Videoconference Sessions

ATTENTION - Registration Required: Owing to limited seats availability, we encourage you to register for Videoconference sessions by sending an e-mail to one of the following addresses:

futures-digital@ufl.edu

digitala@grove.ufl.edu

Please specify if you wish to attend Session 1 or 2 (or both) in your e-mail and make sure you receive confirmation about seats availability by the Digital Assembly staff before attending the event.

Thank you for your collaboration and we look forward to meeting you in the DWI Reve Room on Saturday Feb 27th.

27 February, 2010 - Digital Worlds Institute, REVE room.

As a conclusive event, the Futures of Digital Studies 2010 features a round table discussion focusing on the theoretical and institutional developments of both scholarship and creative paractices in the digital field. The discussion is articulated in two separate sessions centered on different themes and featuring different set of scholars remotely-connected with the REVE room at the DWI. From their respective physical locations specialists in the field will be able to join other conference participants (scholars and graduate students) in the REVE room in a wide-range intellectual conversation.
Conference speakers appearing on multi-screen facility in the REVE polymodal immersive theater are listed below:

Session 1: Beyond Literary   (12:00 - 1:20pm)
N. Katherine Hayles (Duke), Nick Montfort (MIT), Jerome McGann (UVA), Matthew Kirschenbaum (UM), Michael Joyce (Vassar College)

Session 2: Perspectives of Machinic Expression   (1:40 - 3:00pm)
Rita Raley (UC Santa Barbara), Arthur Kroker (U of Victoria), Luciano Floridi (Oxford, UK), Lev Manovich (UCSD), Janet H. Murray (Georgia Tech)

Scholars offering papers in regular conference panels during February 25th and 26th qualify for admission to limited available seats in the REVE room. 

Seats will be reserved also to graduate students and conference attendees subject to availability.

Videoconference Speakers' Profiles

Session 1

N. Katherine Hayles Professor of Literature and English in  the English Department at Duke University, teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries.  Her book How We Became Posthuman:  Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics won the Rene Wellek Prize for the best book in literary theory for 1998-99, and Writing Machines won the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship.  Recent publications include My Mother Was a Computer:  Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, and Electronic Literature:  New Horizons for the Literary.  She is currently at work on a book entitled How We Think: The Transforming Power of Digital Technologies.

Nick Montfort is associate professor of digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Montfort has collaborated on the blog Grand Text Auto, the sticker novel Implementation, and 2002: A Palindrome Story. He writes poems, text generators, and interactive fiction such as Book and Volume and Ad Verbum. Most recently, he and Ian Bogost wrote Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press, 2009). Montfort also wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003) and co-edited The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 (ELO, 2006) and The New Media Reader (MIT Press, 2003).

Jerome McGann is John Stewart Bryan University Professor at the University of Virginia. He is the author of many books including Fiery Dust (1968), The Romantic Ideology (1983), The Beauty of Inflections (1985), Social Values and Poetic Acts (1988),Towards a Literature of Knowledge (1989), The Textual Condition (1991), Black Riders (1993), and Poetics of Sensibility (1996). His volumes of poetry include Air Heart Sermons (1976), Writing Home (1978), Nerves in Patterns (with James Kahn; 1979) and Four Last Poems (1996). McGann is editor of the multivolume The Complete Poetical Works of Byron (1980– ), The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse (1993), and the on-line The Rossetti Archive. He has been at the forefront of the digital revolution in the humanities. His pioneering critical projects on the World Wide Web have redefined traditional notions about interpreting literature. McGann was awarded the Modern Language Association’s Lowell Prize for best literary study for his 2001 book, Radiant Textuality: Literary Studies after the World Wide Web.

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH, an applied thinktank for the digital humanities), and Director of Digital Cultures and Creativity, a new “living/learning” program in the Honors College. He is also an affiliated faculty member with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at Maryland, and a Vice President of the Electronic Literature Organization. Kirschenbaum’s first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, was published by the MIT Press in early 2008. Currently he is co-authoring a report on Computer Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections, funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation and to be published by the Council on Library and Information Resources.

Michael Joyce lives along the Hudson River and teaches at Vassar College. He wrote afternoon, a story (1987) and thereafter published a number of other hypertext fictions on the web and on disk. His most recent print novel, Was: Annales Nomadique, a novel of internet, was published by Fiction Collective 2. Recently he has been collaborating in multimedia work with LA visual artist Alexandra Grant and has taken more and more to poetry, with poems appearing in various literary journals.

Session 2

Rita Raley is Associate Professor of English at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, where she researches and teaches courses in
the aesthetics, poetics, and politics of new media. She is the author
of Tactical Media (University of Minnesota Press) and articles
on such topics as locative narrative, code art & poetry, literary
uses of mobile media, hypertext, machine translation, and text-based
media arts installations. She is currently working on an article on
dataveillance and an ongoing book project on Global English.

Arthur Kroker is writer and lecturer in the areas of technology and contemporary culture. He is the Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture, and Theory, Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture at the University of Victoria.
Dr. Kroker's research interests include: contemporary French and German political theory; Canadian political and social thought; Technology, culture and theory; ethics and biotechnology. He teaches courses on technology and theory, and contemporary political thought. He is co-editor with Marilouise Kroker of the Digital Futures Book Series (UTP Press), and of CTheory, an international peer-reviewed electronic-journal of theory, technology, and culture. He recently co-edited with Marilouise Kroker Critical Digital Studies: A Reader (UTP Press 2008).

Luciano Floridicurrently holds the Research Chair in philosophy of information and the UNESCO Chair in Information and Computer Ethics, both at the University of Hertfordshire, Department of Philosophy. He is also Fellow by Special Election of St Cross College, Oxford University, Senior Member of the Faculty of Philosophy and Research Associate and Fellow in Information Policy at OUCL (the Department of Computer Science), University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of St Cross College, University of Oxford  and of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (AISB). He is best known for his pioneering work on two new areas of philosophical research, which he has contributed to establish: the philosophy of information and information ethics. In 2006, he was elected President of IACAP (International Association for Computing And Philosophy). In 2009 he was awarded the Barwise Prize by the American Philosophical Association and became the first philosopher to be elected Gauss Professor by the Göttingen Academy of Sciences.

Lev Manovich is a Professor in Visual Arts Department, University of California - San Diego, a Director of the Software Studies Initiative at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), and a Visiting Research Professor at Godsmith College (University of London), De Montfort University (UK) and College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales (Sydney). He is much in demand to lecture around the world, having delivered 300+ lectures, seminars and workshops during the last 10 years. His books include Software Takes Command (released under CC license, 2008), Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (The MIT Press, 2005), and The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001). He has written 90+ articles which have been reprinted over 300 times in 30+ countries.

Janet H. Murray is Dean’s Recognition Professor , and the director of Georgia Tech's Graduate Program in Digital Media. She is the author of Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (1997) and Inventing the Medium: A Principled Approach to Interactive Design (forthcoming, MIT Press), as well as several works in Victorian Studies. Her recent interactive design projects at include a digital edition of the Warner Brothers classic, Casablanca, funded by NEH, in collaboration with the American Film Institute, and the InTEL Engineering Education Project, funded by NSF, as well as numerous prototypes of interactive television. Murray holds a PhD in English from Harvard University.