Friday, April 25

1:00 PM–2:00 PM – Lunch – Cobb Hall 310

2:00 PM–2:15 PM – Welcome and Opening Remarks – Cobb Hall 307
Conference Organizers: Hugo Ljungbäck & Nat Modlin (University of Chicago)
Chair of Cinema and Media Studies: Patrick Jagoda (University of Chicago)

2:15 PM–3:30 PM – Panel 1: Algorithm, Programming, Glitch – Cobb Hall 307
Moderator: Patrick Gwillim-Thomas (University of Chicago)
Bee Rinaldi (North Carolina State University), “On Programming Languages and the Body’s Refusal to be Read”
Pascal Maslon (University of Zurich), “Glitching Media Theory, 1986/2025”
Stephen Yang (University of Southern California), “Uncertainty as Spectacle: Real-Time Algorithmic Techniques on the Live Music Stage”

4:00 PM–6:00 PM – 20th Anniversary Faculty Roundtable – Logan Center 201
To celebrate the 20th Cinema and Media Studies Graduate Student Conference, this roundtable features five previous conference organizers, who will give short presentations about their work, reflect on their time as PhD students in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, and discuss how they have seen the discipline change over the past two decades.

Moderator: Daniel Morgan (University of Chicago)
Adam Charles Hart (Media Burn Independent Video Archive)
Sarah Keller (University of Massachusetts Boston)
Diane Wei Lewis (Washington University in St. Louis)
Joshua Yumibe (Michigan State University)

6:00 PM–7:00 PM – Dinner – Logan Center 801

7:00 PM–8:30 PM – Performance: Gibson + Recoder, The Changeover System – Logan Center 201
Known for their performances transforming films into captivating sculptures of light, New York City-based artists Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder present The Changeover System. During this singular live performance, Gibson + Recoder will work from within the projection booth to transform the film projector’s light. They will use rotating, hand-blown glass objects and other diffracting elements to bend, scatter, and distort the film’s image, redefining what cinematic film projection can be.

(35mm, color, soundtrack by Richard Garet, approximately 70 minutes, 2023) 

Saturday, April 26

9:00 AM–10:00 AM – Breakfast – Cobb Hall 310

10:00 AM–11:15 AM – Panel 2: Elemental and Environmental Failure – Cobb Hall 307
Moderator: Parker Stenseth (University of Chicago)
Jiayu Yang (Temple University), “Articulating Bugs: The Wax Worms (Galleria mellonella) in and as Media”
Juntao Yang (Columbia University), “Fault Lines and Echoing Strata: Attunement and Unsecurement through Earthquake-Media”
Merve Ünsal (University of California, Santa Cruz), “Sinkhole as Glitch”

11:30 AM–1:00 PM – Panel 3: Forensic Aesthetics – Cobb Hall 307
Moderator: Ziyi Lin (University of Chicago)
Ketan Krishna (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), “Upscaling the Past: The SD-to-HD Transition and Its Impact on Modern Video Processing”
Gian Gregorio (University of California, San Diego), “‘I Hate Computers’: Failing Sonar, Virtual Witnessing, and Scientific Authority in Jurassic Park”
Jermaine Anthony Richards (University of Southern California), “The Methodology of Forensic Gamification: Moral Costs of Reconstructing Criminal Accidents”
Jinxiu Rebecca Han (University of Texas, Dallas), “Rethinking Compulsory Able-Bodiedness in ‘Stupid AI’”

1:00 PM–2:00 PM – Lunch – Cobb Hall 310

2:00 PM–3:15 PM – Panel 4: Media Archaeology and Infrastructure in East Asia – Cobb Hall 307
Moderator: Hang Wu (University of Chicago)
Rosalie Liu (University of California, Berkeley), “Revolutionizing Darkness: Media Archaeological Excavation of Daylight Cinema, 1910–1950”
Kelly Fan (University of California, Berkeley), “Bad Connections: Telephony, Literature, and Mediation in Early Republican China”
Miao Wang (University of Chicago), “Operative Blockage: Small-Gauge Projectors in Socialist China”

