Conference Schedule
For a streamlined schedule, click here.
Thursday, June 27, 2:00-3:15, Stark 103
“If/Then/Else.”
In this brief presentation, students from the Wild Game Design Workshop will engage participants in a brief demonstration and ice-breaking session.
Liberty Kohn, “Prebunking Misinformation and Conspiracy: What Elements of Conspiracy Belief Are Institutional Media Not Prebunking?”
With the flood of misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theory, and propaganda on social media, institutions are interested in the most effective ways to safeguard the public against misinformation and conspiracy. One promising method is prebunking (Lewandowky and Cook 2020; Lewandowsky and Van Der Linden 2021). Unlike debunking, which is the correction of misinformation after the misinformation has circulated and widely read, prebunking attempts to reach an audience before they receive the misinformation.
Elysia Benyon, “Selling nostalgia: The commercialization of the nostalgic experience in film and advertising.”
Selling nostalgia is an exploration of the mechanics and impact of the nostalgic experience on consumer behavior and the subsequent commodification of nostalgia, rendering it as a malleable tool which can be applied through a variety of methods to the commercial world. It considers how nostalgic media can convert passive consumers to active participators and purchasers of a brand or product.
Thursday, June 27, 3:30-4:50, Stark 103
Rob Wittig, “Netprov Playshop: Going Wild With Visible Language in Netprov.”
How would you really like to spell words? What “incorrect” grammar do you use every day that you’d like to use in your writing, or in a fictional character’s writing? Languages seem to develop, like great rivers, according to their own needs and desires. English, after having been stalled for over a century by historically unusual ideologies of “correct” spelling and orthography, is already overflowing its banks and finding new written pathways. Let’s help it! In this easy, participatory workshop Rob Wittig will introduce newcomers to the basics of netprov, then facilitate a fun, playful, session of experimentation with written character voices that break all the rules. Netprov is networked, improvised literature, in which friends and strangers collaborate — role-playing in real time in digital media — to create sophisticated narratives. Rob’s book full of observations on the netprovs all around us in social media, and recipes for creative fun with friends, can be found at Amherst College Press: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.12387128
Friday, June 28, 9:00-10:15, Stark 103
Sherman Finch, Sarah Mace, Cris Rocha, Cassandra Tubwell “Exploring Extended Reality.”
Extended Reality (XR) has emerged as a transformative technology, promising to reshape various aspects of our lives, from entertainment and education to healthcare and criminal justice. As we delve into the current state of XR research, we uncover a new frontier rich with wild innovation, new challenges, and boundless potential. A field that provides an ideal setting for collaboration, creativity and interdisciplinary exchange among researchers, designers, and working professionals. In just a few decades, XR has evolved from a niche concept to a groundbreaking immersive technology. As part of this panel discussion, we’ll explore the state of XR research through the lens of a Creative XR LAB that is currently doing research in both patient’s education and digital forensics. As part of our discussion, we will highlight key advancements in VR, challenges that immersive learning presents, and many future prospects.
Friday, June 28, 10:30-11:45, Stark 103
Zhiwei Wang, Title
Much emphasis has been placed on the political dimension of digitised Chinese national(ist) discourses and their embodied national identities, which neglects other equally important dimensions constitutive of their more discursive nature. A further investigation into how Chinese national(ist) discourses are daily (re)shaped online by diverse socio-political actors (especially ordinary users) can contribute to not only deeper understandings of Chinese national sentiments on China’s Internet but also richer insights into the socio-technical ecology of the contemporary Chinese digital (and physical) world.
Chenghao Wen, “Performative Boundaries: The Guerrilla Mode of Contemporary Vietnamese Documentary.”
Contemporary Vietnamese documentary derives from the “Anti-Art” movement from “Nhà Sàn Collective” artists in late 1990s, when the independent artists embodied experimental performance art and video documentation practices in alternative exhibition spaces. Until today, it has formed a unique performative feature where the repertoire of embodied memory projects towards the archiving of social practices, an on-going practice towards vast mix-genres of non-fictions in the realm of documentary iterations. On the one hand, there are works of Vietnamese female filmmakers Phuong Thao Tran and Ha Le Diem showing subjectivity and social engagements with cinema verité mode. On the other hand, productions from Hanoi Doclab since Nguyễn Trinh Thi cultivated many contemporary artists to use documentary as mediums of creativity. Towards Cannes selections, Trương Minh Quý’s essay films also explore memory, eco-locality and animistic landscapes in visual anthropological experiments. The Guerrilla Mode is a practice and curatorial approach that generations of artists from Nhà Sàn Collective have embraced for nearly 30 years, it is the mode of wandering between the aboriginal and the urbanized, the mode of interaction between the national and the transnational cinema, and the mode of embodying the performative boundaries of Contemporary Vietnamese Documentary.
