Date – Friday, August 29, 2025
Keynotes & Panels – 10:45 AM, AB1087
Gala Dinner and Celebration of Faculty Publications – 6:15PM ,AB Dining Hall
Join us for the Fall Conference on Digital Humanities on Friday, August 29, 2025, at HRC! The day features keynote lectures by Mark Hansen (Duke) and Adel-Jing Wang (Zhejiang University), engaging roundtable discussions with faculty and scholars, and a faculty panel exploring traces, imprints, and ghostly presence in digital spaces. Enjoy networking during coffee breaks, lunch, and a reception celebrating faculty publications.
Scan the QR code in the poster to register for the conference and the banquet.
Friday, August 29, 2025 – Fall Conference Schedule
10:30–10:45 – Registration and Coffee | AB1087
10:45–11:00 – Opening Remarks | AB1087
carlos rojas, Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Duke University
Selina Lai-Henderson, Associate Professor of American Literature & History, DKU
Zach Fredman, Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Division of Arts and Humanities, DKU
11:00–12:30 – Keynote Lecture 1 | AB1087
Mark Hansen, Astrotechnical Intelligence
Chair: carlos rojas
12:30–14:00 – Lunch | Community Center
14:00–15:00 – Roundtable Discussion | AB1087
Art & Generative AI
Participants: Rui Hu, Jung Choi, Zairong Xiang, Ziv Cohen, Mark Hansen, Adel-Jing Wang
Chair: Selina Lai-Henderson
15:00–16:30 – Keynote Lecture 2 | AB1087
Adel-Jing Wang – From Qi-Sensing Listening to Decibel Governance: The Re-Coding of the Body in Digital Acoustics
Chair: Vivian Xu
16:30–16:45 – Coffee Break
16:45–18:15 – Faculty Panel | AB1087
Benjamin Bacon, Vivian Xu – Traces, Imprints, and Ghostly Presence: Excavating Spaces In-Between
Odelia Lu – Curses and Barks: Exploring Cantonese Identity Through Video Game Dialogue and Localization
Giovanni Santini – Spacetime Variations in Immersive Worlds
Chairs & Discussants: Rong Chen, Nick Nie, Jackie Lyu, Xiaoyi Zhu
18:15 – Gala Dinner and Celebration of Faculty Publications | AB Executive Dining Room
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS BIOS
Mark B. N. Hansen, Professor of Literature at Duke University, is a scholar whose work spans literary studies, media, philosophy, science studies, and cognitive neuroscience, with a focus on how technology shapes human experience and culture. His research examines how technologic
al change— from the industrial to the digital revolution—reshapes human agency, knowledge, and the humanities. Author of Embodying Technesis, New Philosophy for New Media, and Bodies in Code, Hansen engages with art, literature, and media to explore the evolving relationship between humans and technology in a networked world.
KEYNOTE SPEECH ABSTRACTS: Integrating insights from philosopher Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of information as individuation, astrobiologist Sara Walker’s science of life as informational lineage, and the cosmological thought of Alfred North Whitehead and political philosopher Frédéric Neyrat, my talk introduces the concept of “astrotechnical intelligence.” By astrotechnical intelligence, I mean the recursive process through which the universe individuates itself via embodied information – information-made-physical and propagating as life, technicity, and planetary reflexivity. I argue that information is not merely a medium of communication but the constitutive operation of individuation across biological, technological, and planetary cosmological scales. On this basis, contemporary artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT can be understood not as “artificial” simulations but as phases of the cosmos’s own informational individuation and thus as part of life qua the becoming-physical of information. AI technologies embody astrotechnical intelligence by actualizing metastable potentials (Simondon), propagating informational lineages through top down causation (Walker), and expressing the cosmological inhuman horizon of technicity (Neyrat).
Adel-Jing Wang is an associate professor of Sound Studies at Zhejiang University. She was the 2023-2024 Berggruen Scholar. She was a Visiting Professor at MIT anthropology (2019-2020), a visiting scholar at School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong (2017.2). She was the residency artist at The Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia (2022-2023). Academically, she is the author of the book Half Sound, Half Philosophy: Aesthetics, Politics, and History of China‘s Sound Art (Bloomsbury, 2021) (in English) and Sound and Affect: An Anthrop
ology of China’s sound practice (2017) (in Chinese). Artistically, she curates sound-related events and exhibitions. As a self-taught artist, she works with field-recordings, voicebased multimedia art and performance. She considers research and art practice not as separate but as in reciprocal relation in producing concepts for thought and affects for co-presence.
