California Humanities Scholars

UCLA's Center for Digital Humanities and the Keck Digital and Cultural Mapping Program announce a new online showcase for Keck DCMP student projects.  The new student project showcase features projects by UCLA graduate and undergraduate students in KECK DCMP courses.  Each project is accompanied by a description of the project and the course it was created for.

UCLA's Keck Digital and Cultural Mapping Program explores how new technologies can be utilized to investigate and map a wide range of cultural, historical, and social dynamics.  The innovative undergraduate curriculum, now in its third year, has introduced students in the Humanities and Social Sciences to digital mapping tools that change the way we visualize the world around us.  Current and past courses incorporate Geographic Information Systems (GIS), virtual globes, 3D modeling and other online mapping programs in ways that spark student creativity and sharpen critical thinking skills.

UCLA's Center for Digital Humanities is pleased to announce the re-launch of its website.  The new site represents the breadth of digital humanities research at UCLA.  It provides detailed information about UCLA's new digital humanities minor and graduate certificate program as well as an up-to-date listing of digital humanities courses offerings and faculty and staff working in digital humanities.  It showcases projects from CDH partners and affiliates and will also act as a clearinghouse for information about funding opportunities.

UC Davis's Science and Technology Studies Program and its Anthropology department will sponsor a number of events this spring, as will UC Berkeley's Science, Technology and Society Center. Here is a short list of STS events at northern Cal's UC campuses for the first weeks of May. If you're interested in: materials, science, tech, biomedicine, or knowledge production: do not miss!

1. STS at UC Berkeley Conference: Pasts, Presents, and Futures in Science

'The Reinvention of Time: Articulations of the Past and Future in the Scientific Present'

Fri, May 6, 9am - 6pm, Stephens Lounge, MLK Union, UC Berkeley

Scholars of science, technology and medicine have recently begun to unpack how articulations of the past and the future are entangled within scientific accounts of the present. This body of work has ranged from looking at the effects of the post-colonial past on modern medicine to examining how the horizon of anticipated future crises supports entire scientific research paradigms. This conference will gather together scholars from a variety of disciplines to examine the phenomenon of time in relationship to the practice of science and the development of new technologies. The conference will critically engage with the conception of the future as an organizing site for scientific scholarship and practice and ask: To what extent does a focus on the future call into question scientific modes of engagement with other temporal frames?

Opening Remarks: Vincanne Adams, University of California, San Francisco

Morning Keynote speaker: Andrew Lakoff, University of Southern California

10:15 am: 'Pasts': Rosemary Joyce, Cathryn Carson, Thomas Laquer

1:15 pm: 'Presents': Tim Choy (UC Davis anthropologist), Kimberly Tallbear, Paul Rabinow (UC Berkeley anthropologist)

3:15 pm: 'Futures': Charis Thompson, Joe Dumit (UC Davis anthropologist), Sharon Kaufman. Discussants: Lawrence Cohen (UC Berkeley anthropologist), Cori Hayden, and Adele Clarke

Afternoon keynote speaker: Michelle Murphy, University of Toronto

2. STS at UC Davis presents 'Food for Thought' Lunch and Talk

Warren Sack, UCSC: "Mutual Recursion: What Happens When Politics Becomes Code?"

Friday May 13, Noon, with Pizza Deathstar building (SSH): 1246

YOU ARE INVITED TO ATTEND:The Media Design Program's 2011 Thesis Show  FIRST SHOWING:Wednesday, April 20, 6:00 – 10:00 PM4HOURSSOLID: Work and Ideas from the Graduate School at Art Center College of Design SECOND SHOWING: Saturday, April 24, 8:00 – 10:00 PM Media Design Thesis Show and Grad Art Open Studios PLACE:Wind Tunnel Gallery, South CampusArt Center College of Design950 South Raymond Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91105 2011 THESIS PROJECTS:_______________________________________________________________________Hye Mi Kim Minding the Gap     Minding the Gap is an investigation into the ambiguity of data sets, reexamining scientific and technological data. Through exposure, study, and the illustration of gaps, data is transformed from a barometer of reality into a space filled with subjective and imaginative interpretation. _______________________________________________________________________Scott Liao Collaborative Perception     Collaborative Perception researches the affordances of low-cost technologies as tools for participatory storytelling, reconsidering the use of two-dimensional media content. The approach creates a multi-layered authoring space that can be explored with the audience’s imagination and curiosity. _______________________________________________________________________Ina Xi  Augmentable, Believable, Improvable and Invisible   Augmentable, Believable, Improvable and Invisible investigates how social media users craft virtual identities, manage reputations and augment real-world relationships by sharing misleading personal information. The project envisions services that incorporate deception as a fundamental affordance of the social networking experience. _______________________________________________________________________Sara Moore In Absentia    

In absentia explores how emergent technologies can assist in the processes of personal grieving. Through scientifically- and technologically-informed design, this speculative project creates new rituals and artifacts to help us remember our deceased and deal with death.

