InFormation Year

Event website: http://nucri.nu.edu/incommunity
Live Webcast (Nov 10 - 11 only): http://www.hastac.org/live/

Please see below for a PowerPoint presentation on National University's InCommunity events. Also, Debra Amidon has agreed to share her presentation from the mini-town meeting. It is also attached below.

Site: National University (San Diego, CA)

The programming for InCommunity will comprise the following components:

• InCommunity Forum: “Toward a New Civic Culture: Smart and Creative Community Building”
• Community-based Initiatives in digital story telling, community capacity building case studies, applications of community technology, and media support for community outreach

InCommunity Partners

• National University
• National University Community Research Institute (NUCRI)

“Toward a New Civic Culture: Smart and Creative Community Building”
Schedule of Virtual Events
InCommunity Forum November 10-11, 2006
NU Academic Headquarters & Spectrum Business Park Campus

Friday, November 10, 2006, 9:30 a.m. to 11:45 a.m.
Mini-Town Meeting with Thought Leaders and Practitioners on Civil Society & Community Building

• Brian O’Connell (Civil Society)
• Harry Boyte (Citizenship & Public Work)
• John Eger (Smart Communities)
• Debra Amidon (Innovation)
• Mark Linder (Strong Neighborhood Initiative, City of San Jose)
• Moderator Fred Blankenship Channel 10 (ABC) Weekend Anchor

Friday, November 10, 2006, 12 Noon to 1:45 p.m.
Webcast Luncheon Presentation on Connecting the Community with Cyberinfrastructure
Vijay Samalam, Executive Director, San Diego Supercomputer Center at UCSD.

Friday, November 10, 2006, 2:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m
Roundtable on the Impact and Use of Technology in the Community

• Kevin Franklin (UC Humanities Research Institute)
• Tom Tabor (Grid Today and HPC Wire)
• David Cleveland (Telesis Corporation)
• Don Jones (Qualcomm)
• Sergio Rosas (National City Collaborative/Family Resource Centers)
• Ron Schultz (Legacy XXI Social Enterprise Initiative)
• Community Capacity Building Demonstrations

Saturday, November 11, 2006, 9:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Digital Saturday International Digital Media Arts Presentation and InCommunity Panel

• Paul Churchill (ILM-Lucas Arts)
• Jeff Heusser (Effects Artist)
• Tim Langdell (NU School of Media & Communications)
• Sarah-Ellen Amster (NU School of Media & Communications)
• James Jauarez (NU School of Media & Communications)
• Ana Boa Ventura (University of Texas and NUCRI Fellow)
• Multimedia Showcase on “Making the School-Community Connection” (High Tech High, AmeriCorps Service Learning, Gillispie School)

Webcast on "smart mobs": interview

• Howard Rheingold (Stanford University, smartmobs.com)

Site: Duke University (Durham, NC)

The programming for Interface will comprise the following components:

• A year-long residential faculty development seminar on Interface
• A graduate student conference on Thinking Through New Media
• The HASTAC International Conference with keynote speaker John Seely Brown

Interface Partners

• Duke University
• Renaissance Computing Initiative (RENCI)
• National Humanities Center (NHC)
• NC Museum of Life & Science (NCMLS)
• John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies
• Franklin Humanities Institute
• Fitzpatrick Photonics Center
• ISIS (Information Science + Information Studies)
• Center for the Study of the Public Domain
• Center for the Genome Ethics, Law & Policy (GELP)
• Jenkins Collaboratory
• Perkins Library
• Nasher Museum of Art

Faculty Development Seminar > 2006 - 2007 > Co-Conveners Tim Lenoir (New Technologies & Society) and Priscilla Wald (English & Women's Studies)

For In|Formation 2006-07, Duke University's John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute will be sponsoring a year-long residential Seminar on

Site: Wayne State University (Detroit, MI)

Integration will be a full-day conference in adjacent spaces of the Adamany Undergraduate Library (Wayne State University) comprising three parts:

• A computer poster session with demonstrations
• A public lecture by keynote speaker John Wilkin followed by Q&A session
• Roundtable discussion on the topic of the “ Remediation of English Studies”

Integration Partners

• Wayne State University (WSU)
• WSU Humanities Center
• WSU Libraries
• College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS), WSU
• Department of English, WSU
• Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, WSU
• Office of the Vice President for Research, WSU
• The Henry Ford
• Detroit Historical Museum

