Program of Events

Welcome Remarks

Dr. Helen Burgess - Director, CRDM

Dr. Steve Wiley - Assistant Director, CRDM

Introduction to this Year's Theme

Dr. Fernanda Duarte - Faculty Symposium Coordinator

Luke C. LeGrand, PhD Candidate - Graduate Symposium Coordinator

Speculative expressive computing with apothec.ia, a queer posthuman programming language

Bee Rinaldi, CRDM, NC State University

This project details the theorizing and development of apothec.ia, a programming language I created for my dissertation work, as an attempt to incorporate queer and posthuman philosophies of computing into programming language design. Programming language design is often littered with language about elegance, efficiency, and pragmatism, while also overflowing with whimsy and an embrace of rhetorical subjectivity that some might view as uncharacteristic of the field of computer science. In designing apothec.ia, the goal was to refuse the neoliberal embrace of efficiency and embrace the care work of creating rhetorical space in computer programming for queer and posthuman theories concerning agency, especially in relation to reciprocity and collectivism. Agencies in computational space can be formulated as a binary of human and machine, with the human giving the orders in the form of the script and the machine delivering the output of said instructions. Queer theory encourages us to consider what this binary structuring of agential dynamics leaves out, and what subversive power lies in the actions of machine and programmer that can create unexpected, or even radical, outcomes. Posthumanism attributes agency back to the machine as a thing with power over the programming situation while also asking us to consider the agential entanglement of human and computer overlap. What results is a reconstruction of the programming environment as a place of dialogue and reciprocal engagement instead of strictly call and response. In this reconstruction, apothec.ia asks users to consider new relations to programming languages as communication tools and instead turn their attention to the generative space between the input/program and the output/result, what I’ve termed the kairos of runtime. This presentation will give users a description of the language, its syntax, and example scripts, then allow users to try programming using apothec.ia and log their outputs and experiences. Through communal experimentation, users can explore apothec.ia as a language and as a temporal magnifying glass, attempting to bridge the gap between programmer and interpreter.

Accuracy 0.78: Reflections from an Automated Gaze

Rose Ansari, Duke University

Accuracy 0.78 is a video work composed of urban footage processed through a machine learning system trained to detect and classify human and nonhuman entities. The city becomes a testing ground for automated perception. Bodies, reflections, buildings, vehicles, and shadows are continuously boxed, labeled, and scored according to statistical confidence levels. The numbers visible onscreen—0.78, 8123, 7963—are confidence scores generated by the detection model. They indicate how certain the system is about what it identifies. Vision here operates as probability rather than recognition. Every frame reveals that what appears stable to the human eye is, for the machine, a fluctuating calculation. Reflective architecture and mirrored surfaces intensify this instability. Glass facades, metallic curves, and distorted reflections cause the system to misidentify surfaces as bodies, fragment individuals into partial detections, or shift confidence levels from moment to moment. These glitches are not corrected; they are central to the work. Error becomes a visible trace of the system’s limits. The video exposes how automated vision reduces presence to bounding boxes and numerical thresholds. A body is not recognized; it is estimated. At times, nonhuman forms inherit human classification, while actual people fall below the required threshold of certainty. The boundary between subject and object becomes unstable, mediated entirely through algorithmic inference. Accuracy 0.78 questions the authority of computational vision in public space. When perception is defined by likelihood scores, visibility becomes conditional. The work reframes machine error not as failure, but as evidence—revealing that the automated gaze is neither neutral nor objective, but structured by probabilities that shape how bodies are seen, ranked, and validated.

Circuit Breakers' "Call Connected"

Created by through a collaboration of CRDM Students and Faculty, led by Haley Kinsler, Bee Rinaldi, NC State University

“Call Connected" is a collective sculpture constructed from disused (but not discarded) technology. Emphasizing the enduring material substrate from which our technological milieu springs, this piece blends the burnt out, dysfunctional, glitching, deprecated, outdated, and broken into a uniquely usable interface. It is through the sculpture that the symposium’s keynote speakers will join us. In the gallery, “Call Connected” shows a time-lapse video of the piece’s construction by the CRDM community. 

This session of individual papers explores embodied resistance to computational systems. From digitally mediated BDSM devices and algorithmic vision regimes to circuit-bent game consoles, presenters examine how automation, abstraction, and code encounter affect, perception, and material breakdown, foregrounding glitch, critical making, and malfunction as sites of epistemic refusal, queer disruption, and embodied critique.

