Innovation Showcase
Researchers and innovators present products or research and development. All presentations should be grounded in the presenter's research experience. Promotional conversations are permissible, however, products or services may not be sold at the conference venue.
How Comedy Interacts with Technology to Enhance Immersion in Story-worlds: How Can New Technologies Offer More Scope for Storytelling?
Innovation Showcase Rachel Genn
I describe how different technologies and incarnations of the image have contributed to my work on the role of regret in addiction which began in Neuroscience. From a gallery installation of the National Facility for the Regulation of Regret (2015 and accompanying 360 tours) to an Aesthetica Short Film Festival (ASSF) selected film (2016) and online reality (VR) experience associated with the quasi-facility, I have exploited technologies appropriate to the rich storytelling seam that regret opens up. The Regret-o-Tron (2016) was a reinvention of digital psychological testing for Festival of the Mind, ostensibly uncovering individuals' propensity to regret. I have also recently proposed telling the story of lives lived with compulsions in an embodied VR experience. My latest project, "Bouquet" is an audio documentary of my family's understandings of their own and each others' various addictions. Using photographic and video examples, I focus particularly on how comedy can enhance a meaningful interface with technology and heighten rather than diminish immersion in story-worlds.
America the Borderland: Transdisciplinary Photography Education in Action
Innovation Showcase Glenna Jennings, Leora Kahn
“America the Borderland, a Moral Courage Project” is a trans-disciplinary, educational, research-based project that took place along the US-Mexico border between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez from 2017-19. A team of educators and students from the University of Dayton, Ohio teamed up with the New York-based non-profit PROOF: Media for Social Justice to tell the stories of citizens and upstanders facing issues directly related to the border, with a focus on the political, social and cultural narratives that are the current focus of international media and government attention. Glenna Jennings (Associate Professor, Photography) and Leora Kahn (Executive Director, PROOF) worked alongside their students and colleagues from Political Science, Sociology, English, Human Rights Studies and Art and Design to create photographs and conduct interviews with participants including deported US war veterans, immigration attorneys, civil rights activists and visual artists. Employing methods that privilege story-telling within a Human Rights framework, they worked with dozens of individuals and a number of organizations to produce an exhibition, pod-cast, and zine. Jennings and Kahn present documentation of the project alongside excerpts from the podcast, and other published materials in order to discuss the role social documentary photography can play in cross-disciplinary endeavors. They share the visual stories of individuals who are playing key roles in the current US - Mexico “border crisis” to protect immigrant and refugee rights, secure civil rights, and celebrate the unique Fronteriza culture that enriches and defines the southern US borderland.