3:30 PM–5:00 PM – Keynote: Nicholas Baer, “Failing Upwards: On the Concept of Perfection” – Cobb Hall 307
What is the opposite of media failure? Over the past years, a growing body of literature has examined forms of failure (e.g., glitch, error, noise) as habitual phenomena in the operations of media. While such scholarship has often defended imperfection as a critical alternative to hegemonic media logics, it has left perfection itself undertheorized. Inverting the terms of contemporary debates, Baer’s talk demonstrates that the very ideal of perfection is an engine of semantic instability in the modern age. He argues that cinema challenged classical understandings of perfection, which gradually and unevenly gave way to perfectionism, perfectibility, and an aesthetics of imperfection. Integrating Reinhart Koselleck’s method of conceptual history into the study of moving images, his talk offers a differentiated and historically dynamic understanding of perfection as a key concept in global film and media theory.

5:00 PM–6:30 PM – Dinner – Cobb Hall 310

Nicholas Baer is Assistant Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley, with affiliations in Critical Theory, Film & Media, Jewish Studies, New Media, and Science, Technology, Medicine & Society. He is author of Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism and co-editor of The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933, Unwatchable, and Technics: Media in the Digital Age.

Kelly Fan is a PhD student in the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley studying modern Chinese literature, film, and media culture. She is interested in the materiality of literary form and its entanglement with technology, infrastructure, and other media—especially how theories of probability and the self-organizing dynamics of matter inform aesthetic and formal practices. Her translations have appeared in Renditions and the Journal of Chinese Cinemas. 

Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder have exhibited their expanded cinema installations and performances at the 2004 Whitney Biennial, Mad. Sq. Art, REDCAT, Wexner Center for the Arts, Ballroom Marfa, The Kitchen, Light Industry, Anthology Film Archives, San Francisco Cinematheque, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Conversations at the Edge, Walter and McBean Galleries, Memorial Art Gallery, Young Projects Gallery, Robischon Gallery, Microscope Gallery, I-Park Foundation, Exploratorium, Sundance Film Festival, National Gallery of Art, Artefact Festival, Palais des Beaux-Arts, M HKA, HMKV, Viennale, Austrian Film Museum, Metro Kinokulturhaus, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, International Film Festival Rotterdam, La Casa Encendida, Serralves Foundation, Museu do Chiado, Solar Galeria de Arte Cinemática, and EYE Film Museum. They live and work in New York.

Gian Gregorio is a PhD student of Anthropology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is interested in cultural relationships to fossils and to modes of visualizing prehistory in the context of contemporary North American settler-colonial capitalism. Their undergraduate senior thesis, “Reconstructing Dinosaurs: Practices, Paleo-Ontologies, and Experiencing Prehistory,” which traced the historical, cultural, and onto-epistemological underpinnings of paleontological knowledge production practices, was awarded Exemplary Thesis by the Reed College Anthropology Department.

Patrick Gwillim-Thomas is a PhD student in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Broadly, his research grounds the study of digital culture in Japan and Korea in an understanding of the technology of the internet. This includes understanding the affordances of internet technologies, like the Country Code Top Level Domain names (.kr, .jp), as the media of digital culture. It also includes the structuring thought of a new technological ‘internet age’ that surrounds all digital culture, which is his PhD research focus.

Jinxiu Rebecca Han is a Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Dallas, majoring in Art, Technology, and Emerging Communication, whose research investigates identity construction at the intersection of digital media, visual culture, and gender, blending practice and theory to explore how technology shapes the self and society.

Adam Charles Hart is a scholar and archivist, and the curator for Media Burn, an independent video archive based in Chicago. He is the author of Monstrous Forms: Moving Image Horror Across Media and Raising the Dead: The Work of George A. Romero. He holds a PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago and has published widely on topics related to genre cinema and to avant-garde film and video.

