IFM2024
6TH INTERACTIVE FILM AND MEDIA CONFERENCE 2024:
COMMUNITIES STRUCTURES ENTANGLEMENTS
Hosted Virtual byToronto Metropolitan University (Canada)
June 11-14, 2024
The VI Interactive Film and Media Conference 2024 is thrilled to announce a Call for Proposals focused on the compelling and intricate themes of "Communities - Structures - Entanglements." These themes present a rich ground for exploration, innovation, and critical examination in the rapidly evolving interactive film and media domain.
Themes:
Communities
Communities navigate complex relationships, power dynamics, and ethical considerations. How are these challenges integrated into the community's evolving structure? In the interconnected world of interactive film and media, understanding the evolving roles and nature of communities is crucial for both creators and participants. What defines a community? How do communities evolve and sustain themselves? What kinds of "shared language," including shared narratives, questions, and commitments, enable a community to form and flourish? What does "shared" mean in this context? How does a community become a shared experience? Technologies like AI, VR, and AR are redefining communal experiences, so how are power dynamics and member contributions managed in these contexts? Communities also act as collective memory banks, archiving shared experiences. How does this shape community identity?
Structures
Structures serve as scaffolding that shapes narratives, fosters creativity, and broadens new possibilities. Studying these frameworks inspires both analysis of current methods and the creative imagining of novel structures that open up new spaces for exploration and consideration. This venture blurs the line between visual and conceptual, urging deeper examination of idea visualization and encouraging dialogue about needs and aspirations within the field of interactive film and media. As we navigate the complexities of structuring interactive narratives, the fusion of creativity, narrative and form emerges as pivotal thinking about how stories are experienced and engaged in the interactive digital environment. How do design choices in the underlying structures of interactive digital projects impact the form and content of different media forms, digital creativity, narrative structure, and interactors' agency? What challenges and opportunities do these structures present to create innovative, inclusive, and ethical storytelling experiences in an increasingly entangled digital world? As creators, researchers, and consumers, how can we actively shape these structures to foster new narrative exploration and interaction paradigms?
Entanglements
Entanglements promise the possibility of an intricate dance of influences within interactive media, where elements intertwine. Each element contributes to an overall tapestry of narrative, whose formal features produce interconnections that resonate for audiences. Entanglements demand careful consideration and management to ensure a harmonious and impactful interactive experience. How can creators effectively identify and balance the multitude of entanglements within an interactive project to create a coherent and engaging narrative? How can insights into entanglements enhance the design process to enable a more holistic integration of diverse elements while also promoting inclusivity, ethical considerations, and adaptability? Why is this important to the design of an interactor experience that is seamless, intuitive, responsive, and immersive? Is there a way the structuring of entanglements opens onto new forms of community?
TRIBUTE TO PATTY ZIMMERMANN
The VI Interactive Film and Media Conference 2024 is thrilled to announce a Call for Proposals focused on the compelling and intricate themes of "Communities - Structures - Entanglements." These themes present a rich ground for exploration, innovation, and critical examination in the rapidly evolving interactive film and media domain.
Themes:
Communities
Communities navigate complex relationships, power dynamics, and ethical considerations. How are these challenges integrated into the community's evolving structure? In the interconnected world of interactive film and media, understanding the evolving roles and nature of communities is crucial for both creators and participants. What defines a community? How do communities evolve and sustain themselves? What kinds of "shared language," including shared narratives, questions, and commitments, enable a community to form and flourish? What does "shared" mean in this context? How does a community become a shared experience? Technologies like AI, VR, and AR are redefining communal experiences, so how are power dynamics and member contributions managed in these contexts? Communities also act as collective memory banks, archiving shared experiences. How does this shape community identity?