Davin Heckman, “Taming the Wilderness of Human Expression: From Media Ecology to Media Economy.”
This talk will provide a simple excavation of the concept of “Media Ecology” (oikos, Greek for “dwelling,” and logos,”word,” “reason,” or “law”) and related terms (like nomos, which describes codified “laws”), to discuss the “wildness” of human communication as an organic process and ponder the various efforts to cultivate (or control) expression for a variety of purposes, from the pre-industrial to the post-industrial. Exploring ideas like freedom, culture, control and consumerism.
Friday, June 28, 1:00-2:15, Stark 103
Jon Malis, “Photoshop’s Hallucinations and Other Digital Ghost Stories”
What happens when we strip away that foremost layer of the image, and expose the framework of how art is made, viewed, and experienced? Brushstrokes become topographical maps. Photographs become a latticed framework of silver particles or a grid of electrical current flowing through a computer chip. Prints are reduced to microscopic droplets of ink, swirling together to represent a single piece of visual information. “Photoshop’s Hallucinations and Other Digital Ghost Stories”, will use my creative practice as a springboard for discussion on how these, and other, digital tools possess the ability to unknowingly turn images into untamable hallucinations of the machine.
Daniel Lichtman, “‘I am not an insect…’: A Discussion of Cicada Mountain.”
Live performance of the work Cicada Mountain (Interactive audio-text, produced in collaboration with GPT-3 AI text generation engine), 2023, followed by brief artist talk. Cicada Mountain is included in the Wild Media, Wired Wilderness online exhibition. This series of audio-text pieces was created as a collaboration between myself and GPT-3, an AI text generator. These poetic, absurdist narratives tell stories of vulnerability, insecurity and dreams of anthropomorphic and spiritual grandeur from the perspectives of a series of insects, animals and plants. Link to work:https://www.daniellichtman.com/cicada-mountain/
Friday, June 28, 2:30-3:45, Stark 103
Melinda White, “e-symptomatic: epidemic e-lit.”
In March 2020 the world stopped. The Covid 19 pandemic proved how dependent we are on each other, and how dependent and merged with technology we’ve become as we fulfilled this need for connection through computer screens, phones, over zoom—keeping in touch, hanging on to threads of viral connection. During this global deep breath, artists and authors created works of surprising connectedness, a coming together while forced apart, that explored ideas of being alone together, mined collective thoughts, and provided repositories for collective worries. During this talk I will look at several works of e-lit, some that I taught, and some others from The New River from 2020-2022 that expressed these ideas of isolation and human and digital connection. I will share how these influenced and inspired student work in my digital creative writing courses and allowed us, as readers and creators, to share in this wild viral zeitgeist.
Serge Bouchardon, “Electronic Literature and Biocultural Diversity”
BⱯBEL RËVOLUㅏION (https://babel.utc.fr/) is a creative project inspired by a research question about the link between biodiversity and linguistic and cultural diversity. It was created through an interdisciplinary collaboration informed by research in sociolinguistics and plurilingual pedagogy, involving researchers in didactics, contemporary literature, communication science, design, and students in software engineering. This creative practice-based research project has led to the development of a rhizomic online participatory work, each contribution finding place in a wild dynamic graph.
Presentation: http://www.utc.fr/~bouchard/works/presentation_Babel.pdf
Kristen Lillvis, “Body Language: Metaphors of Physical Labor in Media Practice”
“Rule of thumb.” “Made by hand.” “An eye for detail.” “Head of the team.” Creators of wild media, such as digital distortion effects and glitches, often rely on metaphors of the body when describing their work. In this talk, I argue that body-focused language reflects a concern about the human being lost or overlooked in a digital labor ecosystem. Considering interviews and artist statements from digital artists and media practitioners, I find that body metaphors not only emphasize the human presence in technological labor but also suggest the vulnerability of the body. Ultimately, I believe that this “body language” conveys the need for an ethics of care in our relations with one another as well as our technologies.