_______________________________________________________________________Yuin Chien Hijackers     Hijackers is a radical response to patterns of interface design that predict user behavior. These mash-ups of hacked web technology and quirky human expressions illuminate our complicity in the digital status quo. _______________________________________________________________________Sue Yang Ordinary Epistemes      Ordinary Epistemes mines the tension between objective knowledge and subjective perception by contextualizing abstract phenomena we experience ordinarily. The project defines our epistemic challenges to 'know' as the process of creating engaging media, the 'thought instruments.' _______________________________________________________________________Julianne Weiss Myriad Accounts     Written and performed live, Myriad Accounts positions multiple writers beside one another as they record their surroundings textually in real time. This arrangement and its dynamic publishing mechanism allow readers to experience multifarious linguistic and personal reactions to the real.     _______________________________________________________________________Jiha Hwang Strange Companions     Strange Companions asks us to experience a new type of robotic companion with unexpected and idiosyncratic behaviors. Through a series of visual studies the audience can imagine how such creatures might behave in their living spaces. _______________________________________________________________________Hae Jin Lee  Happiness Initiative     In a society obsessed with happiness, what kind of genetic, neural, pharmacological and computer technologies may arise to meet people's increasing desire for happiness? The Happiness Initiative invites people to imagine what it will be like when those technologies enter our daily lives. Will we become happier? What is happiness, after all?  _______________________________________________________________________Hoon Oh The Story Gets Better     The Story Gets Better: Precipitated Experience uses the context of sports to investigate the effects of emerging technologies on relationships among people and spaces. This media-based study inspires speculation about augmented reality, media coverage, and computational environments. Old distinctions begin to collapse.  _______________________________________________________________________Alex Braidwood Listening Instruments     Listening Instruments is a set of inventions that transform the relationship between people and the noise in their environment. The functional prototypes on display are simultaneously devices that respond to their surroundings and tools for manipulating how a user listens. _______________________________________________________________________Ana Ramos Object Compression    

We define ourselves through the objects we own. Using fire as a catalyst, Object Compression (OBCO) is a service that synthesizes the most valuable aspects of one’s objects, compressing them into a single essential item. The project challenges consumer culture, planned obsolescence and what is worth inheriting.

_______________________________________________________________________Manny Darden A Screen is a Stage is a Set is a Story     A Screen is a Stage is a Set is a Story explores the creation of immersive narratives, distributing a single story across multiple viewing spaces. Drawing on the principles of scenography, this projectaddresses both physical and digital design in its engagement with the audience. _______________________________________________________________________Daniel Lara Body 2.0  

Friday – Saturday, April 15 – 16

McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

This conference is an interdisciplinary exploration of how form arises from practice. Grammatical, literary, and cultural structures become entrenched over time and with repetition. Ideas and behaviors become increasingly routine, ritualized, automatic, opaque to self-reflection, and difficult to eradicate. But these processes of entrenchment – which might seem to lead only to stagnation – are, in fact, instrumental in cultural, literary, and linguistic change, as well as in learning and change in the individual. Three keynote lectures and an interdisciplinary panel discuss entrenchment as part of our famed capacity for neural and psychological plasticity, and its relevance across disciplines.

[Click on the above images to view larger]

WHAT: ART IN ATHLETICISM: THE FORM AND PHYSICALITY OF BOXING

WHERE: OLD GYM GALLERY 479

WHEN: APRIL 18TH - 22ND, 2011

HOURS: GALLERY M-F @ 11-5PM // TRAINING FACILITY T/R @ 5-6PM

EXHIBITION BOUT / CLOSING RECEPTION: FRIDAY, APRIL 22ND, 5PM

FEATURING: DESIREE D'ALESSANDRO IN COLLABORATION WITH RAYMOND DOUGLAS

Old Gym Gallery 479's sports and recreation imbued history is embraced in this exhibition that focuses on hybridizing the fields of Art and Athleticism. 10 student boxers from the local community will be on display alongside heavy bags and a full scale boxing ring. During Gallery hours, the space is pregnant with potential amongst the spotlit artifacts. After Gallery hours, the doors remain open and the house lights flicker on. Tuesday and Thursday evenings the space will be utilized as a boxing training facility where the featured student boxers make an appearance in honor of camaraderie and endearment for the Noble Art of Boxing. The show will close Friday at 5PM with an exhibition bout -- a finale that can't be missed!

Be sure to come to our Closing Reception and Exhibition Bout Friday, April 22nd @ 5pm. It'll be a night to remember.

We look forward to seeing you there!! :D

Facebook Event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=207001692658853

Gallery Information: http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/facilities/gallery479

The Los Angeles Division of the Academic Senate of the University of California will be hosting the 110th UCLA Faculty Research Lecture, given by Anthony Seeger, Distinguished Professor of Ethnomusicology and Director of the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archives. Titled "Who Owns Music and Why You Should Care," Prof. Seeger will give his lecture at Schoenberg Hall in the Schoenberg Music Building at 3 p.m. Tuesday, April 5, 2011. A reception immediately follows; RSVP for the reception by Monday, March 28 by contacting [email protected] or (310) 794-6421.

