Guests of the Center for Digital Narrative
Visiting researchers and artists to the CDN
Main content
Current guests
Future guests
Jaroslav Švelch is an assistant professor at Charles University, Prague. He is the author of the recent monograph Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games (MIT Press, 2018). He has published work on history and theory of computer games, on humor in games and social media, and on the Grammar Nazi phenomenon. He is currently researching history, theory, and reception of monsters in games.
Tuuli Hongisto
Tuuli Hongisto is a PhD student majoring in comparative literature at the University of Helsinki. She has a background in comparative literature and would like to get involved with other researchers in the field of electronic literature. Computer-generated literature has interested her for a while now and she had computer science as a minor in her master’s degree. Her MA thesis was on the topic of "Essential narrative features in story-generating algorithms”, focusing on what characteristics of narrative the developers of story-generation programs regarded as most desirable (in programs developed in the context of research into computational creativity, such as Tale-Spin, Minstrel and Mexica).
David Bithell
David Bithell is an interdisciplinary composer, artist, and performer exploring the connections between visual art, music, theater, and performance. Utilizing new technologies and real-time interactive environments, his work brings the precision and structure of contemporary music and audio practices together with an understanding of performance, narrative, and humor drawn from recent theater, live cinema, and performance art.He currently is an Associate Professor of Digital Art at Southern Oregon University where he heads the Cross-disciplinary Studio for Art and Technology (xARTS) and is a core faculty member of the Center for Emerging Media and Digital Arts (EMDA).
Nataliya Gorbina
Nataliya is a Walter Benjamin postdoctoral fellow at the University of Konstanz (Germany), working on a project on the biophilic (eco-)poetics of video games. Her project has a focus on contemporary narrative experiences. Her current research is dedicated to an investigation of the (eco-)poetics of video games as a poetics of biophilia. The project suggests that biophilia constitutes one of the major grand narratives of the contemporary condition of metamodernity and finds particular expression in video games as cultural artefacts. She is especially interested in the evocation of the biophilic impulse through the processes of both reception (players’ engagement with virtual nature) and creation (environmental awareness in game design).
Former guests
Søren Pold
"Søren Bro Pold (Digital Aesthetic Research Center, Aarhus University) has published on digital and media aesthetics – from the 19th century panorama to the interface in its different forms, e.g., electronic literature, net art, software art, platforms, AI, and digital culture. His main research field is interface criticism which discusses the role and the development of the interface for art, literature, aesthetics, culture and IT. He has also taken part in collaborative artistic research with e.g., The Poetry Machine and the Covid E-lit projects. He co-chaired the ELO 2021 conference."
Joellyn Rock
"Joellyn Rock is an Associate Professor of Art and Design at University of Minnesota Duluth. Her creative work includes digital print, interactive narrative, and experimental multimedia in a range of hybrid text/image/video projects. Interested in how emerging media is reshaping the ways that stories can be told, Rock helped establish the Motion and Media Across Disciplines Lab at UMD. Collaborating with writers, coders, dancers, actors, and other visual artists, Rock contributes to experiments with networked improvised literature or Netprov."
Rob Wittig
"Rob Wittig is co-founder (1983) of IN.S.OMNIA, a literary electronic bulletin board system that pioneered the creative possibilities of the electrosphere and has been termed "legendary" by cyber-chronicler Howard Rheingold. Rob's book, Invisible Rendezvous, Connection and Collaboration in the New Landscape of Electronic Writing (Wesleyan University Press, 1994), based on Fulbright work with Jacques Derrida, is an analysis of this early period of electronic literature. Rob coordinated several collaborations with members of the legendary French experimental literary group Ou.Li.Po. for IN.S.OMNIA. He also created web literature projects such as the faux-vernacular "Fall of the Site of Marsha," the chatroom novel "Friday's Big Meeting," and the hand-illustrated e-mail novel "Blue Company." Rob has worked and played for years in the graphic design and publishing industry. He teaches graphic design, art history and writing studies at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. He completed an MA in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen, Norway in 2011."
Tyne Daile Sumner
Researcher, The Australian National University
Tyne Daile Sumner is a researcher, writer, and public speaker at The Australian National University (ANU). Her work focuses on the intersection of surveillance studies, digital culture, and the humanities. She explores how literary texts help us understand human subjectivity under conditions of datafication.
Tyne’s first book, Lyric Eye: The Poetics of Twentieth-Century Surveillance (2021), delves into the relationship between 20th-century American poetry and surveillance. Currently, she is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow, working on her project titled 'Beyond Big Brother: New Narratives for Understanding Surveillance’. She is also President of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (aaDH) and on the international Steering Committee of the Art, AI & Digital Ethics research collective.
Kate McDowell
Associate Professor of Information Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Kate McDowell regularly teaches both storytelling and data storytelling courses. She researches and publishes in the areas of storytelling as information research, social justice storytelling, and what library storytelling can teach the information sciences about data storytelling. Her projects engage contexts such as libraries, non-profit fundraising, health misinformation, social justice in libraries, and others. Dr. McDowell has worked with regional, national, and international nonprofits including the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO, part of WHO) and the Public Library Association (PLA). Her nationally-funded project Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians with co-PI Dr. Matthew Turk is under development.
Her storytelling research has involved training collaborations with advancement with both the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and the University of Illinois system (Chicago, Springfield), storytelling consulting work for multiple nonprofits including the 50th anniversary of the statewide Prairie Rivers Network that protects Illinois water, and storytelling workshops for the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI). She formerly served as interim associate dean for Academic Affairs and assistant dean for Student Affairs and has led multiple transformative projects for the School.
Ben Grosser
Professor of New Media, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Ben Grosser creates interactive experiences, machines, and systems that examine the cultural, social, and political effects of software. Recent exhibitions include Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Barbican Centre and Somerset House in London, Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin, SXSW in Austin, and the Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo. His projects have been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, El País, and Folha. The Guardian (UK) proclaimed Grosser’s film ORDER OF MAGNITUDE to be a definitive artwork of the 21st century, “a mesmerising monologue, the story of our times.” RTÉ (Ireland) dubbed him an “antipreneur,” and Slate commended his work as “creative civil disobedience in the digital age.”
His artworks are regularly cited in books investigating the cultural effects of technology, including The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, The Metainterface, and Investigative Aesthetics, as well as volumes centered on computational art practices such as Electronic Literature, The New Aesthetic and Art, and Digital Art. Grosser is Professor of New Media in the School of Art & Design, co-founder of the Critical Technology Studies Lab at NCSA, and an affiliate faculty member with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and the School of Information Sciences. He was a recent Fellow and is now a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
