technoSpheres: Futures of Thinking

Aug 14–Aug 25, 2006
UC Irvine

Program Overview

Participants in the 2006 Seminar explored new ways of thinking about and with technology. The Seminar included paired conversations between cutting edge technological innovators and experimental humanists, artists and social scientists, around the many issues that engage the human and the technological. The Seminar also included demonstrations of new technological devices, their applications and scholarly practices. Participants had opportunities to engage with new digital applications in the context of small-group workshops, large-group social networking exercises and art/technology installations.

Conversational Themes

Workshops

Demonstrations

Vectors: A Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular | Technological RePlacements | New Narrative Machines | Wi-Fi Bedouin | Among Others

Presenters

Steve Anderson: Assistant Professor of Interactive Media at the USC School of Cinema-Television

Anne Balsamo: Director of Academic Programs, USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy; Professor, Interactive Media and Gender Studies; Founding Partner, Onomy Labs

Julian Bleecker: Head, Mobile and Pervasive Lab, a near-future think tank, School of Cinema-TV and the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California

John Seely Brown: Former Chief Scientist, Xerox Corporation; Director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)

Craig Calhoun: President, Social Science Research Council. Social Science Professor, New York University

Lisa Cartwright: Associate Professor, Department of Communication, UC San Diego

Rosemary Comella: The Labyrinth Project, University of Southern California

Beatriz da Costa: Assistant Professor, graduate program in Arts, Computation and Engineering, UC Irvine. Co-founder of Preemptive Media, an art, activism and technology group

Cathy N. Davidson: Vice-Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies; Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English; Founding Co-Director, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University

Anna Everett: Assistant Professor, Film Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara

Scott Fisher: Chair, Interactive Media Division, USC School of Cinema-Television. President of Teleprescence Media

Tracy Fullerton: Assistant Professor and Co-Director, Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab, USC School of Cinema-Television’s Interactive Media Division. Founding member, R/GA Interactive

Rene Garcia: Curator

David Theo Goldberg: Director, UC Humanities Research Institute; Professor, Comparative Literature, and Criminology, Law and Society, UC Irvine

Guillermo Gómez-Peña: Performance artist/writer, artistic director of “La Pocha Nostra” in San Francisco

Judith Halberstam: Professor at University of Southern California, Specialist in Media studies, film, queer theory, feminist and gender studies, postmodernism, nineteenth-century British literature

Katherine Hayles: English Professor, UCLA. Author, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics

Lynn Hershman: Professor Emeritus, UC Davis. A.D. White Professor-at-Large, Cornell University. Author, The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson: Secret Agents, Private

Perry Hoberman: Teaches in the graduate Computer Art Department, School of Visual Arts, New York. Art Director at Telepresence Research He works with “a variety of technologies, ranging from utterly obsolete to seasonably state-of-the-art.”

Judith Jackson Fossett: Associate Professor of American Studies, Film & Popular Culture, Minority Discourse, 19th-Century at University of Southern California

Jerry Kang: Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. His teaching and scholarly pursuits include civil procedure, race, and communications

Marsha Kinder: Professor of Cinema, Comparative Literature, Critical Studies, Portuguese and Spanish, University of Southern California

Norman Klein: Urban and media historian and novelist. Professor, California Institute of the Arts. Adjunct professor, UCLA and Art Center College of Design

Andreas Kratky: Independent media artist and designer

George Lewis: Edwin H. Case Professor of Music, Columbia University. Improvisor-trombonist, composer, computer/installation artist. MacArthur Genius Award Winner. Member, Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians

Alan Liu: Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Principal investigator of the NEH-funded Teaching with Technology project at UCSB and co-director of the English Dept’s undergraduate specialization on Literature and the Culture of Information

Geert Lovink: Media theorist and activist. Co-founder of the international mailing list Nettime and The Digital City. Member of Adilkno, the Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge

Peter Lunenfeld: Professor in the graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Founder of mediawork: The Southern California New Media Working Group; Director of the Institute for Technology & Aesthetics (ITA)

Tara McPherson: Chair and Associate Professor, Division of Critical Studies, USC School of Cinema-Television

Michael Naimark: Visiting Associate Professor, Interactive Media Division of the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television. Visiting Committee member, MIT Media Lab. Member, Society for Visual Anthropology

Lisa Nakamura: Assistant Professor of Communication Arts & Visual Culture Studies at University of Wisconsin, Madison

Robert Nideffer: Associate Professor in Studio Art and Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine, where he also serves as Affiliated Faculty in the Visual Studies Program, and the Art, Computation and Engineering (ACE). Makes art, researches, teaches, and occasionally publishes in the areas of virtual environments and behavior, interface theory and design, technology and culture, and contemporary social theory

ONOMY LABS (Design for Culture): Onomy Labs creates interactive cultural technologies. Onomy’s interactive systems are found around the world in research labs, corporate briefing centers, theme parks and museums. They are a design-build firm that creates signature exhibits: the exhibits that people remember and tell their friends about

Simon Penny: Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Layer Leader for the Arts, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Cal-IT2)

Saskia Sassen: Professor of Sociology, University of Chicago. Centennial Visiting Professor, London School of Economics. Chair, Information Technology and International Cooperation Committee, Social Science Research Council

Larry Smarr: Founding Director, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology CAL(IT)2 and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)

Floyd Webb: Filmmaker, multimedia/Internet designer/consultant. Founder and creative director, Blacklight Festival of International Black Cinema. Creative Director of e22 Digital