Center for New Media: Website Building Forum
From the
Townsend Center Newsletter (Oct 2003):
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In related news, it is a true honor to announce that some of the large issues that motivated the founding of the ATC series will now be pursued as well by UC Berkeley’s newly-formed Center for New Media. Emerging in summer 2003 from Berkeley’s Strategic Plan for New Initiatives, the CNM will facilitate collaboration between three major modes of inquiry: Humanities, Technology, and Arts/Design. Berkeley’s commitment to nurturing the arts and humanities while building an outstanding center of technical research uniquely positions the CNM to respond to the broad spectrum of technologies for representation and communication that are based on the paradigm of computation. The CNM, led by professor Linda Williams, will bring together scholars from Art History, Architecture, Film Studies, Engineering, Journalism, Philosophy, and SIMS, as well as dozens of other disciplines to collaborate on research and new curricula. Plans include hiring of new faculty and a major new studio laboratory on campus. The ATC will be at the core of the CNM’s Colloquia program.
The ongoing aim of the ATC Colloquium is to present unorthodox ideas and responses to technology that encourage skepticism without cynicism. Newspapers and magazines thrive on speculation about new technologies and how everything is just about to change. But historians and scholars know that something new rarely appears under the sun; we must carefully scrutinize history, images, technologies, and ideas to anticipate and contextualize our next irrational exuberance.
