Digital and Computational Studies Blog

Bowdoin College - Brunswick, Maine

Karofsky Common Hour–Sarah Bay-Cheng: Love and Information: Contemporary Performance in Digital Culture

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March 2, 2018 | 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM | Visual Arts Center, Kresge Auditorium

Each semester, the Common Hour program asks members of the student body to nominate a faculty member to present the Karofsky Faculty Encore lecture, honoring that faculty member as a teacher and role model. This semester’s presenter is Sarah Bay-Cheng, Professor and Chair of Theater and Dance.

In a world saturated with digital media and technology, what is the role of live performance? When you can live-stream the world in your phone, why should anyone attend a live show? And, what does ‘live’ mean anymore? Connecting popular culture, critical theory, and new technologies, this talk considers current trends among international theatre and performance artists who focus their work on emerging digital technologies with particular attention to British playwright Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information (2012). This talk further serves as an introduction to the working process and ideas behind the upcoming production of Churchill’s play in Bowdoin’s Department of Theater and Dance, March 2-4, 2018.

This lecture will be streamed live at Bowdoin Live Webcasts

Trump as Manager: Reflections on the President’s First Year with David E. Lewis, Vanderbilt University

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February 12, 2018 | 4:15 PM – 5:30 PM | Hubbard Hall, Thomas F. Shannon Room [208]

The Trump White House promised “deconstruction of the administrative state”. But what does that mean? Is it happening? In this talk, Professor David E. Lewis of Vanderbilt University will assess President Trump’s approach to managing the executive branch during his first year in office, including his appointments (and vacancies); his organizational initiatives; and the interaction of political appointees and civil servants as the White House seeks to control the wider bureaucracy.

Lewis is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. An expert on the presidency, executive branch organization, and the US civil service, Lewis is the author, most recently, of The Politics of Presidential Appointments: Political Control and Bureaucratic Performance (Princeton University Press) and winner of the Herbert Simon Award for contributions to the scientific study of the bureaucracy. Before joining Vanderbilt, he taught at Princeton University and the College of William and Mary. Lewis currently serves as the president of the Southern Political Science Association and of the Midwest Public Administration Caucus.

Sponsored by the Department of Government & Legal Studies with support from the John C. Donovan Lecture Fund.

Free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be provided.

“Technology and Dance” with Ashley Ferro-Murray – Part of the Technology, Art, and Culture Lecture Series

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February 5, 2018 | 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM | Visual Arts Center, Beam Classroom

Ashley Ferro-Murray will discuss how certain trends in the history of the relationship between “technology” and “dance” impact her work as a curator of dance and theater at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), a multi-venue arts center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. From this historical perspective, Ferro-Murray will discuss a range of current curatorial projects including her work with Trajal Harrel, Maria Hassabi, Ali Moini, Okwui Okpokwasili, and Andrew Schneider. She will reflect on what she sees as the current and evolving state of incorporating digital culture into cross-disciplinary performance, including film and installation works, through the lens of her curatorial work with these and other artists.

Ferro-Murray is associate curator of theater/dance at EMPAC. She holds a PhD in performance studies with emphasis in new media from the University of California, Berkeley. Current commissions and coproductions include works by Mary Armentrout, Mallory Catlett, Elena Demyanenko and Erika Mijlin, Trajal Harrell, Maria Hassabi, Ali Moini, Andrew Schneider and Alice Sheppard.

She is also currently working on a book project titled Choreography and the Digital Era: Dancing the Cultural Differences of Technology. Based in part on her doctoral research and informed by her current curatorial practice, Choreography in the Digital Era explores the importance of movement in the construction of bodies and identity in the digital age. She has published in Media-N Journal, The Drama Review, and Dance Research Journal. Recent articles include ‘Transborder Immigrant Tool’, ‘Choreographic Resistance in the US-Mexican Borderlands and Technologies of Performance’, and ‘Machinic Staging and Corporeal Choreographies’. Ferro-Murray has given talks at University of California, Irvine, The University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, Cornell University, and Bowdoin. She was previously the Andrew W. Mellon Creative Time Global Fellow and the recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Grant. This summer Ferro-Murray will be on faculty of the NEH Institute for Digital Technologies in Theatre & Performance Studies at the University of Georgia.

