Arts + Design Wednesdays @ BAMPFA: Experiment and Exploration
In order better to serve our students and public and to gauge audience, we will now ask you to reserve a your seats in advance. Seats will be made available 10 days in advance of the talks on this website, social media platforms, and in the newsletters.
This series explores the exciting world of the Bay Area’s alternative, underground, and experimental media arts communities and the ways they have transformed contemporary art and media culture. Led by UC Berkeley Associate Professor of Film and Media Jeffrey Skoller, the series engages prominent media artists, curators, and critics to explore the idea of experimentalism in art as a risk-taking approach to creative expression and as a philosophical position that emphasizes art as process and invention over product and professional mastery.
Arts + Design Wednesdays @ BAMPFA is organized and sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Arts + Design Initiative in partnership with Big Ideas courses. In-kind support is provided by BAMPFA.
Fall 2017 archived schedule and lecture videos for Curation Across Disciplines can be found here.
Spring 2018 Lecture Schedule
Craig Baldwin
Wednesday / 1.24.18 / 12:00
Craig Baldwin is a San Francisco–based filmmaker and curator of the Other Cinema at the ATA media gallery, one of the last underground art spaces in San Francisco’s Mission District.
Barbara Hammer
Wednesday / 1.31.18 / 12:00
Pioneering feminist visual artist and experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer has pursued a multiple praxis for the past forty years, with resonating impact on young artists today. Her work was included in the 1985, 1989, and 1993 Whitney Biennials and is in the permanent collections of the Australian Center for the Moving Image; the Museum of Modern Art, New York the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and elsewhere. She is the author of Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life. She has had major retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Kunsthall Oslo; Toronto International Film Festival; Muzeum Sztuki, Krakow; Ujazdowski, Warsaw; Museum Sztuki MS2, Lodz; and Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. The Austrian Film Museum will present a retrospective of her work in spring 2018. Hammer is represented by KOW Gallery,Berlin, and Company Gallery,New York. She currently lives and works in New York City.
Ken Ueno
Wednesday / 2.7.18 / 12:00
Rome Prize and Berlin Prize winner Ken Ueno is a composer, vocalist, and sound artist. Ueno’s collaborators include the Hilliard Ensemble, Kim Kashkashian and Robyn Schulkowsky, Steve Schick and SFCMP, and Frances-Marie Uitti. His music has been performed at venues and festivals around the world. He has performed as soloist in his vocal concerto with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project in New York and Boston, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Lithuanian National Symphony, and the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra, and with orchestras in Pittsburgh, North Carolina, and California. His sound installations in collaboration with architects Thomas Tsang and Patrick Tighe and artist Angela Bulloch have been installed at MUAC, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Art Basel, and SCI-Arc. Ueno is currently an associate professor at UC Berkeley, where he holds the Jerry and Evelyn Hemmings Chambers Distinguished Professorship in Music. His bio appears in The Grove Dictionary of American Music.
Chip Lord
Wednesday / 2.14.18 / 12:00
Chip Lord grew up in 1950s America, a place that has been a continual source of inspiration in his work as an artist. Trained as an architect, he was a founding partner of Ant Farm, with whom he produced the video art classics Media Burn and The Eternal Frame as well as the public sculpture Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas, and the House of the Century, outside Houston.
Jacob Gaboury
Wednesday / 2.21.18 / 12:00
Jacob Gaboury is assistant professor of new media history and theory in the Department of Film & Media at UC Berkeley. His work engages the history of digital imaging and computer graphics along with early experiments in art and technology in the US and Europe. His writing has appeared in a range of popular and academic publications, including the Journal of Visual Culture, Camera Obscura, Art Papers, and Rhizome, and his forthcoming book, Image Objects, explores the history of 3D graphics through a set of key objects that structure the production and circulation of all digital images today.
A Talk with Jeanne C. Finley and John Muse
Wednesday / 2.28.18 / 12:00
Since 1988 Jeanne C. Finley and John Muse have worked collaboratively on numerous experimental documentaries and installations. These works have been exhibited nationally and internationally, at festivals and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Biennial, San Francisco International Film Festival, Berlin Video Festival, Toronto, and World Wide Video Festival. In 2001 they received a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship. Additional awards include a Creative Capital Foundation Grant and an Artists in Residence at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. In 2009 they were presenting artists at the Flaherty Film Seminar. Finley, a Guggenheim Fellow and Alpert/Cal Arts Award winner, is a Professor of Film and Graduate Fine Arts at the California College of Arts. Muse is currently a Visual Media Scholar at Haverford College, Haverford PA.
Jim Campbell
Wednesday / 3.7.18 / 12:00
Jim Campbell is a Bay Area–based, internationally recognized new media artist. His electronic sculptures and installations combine the moving image and LED light.
Jon Leidecker, a.k.a. Wobbly
Wednesday / 3.14.18 / 12:00
Jon Leidecker has been engaged with the medium of electronic music since the mid 1980s, performing in collaboration with others and appearing solo under the unchosen pseudonym Wobbly with an emphasis on live performance and improvisation. His early works utilized sonic collage and musical appropriation, growing out of a series of appearances on Negativland's live-mix radio program Over the Edge, which involved improvising with recorded sounds to produce music that inherently resists the act of being recorded. Recent work includes investigations of the history and musical aesthetics implied by the physics of acoustic and electrical feedback; research into the technology and creative workflow required for immersive sound diffusion (including five years of work as a member of the engineering team for Dolby's 3D sound format Atmos); and the use of mobile devices and their built-in microphones as cybernetic improvising partners.
In 2008, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona commissioned the podcast Variations, a nine-hour musicological tour through the history of collage and the practice of sampling through the twentieth century. Wobbly's live and studio collaborations include work with Negativland, Dieter Moebius, Tim Story, Matmos, People Like Us, Fred Frith, Zeena Parkins, Carl Stone, John Oswald, Thomas Dimuzio, Huun-Huur-Tu, and Sagan. In 2015 he inherited the Over the Edge program, which continues to be broadcast twice a month on Berkeley's KPFA.
Lynn Hershman Leeson
Wednesday / 3.21.18 / 12:00
Artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson is widely recognized for her innovative work investigating issues that are now recognized as key to the workings of society: the relationship between humans and technology, identity, surveillance, and the use of media as a tool of empowerment against censorship and political repression. Over the last forty years she has made pioneering contributions to the fields of photography, video, film, performance, installation, and interactive art, as well as net-based media art.
Gregory Sholette
Wednesday / 4.4.18 / 12:00
Gregory Sholette is an artist, activist, and author. He is the author of Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture and Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism. (He writes on the histories of political art, artists’ collectives and social practice. He cofounded the artists' collectives Political Art Documentation and Distribution (1980–88) and REPOhistory (1989–2000).
The Black Aesthetic
Wednesday / 4.11.18 / 12:00
The Black Aesthetic is an Oakland-based collective of artists, writers, filmmakers, and designers who curate film screenings and publish a journal of essays about black film and culture.
Porpentine Charity Heartscape
Wednesday / 4.18.18 / 12:00
Bay Area new media artist, video game designer, writer, and curator Porpentine Charity Heartscape is joined in conversation by artist Elisa Giardina Papa.
Malkia A. Cyril
Wednesday / 4.25.18 / 12:00
Malkia A. Cyril is an Oakland-based media activist, founder and executive director of the Oakland Center for Media Justice (CMJ), and cofounder of the Media Action Grassroots Network.