selz on Fernando Botero -- Fernando Botero: The Abu Ghraib Series

Fernando Botero and Lawrence Rinder in Conversation -- Fernando Botero: The Abu Ghraib Series

Angelo Plessas -- NetArt: Three-Minute Artist Interview

Conversation: Kurt Cuffey and Dario Robleto -- Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet

Galaxy: A Hundred or So Stars Visible to the Naked Eye -- Curator’s Tour

Neighborhood Public Radio, Oakland / Chicago / San Diego -- 1/4 Watt of Pure Power: Experiments in the Dark Transmission Arts

Joseph DeLappe, Artist, Reno, Nevada -- You’ll Never Walk Alone: Protest, Memory, and Reenactment

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Artists, NYC -- I’ll Replace You: Outsourcing Everyday Life

Marcia Tanner, Curator, Berkeley, California -- Where the Girls Are: Women Artists Working With Technology

Ray Beldner, Artist, San Francisco -- Flickr, Flarfing and Babelfish: The Internet and Art Practice

Artist’s Talk: Mario García Torres -- Je ne sais si c’en est la cause, What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger, and Some Reference Materials / MATRIX 227

Artist and Curator in Conversation: Paul Chan and Elizabeth Thomas -- MATRIX 30th Anniversary Event

Anne Pasternak, Director, Creative Time, New York -- Public Art and Media: From Spectacle to Political

R. Luke DuBois, Composer/Artist, New York -- How to Type Fast and Influence People

Artist and Curator in Conversation: Susan Rothenberg and Michael Auping -- MATRIX 30th Anniversary Event

Hasan Elahi, Artist, San Jose -- Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project

Artist and Curator in Conversation: Nayland Blake and Lawrence Rinder -- MATRIX 30th Anniversary Event

Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage
Curators' Gallery Talk --