Brightly lit skyscrapers with pedestrians walking in front of them

This Winter: ES 440/540

This winter term (Winter 2025), NMCC invites you to consider enrolling in Dr. Abigail Lee’s course ES 440/540: Techno-Orientalism: Asian American Sci-Fi & Futures (MW 10:00-11:20am).

Course Description:

Why are Asian Americans so often ridiculed as robots or machines, and why are the high-tech cityscapes of sci-fi films, video games, and fiction so often coded as Asian, even if there are no Asian characters living in them? The term techno-Orientalism describes cultural depictions that associate Asianness with the future in harmful and reductive ways. Our course will consider this racist history of inscribing Asianness as alien and robotic in dehumanizing ways, but we will also investigate how Asian Americans imagine our own futures. To do so, we will read, watch, and study AAPI futures through Asian American speculative fiction, comics, poetry, sci-fi films, and critical theory. Together we will ask: What areAsian American futures, and how do we live, resist, and imagine differently? Some weekly topics will include: Asian American cyberfeminisms, robots and posthumanism, Palestinian futurisms, and speculative utopias.

Please contact Dr. Abigail Jinju Lee at ajinju@uoregon.edu to discuss any questions you may have.

CFP: Data|Media|Digital Graduate Student Symposium

Call for Submissions

University of Oregon’s Eighth Annual
Data | Media | Digital Graduate Student Symposium

Submissions Due: Tuesday, January 28, 2025

We invite submissions from UO graduate students for 15-minute presentations on any aspect of data, media, or digital studies for a symposium in the UO Knight Library DREAM Lab on Friday, April 11, week 2 of the spring term at the Data|Media|Digital Symposium.

D|M|D is an opportunity to showcase the exciting multidisciplinary work produced by UO graduate students across campus. In addition to panels, we will have informal discussions over food and drinks, a hosted lunch, and a panel of short presentations by UO faculty working in these areas. We hope student participants will be able to attend the full day of panel sessions.

Presentations can be based on work in progress or research and work in the final stages of development. Proposals should specify clear scholarly or pedagogical goals and should articulate how the design or argument of a data/media/digital project might address those goals.

Any kind of data, media, or digital studies project is welcome. If you aren’t sure if your project fits our call, then it probably does, but please get in touch, and we can offer you our guidance.

Send your submission to nmcc.uo@gmail.com by 11:59 p.m. PT on Tuesday, January 28. Complete submissions will include the following:

  • Your (preferred) name (in the body of your email)
  • Your presentation title (in the body of your email)
  • Your home department at UO (in the body of your email)
  • Your degree program (Master’s, Doctoral) and your anticipated graduation term/year
  • A list (or selected list) of previous academic conference/event presentations (if this will be your first academic presentation outside of a class, that is okay and this will not impact the review of your submission; we request this information for our planning)
  • A separate PDF document with a 250-500 word abstract (or summary description of your project), the title of your presentation at the top, and your name. Please make sure this is a separate attachment and is not pasted in to the body of the email.

Decisions about all submissions will be shared in February.

You can share questions about D|M|D with any member of our organizing committee:

This Winter: ARTD 413/513

Person with fluorescent green hair and dress jumping into a field of pink flowers
Ashley Campbell from artist book “I am Falling into the Abyss”

This winter term (Winter 2025), NMCC invites you to consider enrolling in Dr. Colin Ives’ course ARTD 413/513: Machine Vision and Artificial Intelligence (MW 12:00-2:50pm).

Course Description:
Artists can use their unique perspectives to explore the cultural and societal implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its potential impacts on humanity. Through their work, they can raise awareness of the ethical considerations surrounding AI, spark critical dialogue about its use, and experiment with AI as a tool to create new forms of expression, pushing the boundaries of traditional art-making. By engaging with AI, artists contribute to a more nuanced understanding of its potential and limitations, helping to shape its role in society. This course will explore the growing field of AI through creative expression, focusing on Machine Vision and AI-driven image and video generation. We will engage with and examine the contradictions, challenges, and possibilities that AI presents to contemporary practitioners.

Please note that students are required to complete ARTD 370, 378, 416, or equivalent work as a prerequisite to enrolling. Contact Dr. Ives at ives@uoregon.edu to discuss any questions you may have.

Spring 2024 NMCC Shelfie: Annie Liu

Annie Liu (she/her) is a third-year Musicology, MM Bassoon Performance master’s student and an NMCC recipient. Liu is graduating from UO in June 2024 and starting a PhD in musicology at Princeton this fall. 

Profile

Liu’s current research focuses on voice, timbre, and politics in Chinese popular music from 1920–1980. She uses digital tools, like Sonic Visualizer, to create spectrograms or visual ways of representing the signal strength over time at various frequencies present in a particular waveform. 

Early in her program, she became interested in music and the Internet/social media, leading her to the NMCC. She wanted to learn about digital humanities and making musicology public and accessible. Liu always wanted to take courses outside of music to meet faculty and students across campus.