Shock Appeal: Sex with Machines

Luke C. LeGrand, CRDM, NC State University

Breaking the Vision Machine: Algorithmic Perception, Disembodiment, and the Refusal of Seamless Seeing

Rose Ansari, Duke University

GlitchCube

Bryce Stout, CRDM, NC State University

This panel explores how LGBTQIAPN+ lived experiences produce technological practices as forms of disobedience, dissidence, and subversion. LGBTQIAPN+ individuals continuously navigate sociotechnical systems that are often exclusionary or violent. Technologies serve multiple, sometimes contradictory, roles in these lives: they can function as tools of surveillance and control, but also as platforms for refuge, resistance, and creative expression. This tension grounds the panel’s central concept of disobedient technologies—technological practices, artifacts, or systems that introduce friction, provoke critical reflection, and invite alternative ways of knowing and being. The panelists examine how digital activism, autobiographical storytelling, critical making, and community-engaged research can become strategies for confronting disinformation and violence while fostering visibility and collective well-being.

When does failure turn into dissent?

Bruno Leal and André Mintz, Federal University of Minas Gerais. 

WhatsApp as a welcoming environment for the production and sharing of autobiographical writings by LGBTQIAPN+ people.

Juarez Guimarães Dias & Carlos Frederico de Brito d’Andréa, Federal University of Minas Gerais. 

From “Vale Tudo” to “Loquinha”. Lesbianities in dispute in Brazilian telenovelas and on X/Twitter.

Dayane do Carmo Barretos & Felipe Viero Kolinski Machado Mendonça, Federal University of Minas Gerais. 

This workshop invites you to make and reflect on fidgeting as a neurodivergent technological practice. Fidgeting, stimming, and other repetitive bodily movements are associated with conditions including ADHD and autism, and can be seen as “circuit-breaking” uses of technologies and bodies in unexpected and contested ways. Fidgeting brings together a range of material artifacts that may be purpose-made or improvised, and may be spontaneously adopted or part of “sensory friendly” or “autism friendly” accommodations. Depending on a variety of context clues, they also may be associated with socially acceptable “normal” behavior or may be stigmatized as anti-social, distracting/distracted, disruptive, or non-productive.

To explore fidgeting as a technological practice, the session will take the form of a DIY “fidget lab” to explore fidgeting and its ties to neurodiversity. Workshop participants will be invited to share their reflections on fidgeting, and will make simple fidgets including beaded lanyards, tassels, and cardstock or cardboard fidget spinners. Participants may view and interact with fidget/stimming objects targeting varied senses, with prompts to reconsider the sensory design and sensory care embedded in everyday products and practices such as chewing gum, throwing on a pair of sunglasses, or moving air with a fan. Together, making and sampling will facilitate shared inquiry around the possibilities and necessities of hacking sensory experience as an act of both self and communal care. 

This making session draws on ideas of crip technoscience, or the distinctive technological engagements and knowledge associated with disability (Hamraie and Fritsch). It is presented by two neurodivergent scholars seeking links to our respective research in accessible design and technological ethics. While fidgeting is associated with ephemeral, disposable objects or repurposed things, it also suggests self-identified preferences and selection among objects (texture, durability, visual interest, movement) as well as negotiation of social acceptability. Making collectively, we hope to explore varied social and material dimensions of this practice and its associated technologies.

This workshop will explore the question “What is a codable interface?” by turning the room into a functional IDE with OZO Bot!

In this one-hour, hands-on session, participants use Teachable Machine to build and train a no-code image classifier. By constructing categories, capturing training data, and stress-testing outputs, we examine how bias, authority, and ideology become embedded in seemingly simple AI systems.

Through rapid experimentation and critical reflection, the workshop reframes "machine learning" as a media practice shaped by human choice, platform design, and invisible labor. Participants leave with a working model — and a sharper understanding of how frictionless AI tools reproduce (or disrupt) existing circuits of power.

This panel brings together four interrelated projects that advance decolonial, community-centered approaches to media, data, and mapping. Framed by Decolonize Media Studies! (A Manifesto), the panel foregrounds the Listening Machine as a socio-technical assemblage for transforming colonial infrastructures of knowledge production. Complementing this intervention, Indigenous Decolonial Mapping examines global Indigenous-led mapping initiatives to theorize access, data sovereignty, technology, and storytelling as relational practices. The Decolonial Media Studies Database presents an interactive, pluriversal resource that challenges Eurocentric canons and citation networks. Finally, Pathways and Lifeways reports on a collaborative project with the Occaneechi-Saponi community, a remapping of the Great Trading Path grounded in Indigenous epistemologies and sovereignty. Together, these presentations argue that decolonization requires not only representational change but also infrastructural, methodological, and ethical transformation. The panel highlights collaborative “thinking-doing” as a pathway toward more just, relational, and accountable forms of media scholarship.

Decolonize Media Studies! (A Manifesto) 

Austin Haigler, Michael Fennessey, and Dr. Fernanda Duarte, CRDM, NC State University

Indigenous Decolonial Mapping: A Review of Kindred Projects

Sara Ghasemzade and Tasnim Jannat, CRDM, NC State University

The Decolonial Media Studies Database

Dr. Khawar Latif Khan, University of Oregon, Dr. Maurika Smutherman, North Carolina Central University, and Dr. Nii Kotei Nikoi, NC State University.

