The Digital Media Workshop is a forum for students and faculty who work on digital media across the humanities, social sciences, STEM, computer and information science, and the arts. 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. The 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 includes, but is by no means limited to, digital cinema, television, and animation, CGI and digital effects, video games, short-form video and social media platforms, streaming services, virtual and augmented reality, machine learning and artificial intelligence, coding and programming, climate models and global warming, contemporary art and design, and experimental print media.

2024–25 Coordinators:

Jiyoon Kim
jiyoonkim@uchicago.edu

Hugo Ljungbäck
hmal@uchicago.edu

Email Jiyoon or Hugo to subscribe to our listserv for updates about the workshop!

2023-2024

2022-2023

2021 – 2022

Call for presentations: Digital Media Workshop 2024–25
Workshop Coordinators: Jiyoon Kim and Hugo Ljungbäck
Faculty Sponsors: Katherine Buse and Patrick Jagoda

We are happy to announce the return of the Digital Media Workshop for the 2024–25 academic year! We are currently accepting proposals for the entire year, but are particularly eager for students willing to present in Autumn 2024. Please submit your proposals by Sunday, October 20. Early submission is encouraged.

The Digital Media Workshop is a forum for students and faculty who work on digital media across the humanities, social sciences, STEM, computer and information science, and the arts. 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.

The 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 includes, but is by no means limited to, digital cinema, television, and animation, CGI and digital effects, video games, short-form video and social media platforms, streaming services, virtual and augmented reality, machine learning and artificial intelligence, coding and programming, climate models and global warming, contemporary art and design, and experimental print media.

We welcome traditional as well as 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.

If you would like to propose a presentation, please submit a brief proposal to both Jiyoon Kim (jiyoonkim@uchicago.edu) and Hugo Ljungbäck (hmal@uchicago.edu).

Proposals should be 150–200 words in length and include the following:

1. A working title;
2. A short description of the content and/or argument;
3. A short bio;
4. The proposed presentation format (e.g. dissertation chapter, article in progress, research findings, collaborative session, game or teaching demo, roundtable);
5. Any specific technical and/or A/V needs; and
6. Your preferred quarter and any other scheduling information.

In the interests of accessibility and in building bridges across institutions, the workshop will continue to 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.

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.