courses /winter 09 /danm 249 /projects
Faculty Researcher Interview/Analysis
Please post your name and the name of the Faculty Researcher you wish to interview - indicate which of the four research focus areas you think their research relates to and include a very brief statement of the significant research question they are addressing within this area of focus.
This will assist us in pairing you with a fellow student for the interview/analysis project. If you have already organized a pairing for yourself please indicate that here as well.
Nick
Interview with Derek Murray
ABOUT NICK
My work explores new communicative, collaborative, exploratory and participatory possibilities that digital media affords. I am interested in creating work that push the limits of new technologies to explore their unique possibilities to transform art-making practice. My personal work relies heavily on exploration and play as I seek to push the limits of new media. I am interested in exploring the irrational as a means to create art that is socially transformative. As an artist, I hope to create new media art that incorporates my skills in traditional media, is solidly grounded in social/cultural theory and explores the new creative possibilities afforded to us by digital media.
Kathleen
PATTY GALLAGHER (Theater Arts)
Research relevance: Performative Technologies/Playable Media
Research question: embodiment of alternate identities, the history and role of fictive personas
DEE HIBBERT-JONES (Art)
Research relevance: Participatory Culture
Research question: examining psychological/political/social states through art objects/experiences.
Kyle link to my discussion of this project
IAIN BOAL (Community Studies)
Research relevance: Participatory Culture
Research Questions: appropriate technologies, fencing of the (creative) commons, relationships b/t Malthusian economics and progress narratives implicit in new technologies
Iain Boal is an Irish social historian of science and technics, associated with Retort, a group of antinomian writers, artisans and artists based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is one of the authors of Retort's Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (2nd edn, Verso, 2006). His own work on the bicycle as an "antique modern," his histories of counter cultures, the curtailing of the commons, and his skepticism about the social value of new technologies are all applicable to my work thesis work and interests in participatory culture. Boal is a lecturer with the Community Studies Dept.
IRENE GUSTAFSON (Film and Digital Media)
Research relevance: Participatory Culture? Mechatronics?
Research Questions: How transgressive subjecivities signify differently in analog versus digital mediums.
Irene Gustafson makes experimental documentaries. Some of these focus on the subjective experiences of marginalized social identities (such as gender queer/ trans folk). Others have explored the potential of video/ new media to change the (narrative) meaning of older films. Much of Gustafson's recent work deals with relationships between histories, technologies, and the histories of technologies with an eye to how those relationships form and are formed by subjectivities.
Elizabeth
Karen Barad (Feminist Studies)
Interview preparation assignment
Faculty Research Interview:
Entanglement #1 (Download PDF)
Chris Molla
Interview with composer David Cope
The notion of a "poetic environment" keeps returning in my thinking as I contemplate the potentials of digital technology to engage audience/participants with the artwork. Just as an artwork in any medium is subject to a spectrum of interpretations by the individuals who comprise the audience for the work by virtue of individual experience, history and proclivity, so the potential for interactivity creates the opportunity for audience/participants to take the creative energy involved in interpretation to the level of collaboration in the generation of meaning within the context of the work. These potentials for participants to engage in meaning-generation are an outgrowth of the foregrounding of broadening concepts of creativity and play in the development of technology and the evolution of culture. Because I am interested in building on my foundations within the field of music, while using digital technology as a vector for exploring different modes of thought and creative practice, I am determined to try to conduct two interviews: One with composer and Music Professor David Cope, and with poet and Professor of Literature Rob Wilson.
Rob Wilson (Literature)
Research Relevance: Multi-sensory poetics.
David Cope (Music)
Research Relevance: Multidisciplinarity in Music/Sound Art practice.
Questions/Topics:
For David:
Describe some of the ways in which your extra-musical research informs your creative process, particularly with respect to your piece The Way.
How does your work in computer programming influence your aesthetic, both generally, and with respect to the development of individual pieces? Does your computer work inform your composition process for acoustic instruments?
For Rob:
Describe some of the relationships you see between mongrel poetic practices, the technological mediation of reality, and notions of virtuality.