Structures
Structures serve as scaffolding that shapes narratives, fosters creativity, and broadens new possibilities. Studying these frameworks inspires both analysis of current methods and the creative imagining of novel structures that open up new spaces for exploration and consideration. This venture blurs the line between visual and conceptual, urging deeper examination of idea visualization and encouraging dialogue about needs and aspirations within the field of interactive film and media. As we navigate the complexities of structuring interactive narratives, the fusion of creativity, narrative and form emerges as pivotal thinking about how stories are experienced and engaged in the interactive digital environment. How do design choices in the underlying structures of interactive digital projects impact the form and content of different media forms, digital creativity, narrative structure, and interactors' agency? What challenges and opportunities do these structures present to create innovative, inclusive, and ethical storytelling experiences in an increasingly entangled digital world? As creators, researchers, and consumers, how can we actively shape these structures to foster new narrative exploration and interaction paradigms?
Entanglements
Entanglements promise the possibility of an intricate dance of influences within interactive media, where elements intertwine. Each element contributes to an overall tapestry of narrative, whose formal features produce interconnections that resonate for audiences. Entanglements demand careful consideration and management to ensure a harmonious and impactful interactive experience. How can creators effectively identify and balance the multitude of entanglements within an interactive project to create a coherent and engaging narrative? How can insights into entanglements enhance the design process to enable a more holistic integration of diverse elements while also promoting inclusivity, ethical considerations, and adaptability? Why is this important to the design of an interactor experience that is seamless, intuitive, responsive, and immersive? Is there a way the structuring of entanglements opens onto new forms of community?
In honor of distinguished professor and friend Patty Zimmermann, the IFM community will celebrate her contributions to strengthening communities, her careful structuring of entanglements, and her commitment to empowering people to speak. We will dedicate sessions of the conference to our esteemed colleague, relentless scholar, dedicated social advocate, and a pioneering force in cultivating cross-platform and interdisciplinary engagement.
Organizing Committee
Hudson Moura, Chair (Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada) Stefano Odorico, Co-Chair (Technological University of the Shannon, Ireland) Heidi Rae Cooley (The University of Texas at Dallas, USA) Dale Hudson (NYU Abu-Dhabi, United Arab Emirates) Jenna Ng (University of York, UK) Leah Shafer (Hobart and William Smith Colleges, USA) Marta Fiolic (NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal) Il Sun Moon (Kingston University, UK) Logan Acton (The University of Texas at Dallas, USA) Designs by Darius Shah and Anika Noehre
IFM2023
5TH INTERACTIVE FILM AND MEDIA CONFERENCE 2023:
CRAFT CARE COLLABORATION
Hosted byToronto Metropolitan University (Canada)The University of Texas at Dallas (USA)Technological University of the Shannon (Ireland)Leeds Trinity University (UK)Ithaca College (New York, USA)(virtual)
June 7-9, 2023
The annual Interactive Film and Media Conference invites abstracts that explore, interrogate, interweave, unravel, and reinvent the dynamic relationships between craft, care, and collaboration across new media platforms, practices, and theories. This nexus of craft, care, and collaboration has emerged as a fertile ground for thinking through the crucial yet unresolved work of combatting polarization with multiple voices, plural practices, and new ways of working together to invent shared languages and ideas. The conference invites participants to think about these three axes–craft, care, collaboration–whose definitions and relationships are not fixed, but fluid and adaptive.
CRAFT
Craft suggests a physical relationship to material to emphasize tactility and concrete engagement with the matter of the world. Craft traditions such as quilting bees and barn-raisings, gardening and sewing, etc., re-emerge in digital cultures through questions of tactility, working with machines, rethinking exhibition strategies, and more. Sometimes, craft is considered as a form of individual authorship or artisanal; other times, it is deemed collective; most of the time, it winds between both. Our conference asks the following: what is craft? Why is it important now? Is it possible to think of craft in new ways? How does craft work through our engagement with material?
CARE
Care implies attention to relationships between the human and the nonhuman. It is embedded in the relationship between makers/designers and subjects, and between work(s) and its participants/audience. This notion speaks to the affordances of the technologies, materials, and infrastructure that make media work possible. Care pays attention to how work is made in communities, and how an ethics of care entails endlessly reformulated and adaptive relations that we inhabit. How do works invite care? What is the ongoing work of care in media work and practice? What kinds of bonds are formed in and through this work, and how can they be nurtured, respected, and encouraged to evolve?
