[Leonardo/ISAST Network] Join Leonardo/ISAST at Berkeley Big Bang 08: New Media Symposium and Art Festival, June 1-3, 2008

[Leonardo/ISAST]

Berkeley Big Bang 08: New Media Symposium and Art Festival
June 1 - 3, 2008
Hosted by The UC Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archives (BAM/PFA) and the Berkeley Center for New Media
Berkeley, CA, USA
http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/events/education/bigbang

June 1: New media art presentations by San Francisco Bay Area artists Trevor Paglen, Lynn Hershman Leeson and Jim Campbell
June 2 - 3: Two-day symposium on new media, art, science, and the body in partnership with Berkeley Center for New Media and Leonardo/ISAST

Leonardo community members who will be in the San Francisco Bay Area in early June are invited to Berkeley Big Bang 08, three days of new media and art hosted by The UC Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archives (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 in San Jose. Occurring together for the first time, these two events combine 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 will include a two-day symposium on new media, art, science, and the body in partnership with BerkeleyCenter 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 is presented in tandem with BAM/PFA exhibitions of work by media artists Trevor Paglen, Jim Campbell, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Scott Snibbe.

A very low admission fee is set to encourage students and a broad public audience to participate in the two-day symposium—a nominal $3.00 processing fee per day will be charged when you register online. Please note that you can register for each day of the symposium separately or for the complete two-day package. Space is limited, and registration via the UC Berkeley Art Museum website is required. 

REGISTER ONLINE NOW: http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/events/education/bigbang

Berkeley Big Bang Program Outline

Sunday, June 1

Trevor Paglen: The Other Night Sky, exhibition opening and artist talk at the Berkeley Art Museum (free admission)

Lynn Hershman Leeson: Virtually Everything, Virtually, a marathon screening of the artist’s video works at the Pacific Film Archive (PFA ticket purchase required)

Jim Campbell: Home Movies, installation on view at the Berkeley Art Museum (Museum admission required)
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Monday, June 2 

Embodied Media, the first of a two-part symposium, co-hosted by the Berkeley Art Museum and the Berkeley Center for New Media. In the Museum Theater, 9:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. 

Keynote:
Hubert Dreyfus, UC Berkeley Professor of Philosophy
Virtual Embodiment and Myths of Meaning in Second Life

Second Life is a popular networked 3-D virtual environment where millions of online visitors control avatars that interact with each other, build structures, visit shops, and engage in a variety of social and economic activities. Dreyfus analyzes Second Life from a philosophical perspective, exploring how thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger would respond to the virtual embodiment enabled by such systems. Dreyfus argues that the explicit conscious indirectness inherent in how responses and emotions are conveyed in Second Life is distinctly Cartesian, dualistic, and fundamentally limited. Drawing from Existential Phenomenology, Dreyfus suggests that maximally meaningful human experiences require an intuitive shared sense of vulnerability, mood, and emotion that is currently lacking but may be possible with future technological advances that would directly link the bodies or brains of the participants in Second Life with their avatar bodies in the virtual world.

Black Cloud/Red Eye: You are invited to play this immersive alternate reality game created by artist Greg Niemeyer; on the UC Berkeley campus.

Scott Snibbe: Falling Girl, exhibition opening and reception at the BerkeleyArt Museum (free admission)
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Tuesday, June 3

Remix: From Science to Art and Back in the Digital Age, the second of a two-part symposium, co-hosted by the Berkeley Art Museum and Leonardo: The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST). In the Museum Theater, 9:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.

Introduction by Steve Wilson, Leonardo board member since 1983, celebrating forty years of Leonardo: The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology.

“Osmosis”: What Can the Arts Do for the Sciences? 

Art-Science interaction is a two-way process. The impact of science and technology on the arts is much discussed and well-documented. This panel seeks to examine the influence of the arts on the sciences, and the benefits that science can derive from the arts.

“Osmosis” Panelists:
- Bronac Ferran
- Jim Crutchfield, physicist at UC Davis
- Chris Chafe, Director, StanfordUniversityCenter for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA)

Brilliant Noise: How Data Becomes Experience for Artists and for Scientists 

Most information about the world we live in is now mediated by instruments. This data is often visualized and sonified, both to aid analysis and to communicate with other researchers, but artists, too, can make this data meaningful and “sensual.” The same data sets can lead to very different kinds of work. One person’s noise is another person’s sound.

Brilliant Noise Panelists:
- Michael Joaquin Grey, artist and inventor
- Laura Peticolas, geophysicist at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab
- Douglas Kahn, Professor and Founding Director, UC Davis Technocultural Studies Program

Free-form meeting of interested audience members with Leonardo ISAST board members during the lunch break.

The New Sensuality: Epistemologies of the Very, Very Small

Human cognition is bounded by the inadequacy of human senses to allow us sensory contact with the world on scales larger or smaller than ourselves. To perceive the nano world one needs extended senses or new senses. The nano world requires a new ontology and a new epistemology.

The New Sensuality Panelists:
- Ruth West, artist with a background as a molecular geneticist
- Gordon Wozniak, former nuclear scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- Wayne Lanier, microbiologist at the Hidden Ecologies project of the San Francisco Exploratorium

Closing event of the two-day conference for the audience to mingle with the speakers of the various panels and with Leonardo board members.

For more information about Berkeley Big Bang 08 and to register, visit: http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/events/education/bigbang

For more information about Leonardo projects and activities, visit: http://www.leonardo.info

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