I’m late in posting this, but I’m pleased to announce the 2009-2009 lecture series for the UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts (DMA). The faculty worked closely together and with the graduate students to put together a list of the people we were most excited to invite. I spent the summer emailing people, negotiating, working around schedules, etc. to put together the final list. I feel the list accurately reflects the different interests and fields that define our department. I hope some of you will be able to join us for this great series. Thanks to Brenda Williams for taking the process over from there. All lectures begin at 6pm in the EDA at the Broad Arts Center, UCLA.

Kenya Hara
September 30, 2008, 6:00 pm
Kenya Hara is interested in designing “circumstances” or “conditions” rather than “things.” A graphic designer and Professor at the Musashino Art university, Hara has been an Art director of MUJI since 2002.

Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid
October 29, 2008, 6:00 pm
Miller explores the overall theme of sound in contemporary art, digital media, and composition. He reconstructs the history of sound and recorded media by several of the most well known artists of their field.

The Yes Men
November 20, 2008, 6:00 pm
The Yes Men are a merry troupe of imposters who have poked fun at some of the world’s biggest corporate criminals. They are most well known for impersonating the WTO– the subject of a feature film and book– but they have had dozens of other escapades fighting corporate crime with words, glue, and rubberbands.

Clay Shirky
January 13, 2009, 6:00 pm
Shirky is the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He divides his time on consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies.

Steven Heller
January 28, 2009, 6:00 pm
Heller is an art director at the New York Times, originally on the OpEd Page and for almost 30 of those years with the New York Times Book Review. Currently, he is co-chair of the MFA Designer as Author Department, Special Consultant to the President of SVA for New Programs, and writes the Visuals column for the New York Times Book Review.

United Visual Artists
February 10, 2009, 6:00 pm
United Visual Artists is a British-based collective whose current practice spans permanent architectural installation, live performace and responsive installation. Research and development is a core part of their process — enabling them to constantly explore new fields.

Amy Franceschini of Futurefarmers
April 7, 2009, 6:00 pm
Franceschini is an artist and educator. She founded Futurefarmers in 1995 to bring together multidisciplinary practitioners to create new work. She is currently teaching media theory and practice courses at Stanford University and the San Francisco Art Institute.

Kryzsztof Wodiczko
April 21, 2009, 6:00 pm
Woriczko is internationally renowned for his largescale slide and video projections on architectural facades and monuments. He has developed a series of nomadic instruments for both homeless and immigrant operators that function as implements for survival, communication, empowerment, and healing.

Natalie Jeremijenko
May 5, 2009, 6:00 pm
Jeremijenko is an artists, inventor, and engineer with the mission to reclaim technology from idealized, abstract concepts and to apply it to the messy complexities of the real world, often with disquieting results.

We’re now a few weeks into the fall quarter at UCLA and the documentation website for DMA 28 is up and running. The class is described in the syllabus:

This course is an introduction to concepts of interactivity. We discuss what constitutes interactive work and how aesthetic and conceptual concerns can impact interactive design while developing computer programming skills required for creating interactivity. The concepts and skills taught in this course set a foundation for future DMA courses about the Internet, game design, and media arts.

This class is mandatory for all sophomore and incoming transfer students. I firmly believe that everyone studying the visual arts in the twenty-first century needs to be introduced to what the computer can do beyond its use as a production tool.

My Programming Media 2 class (it will be called Interactive Media 2 next year) has finished its Goldbergian Voting Machine. The project was an experiment in democracy carried out by a group of nineteen students who worked together for eight weeks to produce a fully functional voting machine comprised of nineteen individual modules. The modules communicated through either physical or electrical signals which carried a vote through each of the modules until it reached the final destination where it was archived.

The project brief follows:

The cartoonist Rube Goldberg (1893 - 1970) is know for his drawings of absurd, complicated machines that perform simple tasks. His name has become synonymous with these artifacts. The Merriam-Webster dictionary states:

Main Entry: Rube Gold·berg
Variant(s): also Rube Gold·berg·i·an
Function: adjective
Etymology: Reuben (Rube) L. Goldberg died 1970 American cartoonist
: accomplishing by complex means what seemingly could be done simply <a kind of Rube Goldberg contraption…with five hundred moving parts — L. T. Grant>; also : characterized by such complex means

The Wikipedia entry for “Rube Goldberg Machine” provides a good summary of how his ideas have influenced popular culture. Type “rube goldberg” as a keyword at YouTube or Google Video to see some hobby projects.

