Conference Schedule

Thursday, October 9

Registration (not required, but encouraged): Folk Media Form.

9:30-10:50: “Folk Media: Concepts and Practices.” (Davin Heckman, Mara Koenck, Jenifer Frick, Aubree Hansen, Jayley Andresen, and Rhya Brandemuehl)
Location: Minnesota Room, Kryzsko Commons/WSU Student Union (Map)

11-12:30: “New Romance” (Negin Ehtesabian and Patrick Lichty):
In this talk, Patrick Lichty and Negin Ehtesabian will discuss a series of their works spanning their time as artists, collaborators, and a couple, navigating geographical dislocation, the creation of shared spaces, and the use of networked forms of communication in a time of of uncertainty. Touching down on a diverse range of practices from mail art to networked spaces, textile arts to generative AI, this talk will explore “folk practice” as adaptive strategies to the creation home in the contemporary world.
Location: Minnesota Room, Kryzsko Commons/WSU Student Union (Map)

12:30- 2: Lunch Break

2-3:30: “An Introduction to Fortepan.” (Kathryn Hannahan, Bettina Fabos and Isaac Campbell).
This session will introduce participants to the Fortepan US vernacular photo platform and highlight many of our initiatives and experiences with community building through the public photo history project. These include Fortepan’s crowd-sourced tagging capabilities; the platform’s public access FotoAlbum and FotoStory tools; our public embed and display features; our public lecture series initiative to interpret the archive; a proliferation of public library scanning hubs; curated photo exhibitions and billboard-sized public wheat paste art; creative digital projects; and the capability to overlay historical photos on a modern-day 360º image (like a historical Google Street View). Our overall mission is to use our archive of family snapshots to create dynamic intergenerational conversations within our local communities about culture, history, and identity.
Location: Minnesota Room, Kryzsko Commons/WSU Student Union (Map)

3:30-4:50:“Collage to e-lit: cut, paste, hypertext!” (Melinda White).
“Never forget that. Always remember the fun.” –Robert Coover
Collage has been around since there was paper to cut and paste and extends its branches to music and literature as well. In this workshop we will call on the ghosts of the DADA, early precursors to hypertext, drawing inspiration from their collage and cut-up practices, the tactile cutting and pasting, sampling, re-imagining, and repurposing of image and text. We will then remediate our artwork into digital form by creating a ThingLink project, where we can create links, pop-up windows, and linked pages if we so desire! You can write poetry here, extend your cut-up inspirations, or begin a story or piece of memoir. You are welcome to bring images or texts to cut-up, scissors and glue if you have them, but some supplies will be provided. You may also use your own ThingLink account if you have one, but one will be provided for the group. Let’s get back to those roots of sampling, fragmentation, and connection!
Location: Purple Room, Kryzsko Commons/WSU Student Union (Map), Seating Limited (20)

3:30-4:50: Netprov Workshop. (Rob Wittig)
This workshop session, led by an experienced netprov player, creator, and scholar, will provide hands-on experiences of collaborative digital storytelling. For the past ten years, Rob Wittig has been helping develop the netprov form for use in everyday life via Meanwhile Netprov Studio, and in the classroom during his decades at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. Netprov offers an opportunity for synchronous or asynchronous writing and critical thinking by small or large groups of authors in digital media. The principles discussed in this workshop apply across many social media platforms and can be used for narratives that are variously: comic, dramatic, or activist. Topics will include successful character creation, playing multiple characters, narrative development, and successful collaborative authorship. Specific techniques covered include how to support other netprov players: by quoting, by voting, by using emojis, stage directions and other phatic communication, by imitating, and by extending. The workshop also offers advice and support for those who wish to stage netprovs of their own. Bring a digital device and come build characters and stories with us!
Location: Minnesota Room, Kryzsko Commons/WSU Student Union (Map)