Patrick Jagoda is a digital media theorist and game designer. He is William Rainey Harper Professor of Cinema & Media Studies, English, and Obstetrics & Gynecology at the University of Chicago. Patrick is also co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and the Transmedia Story Lab, as well as Executive Editor of the interdisciplinary journal Critical Inquiry and faculty director of the Weston Game Lab. Patrick’s books include Network Aesthetics, The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer, and Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification.

Sarah Keller is professor of art and cinema studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research focuses on experimental form, film experience, and feminist issues in cinema. She is the author of Maya Deren: Incomplete Control, Anxious Cinephilia: Pleasure and Peril at the Movies, and Barbara Hammer: Pushing Out of the Frame, and co-editor of Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations. She is founder and organizer of the Boston Cinema/Media Seminar.

Ketan Krishna is currently a PhD candidate at the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on the history of film and photographic technologies, film restoration, and related areas involving computational tools and visual culture. He holds an M.Phil degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and has previously worked as a documentary filmmaker.

Diane Wei Lewis is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her work centers on the 1910s and 1920s—key decades for the industrialization of cinema, the expansion of mass media, and the introduction of new media technologies in Japan. She examines Japanese cinema and media with an emphasis on histories and theories of labor, consumerism, emotion, and gender and sexuality. She is the author of Powers of the Real: Cinema, Gender, and Emotion in Interwar Japan.

Ziyi Lin is a Neubauer Doctoral Fellow and PhD student at the University of Chicago interested in East Asian media and popular culture from the late 20th century to contemporary time. She is particularly intrigued by the theme of space and modes of spatiality in different media, from printed to digital. During her years researching Japanese media, she has been guided by inquiries such as how space is configured and how people experience space with different media, especially digital media including the Internet cyberspace and video games. A product out of such curiosity is her master’s thesis on Japanese video game maps.

Rosalie Liu is a second-year graduate student in Asian Studies at University of California, Berkeley. She received her BA in Radio/TV/Film and Comparative Literature from Northwestern University in 2023. She is broadly interested in the history, aesthetics, and philosophy of technologies in modern China. Her research engages with media archaeology, infrastructure studies, and elemental and environmental mediums. Beyond academics, she wrote and directed 8 films that received the Media Art Grant from Northwestern and were selected by international film festivals.

Hugo Ljungbäck is a filmmaker, archivist, and media scholar whose work examines the intersections of queer art, experimental film and video, media archaeology, and archival studies. His research investigates the materiality of the moving image and its processes of mediation, and his writing has appeared in Found Footage Magazine, Cinema & Cie, and Media, War & Conflict. His award-winning films and videos interrogate queer history, representation, identity, and sexuality and have screened at film festivals, art galleries, and museums internationally. He is currently a PhD Student in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago.

Pascal Maslon is a research assistant and PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of Zurich. He is interested in examining and historicizing discussions on methodology and shifts in value attribution in film and media studies. He has written on various topics in film and media, such as the notions of contemporary visual culture in and around the work of Harun Farocki and the relationship of theory and image in contemporary theories of photography. Pascal holds an MA in Theater, Film, and Media Studies from Goethe University Frankfurt and a BA in Media Studies from the University of Cologne.

Nat Modlin is a joint PhD candidate in the departments of Germanic Studies and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Their work is situated at the intersection of environmental humanities and German film & media studies. They are interested in how turning to “blue media”—German films and media about aquatic and oceanic spaces—can shift how we think about German ecological thought. Their literary translations and criticism have been published in TRANSIT: A Journal of Travel, Migration and Multilingualism in the German-speaking World and in Chicago Review.

Daniel Morgan is Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. His work focuses largely on the intersection between cinema and aesthetics. He has written extensively on the history of film theory and philosophy; trends in media theory; film and politics; animation; non-fiction film; experimental media; and questions of film style. He is the author of Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema and The Lure of the Image: Epistemic Fantasies of the Moving Camera, and editor of a range of books and special issues of journals.

