Abstract: How do we reflect on new media and how does new media reflect our own image back to us? How do we imagine digital networks in the internet era and how can we undermine social imaginaries which restrict and construct these networks as privatized and insidiously secure? In my paper, I explore these questions by analyzing the narrative of the 2014 film Ex Machina, taking seriously the ways in which fictionalized AI participate in shaping present and future human interactions with technological and affective networks. The raced and gendered automatons use their presumed fungibility to navigate and subvert spaces that seek to contain. While humanity uses the network as a means of security and control, the embodied AI incorporate the chaos and fluidity of the network into their very mode of being. I argue that by radically accepting the ‘leakiness’ of new media and the affective permeability of private spaces, Ex Machina challenges notions of singular and plural, individual and collective. A being singular-plural is privileged in this imaginary; fluidity is interiorized by animated objects that ultimately refuse humanization and refuse to update. The temporality of new media in which the world is in a constant state of update and the future is always just out of reach, is replaced with an alternative mode of living in obsolescence. The film finally leaves us with a conception of freedom based not on transcendence or secured borders, but on an embodied presence that emerges only through intersection.
Bio: MacKenzie Patterson is a second-year student enrolled in Boston University's PhD program. Her research currently focuses on the relationship between literature and technological embodiment, with a particular focus on depictions of monstrous and/or posthuman bodies. She is especially interested in how speculative narratives of technological progress challenge, confirm, and subvert understandings of race, gender, and sexual identity.
Abstract: Connecting to historic individuals and trying to understand how they felt and why they performed the actions they did can be a challenge. Textbooks and articles can explain historical reasonings and motivations, but these written forms often lack in showing, as opposed to telling, the reader what life was like in years gone by. Digital games provide the opportunity for the reader, or player, to be immersed in a historic setting and to better understand and experience the actions of the past.
This project presents a digital choose-your-own-adventure-type game that allows players to place themselves into the shoes of late-nineteenth century students at a Massachusetts normal school. As the historic student, players participate in classroom lessons, discuss pertinent topics with classmates, and take part (or not) in a schoolwide effort to make a stand for a cause they believe in. More than a century separates the higher education students of today and the students in the game, yet the game allows players to relate with and understand the historic students. This is achieved by incorporating interdisciplinary games studies methods including, situatedness, agency, empathy, reflection, critical thinking, and bridging the past and present. This paper presentation explains the strategies used and explores how connections to the past can be made through a digital game.
Bio: Nicole O’Connell is a PhD student in English, concentrating in composition and rhetoric, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is especially interested in technical and professional communication, public history, and digital humanities.
Abstract: In a section of her newest collection Zoom Rooms (2022), Mary Jo Salter uses the formal constraints of the sonnet to illustrate the limitations and opportunities latent in our increased use of communication technologies like Zoom Meetings. "Zoom" has experienced a meteoric rise since the COVID-19 pandemic as institutions like offices, schools, and even funeral homes have hastily adapted to video streaming in lieu of in-person gatherings. Squeezing so much of our lives into pixelated portraits mirrors the compression of language into sonnets; Salter's series of boxy, 14-line expressions serve as a reminder that the forms that contain our interactions necessarily shape them. What’s at stake in Salter’s multimedia and multi-formal analogy are questions of accessibility, engagement, and ultimately the limits of such mediated connections. The eerie symmetry of a Zoom ‘room’ makes distanced gatherings possible--up to 1000 "participants" at once given the proper devices, connection, and subscription plan--while sanitizing so many of communication’s peripheries. Salter’s formal (and formalist) poems do not sync the two mediums tidily together, but her work does draw out some significant repercussions: Traditional forms comfort those who know them and intimidate the uninitiated; Zoom memorial services and family gatherings remind us of distance and disconnection as much as they attempt to create connection. Sonnets by and large present the musings of a solitary speaker; Zoom’s audio interface allows only one person to speak at a time before multiple voices blot each other out. The bounded and prescribed forms of such digital communication are quite conspicuous, but they are just the newest iteration of the commercially published technologies we have to connect with one another.
Bio: Jeffrey Careyva (he/him/his) is a PhD candidate in English at Harvard University. Jeffrey researches 20th- and 21st-century anglophone poetry in particular, and his dissertation focuses on the representation and significance of speaking disabilities in the work of a selection of poets.