Computer Poster Session and Demonstrations > WSU Libraries Digital Projects Collection > February 23, 2007 > 9:00 am – 10:30 am & 12:15 pm – 1:30 pm

All events during our conference will have the theme of Integration, in the dual sense of “interdisciplinary” bridging of disciplines and fields and “interinstitutional” partnering of universities, museums, and libraries. Part 1 of the conference will feature the local WSU Libraries Digital Projects Collection. Taking place in the Atrium, the Computer Poster Session will have a projection station, hard-copy poster boards mounted on easels, handous, and a graduate student host. Demonstrations will also be held in Computer Lab A with HASTAC team members Jeff Trzeciak and Matt Martin with the help of graduate students. Short presentations will address the challenges of creating a unique cultural resource that “virtually unifies” individual collections, including related digitization issues such as project planning, materials selection, copyright and intellectual property, quality control, sustainability, evaluation, metadata and preservation, and ongoing evaluation methods. See description of projects that will have demonstrations below:

• Digital Dress Collections > this project is a collaboration of the Wayne State University (WSU) Library System and the Detroit Historical Museum, the Henry Ford (museum), and Meadow Brook Hall at Oakland University. It is a universally accessible web portal that “virtually unifies” 5,000 digital images of Detroit-worn men’s, women’s, and children’s clothing and accessories. The multi-institutional collection supports interdisciplinary research and teaching on significant changes in popular culture, industrialization, inventions, labor organization, and Detroit’s socio-economic, racial, and ethnic mix during a period of urban transformation spanning 1800 and 2000. Digital Dress Collections may be viewed at http://www.lib.wayne.edu/geninfo/units/lcms/dls/grants/ddgrant.php

• Detroit Plays > this project is a collaboration of the WSU Libraries and the Detroit Historical Museums. It centers on a toy collection that encompasses over 5,000 objects, including mechanical toys, dolls, doll houses and their furnishings, toy cars, wagons, bicycles, toy trains, and banks. The project’s website archive will facilitate studies of social history through the development of toys over Detroit’s 300-year history, illuminating the daily lives of people of all ethnic, economic, religious, and cultural backgrounds. The online exhibit is being built in part by student interns in a program aimed at bringing underrepresented groups into the profession of librarianship by working with senior librarians in the fields of systems, digital project development, metadata, digital archives, and museum management. Detroit Plays may be viewed at http://www.lib.wayne.edu/resources/digital_library/toys/index.htm

• Herman Miller Consortium Collection > this project is an online database of historical products that unifies collections held by thirteen museums around the United States. Herman Miller, Inc. established the Consortium in 1988 to share the collection that had accumulated as part of its corporate archives in Zeeland, Michigan. The collection contained about 750 pieces of furniture and a large quantity of product literature. As the lead institution, the Henry Ford maintains the record of consortium holdings and performs the digitization, while Wayne State University provides hosting, website design, technical support, database and image loading, and consultation for the online database. The Herman Miller Consortium Collection may be viewed at http://dlxs.lib.wayne.edu/cgi/i/image/image-idx?page=index;c=hmcc

Keynote Address with Q & A > John Wilkin > February 23, 2007 > 10:30 am – 12:00 pm

John Wilkin, Associate University Librarian, Library Information Technology and Technical and Access Services, University of Michigan, will deliver the keynote address in Bernath Auditorium. He is affiliated with the Google Print Library effort to digitize and index millions of books from the world’s foremost libraries, changing not only the way that library resources are delivered but also the relationship of digital technologies and culture. Prior to the Google project, Wilkin served as the Head of the Digital Library Production Service at Michigan (DLPS). One of the units of DLPS, the Humanities Text Initiative, is responsible for SGML document creation and online systems that Wilkin founded in 1994. Before that, he worked at the University of Virginia as Systems Librarian for Information Services, where he shaped the Library's plan for establishing a group of electronic centers, led and provided technical support for those centers, and consulted for the University's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) on textual issues.

Lunch Hour: The first 100 registrants will be provided a free box lunch from 12:15-l:30 in the Atrium commons. They will also be free to view the Computer Poster Session and Demonstration at this time.