A Country the Color of Heaven: Islam, Iran and Imagination in the Work of Henry Corbin

May 10, 2011

Humanities Gateway 1030 Tom Cheetham

Henry Corbin (1903-1978) was a profound and uniquely creative Protestant theologian and a prolific and important scholar of Sufism and Islamic mysticism in general, with a particular focus on the religious thought of Shi’ite Iran. His vision of the unity of the grand sweep of the religions of the Prophetic Tradition - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - is of vital importance for the contemporary world. Corbin taught in Paris and in Teheran and lectured annually at the Eranos Conferences from 1949 until his death. He was a friend and colleague of C.G. Jung and shared his view of the central importance of the active imagination in human life. His works have had a lasting impact on scholars of religion, visionary thinkers and poets. His great book Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi is a classic initiatory text of visionary spirituality that transcends the tragic divisions among the three great monotheisms. Corbin’s life was devoted to the struggle to free the religious imagination from fundamentalisms of every kind. His work marks a watershed in our understanding of the religions of the West and makes a profound contribution to spirituality and liberal theology in the contemporary world.

This illustrated lecture will introduce the life and work of Henry Corbin and provide an orientation in the basic themes of Islamic and Iranian spirituality as he understood them. We will outline his vision of the unity of the Religions of the Book. Topics include the mundus imaginalis and the meaning of creative imagination, spiritual alchemy and the meaning of ta’wil, divine and human love, and the role of the Angel Holy Spirit in the life of the soul.

Tom Cheetham, PhD, is the author of three books on the implications of Corbin’s work for contemporary thought: The World Turned Inside Out, Green Man–Earth Angel and After Prophecy. He is a Fellow of the Temenos Academy in London and adjunct professor at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. He lectures widely on Corbin and the meanings and uses of the imagination in human life. See The Heart of the Prophetic Tradition: www.tomcheetham.blogspot.com &

California Humanities Scholar and HASTAC scholar, Desiree D'Alessandro, will be presenting at the upcoming Media Fields 3: Contested Territories Conference. Her paper, TRADITION AND TERRAIN UNDER THREAT: DELEUZE ON OUSMANE SEMBÈNE'S CEDDO, will start off the second panel on the theme of "Places." The paper will also be featured in an upcoming publication of Aether: The Journal of Media Geography.

                                                     The CRITO Hour              

                                               Wednesday, March 23, 2011 11:45 am - 12:50 pm UC Irvine Calit2, Room 3008  

                                              Peter Krapp, UC Irvine "Daisy, or A Bicycle for Two: On Computers and Music"  

RSVP to [email protected]   Join us for this casual & informative speaker series. More info at crito.uci.edu/critohour

Abstract A lunchtime talk discussing the media archeology of music and computer technology, guided by the song HAL offered in the science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Raising questions about sound under the conditions of the networked computer, the talk will also discuss the role of noise in the context of ergonomics and efficiency.

Biography Peter Krapp is Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies, Visual Studies, and English at the University of California Irvine, and affiliated also with the Department of Informatics. He is the author of Deja Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory (University of Minnesota Press 2004) and of the forthcoming book Noisy Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture (University of Minnesota Press 2011).   

HYBRID MENAGERIES

This is the beginning of a talk on technology and human-animal relations by Jody Berland of York University, Toronto, ON, including an introduction by Lisa Parks of UCSB.  The talk was delivered at the UCSB Department of Film and Media Studies in February.

Filmed with my California Humanities Scholars Flip camera.  Next time, I’ll get there early and find a better angle.  And try to have a steadier hand. 

Thursday March 31, 4:10-5:30pm

Body Animations (or, Lullaby for Fallujah)

Jackie Orr

Lab A, Wright Hall

Even as the Iraqi dead, uncounted, and the flag-draped U.S. military coffins, undocumented, pile up at the feet of Progress; even as Walter Benjamin’s angel of history weeps in the storm of debris blowing from the future — tens of thousands of spectators line up for the most recent exhibition of Body Worlds™, a display of plastinated corpses designed by the German technoscientist Gunther von Hagens. Intelligible, in part, as a spectacular symptom of surplus value, Body Worlds™ can also be situated within traumatized economies of militarized perception where even dead bodies are not safe from the victor’s … re-animation. 

 In this performative lecture, Orr mixes digital media, sound, and social science scholarship into a sustained meditation on public forms of mourning and re-memory in the face of an ongoing aestheticization of war which Benjamin, over 70 years ago, located at the heart of fascist spectacle. How to think through and beyond the value-added theaters of death performed by Body Worlds™  and the psychic landscapes they animate? Taking trauma as both a cultural content and a powerful methodo-logic for composing post-disciplinary knowledges, Orr pursues performance as a critical technique for examining the political and psychic confusion of our present moment. 

Visual material includes digital samplings of War of the Worlds (Spielberg 2005), and web-archived images from the U.S. siege on Fallujah, Iraq.