interdisciplinary

Guest lecturer by Greg Niemeyer at the University of Bergen, May 02, 2018. As the University of Bergen develops a new strategy to become a leader in innovative approaches to digital media and culture, the Berkeley Center for New Media provides a compelling model of cross-campus engagement.

The University of Bergen program in Digital Culture, the departments of Media, Art, Design, and Media City Bergen are pleased to welcome Greg Niemeyer, the co-founder of the Berkeley Center for New Media, to UiB. Professor Niemeyer will give a presentation on BCNM's innovative interdisciplinary approach to critical and artistic engagement with new media.

The Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) is a focal point for research and teaching about new media. It is led by a highly trans-disciplinary community of 120 affiliated faculty, advisors, and scholars, from 35 UC Berkeley departments, including Architecture, Philosophy, Film & Media, History of Art, Performance Studies, and Music; the Schools of Engineering, Information, Journalism, and Law; and the Berkeley Art Museum. BCNM is located at a global center for design and information technology and based in a public research university known for alternative thinking.

The mission of BCNM is to critically analyze and help shape developments in new media from cross-disciplinary and global perspectives that emphasize humanities and the public interest.

Linda Brigham hypercontextualizes contemporary philosophy.

Although a hard-copy book and a hypertext essay hardly present us with apples and oranges, this particular pair troubles the work of comparison. This trouble is not simply a matter of form. Content-wise as well, Arkady Plotnitsky’s interdisciplinary exploration of poststructural metaphysics (or “meta-physics”) and David Kolb’s meditation on the textuality of philosophy relate to each other in a fashion at once too intimate and divergent. Like Blake’s Clod and Pebble from the Songs of Experience, they are contraries, or, to pick up the theme, “complementary.” As Blake would insist, though, it is through such contraries that progress happens.

This is an open session designed to build understanding of evolving contexts and conditions for making and presenting creative works by drawing upon the experiences of those involved both with making works for arts contexts and with curating exhibitions and other arts-venue contexts. The session will invite current and past ELO arts committee leaders, including ELO members involved in the ELO new Media Arts Committee, and gallery curators to help lead the open conversation. The open forum will share knowledge and develop new ideas about making and staging works for the public sphere. The open session may confront practical, theoretical, and perhaps even ideological and political issues, conditions and their cultural paradigms.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

This paper presents the dual narrative of a shared research combining approaches from LIS and literature studies. Content and textual analyses of the digital novel The Unknown help identify areas of common interest, such as genesis and access. Interdisciplinary issues, such as methodology and reporting styles, are also addressed.

Source: Authors Abstract

In Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1987; English translation, 1997), Gérard Genette provided scholars with the seminal concept of paratext: functional elements of the book (such as covers, title pages, illustrations, footnotes, etc.) that help to fulfill the text’s destiny (p. 408) by making it present for the reader (p. 1).

Today, the book often escapes the boundaries of the tangible object of Genette’s study, as is the case with The Unknown – The Original Great American Hypertext Novel. This born-digital collaborative work, so far from Genette’s perception and yet so suited to his views, is a goldmine of thresholds, namely through the source code, which the reader is invited to explore in parallel with the content and navigation provided in the published pages (Gillespie et al., 1999).

This paper combines outlooks from two disciplines, held together by a shared interest in the study of digital culture. The field of information studies provides a qualitative content analysis of the creators’ information-sharing practices and outlines issues of access and retrieval; the literary studies field offers a textual analysis, relating the paratext to the text in order to determine whether the former fulfills what Genette called its “literary function”.

Together, these perspectives reveal how measuring this work against Genette’s framework paves the way for an interdisciplinary study of digital culture. Here, as the concept of book hovers so near the edge it might yet fall over, the paratext may truly be the threshold we need to step inside its new, parallel, and virtual reality.