Roundtable discussion > Remediation of English Studies > Richard Gruisin, Jeff Rice, Steve Shaviro, and Anthony Aristar

The Wayne State English Department includes faculty and curricula in literary and cultural studies, film and media studies, composition studies, linguistics, and creative writing. Today, the Department Chair Richard Grusin observes, English Departments find themselves in a critical position. The failure to come to terms with what has been called the “digital revolution” poses an increasing risk to the stability and prosperity of English Studies in the university. Indeed, it will not be news to note that the place of the English Department in both the academic and non-academic world continues to be in flux. It is now almost a truism that opening up of the literary canon by cultural studies was one of the discipline’s most important accomplishments over the past two decades. Simultaneously, however, this accomplishment has opened the profession of English to criticism from both inside and outside the university, particularly for elevating political goals over more traditional academic goals such as reading critically or writing effectively. One way for English departments to respond to such criticism is to call attention to a parallel project that has been going on during the same time--the refashioning of English from its historical character as a discipline focused primarily on products of print technology into a discipline that has increasingly become the interpreter of and instructor in such diverse electronic media as film, television, video games, music videos, cyberspace, interactive fiction, and the panoply of digital media available through the World Wide Web. If English Studies hopes to reclaim its cultural authority with the American public, and its position of influence in American universities, English departments in particular (and arts and humanities more generally) must move ahead dramatically to continue this project with the increasing number of new media technologies that have accompanied the advent of the digital revolution.

Grusin will moderate a discussion with colleagues who are engaged in a number of projects that are “remediating” English Studies. They include Jeff Rice, Steve Shaviro, and Anthony Aristar. The panel will engage in critical analysis of developments and offer web-based demonstrations of projects. The following are sample websites and other e-links for the Remediation of English Studies:

• Anthony Aristar’s EMELD website (Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data)
• Linguist List website
• Steve Shaviro's webpage
• Jeff Rices’s graduate syllabi, wiki, and practicum:

- Rice, Grusin, and students are also putting together a handbook for the 1020 course that will work with digital related issues.
• Mary Karcher’s use of Drupal:

WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY HASTAC Team

• Walter Edwards, Director, WSU Humanities Center and Professor of English
• Richard Grusin, Chair and Professor in English Department
• Julie Thompson Klein, Professor of Humanities in Department of Interdisciplinary Studies and WSU-HASTAC Administrator
• Matthew Martin, Digital Projects Librarian, WSU Libraries
• Jeff Trzeciak, Associate Dean, WSU Libraries and incoming University Librarian, McMaster University

Site: University of Washington (Seattle, WA)

The Simpson Center’s Invitation year is comprised of four major components:

• An In|Formation Year public lecture and webcast by Cynthia Breazeal
• Three new graduate seminars on topics including cyborg democracy, the public humanities across the digital university, and visual documentation practices
• Three new undergraduate courses that address themes in the digital humanities
• A new crossdisciaplinary research cluster on creating community through blogging

Invitation Partners

• University of Washington, Seattle
• The Simpson Center for the Humanities
• Center for Digital Arts & Experimental Media (DXARTS)
• Center for Advanced Research Technology in the Arts and Humanities (CARTAH)
• Department of Communication, UW
• Department of Computer Science & Engineering, UW
• The Information School, UW
• UW Libraries

Cynthia Breazeal > In|Formation Year Public Lecture > March 1, 2007 > 7:00 p.m. Cynthia Breazeal (Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT) directs the Robotic Group at the MIT Media Lab. She is internationally known for seamlessly blending scientific theories, artistic insights, and engineering principles to create compelling robotic creatures that have a lively social presence to those who interact with them. Her current research extends these themes in the area of human-robot relations to create cooperative and capable robots that can work and learn in partnership with people. Her research program strives to revolutionize the art and science of human-robot interaction and cooperation—to develop robots that engage with us as helpful partners that will ultimately play a valuable, rewarding, and unprecedented role in the everyday lives of ordinary people. In addition to her public lecture, Breazeal will also lead a seminar on March 2, 2007.

Graduate Seminars > Autumn 2006 > Winter 2007 > Spring 2007

• Cyborg Democracy > Tom Foster (English) > This course aims to assess the political claims made for new media and new technologies and to define possible points of articulation and critique between Marxist traditions and new theories of radical democracy, on one hand, and new technocultural formations, on the other. The course will weave together three strands of inquiry, all of which combine readings in popular culture (understood as a site of critical reflection on and speculation about technocultural developments) and an examination of movements organized around new technologies. The first strand will explore the ongoing structural transformation of the democratic public sphere and the mass mediation of social relations through new communications and computer interface technologies, as these changes affect models of citizenship and collective forms of belonging or “imagined community.” The second strand will focus on new models of collectivity emerging out of intellectual property debates—the copyleft movement, the creative commons licensing system, and attempts to elaborate such movements into a general open source culture. The final strand will trace claims of the progressive potential residing in new forms of technological self-transformation, with a focus on the relation between such “posthumanist” or “transhumanist” movements and social or liberation movements. See the course page and syllabus for more information.