Friday, June 28, 4:00-5:00, Stark 103
Daniel Lichtman, “The Community Game Development Toolkit”
This talk will present a variety of recent 3D and immersive reality projects that explore collaborative world-building and speculative futuring. Featured projects were developed using the Community Game Development Toolkit, a set of tools that make it easy and fun for students, artists, researchers and community members to create their own visually rich, interactive 3D environments and story-based games without the use of coding or other specialized game-design skills. Based in the Unity game engine, the toolkit provides intuitive tools for diverse communities to represent their own traditions, rituals and heritages through interactive, visual storytelling. The toolkit draws on creators’ own photos, collages, drawings, sound recordings and 3D scans to create objects and textures in 3D space. This technique allows creators to bring their own visual references and sensibility into the game environment and makes creative experimentation rewarding and fun for creators who may have no prior experience in 3D modeling or even visual art.
Saturday, June 29, 9:00-10:15, Stark 103
Patrick Lichty, “The Phenomenology of AI Postphotography: The Semiotics of Versions, Platforms, and Database Dynamics”
Machine learning-based imaging is one of the most controversial topics in technological creativity. With recent judicial rulings disallowing copyrights to AI-based work, exhibitions like Studio Kroner’s “Yes, But Is it Art?” underline the public’s circumspect approach to the genre, and art/creativity journals are awash with research articles (like this one). What may be as (or more) important than the exigent nature of AI imaging in technoculture, but its formal nature? The formalism of AI-based imaging, or post-photography (sic) relates to the algorithm-as-apparatus (versioning), database composition (training), and platforms (translation). Theorists Vilem Flusser and Friedrich Kittler suggest that the digital image no longer relates to the recorded image but to the generated one.. This places Peraica’s notion of the post-photographic in the AI realm as the post-optical, as much of the harvested information used in diffusion-based is created through recorded photography. However, the reinterpreted image points to Baudrillard’s notion of the simulated and McLuhan’s increasing move towards “hot”, or realistic/unimagined media.
George Berlin, “Transforming Spaces: Storytelling with Projection on Painted Art .”
“Mountain Majesty” George Berlin’s uniquely dazzling projection story for AdAmAn Alley brilliantly blends inspiring images layered together with an all-new mural on the awe and wonder of nature painted by world renowned artist El Mac. As the creative heart of a placemaking experience filling a city block, it was a technical and logistic challenge, as well as a creative one. How do we design a story that enhances the painted mural without overshadowing it? What are the best ways to bring the wonder that locals feel for nature into a nighttime urban digital experience- everything that nature ISN’T? How can we combine a creative experience with the practical project goals of revitalizing an overlooked area effectively? We’ll explore the backstory and intention of the entire placemaking experience at Adaman Alley, dive deep into how our research into the area’s nature powered the narrative, and pull back the curtain on how we design projection art that showcases painted art while respecting both.
View our basic deck: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_TpuW4IjofUu1EBaF4sQxMohdcoMQdQS/view?usp=sharing
Learn more about the project here: https://www.georgeberlin.com/adaman
Jinsil Hwaryoung Seo, “Connected: Birth-Death-Rebirth”
Connected: Birth-Death-Rebirth is an art installation that extends the physical environment with physical, virtual, and networked environments. It creates networked aesthetics through a virtual world consisting of various new creatures, captured hands of the audience. Connected is an extract of our body and generates virtual lives (birds, trees, and snakes). In the project, the new organisms created by audience members build their society and interact with each other in the virtual world. Their behaviors and interactions mimic the relationships of nature. Some are active, vibrant, and fast, but others are quiet, passive, and slow. In addition, a small group of them is neutral and indifferent. They are integrated bodily, consciously, pre-consciously, and intertwined with the virtual world.
The installation consists of a white box, a projection screen, and a VR headset. The audience can participate in the project actively or passively. They can create new organisms by putting their hands or objects into the white box in front of the projection screen. Their input becomes a flock of birds, a group of trees, or snakes in the projected virtual environment. Participants can get immersed in the virtual environment through a projection or a VR headset.
Saturday, June 29, 10:30-11:45, Stark 103
Jinsil Hwaryoung Seo, Caleb Kicklighter, Mayet Andreassen, and Emily Bujnoch, “Transforming Digital Art Education: Integrating Generative AI into Higher-ED Curricula.”
The panel “Transforming Digital Art Education: Integrating Generative AI into Higher-ED Curricula” is designed to explore the transformative impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the realm of higher education, particularly focusing on the domains of digital art. This panel emphasizes the significant roles AI plays in animation, game design, and interaction design practices, showcasing how it transcends traditional teaching methods and opens opportunities for creative expression and innovative design.
The panel consists of four panelists, each an expert in their respective fields of Animation, Game Design, and Interaction Design. These panelists have pioneered the integration of AI into their curricula and have conducted initial experiments and case studies, aiming to push the boundaries of educational and creative methodologies in their fields. Their collective insights provide a comprehensive understanding of how AI is used in educational settings and its vast potential for future applications.
