Venice, Padua, Utrecht, Krakow, Warsaw, Grinnell, Pittsburgh, and LA!

Venice, Padua, Utrecht, Krakow, Warsaw, Grinnell, Pittsburgh, and LA!

Summer 2019 was one of those summers where the timing worked out, but the sanity may have been in question. After teaching year 2 of the DAH Venice/Getty workshop, several of us headed to Padua for a Visualizing Cities Symposium where Cosimo Monteleone and I gave everyone a first glimpse at our plans for Visualizing Lovecraft. I’m very excited to be going back to Padua as a Visiting Scientist in December to continue our work!

We also headed out to Krakow to begin work with Paul Jaskot and other Wired Lab/Visualizing Cities partners. We are thinking about how to visualize the WW2 era Ghetto and Camps, building upon the work we did in Venice around the history of the Ghetto there, but in a very different context and with much more recent materials. A couple of us got further inspiration from the Polin Museum in Warsaw. The question of monuments and memory carries through from Venice but also from the work we have been doing for years with Digital Durham, and which feels a greater sense of urgency given the monument discussions happening in the South.

Next I went to Utrecht where I presented on a VARDHI-related panel with some colleagues from the Institute and other fellow travelers. My talk was about evaluation practices for XR scholarship. Our group will continue to work on this question over the course of the coming year. After that I went to the first ACH conference in Pittsburgh – via Iowa, where I gave a keynote talk on AR at the ACM (Associated Colleges of the Midwest) Symposium on XR in teaching- and then on to Pittsburgh to talk Psychasthenia! (Great new conference from the ACH folks.)

Then finally off to SIGGRAPH 2019 in Los Angeles, where we showcased the Urgency of Reality in a Hyper-Connected Age online exhibition curated by Dena Eber in partnership with the DAC team. As Chair of the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community (different ACM! This is the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques), I work in partnership with our brilliant committee and the wider SIGGRAPH Arts community.

While sometimes it can feel a little like whiplash to go from the DH world to the computational media arts and computer graphics worlds, we all share a deep engagement with how the digital turn is transforming how we study, create, analyze, engage, critique. More to come!