The theme of DFMI 2025 is Energy. 

We come to know energy through its mechanical, molecular, and material flows: the lights come up, the turbines spin, the dam holds. More acutely, we come to know energy through its failures and discontinuities: the electricity shorts, the rig explodes, the grid goes down, the waste accretes. Energy is charged, and it charges us to negotiate both the necessity of its power and the albatross of its extractive incursions on lands, waterways, and communities. We are, then, always in a state of energy transition; the desperate flux between ever-deepening dependence and ever-dire consequence. Thermal energy is essential  for computing infrastructure (Edwards 2020; Hogan 2015; Edwards, Gelms, and Shivener 2023), as molecular movement generates heat. Electrical energy powers blockchain servers, neural networks, and operating systems through electron flow. Sound energy transmits vibrations across digital and physical fields (Hawk 2018; Goodman 2010, 2012), which enables verbal communication, voice recognition, and music. And gravitational energy operates within the deep, underground gas pipeline networks powering our digital systems, all the way up to satellite devices circulating in space—where the push and pull seemingly inherent to matter gains significance. 

Energy inheres…

Energy acquires form in what it has the potential to express. The effect of these systems is a site of energy, a synthesis of capacity that functions dynamically to induce change. This inflection reveals the “political, ecological, and all-too-material” provocations of the relationship between rhetoric and energy, as Chris Ingraham attests (2018). Energy impels: the political, ecological, and rhetorical dimensions of energy demand attention as they shape persistent, ambient digitality (Boyle, Brown & Ceraso, 2018). Energy intensifies: the extractive, emissive dimensions of energy mean that we are never outside of the ethical implications of our reliance on complex energy systems. Energy inheres: as a force and a process, energy threads through all of our practices, all of our inquiry, and all of our methods. Finally, energy invites: sustained critique, collective struggle, and rhetorical inquiry.

…Energy impels

Energy also shares roots with the Greek enargeia, as illustrated by Aristotle and Quintilian, and later forwarded by George Kennedy and Ingraham (Kennedy 1992, 1998). As a method, this approach renders our sites of inquiry anew, revealing alternative ways of perceiving and sensing our grounds for research. As a lens for observing the process of experimentation, energy discloses how power emerges through relations—between the site and subject, observer and witness. Energy guides our sense of how experience emerges as a “material resource” across digital networks and online social spaces (Gabrys 2014). It asks us to confront our assurances and assumptions about the force of matter and its potential to shape human activity and nonhuman ecologies. And as much as energy invites new routes for interpreting our world, it does this through obstruction; it requires us to adapt to contexts of restricted, constrained, and limited capacity. 

Energy intensifies…

Energy– and/as enargeia–will direct our questions and practices for DFMI 2025. Through such a sense of energy, we grasp at the chance to engage with how field methods and emerging digital literacies are entangled across various domains of practice, creation, strategy, and process. We ask: as researchers, how do we perform, imagine, adopt, and absorb the possibilities foregrounded by energetic flows? What tendencies, capacities, and vitalities emerge alongside—or in contrast to—our methods for sustaining activity, especially in the presence of power and capacity? How do we exercise the resources for experimenting with new modes and media to reinterpret their strengths across different environmental, infrastructural, and intellectual contexts? 

Week 1 [Online]: June 30-July 4, 2025

Week 2 [On-site at the University of Texas at Austin]: July 7-11, 2025

Registration opens March 1, 2025