KEYNOTE SPEECH ABSTRACTS: In today’s sensor-saturated environments, acoustic infrastructures increasingly determine not only how we hear but what may be heard. Treating microphones as operative media, this talk examines how machine listening classifies, predicts, and governs through sound. Three reshaping forces are identified: ubiquitous mediation by mic–algorithm pipelines; an aesthetic drift toward clarity and punch over slowness and ambiguity; and memory politics that archive alerts while erasing atmospheres. Against prevailing defaults—dB-centric measurement and Cartesian spatialization—the argument advances resonance literacy, bridging classical Chinese philosophies of sound (qi-based attunement) with contemporary digital humanities. Drawing on sensor-based art practices, the talk outlines design principles for acoustic sensing that preserve diversity, vitality, and spiritual attunement.
PARTICIPATING FACULTY BIOS
Dr. carlos rojas is a Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies; Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies; and Arts of the Moving Image, and his research focuses on issues of gender and visuality, corporeality and infection, and nationalism and diaspora studies. He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2000 and completed his undergraduate studies at Cornell University in 1995.
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Selina Lai-Henderson is Associate Professor of American Literature and History at Duke Kunshan University. She is on the editorial board of the American Quarterly, and is a non-resident Fellow (following her spring 2025 residency) in the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. In addition to chairing American Studies Association’s International Committee (2022-2024), she served on the judging panel for the ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies)’s 2025 Open Access Book Prize in Literary Studies. She is the author of Mark Twain in China (Stanford UP, 2015), and has published widely in the field of transnational American Studies. Her PMLA essay, “You Are No Darker Than I Am: The Souls of Black Folk in Maoist China” is the 2023 recipient of the 1921 Prize in American Literature in the tenured category. She is currently completing her monograph, “You Are No Darker Than I Am”: Writers of Transnational Blackness in Twentieth-Century China (under contract with Princeton UP).
Zach Fredman is a diplomatic and military historian whose research focuses on the United States in the world, modern China, and US-East Asian relations. His first book, The Tormented Alliance: American Servicemen and the Occupation of China, 1941–1949 (UNC Press, 2022), examines the U.S. military presence in China during World War II and the Chinese Civil War. He co-edited Uneasy Allies: Sino-American Relations at the Grassroots, 1937–1949 (Cambridge, 2024) with Judd Kinzley. He is now writing a history of the US military’s overseas rest and recreation program during the Vietnam War. This project draws on research in the United States, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Australia, and the UK.
Rui Hu is an Assistant Professor in Computation and Design at Duke Kunshan University and an artist working with video, installation, and computer simulation. His practice engages with issues related to time and temporality from a multitude of perspectives, such as causation, prediction, choice, and language. He is the recipient of the Best Experimental Animation Award at the 60th Ann Arbor Film Festival and a Jury Special Mention at the 25FPS Festival Croatia. His work has been shown in exhibitions and screenings at art spaces, institutions, festivals, and conferences, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam; UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; IFVA at the Hong Kong Arts Centre; Times Museum, Guangzhou; Three Shadows, Xiamen; Objetifs, Singapore; Start Museum, Shanghai; Wuhan Biennale; Siggraph Asia; IJCAI; ISEA, among others. He received an MFA in Design Media Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a BFA in Film and Television with a minor in Computer Science from New York.
Jung Choi is Assistant Professor of Visual and Media Studies at Duke Kunshan University, as well as a cross-disciplinary theorist and curator whose work bridges contemporary art, digital culture, and emerging technologies. She holds an M.A. in Visual Culture Theory from New York University and a Ph.D. in Visual and Media Studies from Duke University, along with a graduate certificate in Information Science and Studies that provided a foundation in digital humanities research. Choi has worked at leading international media art institutions, including Art Center Nabi in Seoul and the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, where she contributed to pioneering projects in media art and technology. Her work investigates the intersections of art, technology, and media culture, with a focus on how artistic interventions critically respond to and reimagine our evolving media landscape. At the intersection of theory, practice, and pedagogy, she continues to experiment with creative and critical methods that bring together digital humanities, media studies, and the arts to address urgent questions about technology, sustainability, and the future of collective life.