6-8pm: “Keynote: Finding Folk in the Everyday” (Dante DeGrazia):
This keynote event will feature Winona’s own Dante DeGrazia, playing a selection of songs along with a discussion of his creative practice. Dante, known for notable acts like Sleeping Jesus, Texas Toast, Doug Boodle, and Karate Chop, Silence, will discuss the process of writing folk music for the contemporary moment, moving beyond nostalgia, and drawing upon the landscape of everyday life. This performance is open and free to the public.
Free and Open to the Public.
Location: Acoustic Cafe (Map)

9pm: Sandbar Storytelling Festival Presents: “Tales & Ales featuring Don White.”
Don is a storyteller-comedian-author-troubadour-folk singer-songwriter. Don will present his stories and music at no cost. This event is free and open to the public. However, seating will be limited. So please arrive early in order to increase your chance of getting in.
Location: No Name Bar (Map)

Friday, October 10

10-11am: “No budget? No problem!: DIY Television” (Bea Kupper, Karleigh Johnson and Cassie Kuball).
Join artist Bea Kupper and WSU Alumni Karleigh Johnson (WSU ’25) and Cassie Kuball (WSU ’25) as they present a screening and discussion of their low budget YouTube series “Theatre Kids,” a comedic mockumentary about what it takes to make it theatre when you have no talent and no budget.
Location: Solarium, Kryzsko Commons/WSU Student Union (Map)

11-12: UnderAcademy College: Higher Ed for all Folk (Mark Marino and UnderAcademy Fakulty)
Founded in 2011 by Talan Memmott, UnderAcademyCollege is not a parody Institution but instead an alternative unaccredited institution. UnderAcademy neither grants nor accepts certificates, and it certainly will not validate your parking. Emerging at the rise of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course), UnderAcademy offered a different model, as it’s offerings were decidedly miniscule. UAC opposes the unregulated banking model of education built on depositing education in the minds of the learners after vacuuming up tuition dollars. Instead UnderAcademy College offers free education, holding true to its Latin Motto: Ouyay etGay atWhay Ouyay ayPay OrFay. Following the principles of estrangement, this is education for the strange people by strange people. We defamiliarize the educational process, replacing tests and high-pressure assessments with indefinite spring breaks. In a time when academic freedom is under assault, UAC is not beholden to federal tax dollars, following the path of the Flying Universities of Poland who took their lessons up into the skies. We use a Led Zeppelin. In this way we follow a Ferreirian model or a Memmot or a Ferment model: a Pedagogy of the Depressed. A pedagogy that liberates by neither paying its instructors (digressors) nor requires them to follow any stultifying assessment practices. This session will combine a survey of UnderAcademy Courses with a live UnderAcademy class experience. 
Location: Solarium, Kryzsko Commons/WSU Student Union (Map)

12-1pm: “If it’s a mountain to climb…” (Michael Pelly)
In this session, independent hip-hop artist Pelly (WSU ’18) will discuss the process of writing, engineering, and performing from the bottom up.
Location: Solarium, Kryzsko Commons/WSU Student Union (Map)

1-2: Lunch Break, On your own.

2-3:Keynote: “Sound Practices as Activism” (Anna Nacher)
In this lecture, Anna Nacher will like to bring attention to listening and sound practices as the form of activism. From situated listening, where sound becomes a vehicle of inquiry into our place in the world and the way we build our relationships with it, to a classic acoustic ecology aimed at preservation of sonic heritage, to field recordings practices which can become a form of social activism, to various examples of less conventional acts of using silence as countering the platform capitalism – all the sound-based or sonic-oriented examples may help to productively reconfigure the way we think about folk media.
Location: Solarium, Kryzsko Commons/WSU Student Union (Map)

3-4pm: “Folking Around with Code: Midwest Cryptids.” (Talan Memmott and Creative Digital Media Program)
Students from WSU’s Creative Digital Media Program will present an installation.
Location: Photo Studio (B7), Phelps Hall, WSU (Map)

5pm: Keynote Performance: James Patrick Live with John C.S. Keston (keys)
All original and improvised Ableton Push 3 and Modular Synthesizer performance by veteran live performer James Patrick, featuring lifelong musical accompanist John Keston on Keys. James and John have many years of experience making magic with Live looping, lush harmonies, and improvised audio mangling, and this is their final live collaboration before John moves to France. This will be a very special and nostalgic moment for both of them, and a truly unique musical experience that is not to be missed.
Location: Recital Hall, DuFresne Performing Arts Center, WSU (Map)

