2024 Fellow's Day Conference: How Media Count

The Centre for Culture and Technology is proud to present its first annual Fellows Day conference. This conference convenes our 2023-24 Artist-in-Residence, Simone Jones (OCAD), with our Visiting Faculty Fellows: David Cecchetto (York), Jennifer Rhee (Virginia Commonwealth), and Jacqueline Wernimont (Dartmouth). Esteemed cultural critic Jeanne Randolph will also make a special guest appearance.

The Visiting Faculty Fellows will present new scholarship that engages the Centre’s annual programming theme, “How Media Count.” Their work proceeds in conversation with Jones’s themed exhibition of the same name at the Centre in fall 2023. Join us as we engage the politics and aesthetics of counting, quantification, and computation.

After the conference, join us on the patio of the U of T Faculty Club for a closing reception!

About the speakers:

David Cecchetto is Professor of Critical Digital Theory at York University in Toronto, where he directs the graduate program in Social and Political Thought and contributes to several others. David is President of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, and co-edits the Proximities: Experiments in Nearness book series (University of Minnesota Press). His most recent monograph is Listening in the Afterlife of Data: Aesthetics, Pragmatics, and Incommunication (Duke UP, 2022). As a quasi-practicing nonmusician, David has presented creative work internationally.

Simone Jones is a multidisciplinary artist who works with the moving image, sculpture, programming, and electronics to explore shifting relationships between time and space. A key component of these investigations is the performative nature of the work itself. Jones’ works uncover the tensions that can arise between illusion and reality as they apply to modes of perception, representation, and the body. Jones graduated from the Ontario College of Art (OCA) with a concentration in Experimental Art and received her MFA in Sculpture Installation from York University in Toronto. Jones is a Professor in the Integrated Media program at OCAD University.

Jeanne Randolph is a cultural theorist, artist, and curator, and the author of Psychoanalysis & Synchronized Swimming (1991), as well as Symbolization and Its Discontents (1997), Why Stoics Box (2003), Ethics of Luxury (2007), Shopping Cart Pantheism (2015), Prairie Modernist Noir: The Disappearance of the Manitoba Telephone Booth (2018), and, most recently, My Claustrophobic Happiness (2020).

Jennifer Rhee is Associate Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and affiliate faculty in the Media, Art, and Text PhD Program and the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Department. Her research focuses on artificial intelligence across technology, art, and speculative fiction. She is currently working on a book on machine learning and slowness. She is the author of The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Literature and Science (2020) and Informatics of Domination, which is forthcoming with Duke Press.

Jacque Wernimont is Distinguished Chair of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement and an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth College. She is also a co-Director of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaborative) and runs the Digital Justice Lab at Dartmouth. Her books include Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media (2018) and the co-edited Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities (2018). As a digital media scholar who specializes in mathematic and computational media and their histories, her work is synthetic and bridges the humanities, sciences, and arts.

About the Centre for Culture and Technology:

The Centre for Culture & Technology is dedicated to theoretical, aesthetic, and critical inquiry into the impacts of contemporary media on our interconnected world. This project is informed by the Centre’s location in the Coach House, a multi-use heritage building that was once Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s office and salon on the University of Toronto campus. The Centre draws inspiration from McLuhan’s humanistic intellectual and institutional legacy, continuing his stated goal of “investigation into the psychic and social consequences of technologies”.

The Centre promotes the study of media aesthetics in an expanded sense, examining the ways technological media shape contemporary experience by elaborating its histories, its problems, its infrastructures, and its politics. Offering both a setting and a framework, the Centre provides space and programming for scholars working in humanistic media studies across the three campuses of the University of Toronto and in the GTA. The Centre also supports the production of and conversation about contemporary media art, fostering aesthetic experimentation as a mode of inquiry.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Centre for Culture and Technology - University of Toronto, 39A Queen's Park Crescent East, Toronto, Canada