Early in his academic career, engineering professor Ken Goldberg faced a right-brain/left-brain fork in the road. As a kid growing up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in the 1970s, he loved art. He loved studying art in various forms, he loved creating art in various forms, and he loved losing himself among the treasures in art museums in Philadelphia and New York. He wanted passionately to be an artist. He also liked tinkering with and building things. He built rockets and go-carts with his father, an engineer; and he even helped build simple robots for handling heavy metal in his father's chrome-plating factory.

Then came college. Time to decide. Art or engineering? "My mother impressed upon me the need to have a practical skill first—'then you can make art'—so I went for engineering," says Goldberg, who earned dual bachelor's degrees in electrical engineering and economics from the University of Pennsylvania, and a master's and doctorate in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. "But my temperament and instincts were more in line with how artists approached the world." Those who know him say his temperament also resembles that of a Silicon Valley networker and entrepreneur. He is the personification of a contemporary and protean academic.

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The new new thing

One of the obsessions of Berkeley’s Center for New Media is game-based learning, in which we have fun while advancing our understanding of the world—sort of like covering Brussels sprouts with melted cheese.

Get a taster with Bounce, a game encouraging conversation and empathy between people of different generations.

Preview The Tribe, a Sundance-selected short film by Tiffany Shlain, co-written by Ken Goldberg, director of the Center for New Media. It’s about Barbie and Judaism. View film

Goldberg, a kinetic handful of boyishness and seriousness at 45 (who uncannily resembles Lyle Lovett, the droll country music writer and performer, all the way to the electric hair), has spent 20 years making midcourse corrections at his fork in the road. He's built robots, installed art, networked robots and cameras and people, and even enlisted helpers to tend a distant garden through telerobotics and then report how they felt about the experience. (One called it "a subtle rumination on the nature of the commons.") Now, through the emergent Berkeley Center for New Media, which he heads, Goldberg has reconfigured road forks into academic double helixes—coiling engineering, architecture, philosophy, film studies, art history, rhetoric, information, law, journalism, dance, and even the Berkeley Art Museum as complements to one another through 100 affiliated faculty in a unique, decentralized, interdisciplinary initiative.

"New media can transform how we perceive, learn, communicate, and experience the world," says the Center's promotional announcement, evoking the "change-the-world" promises during the peak of the Internet and dot-com "boom," of which Goldberg was very much part. (His wife, filmmaker Tiffany Shlain, founded the Webbys, the so-called Academy Awards for Internet content.) "What's 'new' is accelerating rapidly with emerging technologies, yet remains deeply rooted in powerful aesthetic, cultural, and political forces."

For those who misconstrue new media as new bells and whistles—broader broadband or an omni-tasking iPhone or desktop theater or complex networking—Goldberg wants to be clear. The new media examined by the Center's graduates are rooted in the theories and reasoning behind the alphabet, the printing press, the telescope, the camera, the X-ray, the electric light, psychoanalysis, WiFi, even Wikipedia—but not necessarily in the trappings themselves. In fact, according to its mission statement, the Center is about understanding "what is new about new media from cross-disciplinary and global perspectives that emphasize humanities and the public interest." The Center focuses on the tension between the speed, reach, and remoteness of new technologies versus the solid ground of old values—truth, depth, reliability, authenticity, aesthetics, and public service.

"This is about process, not about tools. The Center is a liaison, a lens between observers and objects and between two cultures—technology and the humanities," he emphasized during an interview at the Faculty Club earlier this fall. He had just finished lunch there with Hubert Dreyfus, eminent professor of philosophy and author of the seminal book What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. Dreyfus, a mentor of Goldberg's, is also a member of the Center's senior academic advisory board.

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