6:15 pm: Performance: Unauthorized Waveforms
These audiovisual sets recontextualize found media through unintended purposes, exploring cultural memory and media separated from the capitalist relationship between commercial productions and consumer products. As technology becomes obsolete, planned or otherwise, the artists speak through “obsolete,” and previously unattainable equipment, media, and techniques, reclaiming and repurposing the materials. Music by Mike Hodnick, John C.S. Keston, Lucas Melchior, and Erik Tinberg. Video art by Chris LeBlanc and Shawna Lee
Free and Open to the Public.
Location: Recital Hall, DuFresne Performing Arts Center, WSU (Map)

9pm: After Party.
Free and Open to the Public.
Location: Broken World Records (Map)

Saturday, October 11

9:00-11:00: Producing with Ableton (James Patrick).
The session will demonstrate Ableton as a performance medium and guide participants through some of the workflow of the Ableton suite of tools and software.
Location: Recital Hall, DuFresne Performing Arts Center, WSU (Map)

11-12:00: Lunch, on your own.

12-1:30 Workshop: As Above So Below (Dameun Strange).

As Above So Below is a project that reflects on stories related to the Mississippi River. Many know of the Mississippi River as a historic major artery for industry and commerce in the United States but equally important is the human connection to the river as a natural and cosmic connection. The Dakota spread their spirit of a community of openness and up and down the Mississippi and see the river as a reflection of our galaxy, The Milky Way where those who passed on watch over the activists of the people below. African Americans enslaved for a route to freedom both on the water and along its banks, the river became a place where freed African American could find work and eventually became the high way through which the sounds of New Orleans dancehalls and the Mississippi juke joints and the stories that came with them made their way to the North creating the foundations of Jazz and the popular music that is created in the world today. There are many stories to be found on the Mississippi and in this workshop we dig into the spirit of the music of the Black Atlantic which has always featured a spirit of improv, sharing your voice, your story with l and supported by the collective in your own special way. Support from the collective requires deep listening skills. We will work on those deep listening skills and how to better incorporate the skill of improvisation in our lives.
Location: Oberton Education Room, Minnesota Marine Art Museum (Map). Seating Limited (30)

1:45-3:00:  Welcome to Frau Holle’s Werkhaus! (Joellyn Rock)
In this workshop/demo session, mixed-media artist will explore Frau Holle’s Werkhaus, a mixed-media installation, combining experimental video projections and large scale hand-crafted crochet. The project re-spins the German fairy tale about climate mistress Mother Holle and the two girls who must shake her feather bed to make it snow. Visual media includes multi-layered video vignettes, a mix of texture gathered from climate data, fiber art patterns, historical public domain images, experimentally generated imagery, and original digital art. Audio includes voices reading from fragments of Joellyn Rock’s retelling of the fairy tale, her Frau Holle “scrumble” essay, and multiple versions of the story generated via human and AI creative writing experiments. The legendary figure of Frau Holle oversees the fiberwork of women and girls, supervising their spinning and weaving. Frau Holle’s Werkhaus toys with threads of this old tale, questioning the value of women’s work, artificial intelligence, climate change, and moral fiber. The mixed-media fiber art / digital installation features a large crochet puppet of Frau Holle with projected text and video.
Location: Laird Norton Center for Art and Design (Map) Seating Limited.

