Art and Film Festival Seeks to Display and Reflect on New Media

The Big Bang may have occurred billions of years ago, but from June 1 to June 3, the Berkeley Art Museum, Pacific Film Archive and Berkeley Center for New Media will create another Big Bang: one that aims to expose people to the universe of new media. The event is called the Berkeley Big Bang '08. It was born out of a San Jose-based new media festival called 01SJ and is the brainchild of Richard Rinehart, the Digital Media Director and Adjunct Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Rinehart describes it as a "new media and arts symposium and festival" that will last three days and feature a number of notable speakers from both far away and close to home-including Professor Hubert Dreyfus of UC Berkeley's own philosophy department and Professor Edmund Campion of UC Berkeley's Center for New Music and Audio Technology.

The Berkeley Big Bang will cover numerous aspects of new media and art. The first day will feature works from various artists at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. These works will include an eight-hour compilation of video works by Lynn Hershman Leeson, who is known for her "technologically astute feature films and interactive gallery incursions." Also featured is artist and geographer Trevor Paglen's MATRIX project, which "scans the heavens for signs of covert activity."

The second day will focus on the relationship between the body and new media. The day will feature a welcome and introduction from Rinehart and Professor Ken Goldberg, who is the director of the Berkeley Center for New Media, a research and graduate-based center. This day of the event will focus on how media is sometimes inadequate in expressing human emotion. Goldberg will also be responding to Professor Hubert Dreyfus, who will discuss Second Life, a 3-D virtual environment where people can interact, and how it currently does not possess the capability to create "meaningful human experiences."

The day will also feature an introduction to the Center for New Music and Audio Technology, presented by Professor Edmund Campion. Campion said that the introduction would involve demonstrations that include aspects of "research, tool-building, and artistic production." Campion hopes to demonstrate the Max/MSP/Jitter Depot and programs that create live electronic accompaniments for musicians, as well as eight channel surround sound in the CNMAT Sound Spatialization Theater at the center. Campion also said he would like to demonstrate a speaker that emits sound from all sides like an acoustic musical instrument.

The closing day of the event will focus on the relationship between art and science. Rinehart said that since this area is not the Berkeley Art Museum's specialty, he invited Leonardo: The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology to co-host that day of the event. The day will include programs such as "'Osmosis': What Can the Arts Do for the Sciences?" and "Brilliant Noise: How Data Becomes Experience for Artists and for Scientists."

Rinehart also noted that the Berkeley Big Bang is different from other new media festivals because it is not "industry-driven" or "positivist." Rinehart said that that many festivals that focus on digital media view technology benevolently, which Rinehart felt was somewhat uncritical.

However, you need not be a new media aficionado in order to appreciate what the Berkeley Big Bang has to offer. Rinehart said that the festival is valuable for students, since new media and the Internet are the "paramount paradigms of the early 21st century" and that "this is one of the few occasions to look at that phenomenon with a critical eye."

Tags: BAM, PFA