Dear all,

Apologies for cross posting

I am happy to announce (if you have not seen this elsewhere) two events at UCLA in early December (Dec 8-9) co-organized by Miriam Posner, Patrik Svensson and myself.

All best, Élika

Composition Across/Between Edges, Surfaces and Materialities Symposium, Dec 8, 2016

This symposium explores compositions that happen, emerge, or are partly enacted at edges, between surfaces and across materialities, scales and modalities. These kinds of compositions–narrative, artistic, scholarly, political, infrastructural, etc.–demand a reorientation of established knowledge models, critical stances, vocabularies and infrastructures. They shift our attention to their architecture – conceptual and material – and the very process of composition as argumentative, narrative, and strategic media ideations. The symposium aims to develop further understandings of these compositions and partake in the imagining of new practices based on prolonged conversations, a range of concrete examples and thematic interventions.

Questions addressed include: What compositions might be possible (and not possible) in contemporary – complex and multimodal – information ecologies? What tools and narrative/material strategies would be necessary to enact them? How can we go beyond “edged” thinking and practice (and contemporary compositional regimes)? How can we learn from earlier and contemporary work on materially complex compositions? What is the compositional significance of the edges? How do they affect material relations of power? How can they be used to enact social and cultural shifts? Participants bring expertise from a range of fields and practices including literary studies, design, scientific visualization, digital humanities, media studies, art history, classics, media arts, and information studies.

Among invited and confirmed participants (so far) are: Rita Raley, Ricardo Domínguez, Mark Marino, Anne Balsamo, Zach Horton, Carter Emmart, Johanna Drucker, Erkki Huhtamo and Jeremy Douglass.

More information and registration here: http://dhbasecamp.humanities.ucla.edu/compositions/

Please register and join us in Southern California/at UCLA in December (and also take the opportunity to attend the event described below)! Registered participants may be asked to be invited participants.

Encoding Diversity Seminar, Dec 9, 2016, 10 am-12 Room 111, Information Studies Building.

This UCLA Digital Humanities Seminar engages with critical themes inside and outside the field. The format is meant to be inviting, generous, sharp, dialogic and experimental. The theme for the December 9 seminar - "Encoding Diversity" - invites critical-material engagement with the encoding of library systems, biodiversity databases, public systems, (digital humanities) institutions and organizations, visual archives, digital humanities "data" and more. The use of "encoding" is also meant to indicate an interest in the active engagement with making, challenging and changing such structures. The conversation will include Ursula Heise, Geoffrey Bowker, Safiya Umoja Noble, Élika Ortega and Todd Presner. No registration required.