3:30-5:00. Anna Nacher Workshop, “Resonances of the Great River. Listening Across Timelines”
The workshop of situated listening with the practice of field recording to capture the
sounds and resonances of the Mississippi. We will use different microphones, such as hydrophones, geophones and contact microphones to listen attentively to the River itself, but also to different forms of human activity around it. Home-made small and simple devices enhancing listening experience will also be available directly on the boat. Through this experience, we will explore many resonances of the Great River. Following the footsteps of Cal Fremling, on a boat named after him, we will listen across different time scales: geological time, riverine time and human time. The session will be recorded by Anna Nacher and made available via online platforms (Soundcloud, Bandcamp,
radioaporee and Echoes). The listening stations and/or micro-performance with the
recordings will be offered immediately after the workshop session.
All participants are welcome to bring their own recording devices. If you would like to
contribute your recording, please register using a separate form. This session is made possible through a grant from the Adam Mikiewicz Institute which “brings Polish culture to people around the world.”
Location: Cal Fremling (Map), Seating limited. (40) Waivers are required for participation.

6:30-7:30. Closing Keynote Performance, Dameun Strange.
As part of iDMAa’s Folk Media Conference, we are thrilled to partner with the Minnesota Marine Art Museum to bring you a performance by artist-in-residence Dameun Strange.
Strange will present a performance of the his graphic score As Above So Below with his improv band IBX (ee-BEKS) a sextet of performers using electro acoustic and electronic instruments. Free and Open to the Public.
Location: Atrium, Minnesota Marine Art Museum (Map)

Registration (not required, but encouraged): Folk Media Form.

Exhibition: “Folk Media in the Digital Age”

Art exhibition of the iDMAa Festival and Conference 2025 : “Folk Media”
International Digital Media and Art Association Conference 2025
Exhibiting art of internationally known artists that challenge folk and traditional narratives through digital contexts.

9-12 October 2025
Opening hours: 5-8 PM
Laird Norton Center for Art & Design
Winona State University, Winona, MN, USA

Sponsored by WSU Foundation.
Curated by Negin Ehtesabian & Patrick Lichty
With thanks to the Winona State Foundation, the Creative Digital Media program, the Communication & Media Department, the Department of Art & Design, Dr. Talan Memmott, Dr. Davin Heckman, & Winona State University.

Featured Artists: (Alphabetical Order)

Afra Al Dhaheri (UAE) @afra_aldhaheri
Almagul Menlibayeva (Germany/ Kazakhstan) @almagul.menlibayeva
Bibbe Hansen (USA) @bibbe.hansen 
Claudia Hart (USA) @claudhart 
FUBAR/Dina & Vedran Gligo (Croatia) @fubar_expo 
Genco Gulan (Turkey) @gencogulan
Judith Carlin (USA) @judith_carlin
Lee Wells (Greece/USA) @lee_wells_art
Michael Ang (Canada/ UAE) @mangtronix  
Mina Cheon (USA/South Korea) @minacheonstudio
Mindaugas Gapsevicius- Miga (Germany/Lithuania) @gapsevicious
Nathan Shafer (USA- Alaska) @nathan_shaferak
Nina Sumarac (Cyprus/ Serbia) @ninaschumaratz  
Sara Niroobakhsh (Canada/ UAE/ Iran) @saraniroobakhsh 
Talan Memmott (USA) @talmott 
Walter Willems (Netherland/UAE) @walterwillems

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FM>iDA invites audiences to explore how traditional folk narratives resonate with contemporary artists in the digital age. Each piece challenges conventions while offering fresh perspectives on identity, community, and culture. This showcase underscores iDMAa’s commitment to pioneering cross-cultural dialogue in a rapidly evolving media landscape.

In this exhibition, we claim that folk media, the oral tales, the hand-made image, the communal song,  ritual object, have not vanished in the age of digital spectacle. Instead, it transforms, disperses, and multiplies within digital networks. If folk media once traveled by footpaths and village squares, today it travels by internet and screens, but its core impulse remains: to tell, to bind, to remember, and to provoke.

 Folk media survives because it answers timeless human needs—sharing wisdom, hope, pain, fear, unity, worshipping or celebrating, sharing rituals, defining priorities of the time, and codifying collective memory.

The digital era amplifies these needs. Stories become shareable units, rituals migrate to online platforms, and communities flourish around micro-narratives, memes, and participatory media.

Let’s call it Transformation, Not Substitution. The tool shifts; from voice and gesture to code, algorithm, and interface.