How can we begin to develop a multimedia, multi-sensory poetics that helps us – individually and collectively – to navigate and influence the evolution of globalized culture?
Jessica Hayden
EG CRICHTON (Art)
Research relevance: Performative Technologies / Participatory Culture
Research question: How can performing what is private (memories, thoughts, personal narratives and dreams) in public spaces help to illuminate hidden histories and to expose collective social concerns? What is the relationship between private desires and the public manifestation of those desires, and how can examining this relationship cast light on the ways in which cultural mythologies are produced?
EG Crichton is a visual artist who creates both gallery installations and collaborative public works. She uses a range of mediums to explore hidden histories, collective social concerns, and controversies about desire. Her subject matter grows out of a collusion between site and historical research, stories from her life, and stories from the lives of people she interviews. The resulting narratives form a layered exploration of both memory and record - an uneasy alliance between private and public voices and images that addresses a space where repression encounters desire.
1/27/09 Collaborative Blurb
My research interests explore the ways that digital technologies can be used in conjuction with more traditional methods of artistic interpretation to explore participatory possibilties in performance and gallery spaces. My work lies on the cusp between the concept of participatory culture, which explores the ways in which new technologies enable greater possibilities for social engagement, and performative technologies, which consider the roles that technologies can actively play when cast as characters within the context of performance spaces.
Questions:
How can performing what is private (memories, thoughts, personal narratives and dreams) in public spaces help to illuminate hidden histories and to expose collective social concerns?
What is the relationship between private desire and the public manifestation of desire in artworks, and how can examining this relationship cast light on the ways in which cultural mythologies about desire are produced?
What performative roles do digital forums play in casting private narratives into public spaces?
How can digital media, communication networks, and interactive systems be used to gather, integrate, and perform personal stories and hidden histories?
How does the placement of a performative work in a given space effect the reception of the work?
How do new technologies open up possibilities for representation and participation in performative works?
What is the relationship between participatory artwork and performative artwork?
How can performative artworks be made more participatory by incorporation of new technologies?
Karl Baumann
- Irene Lusztig (Film)
Research Relevance: Documentary and Historical Memory
- Hayden White (History of Consciousness)
Research Relevance: Contemporary Theories of History and Narrativity
- Irene Gustafson (Film)
Research Relevance: Experimental Documentary
- Catherine Soussloff (HAVC)
Research Relevance: Historiography, theory, and philosophy of Art.
- Derek Murray (Art)
Research Relevance: Contemporary Art Theory and Global Discourse
Christoph
Gary Young (Literature) is also the publisher of Greenhouse Review Press.
Research Relevance: Participatory Culture
Research Question: How does memory as personal experience connect with place?
Jeff
Irene Gustafson (Film and Digital Media)
Drew
Marcia Ochoa – Community Studies
Relevant to Participatory Culture
Gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, Latina/o studies, media and cultural studies, ethnography of media, feminism, queer theory, multimedia production, Latin American studies - Colombia and Venezuela, political philosophy and geography.
http://communitystudies.ucsc.edu/directory/details.php?id=26
Alma R. Martinez - Theater
Relevant to Participatory Culture
Appears to be the only theater faculty member that has worked with Augusto Boal, creator of Theater of The Oppressed
http://theater.ucsc.edu/faculty/bios/martinez.html
Topher
Professor Jim Whitehead, UCSC Computer Science Dept.
- Bio:
Professor Whitehead is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he performs research in the fields of software evolution, software bug prediction, and automated generation of computer game levels. He was an active participant in successful efforts to create a new undegraduate major, the BS in Computer Science: Computer Game Design. As of June 15, 2006, this new major was officially approved by UC Santa Cruz. This major is very interdisciplinary, including several courses from the Arts Division on campus. It is a rigorous Computer Science degree, providing a solid, strong background in computer science, with additional courses that teach the elements of computer game design.
- Focus area: Playable Media
- Interdisciplinary questions for Prof Whitehead:
*
1. You recently helped design the undergraduate games program. Would you tell us your interdisciplinary approach as it relates to games, and what your goals were in creating the program?
2. Do you incorporate interdisciplinary processes in your own research, and if so, how?
3. In working with the games program and DANM, what problems or challenges do you see in implementing interdisciplinary interaction for students and faculty?