While the mechanical complexity of Goldberg’s machines has survived into the twenty-first century, the satirical component of his work has not. Goldberg’s machines are viewed most interestingly as a metaphors for absurd mechanisms within society and inherent in technological progress. One of the first uses of the adjective “Rube Goldbergian” was within the Congressional Record. Lawmakers referred to the opposing parties projects such as the “New Deal” and the “Great Society” disparagingly as “Rube Goldbergian.” (1) For example, a Rube Goldbergian scheme for reducing taxes. Clark Kinnarid, in his introduction to Rube Goldberg vs The Machine Age says that Goldberg regarded his “‘inventions’ as manifestations of a one-man insurrection against needlessly multifarious gadgetry of the machine age that enslaves man instead of freeing him from non-rewarding labor.” (2)

The technologies that appear in Goldberg’s work are from his era: automobiles, electric fans, gramophones, bicycle pumps, oil lamps, hand guns, radios. What are the “needless multifarious gadgetry” of the information age. What technologies would comprise the contemporary Goldbergian device? Possibly a mobile phone, keyboard, light sensor, laser printer, RFID card, video game, brand-name products, ASCII characters?

The Goldbergian context provides an excellent foundation for learning about the concepts of interactivity and the technologies required to make interactive projects. During the next eight weeks, we will complete a contemporary Goldberg machine. Each member of the class will build one component of the device. Each section will receive a signal and transmit that signal to the next section. In addition to building the project, each member of the class will be a part of one documentation committee: video, photography, design, DVD, web, and writing.

In reference to the origins of the word and the recent voting machine debacles, our Goldbergian device will be a voting machine. What are the many problems with voting machines and the American political system? How can our Goldbergian device refer to this context?

Notes:
1. Rube Goldberg, Rube Goldberg vs The Machine Age (New York: Hasting House, 1968), p. viii
2. Ibid. p. vii

This was honestly the most intense course I’ve taught at UCLA. It focused on process and learning new skills more than refined production, but the end result was impressive in many ways. I think more than anything else, it was a complex social process. I congratulate all of the participants: Kyle Audick, Jonathan Bobrow, Jono Brandel, Richard Caceres, Erik Carlson, Danni Chen, Chris Chernoff, Megan Daalder, Gleb Denisov, Patrick Gilliland, Mary Huang, Joe Liao, Fei Liu, Brian Miller, Ben Perkins, Michael Sun, Emerson Taymor, Patrick Tierney, and Steven Ziadie. And it would not have been possible without ace teaching assistant Michael Kontopoulos.

The DMA Senior Exhibition opens this Thursday, 5 June and runs until graduation on Saturday, 14 June. I had the privilege to work with many of these students in more than one class over the last few years (28, 152A, 152B). They are an amazing group with extraordinary energy. They will truly be missed next year. Megan Daalder, Emerson Taymor, Ben Perkins, and Jonathan Bobrow are all showing work that was developed in my classes. Please visit the exhibition website.

EXIT STRATEGIES features new artwork from the graduating MFA class of the UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts. Works span the genres of installation, painting, performance, sculpture, software, sound, and video. Artists include: Casey Alt, Estevan Carlos Benson, Zach Blas, Xárene Eskandar, Yunsil Heo, Jihyun Kim, Gil Kuno, Christopher O’Leary, Aaron Siegel, Jacob Tonski, and Pinar Yoldas.

I am the primary thesis adviser for Yunsil and a committee member for Jihyun, Gil, Aaron, and Pinar.

The opening event is 5:00-9:00 pm, Thursday, 15 May 2008, in the New Wight Gallery of UCLA’s Broad Art Center.

The Mission Statement reads:

Ours is the era of the exit strategy. Whether in military, commercial, or personal engagements, exit strategies inject planned obsolescence into every human action. Exit strategies collapse history into instrumentality: the ends justify not only the means but also the beginnings. They sacrifice openness, complexity, and sustainability to the gods of the closed, the simplistic, and the disposable. They are meager attempts to convince ourselves of the possibility for absolute control and computability in all areas of life.

We see the current cultural obsession with exit strategies as an opportunity. Our work destabilizes the concept of the exit strategy by recasting it as an ethics of escape, subversion, and nomadism. Our exit strategies are material mechanisms for prying open hermetic systems of power and representation. Our practices discover ways out. Our works plot paths for others to follow.

For more information, visit the website.