Lecture sponsored by Digital and Computational Studies (DCS).

“A Prehistory of The Museum of Capitalism” with Andrea Steves of FICTILIS – Part of the Technology, Art, and Culture Lecture Series

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January 25, 2018 | 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM | Visual Arts Center, Beam Classroom

Andrea Steves, from the art collaborative FICTILIS, will talk about the project ‘The Museum of Capitalism’ – an institution dedicated to educating this generation and future generations about the history, philosophy, and legacy of capitalism, through exhibitions, research, and publication. The museum’s programs result from collaborations between a network of researchers, curators, artists, designers, filmmakers, writers, economists, historians, scientists, and non-specialists from all walks of life, including those with direct experience of capitalism.

FICTILIS is the collaborative practice of multimedia artists and curators Andrea Steves and Timothy Furstnau. The word “FICTILIS” is Latin for “capable of being shaped or changed; earthen,” which refers both to the form of their practice and the role it is intended to play within a larger culture.

FICTILIS has curated exhibitions, organized events, and been artists in residence or visiting artists in many different venues across the US and internationally, including Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA); Princeton School of Architecture (Princeton, NJ); Science Gallery (Dublin, Ireland); the Art Meets Radical Openness Festival (Linz, Austria); and the Santa Fe Art Institute (Santa Fe, NM). Recent projects have received grants from the Puffin Foundation, the Left Tilt Fund, and the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, and have been nominated for the Human Impacts Institute’s Creative Climate Award, the COAL Art & Environment Prize in Paris, France, as part of ARTCOP21.

Lecture sponsored by Digital and Computational Studies (DCS).

Being a “Berktern”: Sabina Hartnett ’18 reflects on Summer 2016

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Sabina Hartnett ’18Professor Crystal Hall and Sabina Hartnett ’18 recently reflected on Sabina’s experience as an intern with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University in Summer 2016. Look for announcements about future opportunities as a “Berktern” in February!

Prof. Hall: First, can you describe your internship? What was the big picture? What was your day-to-day work like?

Sabina: Last summer I worked at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. I worked specifically on the Lumen Project (lumendatabase.org) which is a third party transparency website publishing takedown notices (primarily DMCA related). You can kind of think of it as a graveyard for online, albeit often copyright infringing, content. We published notices from a variety of sources, the largest being Google and Twitter. The takedown notices were most often a result of copyright infringement, but were also comprised of defamation notices, trademark, and court orders among other things. Day-to-day I spent time on all levels of the project; I spent time manually parsing through notices and redacting confidential information, I read about current copyright/piracy/torrent/defamation/cyber-law related news and curating our project’s Twitter content, I wrote blog posts, and I conducted individual research on a subset of the data.

Prof. Hall: How did the internship connect with your DCS courses and research?

Sabina: ​While my project dealt with a very niche part of online content-sharing and the importance of collecting data (we can consider Lumen’s database of notices Big Data), I found it incredibly useful to have a DCS background and thus context. From DCS I got a taste of the importance of various data collections and analyses and was better able to appreciate my project and its significance. Not to mention that, for my individual research I did all my analysis (both qualitative and quantitative) and visualizations in R!

Prof. Hall: What advice do you have for anyone thinking about applying for a Berkman Center Fellowship or a similar summer experience?

Sabina: The Berkman Klein Intern program is AWESOME- they do a great job of bringing in a variety of people from a range of backgrounds to build a cohesive and productive community. I had a blast getting to know the other interns as well as some of the Center’s fellows and staff. I would encourage people of all academic backgrounds to consider applying to this internship as well as any similar ones, it’s a great way to expose yourself to new thought processes, ideologies, and academic approaches! It’s amazing to see how so many disciplines can overlap and work together to productively solve real world problems and conduct academic research. My only caveat (for any and all researchers) is to be wary of burn-out, going right from Bowdoin, to another academic setting, back to Bowdoin is tiring. But if you find an opportunity as exciting as the Berkman Klein Center – it is 110% worth it!!