The Digital Media Workshop is a forum for students and faculty who work on issues related to digital media across the Humanities, Social Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Because digital media spans theoretical scholarship, scientific inquiry, and artistic practice, this workshop gathers an interdisciplinary community to engage the political, aesthetic, social, cultural, historical, and technical dimensions of digital media across its many formats. Our faculty sponsors are Patrick Jagoda (English/Cinema & Media Studies) and Thomas Lamarre (East Asian Languages and Civilizations/Cinema & Media Studies).

The Digital Media Workshop sponsors presentations of all topics that explore aspects of the contemporary and historical study of digital media, new media, and emergent media with non-digital elements. This year, our workshop will loosely adhere to the special theme: “everyday media.” How are digital and everyday media constructed through daily, perhaps habitual, rhythms? How do we think of mediation as inherently an everyday temporality? What are the aesthetics and politics of media environments that engage with us day-to-day? How is the concept of everyday media rendered more generative – or more limiting – when we take into consideration global, transnational, and indigenous frameworks?

2023-24 Coordinators:

Lilian Kong
lkong168@uchicago.edu

Ziyi Lin
ziyilin@uchicago.edu

Email Lilian or Ziyi to subscribe to our listserv for updates about the workshop!

2023-2024

2022-2023

2021 – 2022

Digital Media Workshop 2023-2024
Workshop Coordinators: Lilian Kong and Ziyi Lin
Faculty Sponsors: Patrick Jagoda and Thomas Lamarre

We are happy to announce that the Digital Media Workshop is back as a yearlong workshop for the 2023-2024 academic year. We are currently accepting proposals for the entire year, with a focus on Autumn 2023 presentations.

In the interests of accessibility and in building bridges across institutions, this year’s workshop will follow a hybrid format. Whether you choose to organize a remote or in-person workshop, please indicate this in your proposal and offer concrete reasons for your choice. We are especially interested in workshop formats that experiment with a combination of remote and in-person elements.

The Digital Media Workshop is a forum for students and faculty who work on digital media across the Humanities, Social Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Because digital media span theoretical scholarship, scientific inquiry, and artistic practice, this workshop gathers an interdisciplinary community to engage the political, aesthetic, social, cultural, historical, and technical dimensions of digital media across its many formats. Our faculty sponsors are Patrick Jagoda (English/Cinema & Media Studies) and Thomas Lamarre (Cinema & Media Studies/East Asian Languages & Civilizations). 

We welcome a range of traditional and experimental presentation formats from students, faculty, visiting scholars, and non-UChicago-based researchers and artists. These include discussing in-progress articles or chapters, roundtables or industry panels on relevant topics, game prototypes or group gameplay sessions, live interviews with digital media practitioners, performances of electronic music, presentations of scientific research for an interdisciplinary audience, and exhibitions of digital humanities projects.

The Digital Media Workshop sponsors presentations of all topics that explore aspects of the contemporary and historical study of digital media, new media, and emergent media with non-digital elements. This year, our workshop will loosely adhere to the special theme: “everyday media.” How are digital and everyday media constructed through daily, perhaps habitual, rhythms? How do we think of mediation as inherently an everyday temporality? What are the aesthetics and politics of media environments that engage with us day-to-day? How is the concept of everyday media rendered more generative – or more limiting – when we take into consideration global, transnational, and indigenous frameworks?

In general, we welcome proposals that both adhere to and fall outside of this year’s theme. Objects of research can include but are by no means limited to: 

• digital cinema and animation

• CGI and digital effects

• video games

• short-form video and social media platforms

• streaming platforms

• virtual and augmented reality

• machine learning/AI

• coding and programming

• climate models and global warming

• contemporary art and design

• experimental print media

• television

Along the lines of the special theme “everyday media,” we continue to encourage presentations that address issues related to life in a pandemic-shaped world. Of particular interest are presentations that address how the COVID pandemic is shaping its own digital historical archive, mundanely mediated spaces, and modes of governmentality.

If you would like to propose a topic for presentation, please submit a brief proposal to both Lilian Kong (lkong168@uchicago.edu) and Ziyi Lin (ziyilin@uchicago.edu).

Proposals should be 150-200 words in length and include the following:
• A working title
• A short bio
• Type of presentation and format (e.g. dissertation chapter, article in progress, research
findings, collaborative session, game demo, roundtable).
• A short description of the content and/or argument.
• Any specific technical and/or AV needs.

Land acknowledgements serve as an occasion to reflect on the practices of displacement and dispossession that have produced the conditions in which we gather. At the University of Chicago, such practices continue to guide institutional conduct.

The Digital Media Workshop is typically held at the Media, Arts, Data, and Design Center at the University of Chicago on the homelands of the Council of Three Fires—the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi. Nations including the Ho-Chunk, Miami, Menominee, and Sac and Fox also stewarded these lands and waterways for generations. Despite centuries of ongoing colonial violence, tens of thousands of Indigenous people continue to call this territory home.

Yet as we gather remotely this year, it becomes more difficult to pinpoint the specific histories in which we are implicated and the treaties and legal orders we are obliged to uphold. In addition to the many locations from which each of you join us, we now depend more than ever on infrastructures so vastly distributed that they call the entire global history of colonization into play.

The fiber-optic cables transmitting us to one another as data are buried along the same routes as the telegraph lines and railroads that sustained colonial conquest. In the nineteenth century, those railroads directly enabled John D. Rockefeller and Silas Cobb to extract the wealth that was combined with a founding endowment financed by enslaved people’s labour to establish the modern University of Chicago. The British Empire’s telegraph network exploited native lands and labour as indispensable resources supporting imperial connectivity while excluding those labourers from its benefits. Likewise, today’s digital connections are secured by infrastructures built on stolen lands while Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island are disproportionately deprived of access to the high-speed connections that have become increasingly vital to survival.

The platform hosting our meetings, Zoom, depends on a global network of high-emissions data centers, including the Digital Realty Data Center located four miles from the university—one of the largest data centers in the world. The cloud computing economy values territory in this region because it is thought to be relatively insulated from the environmental risks to which it contributes. Those risks are distributed unevenly, concentrated on frontline communities that are overwhelmingly Black and Indigenous. The same is true of the natural resource extraction that allows us to gather remotely. For example, Indigenous peoples in Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile have seen their freshwater supplies diverted to support lithium mining, resulting in economic and ecological devastation.

Land acknowledgements run the risk of becoming prophylactic housekeeping items. But done properly, they ask: now that we know this in common, what does it commit us to doing? How shall we respond to these circumstances?

If you would like to help us begin to answer these questions, please contact the workshop coordinators and/or join our sessions.