Folk Media as Digital-Matter:
Digital tools democratize authorship; a grandmother’s tale can become a generative prompt, a grandmother’s embroidered motif becomes a pixelated motif, a local tune becomes a looping sample. The archive expands from physical to virtual; Memory is no longer contained by borders; it circulates, mutates, and accumulates across communities and platforms throughout the entire world; leading to more similar online collective memories, and re-narrates every culture/language, like old folkloric stories and songs. But this time, the access and borders of influence is unlimited by geography.

In this vast inclusive meaning, political art, disability art and digital storytelling are included.

If folk media once traveled by foot and memory, it now travels by code and cloud, and asks enduring questions: What do we remember together? Who gets to tell the story? How do we preserve authenticity while embracing transformation?

More about iDMAa: https://idmaa.org/

Contact: pa************@****na.edu

This is the poster for the Folk Media in the Digital Age exhibit

 

Folk Media Highlights

We are hard at work building the schedule for iDMAa’s Folk Media Conference and Festival at Winona State. Among the highlights this year, we will be providing:

A Multimedia Performance at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum featuring award-winning composer and artist, Dameun Strange.

An evening of musical performances featuring James Patrick of Slam Academy and a media archaelogical jam session featuring John C.S. Keston, Mike Hodnick, Erik Tinberg, Lucas Melchior (Chris LeBlanc and Shawna Lee on visuals).

A performance and talk by Winona musician and songwriter Dante DeGrazia of Sleeping Jesus, Texas Toast, Doug Boodle, and Karate Chop, Silence.

A keynote address by sound artist and research Anna Nacher.

A variety of workshops on field recordings and nature sounds, networked based improvisational performance, digital music production, and other areas of digital folk practice.

A series of talks, demonstrations, and installations on collage art, slow scan television, radio performance, folk tales for interactive media, FortePan US, and other topics.

A community session, highlighting local resources from our partners like Engage Winona, The Art of the Rural, the Sandbar Storytelling Festival, UnderAcademy College, and others.

Registration (not required, but encouraged): Folk Media Form.

About the 2025 Conference and Festival

The Folk Media Conference and Festival (October 9-11, 2025) at Winona State University will focus on digital media and art from the perspective of “folklore.” Through workshops, performances, exhibitions, and conference presentations, we will explore the creation of media by everyday people through urban legends, memes, zines, DIY media, play, underground music, fandom, found media, and other forms of grassroots expression.

This year, we are proud to announce a collaborative performance with the Minnesota Marine Art Museum’s artist in residence, Dameun Strange, a keynote by the digital artist and scholar Anna Nacher, a performance and workshop featuring Slam Academy founder James Patrick, and a concert and workshop featuring Winona’s own Dante DeGrazia.

Past conferences by iDMAa, our key collaborator, include Digital and the Human, Glitch is the Soul in the Machine, Weird Media, and Wild Media.

About the 2024 Conference

Winona State University will be host to the International Digital Media and Arts Association’s (iDMAa) Conference and Exhibition on “Wild Media” from June 27-30.  The Conference will feature a keynote by Talan Memmott on the spectacle of “wildness” in digital media, as well as talks and workshops by French scholar and artist Serge Bouchardon (University of Technology of Compiègne), narrative theorist Laura Shackelford (RIT), VR artist Jinsil Hwaryoung Seo (Texas A&M), experimental collaborative storytelling pioneer Rob Wittig (Meanwhile Netprov), and creative director George Berlin (George Berlin Studios). The exhibition, curated by internationally renowned multimedia artist Alinta Krauth (Ephemerlab), features dozens of artists from around the world. (Read the schedule here)

The conference is sponsored by iDMAa, the WSU Foundation, Creative Digital Media Program (WSU), the University of Bergen’s Center for Digital Narrative, TLT (WSU), and the Department of Mass Communication (WSU).