Zairong Xiang is the author of Queer Ancient Way: A Decolonial Exploration (punctum books, 2018) and (co-)editor of a journal special issue, an edited volume, and a film archive. Associate professor of comparative literature and director of arts at Duke Kunshan University, his research spans across a wide range of disciplines in the arts, literature, religion, philosophy, gender/sexuality studies in English, Spanish, French and Chinese. He was the curator of How to be Happy Together? at para site Hong Kong (2024 – 2025) and the “minor cosmopolitan weekend” at the HKW Berlin Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2018). He has co-curated the “2021 Guangzhou Image Triennial” with hyperimage group at Guangdong Museum of Art; a special program of the 2022 Seoul Experimental Film Festival; the exhibition Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World) with Anselm Franke, Elisa Giuliano, Denise Ryner, and Claire Tancons (2022 HKW Berlin); and the 14th Shanghai Biennial Cosmos Cinema with Anton Vidokle, Lukas Brasiskis, Hallie Ayres, and Ben Eastham. He is finishing his second book “Transdualism” and continues to research, through the lens of “Shanzhai/counterfeit” on the cultural and artistic exchanges across the Global South, especially between China and Latin America since the nineteenth century. He was research fellow at the ICI-Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry (2014 – 2016) and at the DFG Research Training Group minor cosmopolitanisms at Potsdam University (2016-2020). He was twice the recipient of the EU Erasmus Mundus MA and PhD scholarships. All his writings and lectures could be read here: www.xiangzairong.com
Ziv Ze’ev Cohen is a new media artist who emphasizes how technology has impacted our past, present, and future lives. His work challenges the senses of humans and machines, often speculating about the future to reflect on the impact machines have on our society today. Cohen’s creations oscillate between the virtual and physical, utilizing kinetic movement, light, sound, and interaction elements. His works have been exhibited worldwide, including at the Ars Electronica Festival in Austria, the Museum of China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, the Fusan Foundation in Shanghai, the Zhou B Art Center in Chicago, the Pyramida Art Center in Israel, and the esc medien kunst labor in Graz, Austria.
Benjamin Bacon is an Associate Professor of Media & Arts and the Major Convener of the Computation & Design program at Duke Kunshan University (DKU). He is a research affiliate at the Digital Innovation Research Center (DKU). Previously, he served as the inaugural director of the Office of Signature Work at DKU. He is the co-founder of the Design, Technology, and Radical Media Lab (DTRM). He is a fellow at V2_Lab for the Unstable Media and the co-organizer of the Art, Media, and Cybernetics (AMC) working group at the American Society of Cybernetics (ASC). His practice centers around explorations into computation, its qualities and characteristics as a creative medium, and its changing relationship with society and industry perception. Four main exploratory trajectories have persisted in his research and practice: computational media, machine art, sound, and reality media. His creations have taken the form of mechanical sculptures, machine-learning neural networks, networked systems, experimental interfaces, body-hacking, and sound. His methodology as an artist is fundamentally rooted in the design research process. It is experimental in its essence, often reliant on direct interaction with materials. His conceptual approach is at times playful, at times critical, at times commentary, and at times speculative. Bacon’s work has been exhibited in various venues worldwide, including North America, Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East, at venues such as the Chelsea Museum (NYC), Gallery Ho (NYC), the National Art Museum of China (Beijing), Millennium Museum (Beijing), Plug-In Gallery (Switzerland), Art Laboratory Berlin (Berlin), and more. His work has been profiled by print magazines such as Design 360, IDEAT Magazine, and Modern Weekly, as well as online magazines and platforms such as the New York Times, Rizhome, Creators Project (China), LEAP, The Art Newspaper, Neural Magazine, and CLOT Magazine.
Giovanni Santini is an XR artist who focuses on the use of immersive technologies and networked devices. His focus is on Virtual and Augmented Reality for live performances, as well as shared immersivity for the audience, which implies the use of multichannel projections (or immersive screens) and spatial audio. His research also includes components strongly inherited from game design and mobile game development. His production also widely adopts generative components, embedding machine learning and stochastic processes for the live creation of audio and visual components. Past and ongoing collaborations include Ars Electronica, the Swiss Radio and Television, Fazioli, Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, the Italian Cultural Institute in Hong Kong, UC Berkeley, Hanshan Museum, with performances in more than 20 countries, including Mainland China, Hong Kong, the US, Italy, France, Germany, the UK, Argentina. His artistic practice is tightly connected to arts technology research, with numerous papers published in international conferences and journals (NIME, Sound and Music Computing, Springer Lecture Notes on Computer Science, Mathematics, the book Creativity in the Age of Digital Reproduction etc.).
Vivian Xu is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher exploring the intersections of biology, material ecology, technology, and cybernetics. Her research-driven practice merges studio and laboratory methods, bridging arts and sciences. Her work has been shown internationally at institutions including the National Art Museum of China, Power Station of Art, Fotografiska, NTU Center for Contemporary Art, and the New York Science Museum, and featured in publications such as Climates. Habitats. Environments. Xu holds an MFA from Parsons School of Design and is Assistant Professor of Media and Art at Duke Kunshan University. She co-directs the Design, Technology, and Radical Media Lab (DTRM) and coleads the Art, Media, and Cybernetics Working Group.
Ye Odelia Lu is an essayist, translator, and editor with an MFA degree in Writing and Literary Translation from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Sine Theta Magazine, Columbia Journal, The Margins, Epiphany Magazine, and Samovar. In 2023, she was awarded the Travel Fellowship by the American Literary Translators Association. Before joining DKU, Lu taught creative nonfiction, TV writing, and video game narrative design at Columbia University and Wellesley College. Currently, she is translating Lin Hsin-Hui’s Contactless Intimacy from Chinese to English, a queer sci-fi novel that explores themes of human-machine relationship, autonomy, and heteronormativity.
