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Eric McDougall, designer and advisor for tech companies and artists across the Bay Area, adopts the term “Social Architecture” trying to make connections between design strategies and their interactions with the world around them. After graduating from the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley, McDougall’s experience with music and set design brought him to work closer with this industry. As he explains, eventually video took over much of the space of live stage concerts, and that was when the designer started pursuing graphic works more intensively.

Porpentine Charity Heartscape’s works show us how open and collaborative video games can be. Their role as a designer, programmer, curator, and writer is an example of the broad spectrum of reach the game media has, and that the creative process comes both from the idealizers but the users as well.

Feminist Curatorial Practices: A roundtable convening

Wednesday, April 11 at 5:30pm
Maude Fife Room, 3rd Floor, Wheeler Hall, UC Berkeley

Berkeley/Stanford Symposium

A Line in the Sand: Art, Ecology, & Precarity 

Saturday, April 7 from 10am-5pm
White Box Gallery, 4th Floor, SFMOMA, San Francisco 

Art Against Housework: The Gruppo Immagine and the Wages against Housework Campaign

Jacopo Galimberti on Art against Housework. The Gruppo Immagine and the Wages against Housework Campaign with response by E. C. Feiss

Wednesday, April 4 at 4:00pm
308A Doe Library, UC Berkeley

Acclaimed Spanish architect and recent Berkeley-Rupp Prize recipient Carme Pinós shared some of her work and thoughts on architecture with a packed audience that Monday night at BAMPFA. “The first part of this talk, I will talk about the city. The second part will be about structures.” Pinós explained how she approached her projects, and the selections she had made for that talk.

Until recently, Silicon Valley was known as a diffuse agglomeration of unprepossessing office parks stretched out along the freeways extending some 100 miles down the peninsula between San Francisco and San Jose. This amorphous place began to take a decisive form following WWII, when land rich but cash poor Stanford University sought new means of generating much needed income—they could not sell any of the 6000 acres they owned.

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s work as a new media experimental artist was always ahead of its time. “My work is waiting for your generation to be born, because it is your generation that actually understands it”, Hershman Leeson says when reflecting on the repercussion her pieces had. The artist’s provocative works discussing the relationships between humans and technology pioneered the fields of net-based media art as well as video, film, sculpture, performance, amongst others.

By the end of the performance, the stage of Zellerbach Playhouse was strewn with costumes, toys, and vegetables. Five white squares that had served as platforms and pedestals for dancing were empty. The microphones the performers used to address us, to sing, and to provoke “historical impossibilities” lay silent on a table.

UCSC professor Warren Sack's "The Software Arts" argues that computing grew out of the arts. This argument will be a provocation for some, especially for those who see a bright line dividing the “two cultures” of the arts and the sciences. For others, the argument will not seem provocative at all. Important computer scientists have argued that computing is not a science, software is a literature, and computer programming is a kind of essay writing. For those who see no clear distinction between the arts and the sciences, The Software Arts will be an old saw with some new teeth. . 

“Perennial is a neologism, a new term, and I am here to present this new term for you today”, started the lecturer Gina Pell. One important characteristic of “Perennial” is that it is, on top of everything else, a mindset. Pell explained how the term in a sense is a response to generational divisions or groups, such as millennials, but that it also tries to break off with the idea of categorizing each generation in the first place.

Nowadays a very effective way of understanding and calling attention to some absurdities happening in our world is to address them with a hint of sarcasm. That is precisely the way the “Natural History Museum”, their project, was idealized. Co-founder Beka Economopoulos shared with the audience how this project came to be, and some of the actions performed over the last few years. The museum’s “Trojan Horse” strategy is not only an approach to surprise the “enemy”, but to recognize that once being an insider, there is space for conversation.

DIY Couture Fashion Lab with Angie Wilson

Friday, February 23, from 12:00 – 6:00 pm
Dwinelle Annex, Room 126, UC Berkeley