Thursday, October 9
Registration (not required, but encouraged): Folk Media Form.
9:30-10:50: “Folk Media: Concepts and Practices.” (Davin Heckman and others)
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.