• The Public Humanities across the Digital University > Gray Kochhar-Lindgren (Interdiscipinary Arts & Sciences) and Ron Krabill (Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences) > This course will examine the relationship between the emergence of the Public Humanities and the Digital Humanities as complementary, praxis-oriented responses to pressing questions about knowledge production that address us at the onset of the 21st century. Beginning from the assumption that the digital revolution is powerfully reshaping the nature of universities, non-institutional collectivities, identity formations, and embodiment practices, the course will enable students to explore and to assess new forms of public scholarship emerging along the interface between corporeal and digital technologies. Workshops (physical and virtual) with several partner organizations—the Tulalip Tribes Cultural Resources Department, IndyMedia, and the University of KwaZulu- Natal’s Culture, Communication, and Media Studies Programme—will allow students to explore (and experience) the implications of these transformations, including the links and ruptures between local and global practices of community, the potential uses of the public humanities as a means of building stronger bridges across various “digital divides,” new pedagogical strategies, and emerging university/community partnerships. See the course page for more information.

• Visual Documentation Praxis for Cultural Studies > Daniel Hoffman (Anthropology) and Kari Lerum (Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences) > Through visual production exercises, classroom discussion, and halfday on-site workshops held at collaborating institutions (911 Media Arts, SCAN-TV, the Wing Luke Asian Museum, and the Henry Art Gallery), this course will encourage students to explore how diverse forms of visual production can expand their research interests and forge unexpected connections within and beyond the university. By shifting their “vision” of research from reading and critiquing texts to producing digital videos and photographs, students will consider how their work as academics can (and does) intersect with other practices and epistemologies of visual production. See the course page for more information.

Undergraduate Courses > Autumn 2006 > Winter 2007 > Spring 2007

• Applications of Digital Technologies to Humanities Research > Stacy Waters (DXARTS) > This course offers students the opportunity to learn about the key technologies influencing and transforming humanities research and scholarly communication while providing students a hands-on project based approach to imaging, new media, electronic texts, databases, metadata, rights management, and other issues central to contemporary humanities research. See the course website for more information.

• When Technologies Are New > Philip Howard (Communication) and Simon Werrett (History) > New technologies have a big impact on cultures and communities, but these cultures and communities always adapt technologies in surprising ways. To explore the connections between scientific discovery and social change, this course will draw examples from both the rich history of engineering and the immediate modernity of digital technologies. What role do artists, science fiction writers, and philosophers have in shaping our collective assumptions of and aspirations for science? How is science itself culturally organized? From the development of gunpowder and armaments in China and Russia, to the opportunities for digital surveillance and resistance in Argentina and Tanzania, we will explore the social rhythms to the development of new technologies, analog and digital. This course has several objectives: to teach students about the dynamics of scientific exploration and social change; to give students cultural literacy and practical familiarity with new technologies, both analog and digital; and to inspire students to develop their own sophisticated critiques about the role of technology and innovation in society. See the course website for more information.

• The World in Motion: Animation in Theory and Practice > Stephanie Andrews (Digital Arts and Experimental Media) and Phillip Thurtle (Comparative History of Ideas) > This class studies animation to explore what it means to live in a world of constant change and transformation. Students will learn by viewing a diverse selection of animated work, reading about how media informs our perceptions of time and space, and working on creative projects. They will finish the quarter with a piece of creative digital animation that develops the themes of the class in innovative directions. Students will ask: What does it mean to be animated? What techniques are used to create the illusionary gestures of animation? How do animation practices differ in different parts of the world? How has time-based media developed in the West? How can technology expand our perceptions about animation? Join us as we span the globe from Africa to Asia to Europe, pondering what it means to live in an animated world and exploring possibilities for putting this world in motion. See the course page for more information.

Research Cluster: Creating Community through Blogging > 2006-2007 > Led by Matthew Vechinski (English) and Honni van Rijswijk (English), this research cluster will consider the status of blogs as texts as well as ways in which blogs challenge conventional paradigms of research. Through a series of discussions, instructional sessions, and a reading group, the group will explore how blogging becomes an occasion to consider the intersection of relationships between pedagogy and research, university and community. The year-long activities will culminate in a one-day conference that will investigate blogging as a textual practice that has transformative implications for research, pedagogy, and university-community engagement. See the project website for more information.

