As organizers of the 20th Cinema and Media Studies Graduate Student Conference at the University of Chicago, we cordially invite you to attend this year's conference on Friday and Saturday, April 25–26.
This year's two-day conference on “Failing Media” considers both how the history of media has been littered with malfunctions and mistakes, and reflects on how our own field has (or has not) failed “media.” We ask how breakdowns, glitches, and failures expose the ideologies, systems, and materialities at play in our contemporary media ecologies, and how the push for “media-inclusivity” has changed our conceptions of our own objects of study, altering our disciplinary alliances with fields like art history, visual and performing arts, communication, and area studies.
The conference features four graduate student panels: “Algorithm, Programming, Glitch”; “Elemental and Environmental Failure”; “Forensic Aesthetics”; and “Media Archaeology and Infrastructure in East Asia.”
In recognition and celebration of the 20th anniversary of our conference, Friday afternoon will feature an alumni roundtable with invited panelists Adam Charles Hart (Media Burn Independent Video Archive), Sarah Keller (University of Massachusetts Boston), Diane Wei Lewis (Washington University in St. Louis), and Joshua Yumibe (Michigan State University), moderated by Daniel Morgan (University of Chicago).
On Friday evening, we will also host a film performance by artist duo Gibson + Recoder titled The Changeover System, a singular live performance that redefines cinematic film projection.
Finally, our keynote speaker, Nicholas Baer (University of California, Berkeley) will deliver his keynote lecture, “Failing Upwards: On the Concept of Perfection.”
Registration is not required. Please find more information about our conference, including the full schedule and speaker bios, at our conference website: https://voices.uchicago.edu/failingmedia/
Funding for this conference has been generously provided by the Adelyn Russell Bogert Fund of the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Graduate Council, Film Studies Center, the Digital Media Workshop, and the Departments of Anthropology, Art History, Cinema and Media Studies, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Germanic Studies, and Visual Arts.
Hugo Ljungbäck and Nat Modlin
Organizers, Failing Media Conference
Cinema and Media Studies | University of Chicago