COLLABORATION
Collaboration has become a dominant meme in media practice and scholarly work. It opens up ways to think beyond the auteur-as-individual, drawing on long traditions across the arts and platforms of working with others. It moves from the one to the many, from the monovocal to the polyvocal. It is often grouped with concepts such as collectivity, community, co-creation, participatory modes, activism. What is collaboration? How does collaboration change from project to project in different iterations and different political, social contexts? Why is collaboration necessary or important? What challenges and pitfalls does collaboration pose?
This conference does not propose closed definitions of the terms craft, care, and collaboration. Nor does it map the ways in which these three terms entangle, enmesh, separate, collide. Instead, the conference celebrates the open fields, gaps, and fissures between these terms in an initial attempt to enhance what is ambiguous, unresolved, and needing our attention. The conference invites participants to think through and imagine craft, care, and collaboration in new ways that mine these cracks and ambiguities.
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Hudson Moura, Chair (Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada)
Heidi Rae Cooley (The University of Texas at Dallas, USA)
Stefano Odorico (Technological University of the Shannon, Ireland and Leeds Trinity University, United Kingdom)
Patricia Zimmermann (Ithaca College, New York, USA)
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Sharon Daniel (The University of California, Santa Cruz, USA)
DESIGNS
Darius Shah
Anika Nöhre
The annual Interactive Film and Media Conference invites abstracts that explore, interrogate, interweave, unravel, and reinvent the dynamic relationships between craft, care, and collaboration across new media platforms, practices, and theories. This nexus of craft, care, and collaboration has emerged as a fertile ground for thinking through the crucial yet unresolved work of combatting polarization with multiple voices, plural practices, and new ways of working together to invent shared languages and ideas. The conference invites participants to think about these three axes–craft, care, collaboration–whose definitions and relationships are not fixed, but fluid and adaptive.
CRAFT
Craft suggests a physical relationship to material to emphasize tactility and concrete engagement with the matter of the world. Craft traditions such as quilting bees and barn-raisings, gardening and sewing, etc., re-emerge in digital cultures through questions of tactility, working with machines, rethinking exhibition strategies, and more. Sometimes, craft is considered as a form of individual authorship or artisanal; other times, it is deemed collective; most of the time, it winds between both. Our conference asks the following: what is craft? Why is it important now? Is it possible to think of craft in new ways? How does craft work through our engagement with material?
CARE
Care implies attention to relationships between the human and the nonhuman. It is embedded in the relationship between makers/designers and subjects, and between work(s) and its participants/audience. This notion speaks to the affordances of the technologies, materials, and infrastructure that make media work possible. Care pays attention to how work is made in communities, and how an ethics of care entails endlessly reformulated and adaptive relations that we inhabit. How do works invite care? What is the ongoing work of care in media work and practice? What kinds of bonds are formed in and through this work, and how can they be nurtured, respected, and encouraged to evolve?
COLLABORATION
Collaboration has become a dominant meme in media practice and scholarly work. It opens up ways to think beyond the auteur-as-individual, drawing on long traditions across the arts and platforms of working with others. It moves from the one to the many, from the monovocal to the polyvocal. It is often grouped with concepts such as collectivity, community, co-creation, participatory modes, activism. What is collaboration? How does collaboration change from project to project in different iterations and different political, social contexts? Why is collaboration necessary or important? What challenges and pitfalls does collaboration pose?
This conference does not propose closed definitions of the terms craft, care, and collaboration. Nor does it map the ways in which these three terms entangle, enmesh, separate, collide. Instead, the conference celebrates the open fields, gaps, and fissures between these terms in an initial attempt to enhance what is ambiguous, unresolved, and needing our attention. The conference invites participants to think through and imagine craft, care, and collaboration in new ways that mine these cracks and ambiguities.
