Human Technology Futures (HTF) brings together thirty-plus colleagues at UC Berkeley across the arts, humanities, and interpretive social sciences who are committed to shaping how computing and data science engage with human concerns and how our own fields take up and transform the opportunities that new technologies present. Over the last five years, we have come together to plan new transdisciplinary research efforts, envision new undergraduate and graduate programs, and help ensure that the social sciences, humanities, and arts continue to expand their impact and collaborations with technological research areas across the UC Berkeley campus.
At this moment of change within data science and computing, HTF colleagues have come together as a community of scholars who reflect on the basic premises of past, present, and future technologies. HTF is dedicated to examining how our technologies, human experiences, society, and culture are co-imagined and co-constituted. We do this together on the basis of long traditions of interpretive and analytical scholarship, experimentation, and creative research. HTF colleagues are actively exploring the interfaces of computing with:
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- the materialization and humanization of data through art and performance
- excavating the cultural, societal, and philosophical constitution of algorithmic decision-making, biometric governance, digital surveillance, and social media platforms
- expanding understanding of embodied movement, dance, and live performance within virtual and augmented spaces and with technological interfaces
- deep learning for music and computer-assisted orchestration
- bringing lenses from queer studies, indigenous perspectives, and many forms of critical theory to re-narrate the development of computing and data
- experimenting with machine learning and analytic tools to expand our understanding of human cultural production
- developing, assessing, and teaching new formulations for ethical responsibility and racial justice in a datafied age.
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