#IFM Blog: #IFM NEWSLETTER - Issue 6

Welcome to Issue 6 of the #IFM Newsletter! We are pleased to share key updates as we continue building an international community of scholarship and practice around interactive film and media. As always, we invite you to send us your news, opportunities, and relevant calls.

In this newsletter you can expect:

#Resonances Conversation
on March 12th

with artists Millie Chen and Arzu Ozkal
on SRS (Silk Road Songbook)

An announcement of a special #IFM2026 panel

“Global Black Feminisms and Interactivity,” moderated by Ar Ducao (they/he) — panelists to be confirmed next issue

The #IFM2026 accepted submissions

32 papers and 12 research-creations, representing 24 countries, 45 institutions,
and six continents

The unveiling of the new #IFM2026 poster and visual identity:

“Reaching Out,” developed by our design team for the conference’s theme: “Yet-To-Be-Known”

#Resonances conversation with artists
Millie Chen and Arzu Ozkal

Please join your #IFM colleagues on Thursday, 12 March 2026 at 12:00–13:00 EDT (16:00–17:00 GMT) for a #Resonances conversation with artists Millie Chen and Arzu Ozkal on their audio-video installation SRS (Silk Road Songbook), moderated by curators Claudia Costa Pederson and Dale Hudson.

The #Resonances conversations are an extension of the #IFM conference, an opportunity for our community to gather in discussion around our mutual work and interests. The events will feature #IFM members in conversation with artists, scholars, and practitioners.

REGISTRATION (free admission):

Please click here to register for this event.

Millie Chen and Arzu Ozkal’s audio-video installation SRS (Silk Road Songbook) traces the movement of songs along the Silk Routes from Xi’an to Istanbul. The multiscreen installation weaves land and songs, as musical genres and languages maintain cultural identities across the ancient trading routes into the present. As mapped between Ozkal’s and Chen’s ancestral homes, respectively between Turkey and China, the work neither romanticizes nor demonizes these places, but instead moves to include voices absent in Western accounts of the Silk Routes by sounding five acoustic ecologies from the Eurasian migration route, connecting women’s voices and shared ambient sounds of the land.

More info

Ar Ducao's panel on inclusivity and diversity

We are pleased to announce that Ar Ducao (they/he) will moderate a special IFM2026 panel titled “Global Black Feminisms and Interactivity.”

Ducao is an artist, engineer, educator, and organizer whose work supports underrepresented and incarcerated STEAM learners. At DuKode, they created the Telly Award–winning series The Great Tit is a Bird, and their media and innovation work has been recognized by major institutions and outlets. They are also a co-founder of Multimer and teach with Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

We will announce the confirmed panelists in the next newsletter.

Explore Ar Ducao's work

#IFM2026 Yet-To-Be-Known

accepted subissions - 32 papers and 12 research-creations

#IFM2026 Conference has received an exceptionally strong and intellectually wide-ranging set of submissions. From this remarkable pool, we are pleased to announce 32 accepted papers and 12 accepted research-creations representing 24 countries and approximately 45 institutions, spanning six continents.

Taken as a whole, these contributions engage “Yet-To-Be-Known” as a generative space of speculative inquiry and creative possibility: they examine emergent forms of interactivity and uncertainty in AI and algorithmic cultures; experimental and participatory archives of memory, dissent, and ecological loss; more-than-human ethics and speculative ecologies; and technologies of resistance that respond to the cascading crises of our present. At the conference, our research-creation program will offer a dedicated space to encounter these works firsthand—featuring interactive and immersive projects (including VR/AR, web-based archives, games, and interactive documentary prototypes) and creating opportunities for participants to engage directly with the creators through walkthroughs, demonstrations, and dialogue around process, method, and invention.

List available here

#IFM2026 Poster

The #IFM2026 visual identity, developed through the “Reaching Out” direction by our design team Darius Shah and Anika Vielhauer, materializes Yet-To-Be-Known as an encounter staged at the threshold of the screen: a hand presses forward through a halftone-like veil that simultaneously reveals and obscures, inviting a haptic, exploratory relation to what remains indeterminate.

Rather than promising clarity, the image foregrounds uncertainty as an experiential condition—an unknown presence that can be sensed before it can be named—thereby aligning with the conference’s commitment to speculation, becoming, and the productive friction between crisis and possibility.

By combining a bold typographic structure (“YET-TO-BE-KNOWN") with an unsettling-yet-playful tactile metaphor, the design signals a shift toward a more embodied and participatory imagination of interactivity: not as mastery or prediction, but as reaching, testing, and negotiating meaning in real time, at the edge of visibility.