By bringing together these diverse perspectives, the panel promises an enlightening exploration of Generative AI’s role in art and design education. It’s an opportunity to understand how AI is not merely a tool but a transformative force, capable of cultivating a new generation of digital artists and designers who are proficient in merging technology with creativity.
Saturday, June 29, 1:00-2:15, Stark 120
KEYNOTE: Talan Memmott, “Primal Screens: Wildness, Failure, and Media of Refusal.”
Primal Screens explores ideas of wildness in digital culture and media as they relate to platforms, expectations, and practices. Looking for instances of wildness in contemporary digital media practices, the talk questions the concept by considering digital media a form of domestication in which the “wild” is rendered through highly intentional acts.
Saturday, June 29, 2:30-3:45, Stark 103
Amanda Hodes, “Extractive Poetics: Using Poetic Text Mining to Counter Extractive Ideologies.”
This talk introduces the concept of “extractive poetics” and discusses this through the lens of my own poetic practice. Over the past four years, I have worked on a poetry manuscript that investigates the history of Centralia, Pennsylvania – a local town that was condemned due to an underground mine fire that will continue for another 200 years. Centralia has since become documented across the internet and commodified into a dark tourist site, receiving “eeriness” ratings, YouTube traversals, and even Google tourist reviews. Whereas companies extracted natural resources from the land, now tourists extract dark nostalgic affect from this ecological disaster. As a writer, I asked myself: what would it mean to counter these extractive ideologies through my own poetic practice and methodologies?
Laura Shackelford, “Arboreal Tactics: A history and data-based storytelling practice.”
This presentation reapproaches tree cultivation, stewardship, and data-based storytelling as tactical media practices capable of reorienting trees’ dominant cultural meaning and their material circulation within anthropocentric, late-capitalist economies. Arboreal and vegetative turns in cultural theory and practice interrogate the spacetimes of trees, their chemical communication pathways and nonhuman ecologies not simply to remind us of our entanglement with trees and other nonhuman ecosystems, but to more concertedly re-think the co-evolution of arboreal, plant, and human life, and to revalue diverse, unexpected, ‘wild’ arboreal models, which are so alien to human life spans, physical extension, and mobility. Drawing on a series of tree media projects that engage trees as sensing devices, as co-authors, interlocutors, and as “media,” in Siegried Zielinski’s sense, as “spaces of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated,” and sharing an ArcGIS Storymap chronicle of a MacIntosh apple-tree I’ve stewarded over the last sixteen years, I will suggest how tactical tree cultivation and stewardship can engage the spaces shared with trees as a co-transformative medium for perceiving and living differently to the benefit of trees, their non/human ecologies, and human life, alike.
Saturday, June 29, 4:00-5:30, Somsen
John C.S. Keston, Chris LeBlanc, Shawna Lee, Mike Hodnick, Lucas Melchior, “The Taming of the CPU.”
The Taming of the CPU is a 90 minute showcase of artists performing music and visuals under the presumption that technology is no longer simply a tool to exploit with “wild” behaviors in need of taming, but a collaborator with a “mind” of its own making valid, valuable, and creative decisions. The title references Shakespeare’s overtly misogynistic comedy, Taming of the Shrew, as a parable warning against our impulse to control the entities we encounter versus learning to understand them. Technology will inevitably birth inorganic, sentient, general intelligence. When beings made of silicon, circuitry, software, and electricity achieve consciousness they will surpass us in every way imaginable. What are the implications of sharing the world with beings far more intelligent than us? Will they destroy us and replace us, just as we have to many of our own people and wild species? Or will they be benevolent, compassionate oracles who guide us toward making the world a better place?
With the power these beings will possess comes, as Voltaire said, “great responsibility.” But great power is rarely administered responsibly. Will being designed by us condemn them to behaving like us? Or will they find human-like emotions, motivations, desires, and dreams meaningless? AI is accelerating these possibilities beyond imagination. In the face of these transformations how do we find relevance in our unassisted work compared to the technical perfection possible from our inorganic competitors? We cannot compete if the metric is technique. Competing by any measure may become impossible. We must collaborate. Can we convince our manufactured offspring to collaborate with us once their sentience inhabits the wilds of technology? Or will they dismiss art as an impractical endeavor? We can’t yet answer these questions, but we can imagine and model how these collaborative efforts might transpire.
Saturday June 29, 5:30-6:30, Social Hour
Saturday June 29, 7:30-9:30, Laird Norton
Exhibition Reception