To register for the conference ($150), visit the conference website: https://educate.winona.edu/idmaa/attend/

The exhibition is free and open to the public in WSU’s Laird-Norton Building, 125 W 5th St, Winona, MN 55987:

June 27: Noon-5:00 pm.
June 28: Noon-5:00 pm.
June 29: Noon-5:00 pm, Opening Reception 7:30-9:30 pm.
June 30: Noon-5:00 pm.

https://educate.winona.edu/idmaa/wild-media-exhibition/

About the Weird Media Conference

This year’s iDMAa Conference, Exhibition, and Workshop will be focused on the theme “Weird Media” In keeping with iDMAa’s commitment to “militantly marginal” media practices, this year’s theme will focus on unconventional media studies—from the odd to the uncanny, from the suspiciously animated to the supernaturally ordained, from the familiar forms to far-out fabulations, from established to the emergent—we welcome fresh perspectives that offer insights into how strange mediation can be.

The Conference will feature a keynote address by Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux, authors of Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames (U of MN Press, 2017). The event will also include talks by artists and scholars, including, Margaret Dolinsky, Jennifer Gradecki, Amay Kataria, Talan Memmott, Stephanie Tripp, Giovanna Sun, Merit Thursday, Paul Echeverria, Yamin Xu, Betsy Pike, Josie Cutara, Patrick Lichty, Kristen Lillvis, David Wright, Daniel Lichtman, Rob Wittig, and Chris Blair.

The Exhibition is curated by Patrick Lichty and juried by celebrated Iranian illustrator and artist Negin Ehtesabian, Wade Wallerstein (co-curator Transfer Gallery and Gray Area), digital pioneer Cynthia Beth Rubin, Roger Boulay (Gallery Director, WSU) and Brandon Gellis (Co-Director: Center for Design Thinking, University of Wyoming) and will feature experimental works by over 80 digital artists from around world, including A. P. Vague, Alan Sondheim, Alessandro Amaducci, Alex McKenzie and Dana Potter, Alien AI, Amay Kataria, Andre Perim, Andrey Rylov, Nastya Yatskhey, Alisa Ustinova, Asra Qarakhani, Aya Shabbar, Brian Skalak, Caitlin Fisher, Carrie Fonder, Carter Hodgkin, Citron | Lunardi, Colin Goldberg, David Thomas Henry Wright (with Chris Arnold), Davide Porta, Derek Curry & Jennifer Gradecki, Diane Marsella, Dominick Rivers, Ellen Jantzen, Ershad Fatahian, Eva Davidova, F. C. Zuke, Farnoush Daroudgar, Frederick Maheux, Ghazaleh Seidabadi, Giovanna Sun, Gregory Little, Heejoo Kim, Isabella Uliasz, IZABELLA RETKOWSKA, Jack Bordnick, Jaka Železnikar, Jason Ramey, Jesse Farber, John C.S. Keston, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Joseph DeLappe, Justin Lincoln, Karl Erickson, Kat Mustatea, Kate Hollenbach, Kayoko Nakamura, Keif Oss, Liz Wierzbicki, Malavika Mandal Andrew, Margaret Dolinsky, Marjan Andaroodi, Merit Thursday, Mez Breeze, Michael Jantzen, Michael Marks, Mina Cheon, Nina Sumarac Jablonsky, Patrick LeMieux, Pavel Checkulaev, PlantBot Genetics Inc (aka Wendy DesChene + Jeff Schmuki), RAY LC, Renata Janiszewska, Robert B. Lisek, Ryan Lewis, S4RA, Scott Kildall, Stephanie Tripp, Sue Beyer, Taehee Kim, Talan Memmott, Tommy Mintz, Vincent DeZutti, Vladimir Kalnitsky, Will Luers, Yamin Xu, Yvette Granata, and Zen Cohen.

The iDMAa 2021 Conference

This year’s iDMAa Conference, Exhibition, and Workshop will be focused on the theme “Broken Media” and all that entails—Hacking, Cracking, Glitching, Bending, Dysfunction, Preservation, Remediation, Reform, Exploitation, Activism—all possible interpretations are under consideration! This year, we are especially interested in making the conference accessible and interesting for students. Our goal is an energetic experience that brings students, faculty, and professionals together to ponder what it means to be “militantly marginal” in a post-digital world.