How to Attend: The conference takes place Apr 8-9, 2024 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is free to attend online or in person and brings together a great line-up of speakers. Registration is free for both online and in-person. Registered attendees can view all the talks and also sign up for […]

ABSTRACT They say: AI is here. It is inevitable. It is unprecedented. It is the future. Underneath these claims of inevitably and futurity are residues of technological pasts and presents. Things that stick and smear, pasts that linger. What if we stick with what remains, with these residues—data not used, lands wasted, bodies rendered disposable, labor discarded, life that […]

Event Abstract: There is something deliberate about the history of randomness. Computers are often described as “deterministic”: every process that is performed by a computer is pre-determined, with often formulaic outcomes. “Determinism” is also a historically loaded word—one that has been paired with the term “biological” to justify eugenicist thought related to race, disability, and […]

“Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.” Taking Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando: A Biography” as his starting point, academic virtuoso turned filmmaker Paul B. Preciado fashioned the documentary ORLANDO, MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY—a personal essay, historical analysis, and social manifesto. For almost a century, Woolf’s eponymous hero(ine) has inspired readers […]

The use of digital technologies and platformitization have become a more normalized way of connecting which shapes our relations and ultimately, how we intimise. Where we might mutually recognize a shared togetherness within the digital sphere, we might also discover a feeling of togetherness, alienation, horror or even seduction. I ask questions of how digital […]

Join us for the LGBTQ+ VR Museum Open House hosted by the Digital Studies Institute and the Just XR Futures Lab from Oct. 7 through Oct. 11, 2024. The LGBTQ+ VR Museum was created by DiVRse Technologies, a world-leading immersive studio that produces ground-breaking digital experiences using VR and XR technologies. Disrupting historical gatekeeping and […]

Abstract: Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, “going viral” had nonetheless become commonplace—the epidemiological metaphor characterizing an increasingly-familiar trajectory of explosive circulation, remix, and reportage expanding from individual nodes of audiovisual content online. This presentation briefly historicizes and contextualizes the contagious concept, before suggesting how “virality”—as aesthetic repertoire, as popular narrative, as social logic made […]

Join ESC affiliates and their guests for our Fall mixer at the Elks. We will assemble care packages for student researchers in computing and information who are under attack. Materials will be provided. Free parking in rear. Download the digital flyer here. RSVP Required: Click here to RSVP Formed in 1922 during racial segregation, the […]

November's election brings with it unprecedented disinformation technologies, from new uses of social media platforms to generative AI. Join our panel of experts to discuss how our institutions, platforms, and politicians are both combating and enabling this threat to democracy. Panel discussion to be followed by an interactive Q&A with the viewers. A conversation with Ceren Budak, […]

Also streamed online via Zoom during the event. Abstract This talk examines the combination of policies, practices, and algorithms of suspicion that control workers’ access to wages and work on digital labor platforms. I show how “fraud” acts as a quasi-legal category that legitimizes and protects platform operators’ unilateral decisions to fire workers. This case […]