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Hudson Moura, Chair (Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada)
Heidi Rae Cooley (The University of Texas at Dallas, USA)
Stefano Odorico (Technological University of the Shannon, Ireland and Leeds Trinity University, United Kingdom)
Patricia Zimmermann (Ithaca College, New York, USA)
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Sharon Daniel (The University of California, Santa Cruz, USA)
DESIGNS
Darius Shah
Anika Nöhre
IFM2022
Design by Darius Shah
INTERACTIVE FILM AND MEDIA CONFERENCE 2022:
INTERACTIVE EPISTEMOLOGY, LISTENING, AND ECOMEDIA
Hosted byRyerson University (Canada)The University of Texas at Dallas (USA)Leeds Trinity University (UK)University of Bayreuth (Germany)(virtual)
June 8-10, 2022
Interactivity is omnipresent. From cultural production (games, films, books), audience perception (streaming, virtual reality, real-time), intellectual publications (news, hypertexts, social media), and virtual world economy (cryptocurrency), we are witnessing a shift in all levels of cultural production. As a result, interactivity gains more space and conceptual independence with specific terminology, questions, promises, and challenges. Moreover, interactivity is growing as an academic discipline, field of study, and area of research in several spheres.
What are the interactive film and media epistemological contributions to contemporary art and media fields? How do/might interactive technologies, practices, experiences invite, or indeed, demand revised modes of listening? How might taking seriously the work of listening (as a form of attending to) open onto more generous ways of knowing, practicing, and being in an era of socio-ecological crisis?
Due to what can be diagnosed as deep mediatization--the ubiquity of media in every sphere of life--current modes of thought, behaviour, and culture are becoming increasingly interactive. The inclusion of interactivity in film and media marks a turning point contributing to the development of education and the epistemological repercussions in contemporary cultural practices, activism, and social engagement.
Thus, the 4th Interactive Film and Media International Conference invites academics (faculty, researchers, and Ph.D. students) and practitioners (filmmakers, artists, VR and game designers, and media producers) to explore the definitions, terms, and practices to frame the conditions of interaction and interactivity in three strands:
EPISTEMOLOGY: The first strand will focus on the interactivity’s epistemological contributions. What is this knowledge that brings interactivity? How does interactivity expand cinema and media perception? How does interactivity enhance the immersion of the audience in the realm of storytelling? How does interactivity contribute artistically, aesthetically, economically, and politically to new practices in communication, entertainment, education, and the arts? How does interactivity promote social engagement?
LISTENING: The second strand will address the question of listening, a question that became increasingly prominent across the presentations at the 3rd International Film and Media Conference in August 2021. What does it mean to listen in the 21st century? This second strand intends to provide a lens through which to think about how we know via interactive technologies, etc., and how through our engagements with such technologies we might be inspired to listen more responsibly. What might it mean to listen ecologically? Ultimately, what is to "listen" to our surroundings in ways that might invite us to take up pressing questions differently--more responsibly, ethically, etc.?
ECOMEDIA: The third strand will take up the issue of interactivity in the context of ecomedia. If ubiquitous mediatization is the one big theme of our age, ecology is the other. Believing that the conjunction of the two is thus one of the critical issues for our time, facing an entanglement of socio-ecological crises, we invite reflections on the different forms of interconnection between them. For example, which role do agency, engagement, and immersion play in this context? How can interactivity increase personal engagement and, what can interactive ecomedia add to the striving to create ‘moving’ experiences and encounters?
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Hudson Moura, Chair (Ryerson University, Canada)
Heidi Rae Cooley (The University of Texas at Dallas, USA)
Stefano Odorico (Leeds Trinity University, United Kingdom)
Anna Wiehl (DiD-Digital Documentary Projects, University of Bayreuth, Germany)
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Judith Aston (The University of the West of England, United Kingdom)
Interactivity is omnipresent. From cultural production (games, films, books), audience perception (streaming, virtual reality, real-time), intellectual publications (news, hypertexts, social media), and virtual world economy (cryptocurrency), we are witnessing a shift in all levels of cultural production. As a result, interactivity gains more space and conceptual independence with specific terminology, questions, promises, and challenges. Moreover, interactivity is growing as an academic discipline, field of study, and area of research in several spheres.
What are the interactive film and media epistemological contributions to contemporary art and media fields? How do/might interactive technologies, practices, experiences invite, or indeed, demand revised modes of listening? How might taking seriously the work of listening (as a form of attending to) open onto more generous ways of knowing, practicing, and being in an era of socio-ecological crisis?