Pathways and Lifeways: An Occaneechi-Saponi map of the Great Trading Path

Crystal Cavalier-Keck and Jason Campos Crazy Bear Keck, 7 Directions of Service; Madhusudan Katti and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley, NC State University.

“Fourth Ward still matters.”

This has been the echoing call of our panelists, all of whom are founding members of both the Fourth Ward Historic Neighborhood Association, a non-profit organization focused on service to the neighborhood community, as well as the Fourth Ward Oral History Project, a public history project dedicated to education on the destructive force of urban renewal, documentation of residents’ stories and organizing efforts, and celebration of the neighborhood’s deep roots that go back to the late nineteenth century. Located just south of downtown Raleigh, the Fourth Ward was a historically Black community that was uprooted in the early 1970s when several hundred homes, dozens of businesses, and several churches were seized by the City of Raleigh through eminent domain and subsequently razed. In the span of less than a decade, a thriving community was reduced to rubble, with residents forced out of their homes and scattered across the city and beyond.

Fifty years later, our panelists were joined by their collective investment in housing justice to fight the displacement of Black communities in Raleigh. Activated through their witnessing of a collective forgetting of the Fourth Ward’s history amongst both residents and local officials alike, they came together with a vision to intervene in this instance of collective amnesia and cement the neighborhood’s place within the local historical record. With grassroots efforts, these panelists have fought to establish a historical institution of their own, operating through community infrastructures alone. Digitized images and records have glitched, prints of historical maps have been taped, tacked, and glued, and the community archive for the project’s website runs on the basis of some poorly written HTML, a Google spreadsheet, and a dream. All the same, it is an archive that is the community's alone.

Thus, our panel seeks to explore what is made possible when residents are themselves recognized as scholars, looking to the Fourth Ward’s story as a case study in resistance to a long-standing dynamic that has positioned university researchers as necessary extractors of Black communities’ histories, stories, knowledge, and resources. We look instead to community ownership of their archival technologies as an act of radical scholarship in its own right.

Haley Kinsler, CRDM, NC State University,
Rosa Rand,  President of the Fourth Ward Historic Neighborhood Association
Clara Meekins, Vice-President of the Fourth Ward Historic Neighborhood Association
Johnny Blaylock, Founding Member and Activist with the Fourth Ward Historic Neighborhood Association

This panel examines circulation, breakdown, and reworlding across media ecologies. From a corpse’s afterlife as spectacle and streaming’s dialectics of noise, to broken research infrastructures and psychedelic autoethnography, presenters frame glitch, failure, and lived experience as sites of critique—revealing governance, desire, coloniality, and possibilities for care, refusal, and pluriversal knowledge-making.

The Notorious Case of Elmer McCurdy: Death, spectacle, and the social (after)life of a corpse

Brody McCurdy, CRDM, NC State University

Disrupting Music Streaming Culture: Dialectics of Noise in Audible Circuits of Desire

Michael Fennessy, CRDM, NC State University

Platform Drift & the Ethics of Care in Social Media Research

Desiree Dighton, East Carolina University

Psychedelics as Media of Intra/Intro-spection: Realizing Pluriversal Ontologies through Autoethnographies of ‘Lived Experience’

Austin Haigler, CRDM, NC State University

This panel explores moments when moving images fail—when they glitch, flicker, distort, or break apart—and considers how such aesthetic ruptures have functioned across the histories of both analog and digital media. Rather than treating breakdowns as mere technical errors, the presentations highlight how these interruptions expose the material conditions of image-making, reveal underlying power structures, and open space for new modes of meaning-making. Historically, analog flicker—whether produced by film loops, projector instability, or intentional structuralist techniques—has drawn attention to the physicality of the medium itself: the frame, the perforation, the shutter, the grain. In contrast, digital glitches emerge from compression errors, data corruption, dropped frames, or algorithmic noise. These different forms of breakdown alter not only how the image is perceived, but also how the viewer experiences time, space, and their own conceptions of their identity.  “When the Moving Image Breaks” examines how artists, filmmakers, and communities outside normative frameworks have embraced the flicker or glitch as a powerful aesthetic and political tool. It is both a panel and a piece of performative art that considers how technology complicates moving image studies. The glitch becomes a refusal of smooth representation, while the flicker becomes a pulse of alternative histories. These disruptions challenge dominant narratives by destabilizing the linearity of film as climbing towards a “perfect image.” Collectively, the presentations reveal that when images break down, they also break open the systems that hold them together, expand what moving images can communicate, and illuminate the creative potential of failure.

Undetermined, Uncanny Glitches

McKinley Keener, CRDM, NC State University

 Flickering Urban Spaces

T.R. (MK) Merchant-Knudsen, CRDM, NC State University

buffering…_: The Presentation Will Resume After These Interruptions

Rhea Kendrick Munn, ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