Jermaine Anthony Richards is a scholar-advocate, artist, award-winning social impact producer, and a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where he is a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow. Richards’ work intersects critical theory; the political economies of advocacy media, art, and entertainment; and social change methods and methodologies. He produced Hair Nah: A Travel Game About a Black Woman Tired of People Touching Her Hair, which has been exhibited at the Smithsonian, Tate Modern, and Victoria and Albert Museums.

Abby (Bee) Rinaldi is an NCSU graduate student living in Raleigh, NC. Their focus is on esoteric interactions between computational processes and modalities of composition. They are particularly interested in queer applications in natural language processing and studies of meaning-making through computational interpretative lenses to further expand the queer possibilities of rhetoric in human and more-than-human applications. Working within the framework of new materialism, Rinaldi hopes to explore the expressive capacities of the machine not as a replacement for human thought, but a different type of thinking entirely.

Parker Stenseth is a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. He received an M.A. in Cinematic Arts from the University of Iowa, and his research focuses on the use of animation in industrial, education, and state-sponsored cinema.

Merve Ünsal is an artist who lives and works in Istanbul and Santa Cruz. She works around methods of tuning in and thinks through the media of photography, video, radio, sound, performance, and site-specific installations. She has shown her work in a variety of contexts across the world, most often through artist-driven initiatives in Beirut, Berlin, Cairo, New Delhi, Toronto. She is the founding editor of the artist-centered platform m-est.org and currently a PhD candidate in Film and Digital Media Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz with a designated emphasis in History of Consciousness.

Miao Wang is a PhD student in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He is interested in various kinds of media technologies, such as editing tables/software, film projectors, and OLED screens. He is working on a project that unpacks cinema as a technology-intensive form and explores how film apparatus has profoundly shaped Chinese media culture and aesthetics in the (post-)socialist era.

Hang Wu is a PhD student in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on how the more-than-human, and especially the animal, may help to expand our understanding of digital media and sovereignty in the context of East Asia. Her work has appeared in journals and edited volumes such as Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal and Sound Communities in the Asia Pacific.

Jiayu Yang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Documentary Arts and Visual Research Program at Temple University and earned her MFA in Documentary Media at Northwestern University. Her fields of interest include eco-cinema, critical animal studies, media ethology, and multi-species and multi-sensory ethnography. As a scholar and a filmmaker, she often invites theoretical research into her visual art practices and challenges the bifurcation of science and art. Driven by her entomological upbringing, her dissertation is a research-creation project mapping the human-technology-insect relations across sites of wax worm emergence worldwide.

Juntao Yang is an MA candidate in Film and Media Studies at Columbia University, with a BA in Drama and Film-and-Television Literature from Wuhan University. Working at the intersection of theory and practice, this work explores how film and media can both mediate and reimagine planetary-scale ecological realities. As a scholar and writer, current research centers on planetary cinema, geological thinking, and the environmental media of toxicity and catastrophe. Academic essays and critical writings have appeared in peer-reviewed journals and art publications. As an artist, works have been selected, exhibited, and awarded at film festivals, art galleries, and museums across the globe.

Stephen Yang is a Ph.D. student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, where he is supported by the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship. His research examines the temporal politics of computational media. He scrutinizes how speed manifests as the telos of technology innovation and how we may dream of futures otherwise. His work foregrounds the ethico-political tensions between speeding up and slowing down, between speculation and anticipation, and between possibility and inevitability.

Joshua Yumibe is Professor of Film Studies and English at Michigan State University. His research focuses on the aesthetic and technological history of cinema, specifically related to color. He also has expertise in avant-garde and experimental cinemas, nineteenth and early twentieth century visual culture, Frankfurt school theory, and archival theories and practices. He is the author of Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism and co-author of Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema and Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s, as well as co-editor of several books.

To contact the conference organizers, please email failingmediaconference@gmail.com.