Berkeleyan

Ken Goldberg named director of Center for New Media

11 July 2007

New leadership is coming to a campus center dedicated to exploring the impacts of digital media on people and society.

Ken Goldberg, a Berkeley professor of industrial engineering, has been named the new director of the UC Berkeley Center for New Media, effective July 1.

"New media are changing the ways that we perceive, learn, communicate, and experience the world," says Goldberg, who is an artist as well as an academic. "What is 'new' is accelerating rapidly with emerging technologies, but is deeply rooted in powerful aesthetic, social, and political forces. We're exploring phenomena such as visual privacy, networked games, and appropriation rights from cross-disciplinary and global perspectives."

Ken Goldberg (Bart Nagel photo)

Goldberg comes to the job with experience crossing the boundaries between technology and the humanities. He founded Berkeley's Art, Technology, and Culture lecture series, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in February.

He was also the brain behind last year's "Ballet Mori," an eight-minute performance by Muriel Maffre, San Francisco Ballet principal dancer, to commemorate the anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The first-of-its-kind dance was set to sounds triggered by seismic movements in the Hayward Fault that were transmitted live via the Internet from Berkeley to San Francisco's War Memorial Opera House.

The Center for New Media, established in 2004 with foundations in the campus's humanities and professional schools, is bringing a combination of historical and contemporary thinking to the digital revolution.

The center offers graduate courses to educate future leaders and organizes meetings, symposia, and special events for researchers as well as for members of the general public. The center has more than 100 affiliated scholars from 30 departments, including architecture, art history, philosophy, and rhetoric, as well as from the College of Engineering and the schools of information, journalism, and law. It has established new cross-disciplinary faculty positions and offers a designated emphasis in new media for Ph.D. candidates.

For more information about the center, visit cnm.berkeley.edu.