2020 Speakers
Due to uncertainty about travel and funding, we have to cancel DFMI 2020
Craig Campbell
Craig Campbell is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin, and director of the Intermedia Workshop. His research is concerned with the realm of ethnographic and documentary images. The research and visual experiments that he undertakes explore the possibility for failed, defaced, degraded, manipulated, and damaged photographs to activate interpretive fields typically unacknowledged in conventional ethnographies and histories. This intermedia and aesthetic approach pushes the sensuousness of the world back into an intellectual and scholarly understanding of it. This work necessarily involves careful attention to archives and archival theory.
Heidi Rae Cooley
Heidi Rae Cooley is co-director of the Public Interactives Research Lab (PIRL) and an associate professor in the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication at the University of Texas at Dallas. She investigates what it means to live in an age when mobile devices have become our partners, when our accessories keep track of our steps toward optimal health, when the landscapes through which we navigate are becoming “smarter” and more responsive to our movements through them. Instead of interpreting these technologies as surveillance apparatuses, freedom machines, or both, she considers the routine practices—that is, habits—they engender. And she explores how emerging technologies might open onto habit-change. To explore what habit-change might look like in the mobile connected present, she has collaborated with interdisciplinary teams to design geo-locative software applications that present unacknowledged histories of place (see: http://calliope.cse.sc.edu/index.html/). In conjunction with the Public Interactives Research Lab, she is developing an interactive fish project that explores delight and engagement. Cooley’s first book, Finding Augusta: Habits of Mobility and Governance in the Digital Era (2014), along with its digital supplement Augusta App, received the 2015 Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Recent essays appear in the “Urban Interfaces: Media, Art and Performance in Public Spaces” issue of Leonardo Electronic Almanac, eds. Nanna Verhoeff, Sigrid Merx and Michiel de Lange (2019) and Applied Media Studies, ed., Kirsten Ostherr (Routledge 2018). She is currently working on a second book project tentatively titled “Critical Interface Design.” Cooley serves as co-director of the Public Interactives Research Lab [PIRL].
Nathaniel A. Rivers
Nathaniel A. Rivers is associate professor of English at Saint Louis University. He is past director of SLU’s Compass Lab. He teaches courses in the rhetorical theory, public rhetoric and digital rhetoric. His current research addresses topics such as environmentalism, locative media, and accessibility. He co-edited Kenneth Burke + The Posthuman and Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition. His recent work has appeared in journals such as Rhetoric Society Quarterly, enculturation, Technical Communication Quarterly, and Quarterly Journal of Speech.