Rinehart Leads Talks and Thoughts on Digital Culture

Last week concluded a six-week lecture series headed by Richard Rinehart, Digital Curator of the BAM/PFA, on the growing field of digital media and its interaction with culture. Through the Center for New Media, four guest artists and a UC Berkeley professor of computer science were invited over the course of the class to enrich the lecture material and offer their takes on digital art. The diverse audience was invited to participate in an ongoing e-mail discussion, contributing through in rhetoric, research, and remix. Digital art raises novel challenges and questions that invite discussions from reality and digitization to the role of the body and interactivity in art. Justin Ross moderated and provided the questions for discussion each week, posting especially insightful responses onto the Digital Culture Blog of the BAM and CNM: http://dmax.bampfa.berkeley.edu/blog. Topics were as follows: Digitalization, Body, Interactivity, Space and Time, Social Context and Copyright, and Collective Memory. Rinehart presented the thought-provoking series with an openness and curiosity that optimally encouraged audience engagement, and if lecture were not enough, the works of Camille Utterback, Joel Slayton, Joe McKay, and Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung surely were. Inspiring awe, interest, and even some laughter, their forays with digital art demonstrated the ever-shifting development of the field. Some could be called beautiful, others fun, and still others just antics. Joe McKay's pieces in particular seemed to make the most "sense" to me, in terms of artistic exploration and development—even the implausible "real-time" idea of every person having a personal measure of time based upon current distance from the Prime Meridian seemed to make sense with his energy and intellect. http://rekkerd.org/img/random/joe_cellpianosm.jpg A work by Joe McKay cannibalizing old cell phones to make them play sounds when hooked up to a keyboard. One of Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung's works, GasZappers, is currently on exhibition at the BAM/PFA, and as it is an online-based piece, you can visit and play with it here: http://www.gaszappers.com/ Meeting just these four artists was infinitely informative and eye-opening. I would guess that the number of biology majors attending such a lecture is extremely small, and I highly recommend people of any background to look into this sort of talk as a first foray into the art world.

Jeffrey Tsao