DMAX, the digital media art program at BAM/PFA, is based on principles of innovation, critical inquiry, social participation, and open access, and is an integral part of BAM/PFA’s plans for a new building that connects the campus and city of Berkeley. As the epicenter of the information revolution, the Bay Area is a natural home for digital media art programs that serve inquisitive audiences. DMAX fosters this broad-based community of seekers that overlaps with the art world, and also extends into academia, sciences, and industry. DMAX presents experimental exhibitions of new media art, new forms of educational and public programs, research into preservation and open access of digital art forms, and participatory forums for critical dialogue.

BAM/PFA is one of the first museums in the nation to recognize the emergence of new media culture with a digital art program. Among its distinguished peers, BAM/PFA's DMAX program is distinctive in several ways: the scope of the program that encompasses education, collections, community, and exhibitions; the intellectual engine of UC Berkeley; and the program's character and values

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Program Scope

DMAX engages in a range of activities that are integrated with and further the following core aspirations of the museum.

Education

DMAX presents events like New Media and Social Memory, a symposium on the long-term preservation of digital culture that brought together speakers from the art world, industry, and digital culture such as Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly. The topic lit up the blogosphere and was covered in the national press from KQED, NPR, ArtNews, and the New York Times.

Digital Culture 0101 is a new way to learn about new media. This unique class offers a rare introduction to new media through the lends of digital art and serves as a digital literacy primer. Open to Berkeley students and the public, the hybrid class format creates an inter-generational dialogue about new media and acts as a practicum to concurrent media exhibitions.

Art Collections

BAM/PFA is a national leader in researching how to collect and preserve digital art forms for the next century, leading the NEA-funded consortium project, Archiving the Avant-Garde, writing the preservation language being tested in the US, UK, and EU, and publishing this research in a forthcoming MIT Press book.

The Open Museum - the first open-source museum collection - is a preservation repository and online database of born-digital art. This next-generation cultural works project, currently in the planning phase, also provides a testbed for developing innovative legal, economic, and cultural frameworks for the digital arts.

Community

The Bay Area is home to many overlapping communities interested in digital culture, from the art community to academia to industry to popular culture. DMAX provides a forum for these communities to create new connections and shared knowledge. The DMAX Blog provides our communities with a gathering place to let each other know what's going on, what people think, and what's next. Welcome home!

The DMAX Internship offers selected Berkeley and Bay Area students an opportunity to gain valuable real-world experience producing exhibitions, events, working with artists and conducting research into digital art.

Art Exhibitions

As a museum program, exhibitions are at the heart of DMAX. The inaugural exhibition of the DMAX program, RIP.MIX.BURN.BAM.PFA, looked at museum collections and art practice in the light of open source and remix culture and revealed how new media change the rules of the game for artists.

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The intellectual engine of UC Berkeley

BAM/PFA is a gateway connecting UC Berkeley and the public, bringing the latest research and brightest minds from the campus into a public forum for an open and critical investigation of new media. The Berkeley Center for New Media, an innovative interdisciplinary program at UC Berkeley, regularly partners with DMAX to turn the museum into a laboratory for learning.

Berkeley Big Bang 08, a symposium and festival of new media and art, is exemplary of the public participation in rigorous inquiry that could arise only in the unique environment of an academic museum at a public university.

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Character and Values

DMAX programs embody: the social awareness of Berkeley; the public interest and open spirit of a public university that inspired the Free Speech and Open Source movements; and the experimental impulse of the larger Bay Area, home to the information revolution.

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Art for the 21st Century in the Museum for the 21st Century

BAM/PFA is currently planning a new visual arts center, designed by the internationally acclaimed architect Toyo Ito, that will explore new ways in which art, film, and digital media can intersect and be presented. DMAX is an experimental art program that will be at home in this museum for the 21st Century.

BAM/PFA Digital Media Director & Adjunct Curator Richard Rinehart has recently been named curator for this new program. We have begun building a program that invites you to become an active participant in interactive art exhibitions and new modes of learning that could arise only in the intellectual playground that is Berkeley.