Liu received a Student Presentation Award for the ACTOR Y6 Workshop and will present a chapter from her master’s thesis about shidaiqu vocal timbre. She also co-authored a paper on Peking opera vocal timbre with her advisor, Zachary Wallmark, and it is to be published in Music & Science in the coming months.

Looking ahead, Annie Liu envisions her website, shanghaisong.org, as a dynamic and interactive platform. This space will not only serve as a repository for songs but also foster collaboration among scholars interested in the genre or the time period. Her aspiration is to create a vibrant academic community that thrives on shared knowledge and collaboration.

Liu seated at her computer desk, surrounded by books and screens, smiling at the camera
Annie Liu, Class of 2024

Recommendations

Reading:

Resources:

Rhythm:

Event: Break The Game | film screening and director Q&A

Join the SOJC’s Game Studies minor for an evening with Jane Wagner, director of a new documentary about legendary Zelda speedrunner Narcissa Wright.

When: Thursday, May 30 at 4:30 PM

Where: EMU, Room 214 (Redwood)

What: Film screening and Q&A with the director

Sponsored by the Game Studies Minor, Media Studies Area, SOJC, UO Esports Program, Price Science Library, and the New Media and Culture Certificate

Description: Video games and the community around them have meant everything to Narcissa Wright. Her quests to set speed run records in numerous game titles have allowed her to own competitions and stages across the globe. But as much as she loves the challenge of conquering virtual worlds, her biggest challenge will come from the community whose love and affection she yearns for as she comes out as transgender. Hell-bent on setting a new speedrunning world record in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Narcissa struggles to balance the volatile nature of internet fandom and the prospect of building a fulfilling life outside the confines of pixels and sprites.

OHC Interview with Aimée Morrison now live

OHC’s interview with NMCC’s 2024 annual lecturer, Aimée Morrison, is now live on YouTube. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3pBypE8BBw&ab_channel=OregonHumanitiesCenter

 

Aimée Morrison’s lecture “Touch Grass” made a case for reclaiming learning techniques we’ve outsourced to technology and returning to the power of our hands, particularly in reference to hand-written notetaking. She then led a workshop for faculty and grads demonstrating the power of “sketch-noting.”

 

NMCC Alumna Returns for Guest Lecture

NMCC and Art History Alumna Emily Lawhead (PhD ’22) returns to UO to give the annual Gordon Gilkey Lecture for the History of Art and Architecture dept. Her presentation will share forthcoming research on AI and photography.   Please join us on Wednesday, May 22, at 5:30 to hear her wonderful and timely research.

“Art, Technology, and Discontent: Artificial Intelligence and the History of Photography” 5:30 pm, Wednesday, May 22, Pacific 123

Emily Lawhead (PhD ’22), Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Utah Museum of Fine Arts

Abstract: Heated debates have followed the emergence of new technologies in art for centuries. In fact, today’s discourse surrounding AI mimics historical reactions to and the trajectory of photography as an artistic medium. This talk will draw on the history of photography a data-based medium that has laid the groundwork for considering AI as a critical field of art history.

“Thinking with Your Hands:” A sketchnoting workshop with Dr. Aimee Morrison

On Friday, May 17 at 1:30 pm, Annual Lecturer Aimée Morrison will lead a hands-on workshop for NMCC affiliates interested in learning more about sketchnoting as a research practice. Tea will be served and art supplies will be provided!

Spots are limited – RSVP here! 

Grad students will receive priority, with any remaining spots going to faculty, staff, and undergraduate students in order of RSVP.

What is sketchnoting?

Also called visual note-taking, sketchnoting is the use of diagrams, symbols, drawings, doodles, illustrations, and other visual cues in combination with written notes. This creative, graphic note-taking style can improve focus and help with retention and synthesis of key information from a lecture or reading, and may be particularly helpful for neurodivergent folks. Here’s a quick video intro from Mike Rodhe, who has published a couple of books on the technique:

 

 

NMCC Annual Lecture: Dr. Aimee Morrison

Announcing the 2023-2024 NMCC Annual Lecture: Touch Grass, Thursday May 16th at 3pm, delivered by Dr. Aimée Morrison (Associate Professor of English Language + Literature), in the Knight Library Browsing Room. 

This talk considers how new media platforms, tools, and cultures might be leading us further and further away from our bodies and into our minds, to the detriment of each. The meme “Touch Grass,” an offhanded insult derived from therapy-speak lobbed at those we deem as having lost touch with reality from being extremely online, begins to capture a groundswell of discontent with the increasing virtuality of our everyday lives. By more closely delineating the links between embodied action and cognitive capacity, between producing and creating, we will consider how we might reorient our use of technology to support fully embodied human intelligence and ability, to allow us to “touch grass” more often and with less worry.

Dr. Morrison will also lead a grad workshop on sketch-noting on the afternoon of Friday, May 17th. More details to come.