Site: University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI)

The programming for Injustice will include the following components:

• Public Lecture
• Postdoctoral fellowship
• Distributed Curricular and Research Project

Injustice Partners

• University of Michigan
• Institute for the Humanities
• Rackham Graduate School
• School of Information
• Law in Slavery and Freedom Project

Public Lecture Event > (Un)Making the Archive: Indian Vassals, African Slaves, and Web-Based Tools > Rachel Sarah O'Toole

January 23, 4:00 PM EST
Osterman Common Room
University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities
202 South Thayer Street
Ann Arbor, MI

Rachel Sarah O’Toole, Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine and HASTAC Postdoctoral Fellow with the University of Michigan Law in Slavery and Freedom Project, will discuss how colonial jurists created “Indians” as vassals and constructed Africans and their descendants as beings outside of the body politic. To defend communal water rights or to argue for manumission, indigenous and African-descent peoples inscribed themselves within the parameters of the colonial archive, making Andean or Diasporic perspectives difficult to ascertain. Transcribed documents available on web sites, digital imaging, and historical databases open the possibilities of unmaking the colonial archive in order to discern other meanings within the records. (The lecture will be available as a podcast shortly after the event.)

Commentary by

• Martha Jones, Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the Center for Afroamerican & African Studies and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Law School, University of Michigan
• John King, Professor in the School of Information and Vice Provost for Academic Information, University of Michigan
• Rebecca Scott, Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law, University of Michigan
  

About the participants

Rachel Sarah O'Toole is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine specializing in Colonial Peru, the early modern Atlantic World. and the African Diaspora. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2001 and her publications include "Danger in the Convent: Colonial Demons, Idolatrous Indias, and Bewitching Negras in Santa Clara (Trujillo del Perú)," Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 7:1 (Spring 2006) and "In a War against the Spanish": Andean Protection & African Resistance on the Northern Peruvian Coast," The Americas 63:1 (July 2006).

Martha Jones is assistant professor in the department of History and Center for Afroamerican and African Studies and visiting assistant professor in the Law School at the University of Michigan. After a decade as a public interest litigator in New York City with organizations including MFY Legal Services and The HIV Law Project, Jones joined the faculty of the University of Michigan in 2001. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University and a J.D. from the City University of New York School of Law. Her first book, "All Bound Up Together": The Woman Question in African-American Public Culture, 1830-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007, forthcoming) is an intellectual and cultural history of black women's public lives in nineteenth-century America. Her current work explores the law of slavery and freedom in the Atlantic world through an examination of the migrations of Saint-Domingue's slaves in the era after the Haitian revolution.

John King is Professor in the School of Information and Vice Provost for Academic Information at the University of Michigan. Formerly, he served as Dean of the School of Information. His research concerns the development of high-level requirements for information systems design and implementation in institutionalized production sectors such as common carrier communications, logistics and transport, health care, criminal courts, electric power, and electronic commerce. He has authored over 150 scholarly papers and books from his research. Dr. King served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Information Systems Research from 1993-8, and has also taught at the Harvard Business School and the University of California, Irvine. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Administration from UCI.

Rebecca Scott is Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. She works on the history of slavery and emancipation, and on Atlantic itineraries in the age of revolution. Her most recent book, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba After Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2005), won the Frederick Douglass Prize from the Gilder-Lehrman Institute, and the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association. She is co-director, with Martha Jones and Jean Hebrard, of the Law in Slavery and Freedom Project at the University of Michigan.

Postdoctoral Fellowship & Distributed Curricular and Research Initiative > The Law in Slavery and Freedom Project > 2006-2007