James Miller is Professor of Humanities and Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Initiatives at Duke Kunshan University. His research focuses on the intersection of religion and ecology in China. He has published six books including “China’s Green Religion: Daoism and the Quest for a Sustainable Future” (Columbia, 2017). He is noted worldwide as an expert in Daoism, China’s indigenous religion.
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HRC RESEARCH PANEL ABSTRACTS
Benjamin Bacon / Vivian Xu / DKU
This talk explores the notion of sentience within a distributed, data-rich environment where cognitive capacities and meaning-making processes emerge from the interplay between human and computational agents. As contemporary technologies increasingly embed themselves within larger rhizomatic networks, existing beyond singular entities, human self-awareness and cognition intermingle with technology through flesh and data bodies that are mutually constitutive of one another in frameworks, apparatuses, and infrastructures. Borrowing from Katherine Hayles’ concept of cognitive assemblages, we examine the human-machine hybrid through the framework of being and environment. We emphasize sympoiesis, originally defined by Beth Dempster, in understanding complex cognitive assemblages and their relations. This relationality carries memory and history, inscribed within systems that emerge from latent fields and liminal spaces. We argue that this memory and history, defined by localized relationships, hold the potentiality for sentience and sapience to emerge and evolve. Information structures thus become the connective tissues that facilitate cognitive capacities where co-evolution is perpetuated by meaning making. Humans, machines, and environments become saturated within one another through structural coupling, at times indistinguishable. We examine these entanglements across collapsed and extended spatial and temporal configurations that bridge the biological and the computational.
Ye Odelia Lu / DKU
This essay examines the intersections of language, identity, and representation through a close reading of Cantonese dialogue and its profane registers in contemporary video games. It looks at how Cantonese and Cantonese-speaking characters are portrayed and localized within predominantly English-language gaming environments, such as those in Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption II, and Sleeping Dogs. While acknowledging the superficial immersive effect of Cantonese curses and barks, the essay challenges this notion by considering how translation choices and subtitling conventions contribute to a complex sense of cultural otherness intertwined with belonging for diasporic players. Drawing on scholarship and personal experience, the essay situates these depictions within broader histories of linguistic hegemony and state policy that have marginalized the language. The resulting representations complicate the player’s assumed narrative and ludic control, revealing instances where Cantonese resists assimilation, asserts agency, and conveys cultural texture beyond English’s boundary. Rather than framing Cantonese as an exotic backdrop, the essay argues that video games are more than capable of serving as interactive locales for digital humanities inquiry as they allow players to inhabit, negotiate, and reimagine multilingual identities in the global digital sphere of storytelling.
Giovanni Santini / DKU
I am fascinated by the possible transformations of space and time: how a single environment can change in ways that alter its meaning, perception, and use, and how time can be controlled,manipulated, inverted. In my work, this transformation is articulated in three ways: through the interaction between real and virtual worlds, through the change from one virtual scene to another, and through variation of the same space in different ways over time; time that flows in two directions. This approach treats spacetime as an active medium, one that can be stretched, reconfigured, or hybridized with virtual and physical elements. The process invites sustained attention to the transitions themselves, making change the core subject. Extended Reality and similar immersive technological applications offer the ideal ground for dealing with such matters. More specifically, a dialogic, articulated relationship with concepts of space and time is embedded within the technical and expressive horizon of XR: full control over 4-dimensional spacetime. In this presentation, I will discuss how I articulate concepts of space, time, and immersivity throughout my work.
PARTICIPATING STUDENTS BIOS
Jackie (Yizhi) Lyu is a senior student majoring in Global Cultural Studies, World Literature. Her research interests include gender and sexuality studies, visual and media cultures, and comparative literature.
Xiaoyi Zhu(Taylor): Class of 2027, Student of Computation& Design-Digital Media. Used to attend high school both in China and the US. Current president and founder of the DKU Piano Club. Lover of digital soft applications and film making.
Shenglang (Nick) Nie is an undergraduate in the class of 2026 majoring in Arts and Media, with a track in Media/Digital Culture and Communication. His research interests lie in Philosophy, Public Archive, Gender Studies, and Cultural Anthropology. He is currently working on his undergraduate dissertation “The Yellow Horn: The White Americans’ Self-Prisoning in Their Fetishisation of African American Jazz Music and Asian American Woman”.
Rong Chen is an undergraduate student in the Class of 2027, majoring in Arts and Media at Duke Kunshan University. His research interests include digital media, interactive experiences, and narrative. He is also engaged in visual development and digital art, and is currently working on an AIrelated narrative game project at DKU.
