On April 10th, I had the pleasure of giving a keynote during the University of Waterloo’s Experimental Digital Media (XDM) symposium, “Feedback, Fedback, Feedfoward.” The event included an exhibition of student work exploring the relations between art and information communications technologies. Titled “Executable Culture, Arguments with Objects,” my keynote surveyed the intersections of media theory with media practice, expressing a resistance to knowing-doing binaries as well as to the “withdrawal” of subjects and objects from technocultures. I looked at work by Tara McPherson, Daniela Rosner, Morgan Ames, Nina Belojevic, Tara Rodgers, Alexander Galloway, merritt kopas, Matthew Kirschenbaum, the BitCurator team, Karen Barad, Andrea Johnson and the Architecture as Catalyst team, David Berry, Timo Arnall, Mark Sample, and Kari Kraus, and I touched upon the MLab’s Kits for Cultural History project.
You can access my slides online (they may need a minute to load). I also created a Zotero collection for the talk, and—thanks to Marta Borowska and the XDM team—below are two videos of the event. In the first video, Beth Coleman introduces the XDM project exhibition, and the second video includes snapshots of that exhibition, with students offering overviews of their work. There is also a brief video with excerpts from my talk. Thank you, Marta!
I want to thank Beth Coleman, Marcel O’Gorman, the Critical Media Lab, and XDM in the Waterloo Department of English for hosting me. “Feedback, Fedback, Feedforward” was an exciting event, with such compelling research across an array of social and cultural issues. It is so refreshing to see experimental media happening in both the arts and humanities, and I really enjoyed spending time at Waterloo with like-minded practitioners. I returned to the MLab inspired.
Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the news tag. Video and image care of XDM at Waterloo.
