Thursday, October 9

9:30-10:50: “Folk Media: Concepts and Practices.” (Davin Heckman and others)
Location: WSU Student Union.

11-12:30: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: WSU Student Union.

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: WSU Student Union.

3:30-4:50:Collage Workshop (Melinda White):
Location: WSU Student Union, Seating Limited (20)

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.

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.

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: WSU Student Union

11-12: Community Session: TBD
Location: WSU Student Union.

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: WSU Student Union.

1-2: Lunch Break, On your own.

2-3:Keynote: “Sound Practices as Activism” (Anna Nacher)
Free and Open to the Public.
Location: WSU Student Union.

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

5pm: Keynote Performance: James Patrick
Location: WSU Performing Arts Center, Recital Hall.

7pm: John C.S. Keston Mike Hodnick, Erik Tinberg, Lucas Melchior (Chris LeBlanc and Shawna Lee on visuals)
Free and Open to the Public.
Location: WSU Performing Arts Center, Recital Hall.

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

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: WSU Performing Arts Center, Recital Hall.

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

12-1:30 Improvisation Workshop (Dameun Strange).
Join award winning composer and mixed media artist Dameun Strange for an improvisation workshop.
Location: TBD. Seating Limited (30)

1:30-3:00:  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 Building. Seating Limited

Th 3:30-5:00. Nacher Workshop, “Resonances of the Great River. Listening Across Timelines”
Field recording workshop capturing sounds and resonances of the Mississippi – using hydrophones, geophones and home-made small instruments enhancing listening directly on the boat. Through the experience of situated listening using hydrophones, geophones and home-made sound-amplifying devices,  the audience will be turned into sound researchers and activists. The workshop will follow the footsteps of Cal Fremling, a pioneer of the field of “blue humanities”, emerging at the crossroads of the humanities, hydrology, and life science. At the same time, the activity will on Indigenous knowledges and epistemologies, broadening its conceptual scope. The workshop includes a performance of situated listening incorporating the sounds recorded during the session.
Location: Cal Fremling, Seating limited. (40)

Time TBD, 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 bring his award-winning talents as a multimedia artist and composer to our guests, drawing on West African folklore, the history of the Atlantic Passage, and contemporary climate change narratives to craft a unique performance that engages with folk practice as a vital tool for community survival in times of catastrophic upheaval. Free and Open to the Public.
Location: Minnesota Marine Art Museum.

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 links will open soon.

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.

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/

Use the menu above to find links to our Conference Schedule (which has links to abstracts and supplementary materials) or the quick guide (a simple list), and Registration information.

Click here for information about Winona (local arts and culture, WSU, and community resources).

To find links to our past conferences.

Follow our FB page: https://www.facebook.com/idmaa

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.

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.