The University of Michigan will also focus on the topic of injustice by bringing a postdoctoral fellow to the Institute for the Humanities, in cooperation with the Rackham Graduate School and the Provost, who will contribute to Michigan’s Law in Slavery and Freedom Project. That project is a distributed curricular and research initiative which Michigan has developed in collaboration with The Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France, the University of Cologne, Germany, the University of Campinas, Brazil, and the Centro Juan Marinello in Cuba. Students from these institutions may participate in internet courses taught by faculty from all sites and participate in online discussions of readings on the topic of law and slavery in the Atlantic world. The research agenda is set by faculty who work on slavery, law and emancipation in regions from the American South all the way down the Atlantic coast to Brazil, and conferences are mounted at various sites, the next major conference being “Slavery, and Freedom in the Atlantic World: Statutes, Science and the Seas”, co-sponsored by the University of Michigan and the University of Windsor and taking place in Spring 2006. Michigan has chosen to contribute to this global initiative because we see it as one that could only happen through online technologies. And because in the hands of this project these technologies provide a counterweight to an historical inequality in the production of knowledge, whereby knowledge often continues to be generated in the global north, while the global south, limited in resources and mired in neo-colonial attitudes, either waits for knowledge to passively trickle down or finds that the new knowledge it generates is not properly disseminated throughout the north. Important knowledge is being produced in the field of Salvery and the Law in places like Brazil and Cuba by scholarls from those regions. The Law and Slavery Project, coordinated by Professors Rebecca Scott and Martha Jones at the University of Michigan, Professor Michael Zeuske at the University of Cologne, Professor Jean Hébrard at the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Professors Silvia Lara and Sidney Chalhoub at the University of Campinas, and Professor Marial Iglesias at the University of Havana, is an environment in which north and south, Europe and America, generate knowledge jointly and share it with both faculty and students. Asymmetrical lines of knowledge production and dissemination are thus circumvented thanks to the project’s use of new technology, and the global south is recognized as an active and equal player. Globalized communication between faculty and students is likewise enhanced.

Site: University of California, Berkeley; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Mills College; Stanford University

The programming for Interaction will comprise the following components:

• Tele-Immersion Dance Performance, The Reception
• Symposium on Interaction in cyberspace
• An In|Formation Year public lecture by Lynn Hershman Leeson, The Politics of Presence
• Digital Humanities Fellowships

Interaction Partners

• University of California, Berkeley
• Stanford University
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
• Stanford Humanities Lab
• Stanford Humanities Center
• Stanford University Libraries (SUL)
• Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS)
• Department of Computer Science, UIUC
• Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, Mills College
• Mills College

Tele-Immersion Dance Performance & Symposium > The Resonance Project presents: The Reception > December 8, 6 PM > Hearst Memorial Mining Building, UC Berkeley

CITRIS will webcast live the entire event from both the tele-immersion lab and the HMMB lobby area, in Windows Media Format, beginning at 5:30 PM US Pacific Standard Time, Friday, December 8th.

From Lobby: mms://media.citris.berkeley.edu/webcast
From TI lab: mms://media.citris.berkeley.edu/livecast

Windows PC users will be able to view the streams using Windows Media Player.

Mac OS X users should download Flip4Mac's free Windows Media Components for Quicktime (http://www.flip4mac.com/wmv_download.htm) in order to view the webcasts using the Quicktime player.

Mac OS X & Linux users can also download the free VLC media player from VideoLAN, available from http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

The Reception is a cross-disciplinary performance event utilizing tele-immersion technology and dance choreography in a live theatrical environment. Using 48 cameras located at UC Berkeley and 10 cameras located at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the tele-immersion software will capture images of the performers, and in semi-real time, reconstruct and display the data in 3D creating a new form of bi-located remote presence. This information will be used to create dances and imagery, which resonate between virtual and real worlds, demonstrating new possibilities for visual, tactile, kinesthetic and proprioceptive communication. Following the performance there will be an informal symposium to address questions raised by the performance and provide a vehicle for critical response to the work.

The Resonance Project is a team of choreographers, computer engineers, and visual and sound artists who are investigating 3-D presence/co-presence and corporeal and code interactivity within live and media based performance. Unique to the project is the use of a "performance as research" model, within which scientists and artists collaborate to explore a re-visioning of cyber culture and corporeal presence.

The participants in the Resonance Project include the tele-immersion lab at the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley and the tele-immersion lab within the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Computer Science Department. Other participants include The Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, the Dance Department and Intermedia Program at Mills College , and the Center for New Music and Audio Technology (CNMAT) at UC Berkeley. The Directors of the project are: Ruzena Bajcsy, UC Berkeley, Klara Nahrstedt, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Lisa Wymore, UC Berkeley, Renata Sheppard, UIUC Dance Department, and Katherine Mezur, Mills College. The symposium will be led by the Directors and Edmund Campion, UC Berkeley.