4. Do you have any suggestions to overcome these challenges?
5. Do you see any additional disciplines or fields that may be incorporated into games or playable media in the future?
Topher's MP3 Interview of Jim Whitehead
Lyès
BEN CARSON – Music
Ben Carson's work as a composer is supported by a variety of research, including work in music perception, computation, philosophy of science, and gender theory.
Research Relevance: Playable Media – Performative Technologies
Research Question : How to regain interactor’s focus on sound despite the presence of video screen(s) within audiovisual (interactive) installations ?
DAVID COPE – Arts
His primary area of research involves artificial intelligence and music; he writes programs and algorithms that can analyze existing music and create new compositions in the style of the original input music.
Research Relevance : Playable Media – Performative Technologies
Research Question : How can artificial intelligence be used to enhance one’s experience within audiovisual (interactive) installations?
Antoine Abou Jaoude
Ben Carson (Music)
research relevance: Ben Carson worked on researching musical perception, computation, ethnic music theory, philosophy of science, and gender theory
Since my thesis will revolve around composing melodies and creating Easternized and Westernized version out of them. Ben Carson's musical theory background in both ethnic music and occidental music will definitely help me deal with the binary aspect of my thesis final project.
Questions:
interview content with Ben Carson
Karl and Christoph group blurb:
Gary Young is a poet whose poetry reflects around the landscape of California; he grew up in Santa Cruz and lived in Los Angeles for the duration of his youth. His significant interests include the objectivist poets. Young is interested in publishing and expanding literature that reflects lived life in respect to location by means of a small literary press he has worked on for thirty years. From the beginning of the press, he worked on means to improve the generation of literature with better and better technology. The books he published are widely available through the advent and ease of publishing via digital media.
Irene Lusztig was born in Romania but has spent must of her educational career in the UK and the east coast, attending Harvard for undergrad and receiving a MFA in film/video at Bard and then teaching at Harvard, New York Institute of Technology, SUNY Purchase, and Temple University. Her recent work has utilized the filmic medium as a facilitator of personal explorations into history, especially concerning the former Soviet Union, in order “to open a contemporary landscape”, revisiting and reinterpreting the original state propagandic version of these events.
They’re both working in the geographical/cultural contexts of the areas they were born, or identify with. While Young writes about a personal connection with the experience of surrounding landscape like the mountains in Santa Cruz County, Lusztig works through the personal experience of re-engaging a past cultural landscape, a phantasmal presence of political or familial history. Both appear to be interested in the availability of information to the public through digital variations of older technology (ie publishing and film).
To Lusztig: Does your work seek to not only enact but also provoke historical agency?
To Young: How can literature become readily available publishing them with programs and distributing books via a literary press?
Nik and Lyes
Ben Carson and Suresh Lodha Interviews, Playable Media?
Playable Media hinges on manipulating the relationship between audience and mediated environment. It integrates different concepts coming from fields such as game design, computer science and cognitive science. Therefore, it involves physical design (in the case of installations), software design, and interaction design. The product often presents visuals and audio. Our research interests revolve around the engagement of audience through these modes of mediation and how we can effectively produce involving environments.
Ben Carson’s interest in music can be “summarized in the concept of the musical subject, which he defines as those aspects of music that might carry or represent the identity of a listener, aspects that seem to speak from, or give voice to, our experiences -- experiences of the world, or experiences of the mind's interior”. An interesting perspective to his work would be to discuss the boundary between audio in new media and what is called music in a more traditional way. The interview will also tackle the methods used to create subject focused sound environment and question the way it can be expanded to the Playable Media projects. Since M. Carson research includes music perception in a more psychological point of view, the question of capturing people’s focus on sound when screens are competing in stimulating human senses will be brought up.
Suresh Lodha's research interest in "GeoSpatial, Scientific, Information, Global Inequality, Uncertainty, Multimodal" visualization engage the relationship between information and representation. Professor Lodha's research with Multimodal visualization is especially interesting basis for an interview as these concerns directly address some of the modes of engagement that we seek to investigate.