Digital Studio Seminar Series

2020 research seminars and series

The Digital Studio hosts a diverse range of seminars, leading debates and discussion for digital scholars; whether critics, creatives or champions.

Semester 1

Seeing Double: The Multiple Worlds of Virtual Reality

Histories of virtual reality routinely tell a story of progress, in which early attempts to simulate the real are trumped first by photography, then film, and now by the digital. This is perhaps why digital VR is often quarantined from its non-digital doubles – photography and film, but also literature, painting, theatre, and architecture. This seminar series will highlight this diverse repertoire of virtual realities, focusing on the exchanges between digital and analogue, and on the relations that contemporary virtual realities have, or may have, with their pasts. This seminar series is presented by the Digital Studio in partnership with the Enlightenment, Romanticism Contemporary Culture research unit.

Semester 2

Redefining Digital Keywords: From Digital Archaisms to (Post)Pandemic Neologisms

Curated by Dr Natalia Grincheva (Senior Research Fellow at the Digital Studio) In 2016 Benjamin Peters published his edited collection Digital Keywords (Princeton University Press). With provocative short essays from international digital media scholars in anthropology, history, political science, philosophy, religious studies, rhetoric, science and technology studies, and sociology, the book explored and critiqued the rich vocabulary of the growing field of digital humanities on 25 keywords, ranging from meme to surrogate, from forum to mirror, from cloud to digital. The pandemic outbreak has challenged and reconfigured human experience across physical, social and digital realities, and hence urges us to revisit our digital keywords vocabulary. This global webinar series will bring together leading digital humanities scholars to reflect upon their original contributions to the Digital Keywords. Each webinar will focus on two digital phenomena and their corresponding keywords to explore how their meanings are changing in the face of disruptions caused by lockdowns or social distancing, and what new cultural practices, social challenges and political implications emerge around the new digital vocabulary.

2019 research seminars and series

The Digital Studio hosts a diverse range of seminars, leading debates and discussion for digital scholars; whether critics, creatives or champions.

Digital Politics

The digital environment and the political sphere are now inextricably linked. Digital interference in elections, the rise of online activism, and everyday understandings of politics mediated via Twitter or Facebook, raise new issues for research. What are the digital trends, actors and interventions that are critical to the activity of democracy, policy formation, and political activism? This seminar series examined these intersections between the digital and the political. This seminar series is presented by the Digital Studio in partnership with the School of Social and Political Sciences and The Policy Lab.

Indigenous Australia and Digital Futures

Digital technology is rapidly changing the transmission of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ history and contemporary culture; both within Indigenous communities and for settler Australia. Presenting the work of researchers engaged with the influence of digital technologies on Indigenous futures in Australia, this seminar series interrogated questions of cultural expression, activism, relationality, sovereignty, and decolonisation within the digital world.

This seminar series was presented by the Digital Studio in partnership with the Indigenous-Settler Relations Collaboration.