Public Lecture & Digital Humanities Fellowships> The Presence project: The Politics of Presence > Lynn Hershman Leeson > November 30, 2006

Stanford University will be participating in the HASTAC Interaction session via a special event in Second Life (http://www.secondlife.com), the popular online 3-D environment. The Stanford Humanities Lab (http://shl.stanford.edu) owns a Second Life “island,” where they conduct their interdisciplinary, digitally-inflected research. In this special, invitation-only interaction, the SHL, in collaboration with artist Lynn Hershman, will preview work from one of their ongoing projects, Life to the Second Power (L2). The theme will be “Regenerative Presence: Remixing the Archives of Lynn Hershman Leeson.” This Second Life interaction will be recorded from the perspective of one online avatar at the preview, and will be archived on the HASTAC website afterwards as a digital video. Secondary viewers will also gather in groups at Stanford, Duke, and the U.K. to watch the proceedings live onscreen, and to discussion the presentation afterwards. At Duke, viewers will gather in the John Hope Franklin Center at 3pm EST in room 240 (see http://map.duke.edu/building.php?bid=7510 for location).

The L2 project will re-animate the existing archive of artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, now physically housed in the Special Collections Library at Stanford University. Hershman Leeson has been an award-winning media artist for more than 30 years. Her rich body of work includes feature films such as Conceiving Ada and Teknolust , experimental video, photography and drawings, interactive real-time projects, performances, and installations. She works in overlapping genres that explore questions of identity, presence, and the human body in relation to technology. She is a pioneer in interactive computer and net-based media arts and has won numerous awards, grants and fellowships. Her work has appeared at Sundance, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and many other venues around the world. Hershman Leeson is Professor Emeritus at University of California, Davis, and is A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. The Henry Art Gallery of Seattle recently curated Hershmanlandia, a major international museum retrospective of her work that will tour in 2006-08.

L2 will go to the next step, building a living archive of Hershman's work inside the 3D online world Second Life. Converting the archive into a digital format of hybrid genre will allow users of the content to dynamically revisit the past while simultaneously expanding the audience for this material. This project will use mixed reality and media convergence across multiple channels, through which users will be invited to participate in a deeper exploration, investigation and contemplation of both the nature of archives and the context for documentation of contemporary art.

For more information about the ongoing Life to the Second Power (L2) project, visit http://shl.stanford.edu/research/lifetosecondpower.html. For more information about Hershman Leeson,visit http://www.lynnhershman.com. To view the video archive of the Second Life event, visit the HASTAC website at http://www.hastac.org and log in under the Interaction event after December 7, 2006.

Site: University of Southern California (USC) (Los Angeles, CA)

Artist Laurie Anderson | Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio
Saturday, October 21, 2006
7 PM PDT, Norris Theater, University of Southern California

Laurie Anderson will present an audio-visual lecture exploring the intersections of art, science and creativity. One of the permier performance artists in the world, Ms. Anderson has consistently intrigued,entertained and challenged audiences with her multimedia persentations. Following her presentation, Ms. Anderson will be joined in conversation by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, director of the USC Brain and Creativity Institute and a leading researcher of cognition, emotions, and neural systems.

The programming for Interplay will comprise the following components:

• A public lecture focused on issues of the interplay of art, technology and science featuring Laurie Anderson, followed by a conversation with Antonio Damasio (only the conversation will be simulcast and archived on the HASTAC website)
• A series of four weekend-long celebrations that will further explore the art/technology interface
• A motion-capture dance performance featuring USC theater students working with Mark Morris
• Several post-doctoral and visiting faculty fellowships

Interplay Partners:

• University of Southern California School of Cinema-TV
• Annenberg Center for Communication (ACC)
• Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML)
• The USC Arts & Humanities Initiative
• Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC)
• Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education
• Vectors

Public Lecture > October 2006

The USC events for 2006-2007 will focus on the topic “Interplay.” Our investigations are meant to explore the feelings of possibility and transformation that a variety of digital media invoke, from games to music to remix culture to the thriving social networks that so animate many electronic forms and devices. While we want to hold on to the sense of playfulness and utopian desire that digital culture so inspires, we aim to situate this hopeful mode within a larger understanding of the political, historical and cultural forces in which technological forms are always embedded. The year will kick off in October with a large public presentation by Laurie Anderson focusing on issues of the interplay between art, technology, and science. Long a technological innovator in her musical and multimedia performances, Miss Anderson was recently NASA's first artist in residence. Following her lecture, Anderson will be joined in conversation by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, director of the USC Brain and Creativity Institute and a leading researcher of cognition, emotions, and neural systems. This conversation, moderated by Professor Anne Balsamo, will be simulcast at www.hastac.org/live (register to view).