Due to what can be diagnosed as deep mediatization--the ubiquity of media in every sphere of life--current modes of thought, behaviour, and culture are becoming increasingly interactive. The inclusion of interactivity in film and media marks a turning point contributing to the development of education and the epistemological repercussions in contemporary cultural practices, activism, and social engagement.
Thus, the 4th Interactive Film and Media International Conference invites academics (faculty, researchers, and Ph.D. students) and practitioners (filmmakers, artists, VR and game designers, and media producers) to explore the definitions, terms, and practices to frame the conditions of interaction and interactivity in three strands:
EPISTEMOLOGY: The first strand will focus on the interactivity’s epistemological contributions. What is this knowledge that brings interactivity? How does interactivity expand cinema and media perception? How does interactivity enhance the immersion of the audience in the realm of storytelling? How does interactivity contribute artistically, aesthetically, economically, and politically to new practices in communication, entertainment, education, and the arts? How does interactivity promote social engagement?
LISTENING: The second strand will address the question of listening, a question that became increasingly prominent across the presentations at the 3rd International Film and Media Conference in August 2021. What does it mean to listen in the 21st century? This second strand intends to provide a lens through which to think about how we know via interactive technologies, etc., and how through our engagements with such technologies we might be inspired to listen more responsibly. What might it mean to listen ecologically? Ultimately, what is to "listen" to our surroundings in ways that might invite us to take up pressing questions differently--more responsibly, ethically, etc.?
ECOMEDIA: The third strand will take up the issue of interactivity in the context of ecomedia. If ubiquitous mediatization is the one big theme of our age, ecology is the other. Believing that the conjunction of the two is thus one of the critical issues for our time, facing an entanglement of socio-ecological crises, we invite reflections on the different forms of interconnection between them. For example, which role do agency, engagement, and immersion play in this context? How can interactivity increase personal engagement and, what can interactive ecomedia add to the striving to create ‘moving’ experiences and encounters?
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Hudson Moura, Chair (Ryerson University, Canada)
Heidi Rae Cooley (The University of Texas at Dallas, USA)
Stefano Odorico (Leeds Trinity University, United Kingdom)
Anna Wiehl (DiD-Digital Documentary Projects, University of Bayreuth, Germany)
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Judith Aston (The University of the West of England, United Kingdom)
IFM2021
INTERACTIVE FILM AND MEDIA CONFERENCE 2021:
NEW NARRATIVES, RACIALIZATION, GLOBAL CRISES, AND SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Hudson MOURA, Chair (Ryerson University, Canada)
Heidi Rae COOLEY (The University of Texas at Dallas, USA)
Sonia Regina CUNHA (University of Sao Paulo, Brazil)
Greg ELMER (Ryerson University, Canada)
David SWEENEY (The Glasgow School of Art, Scotland)
CONFERENCE ASSISTANT
Irina LYUBCHENKO (Independent Scholar, Canada)
Full Program
Paper Presentations
IFM2014
DOWNLOAD THE PROCEEDINGS HERE (PREVIOUS CONFERENCE)
Interactive Narratives, New Media and Social Engagement International Conference
Victoria College, University of Toronto
An interdisciplinary conference for researchers and practitioners. In the evolution of narrative practices from text-based literature to the advent of the digital revolution as storytelling moves from literacy to so-called post-literacy. The prevalence of new interactive digital narrative in all areas from games, to literature, to films, to video art has resulted in new forms of storytelling and, accordingly, provoked new practices of reading that transform readers/viewers into active collaborators. Physical public space is increasingly being substituted or augmented by virtual space through digital screens (e.g. video, film, computer). What effect do these new developments have on social space, seen here as encompassing both physical public spaces (streets, hotels, coffee shops) as well as virtual space (YouTube, Vine, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram)? How do these novel practices affect previously clearly demarcated frontiers between the public and the private? Throughout the world, from Brazil to Turkey to Canada, we have recently witnessed the influence of social media on political participation. How have these new platforms engendered innovative forms of expression?
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