Opening Plenary

The opening plenary included welcoming remarks from Simon Penny and Alan Terricciano, acting Dean of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts. Simon noted the themes motivating the conference this year: Embodiment and Context. DAC research increasingly draws attention to the ways in which technology can augment our biologically situated embodiment exploring alternatives to the Cartesianism of much of digital culture, and also draws attention the specificities of culture, the situated nature of cognition, and the locative practices of media and design. Additional themes at the conference draw on trends identified by DAC community members: Embodiment and Performativity, Software and Platform Studies, Beyond Mobile Media, Ubiquity and Embeddedness, Cognition and Creativity, Sex and Sexuality, Environment and Sustainability, and the Future of Humanist Inquiry into digital arts and culture.

In her talk, Digital Arts and Cultures and the Humanities: Challenges and Opportunities, Katherine Hayles spoke about the relationship between Technicity and Historicity. Drawing on research on technogenesis, forensic imaginary, from physical anthropology and new media studies, as well as recent work on distributed cognition, she suggested that technicity is constituted by a combination of the the materiality of technologies and the ways that our attentive resources can be enlisted into larger self-organizing ensembles. She hypothesized an explosive increase in "hyper" attention over "deep" attention and remarked that digital technology transform us through the cycles in which humans remake and are remade by the things they make.

Marc Tuters addressed the topic of critical design framed through Bruno Latour's work on the politics of natures, in his talk entitled: From Control Society to the Parliament of Things: Designing Object Relations with an Internet of Things. He suggested looking to locative tactical media for examples of the sometimes agonistic ways boundaries between things can be reconfigured. If Latour is right that there is a "parliament of things", he asked, what are the new forms of visibility and organization that arise to arbitrate the entry of other species and technologies into politics.

Peter Krapp, in his talk, Cold culture: polar media and the Nazi occult, traced the myths of the global north and south poles. He used what he called a "perverse pivot" or "twist" - exemplified by the historical moment when the "polar imaginary" shifts from an emphasis on race to an emphasis on weather and environmental crisis - to suggest that changes in the technological imaginary take place not only through the phenomenology of new material forms, or the shaping of our conscious modes of engaging the world, but also through sub-conscious psychological heritages of the past. The poles in particular, because of the ways they animate questions of inaccessibility and visualization, inform our current digital imaginary.