Berkeley Center for New Media

Berkeley Center for New Media
Name	Berkeley Center for New Media
Established	2004
Location	Berkeley, California
Parent institution	University of California, Berkeley
Director	TBA

Berkeley Center for New Media is an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley that investigates the social, cultural, technological, and artistic dimensions of digital media. The center convenes scholars, practitioners, and students from departments across the University of California, Berkeley, producing scholarship, exhibitions, and public programs that intersect with work at institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the New School, and the University of Oxford. It engages with prominent cultural organizations and funders including the Smithsonian Institution, the Getty Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

History

Founded in 2004 during an era shaped by the dot-com aftermath and the rise of Web 2.0, the center emerged amid debates that involved figures and institutions like Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and the Mozilla Foundation. Its early initiatives connected researchers affiliated with the College of Letters and Science, the College of Engineering, and professional schools at the University of California, Berkeley to networks that included the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Center for Contemporary Culture at the University of Chicago, and the Department of Design at Stanford University. Over time, projects hosted by the center intersected with exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, collaborations with the Walker Art Center, and grant partnerships with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. Directors and affiliated faculty included scholars whose work resonates with traditions represented by names such as Marshall McLuhan, Donna Haraway, Raymond Williams, and Friedrich Kittler, while its event programming has featured guests from institutions like the Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, and the British Film Institute.

Mission and Research Areas

The center's mission emphasizes interdisciplinary inquiry into digital culture, drawing on methods and questions associated with scholars and institutions such as Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, and engaging with technical practices linked to groups like the Internet Engineering Task Force, the World Wide Web Consortium, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Major research areas include algorithmic media and machine learning studies that converse with work at Google Research, OpenAI, DeepMind, and IBM Research; critical infrastructure studies that relate to the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; and creative practice and digital art that connect to the Walker Art Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Centre Pompidou. The center also foregrounds questions tied to activism and policy involving organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch, the Ford Foundation, and UNESCO.

Academic Programs and Courses

The center offers curricular collaborations, fellowships, and seminar series that integrate across departments including the Department of Film & Media, the Department of Architecture, the School of Information, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, and the Department of Anthropology. Courses and postgraduate seminars often bring together faculty whose research trajectories align with the work of institutions and scholars like Noam Chomsky, Elizabeth Grosz, Henry Jenkins, Sherry Turkle, and Nicholas Negroponte, and incorporate technical labs inspired by practices at the MIT Media Lab, Carnegie Mellon University, and ETH Zurich. Graduate fellowships and visiting scholar appointments have attracted postdoctoral researchers from the University of Cambridge, Yale University, Columbia University, Princeton University, and the University of California, Los Angeles. The center also supports doctoral committees and collaborative degrees that interface with professional programs at the Haas School of Business and the Boalt Hall School of Law.

Public Events and Outreach

Public programming includes lecture series, panel discussions, film screenings, and exhibitions that have hosted speakers and artists associated with the New York Public Library, the British Library, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Barbican Centre, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Notable events have featured commentators and practitioners whose work connects to platforms and projects such as TED, SXSW, Ars Electronica, the Venice Biennale, and the Sundance Film Festival. Outreach initiatives extend to K–12 partnerships and community workshops conducted in collaboration with the Oakland Museum of California, the San Francisco Public Library, the Museum of the African Diaspora, and community media organizations like KPFA and KQED.

Collaborations and Partnerships

The center maintains institutional partnerships with university and cultural partners including Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, the New School, the Walker Art Center, the Getty Research Institute, and the Smithsonian Institution. Research collaborations have involved technology firms and nonprofits such as Google, Microsoft Research, Apple, Facebook (Meta), the Mozilla Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Wikimedia Foundation. Grant and program partners have included the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. International collaborations extend to the Max Planck Institute, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and the Internet Archive.

Facilities and Resources

Facilities associated with the center leverage campus resources at the University of California, Berkeley, including the Bancroft Library, the Doe Memorial Library, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and campus maker spaces and fabrication labs influenced by practices at the Fab Lab network, the MIT Hobby Shop, and the Stanford d.school. The center provides access to digital archives and computational resources that connect to infrastructures such as the Internet Archive, the Digital Public Library of America, the Library of Congress, and cloud platforms used by Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. Exhibition and lab spaces have hosted installations and workshops supported by curatorial collaborations with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

Category:University of California, Berkeley