UC Berkeley News
Press Release

UC Berkeley Press Release

Ken Goldberg named new director of Center for New Media

– New leadership is coming to a University of California, Berkeley, center that is dedicated to exploring the impacts of digital media on people and society.

Ken Goldberg, a UC Berkeley professor of engineering and an artist, 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," said Goldberg. "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."

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

He was also the brainchild 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 UC Berkeley to San Francisco's War Memorial Opera House.

The Center for New Media, established in 2004, has its foundations in the campus's humanities and professional schools and 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: http://cnm.berkeley.edu.

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