Source: Authors Abstract

An important aspect of the European research project on electronic literature, creativity and innovation, the ELMCIP project, is the issue of pedagogical endeavors in the field of digital literary arts. As the Principal Investigator of the Swedish partner in ELMCIP, I researched some pedagogical models in Europe and co-edited an anthology of European electronic literature, which included pedagogical resources. Based in my own experience from curricular development at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden and the research in the ELMCIP project, I will discuss the issue of disciplinary contexts in teaching digital literary arts. In what schools, departments and programs is digital literature taught, and how does it affect the models of teaching? How does the model of digital literature challenge the university structures, and how disciplines are defined? What are some of the lessons learned from the ELMCIP project that can be brought to bear on how humanistic and arts programs are developed in the future? I hope to open up discussion about these questions based in observations of recent trends within the community to consolidate and solidify institutional structures (ELMCIP is one such example; the Electronic Literature Directory another, as is the electronic book review and the Electronic Literature Organization). At the same time, the humanities and the arts are under economic and organizational pressures in Europe and North America, presenting another important context for the discussion. Is the interdisciplinary and international community forming around the nebulous practice of digital literary arts a viable response to disciplinary questions, changes, and fears?

As an educator as well as Director of Digital Media Studies at the University of Detroit Mercy, my pedagogical and personal interests lie in how to use media to incorporate inter-disciplinary studies; to use sound, images as well as visual and narrative compositions to communicate multi-dimensional ideas, passions and concepts. In relation to this inter-disciplinary approach, I incorporate the concept of "mixing" to weave together space, design, technology, story-telling and critical discourse. One of the concepts I try to reinforce is that 'space' includes the psychological as well as the physical. In addition, I teach digital media students that "design" is the intentional approach to choreograph the experiential and that digital technology is a tool for exploring these ideas. Accepting this, I challenge the students to consider: how does the user/viewer experience and process the interaction between digital media and the "narrative" of the everyday? Two of the texts I am currently interested in utilizing in the process of creating digital media artifacts are: Paul Miller, AKA DJ Spooky's manifesto "Rhythm Science" and Henry Jenkins' "Convergence Culture." One of the concepts Paul Miller addresses is that technology has become a paradigm for individual identity as well as an interface of the everyday events that tell our stories. Henry Jenkins offers critical insight into the multi-levels and interdisciplinary force behind current digital culture as well as the woven process by which technology converges with a sense of self and culture in the digital world. Using these texts as the framework for teaching some of the UDM Digital Media Studies courses, students are assigned to create short videos that address ideas from the books. For example, one video project was to weave the concept of "mixing" the students' everyday experiences and perceptions with audio tracks from DJ Spooky's work—using the concept of "synaesthesia" to ultimately weave DJ Spooky's audio pieces, which are themselves, in a sense woven artifacts of historical and auto-biographical reference—with the students' own interpretation of urban life, space and cultural critique. Many of these videos are time-based collages—abstract in nature. Another assignment was for the students to use the tool of technology to assemble Shoebox Stories, short videos taking critical stances on urban issues as well as personal stories and histories of the local culture of Detroit.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)

Digital approaches to information processing foreground the unique interdependence between
knowledge and its representation that has been characteristic of western epistemology for the past five centuries. The essential role representation formats play in modern knowledge construction is generally accepted in all disciplines, attributing, learning and intellectual progress less to one's direct engagement with actual phenomena, and more to notational structures that convey its formulation. In this paradigm, knowledge follows exclusively from its theoretical articulation, not the other way around.

As such, the actual world cannot but appear symptomatic; its material presence reduced to little more than a kind of referential conceit. Michael Heim speaks to this very issue philosophically as early as the 1990s, recognising clear ontological paradoxes in the then newly emergent VR technology: just how our culture understands the term "reality" as an actual environment, he observes, can only weaken and become less physically uncertain "as it stretches over many virtual worlds.”2 Heim's comments recall digital culture's especially complex interactions with the material world around us; yet they capture as well the increasing ontological impasse that has developed over the course of at least a century of intellectual and artistic debate on the relationship of patterns, ordering and schema to what we perceive to be material actualities.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)