From Homunkulus to Golem: Tracking an Alter Avatar

Now in its seventh year, artist and scientist Ken Goldberg has been organizing and hosting a speaker series on Art, Technology and Culture at UC Berkeley's Center for New Media. It's a great way to hear about current topics in the field and to meet the shakers and doers in person. For full info on the current program, video archives of past speakers, directions, and more consult the website at: http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/lecs/

The next lecture entitled FROM HOMUNCULUS TO GOLEM: TRACKING AN ALTER AVATAR promises to be an interesting venture into the spiritual/intellectual/aesthetic world of Berkeley artist Sonya Rapoport, a multi-media artist and pioneer in computer based art.



Monday, November 29, 7:30 PM,
160 Kroeber Hall, U.C. Berkeley, Bancroft Way

In recent years, scientists have advanced our ability to understand and control human sexuality, reproduction, and gender. These developments have been highly controversial and have implications for the constitution of artificially created beings. Berkeley-based media artist Sonya Rapoport draws on alchemy and Jewish mysticism to construct multimedia art works that address these dilemmas.

Combining ancient myths with modern technological sophistication, Rapoport will trace the evolution of her artwork through the past four decades, starting from her abstract expressionist paintings of the 60s to net art. Robert Edgar, media artist and historian, summarizes her early interdisciplinary work as a "mix between Marcel Duchamp and the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss." Rapoport will present slides, video, and her recent interactive webworks, REDEEMING THE GENE, and KABBALAH/KABUL, in which she attributes a soul to an artificially created being, the golem.