Special Events & Weekend-long Series > 2006-2007 > Transformations: Art, Technology, Cognition, Perception

Other events during the year will expand this conversation and will focus on the intersection of art, creativity, and technology in a national and international frame.

• A linked series of weekend-long celebrations, Transformations: Art, Technology, Cognition, Perception, will further explore the art/technology interface and investigate four specific areas, including "Remixing the Archive" (11/4-5), "The Perception of Perception" (1/19-20), "Fiction Science" (3/3-4), and "Distributed Realities" (4/21-22). This series brings together many different manifestations of art and technology's mutual engagement, including installations, sound works, performances, net art, software art, new devices for cultural expression, conceptual work, immersive experiences, and social networking activities. Highlighted scholars and performers across the series include Stelarc, Joichi Ito, Lynn Hershman, Barbara Lattanzi, Timothy Drucker, Rick Prelinger, George Legrady, Norman Klein, and Kevin and Jennifer McCoy. A very special panel will bring together humans, intelligent agents, and various digital-organic hybrids in a lively discussion about the emergence of new technospecies, their rights and responsibilities. (Co-sponsor: The USC Arts & Humanities Initiative)

Motion-capture Dance Performance > April 26-27, 2007

• A related event on April 26-27, 2007 at USC will be a motion-capture dance performance featuring USC theater students, directed by Margo Apostolos, with robots designed by Maja Mataric. Celebrated dancer and choreographer Mark Morris will be resident on campus helping to prepare the performance and conducting workshops and public dialogues with students. (Co-sponsor: The USC Arts & Humanities Initiative)

Post-doctoral & Visiting Faculty Fellowships > 2006-2007

Finally, USC will also host a number of post-doctoral and visiting faculty fellows. Two of the post-docs will be housed in USC's Critical Studies Division in the School of Cinema-Television. Other fellows will be in residence at the Annenberg Center for Communication.

The USC events are made possible by the USC Arts and Humanities Initiative, the School of Cinema-Television, the Institute for Multimedia Literacy, and the Annenberg Center for Communication, among others.

Site:  University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)

The programming for In|Common is comprised of the following components:

• A three-day summit entitled Katrina: After the Storm - Civic Engagement Through Arts, Humanities and Technology
• Panels, peformances, and other convenings on topics of emergency response, poverty, social justice, and racism
• A Virtual Town Hall Meeting using the Access Grid

In|Common Partners

• University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
• National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)

3-Day Summit > Katrina: After the Storm - Civic Engagement Through Arts, Humanities and Technology> Sept 28-30, 2006

As part of HASTAC’s In|Formation Year 2006-2007, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will host a three-day summit entitled “Katrina: After the Storm—Civic Engagement Through Arts, Humanities and Technology”. The summit, which follows the one-year anniversary of the hurricane, will kick off the campus yearlong Martin Luther King Jr. celebration, while further advancing the social justice dialogue that was initiated with the MLK 2006 Celebration quilt, “A Single Garment of Destiny: Our Common Threads”. The summit will include panels, performances, and other convenings and will culminate in a virtual Town Hall Meeting. The proposed dates of this event are September 28-30.

We will create a national virtual community using live chat sessions, blogs, podcasting, webcasting and the advanced collaboration technology of the Access Grid ( http://www.accessgrid.org). The Access Grid is a multicast system that allows multiple people in multiple locations to come together in a shared virtual environment in real time, thus creating a global team that can assemble for a wide range of activities, ranging from education to research to cross-cultural performances. This advanced collaborative technology also enables participants to share audio, video, support materials, even experimental instruments, over high-speed networks in real time. Various forms of technology will enable us to bring together citizens, artists, scholars in the humanities, children, technologists, community activists, educators, and others from across the country in a proactive, innovative environment to explore social justice issues, the impact of Katrina and lessons learned.

During this three-day event, emergency response, poverty, social justice and racism will be presented and examined in a creative and provocative manner, within a multidisciplinary collaborative model that connects academic and professional silos while bridging the gap between “town and gown”. The summit seeks to reveal the possibility and the hope that can be discovered through the act of creation, debate and collaboration.

In short, this summit will serve to learn, create, debate, stimulate, explore and collaborate.