Upcoming Events
The Ammerman Center 18th Triennial on Arts & Technology
March 26-28 2026
Connecticut College
The Ammerman Center’s 2026 Symposium theme continues our questioning: What does it mean to be human, more-than-human, or within the spectrum between? What is the state of humanistic ideals in our precarious techno-political landscape? Scientific and technological advances affect bodies–as extensions, prostheses, knowledge producers, resistance, and beyond. This year’s theme seeks to read the human with and against the grain using art and technology as potent sites of inquiry.
“All Too Human” centers the Human and troubles its boundaries: it seeks definition into what is essential to the human, how humanness unites communities, yet also divides through xenophobia. It engages with the state of Humanism as a philosophy, and the challenges to it. How do technology and techno-optimism collide or collaborate with Humanism? How do we remain humanistic in the face of extreme strife, from authoritarian rule, to climate crisis, war, and automation? Who gets to decide what or who is human, and how are technological and representational systems implicated in this process?
“All Too Human” considers the Non-Human: it expresses the aspirations, anxieties and critical thought over the non-human as it becomes more powerful, autonomous, and generative. Is there a point at which technological agents could be considered human? What would other forms be that these agents could take that stretch or disrupt our understanding of what humanity is? As we grow more aware, through old and new ways of knowing, of the agency of non-humans from plants to animals to fungi, where are the lines drawn? And what is the role of art and technology in catalyzing and criticizing all of the above?
Past Events
ASPERA 2025 Conference
November 25-27 2025
University of Wollongong
As the shape of our natural environment, technologies, and social institutions bend and twist in unprecedented ways, this year’s conference spotlights the roles and possibilities of experimentation in Australia’s screen media ecologies. How does the act of experimentation—its curiosity, uncertainty, and contingencies—reshape the ways we teach, practice, and theorise screen media? How does the process of testing and tinkering enrich our storytelling? What happens when convention is destabilised by speculative, artificial, or unpredictable methodologies? And what is at stake for media ecologies devoid of risk taking?
Experimentation in screen production extends well beyond genre. At the inception of motion pictures, the technology arguably lacked purpose until practitioners like Georges Méliès toyed with its materiality. Within contemporary screen industries, innovation and originality emerge from divergent modes of testing and exploration.
Cinematographers experiment with lenses and lighting; costume designers with fabrics and stitching; directors and actors experiment with motivation or improvisation; writers with words and worlds; while motion designers and others are currently navigating the affordances of gen-AI. If experimentalism is embedded in the creative industries, what are the unique knowledges and skills of a professional experimenter?
MECCSA 2025 Conference
September 4-6 2025
Edinburgh Napier University
Media and culture play a crucial role in shaping identity, especially in contemporary contexts marked by economic struggles, conflict, and migration. The significance of identity is heightened as individuals navigate their sense of self in new and evolving cultural and social environments. This raises questions about how identities can be preserved or adapted, and the responsibilities of academics and researchers in addressing identities at risk.
Questions of identity have been at the heart of MeCCSA disciplines and debates for a long time. How identities are mediated and how they mediate themselves is often at the core of our work. sections and networks in many ways reflect this across gender, race and ethnicity, disability, social movements, etc. Our 2025 conference seeks to further this questioning, whilst also considering the issue of belonging. Whether we belong to research communities that embody media, communications or cultural studies, and whether we belong to groups that prioritise areas such as climate change, policy or conflict, this conference provides an opportunity to reflect on the character of our diverse disciplines and where we find spaces of belonging.
We envisage the conference to be a mix of scholarly papers, themed panels, posters, film screenings, performance, installations, and other practice-based or artistic research contributions.
Sound on Screen IV Conference
June 24-26 2025
Oxford Brookes University
The Sound on Screen research network at Oxford Brookes University are delighted to announce Sound on Screen IV, a three-day conference dedicated to exploring the intersection of sound, music, and screen media.
The programme committee consists of Dr. Jan Butler (Senior Lecturer in Popular Music, Oxford Brookes University), Dr. James Cateridge (Senior Lecturer in Film, Oxford Brookes University), and Dr. Matt Lawson (Senior Lecturer in Music, Oxford Brookes University), and Dr. Lindsay Steenberg (Reader in Film Studies, Oxford Brookes University).
VIVID - I Dream of Reality
June 4 & 6 2025
Bon Marche Studio
University of Technology Sydney
What if reality was a question, not an answer?
Step into a world where fact and fiction blur and experience multiple versions of the future in I Dream of Reality. This Extended Reality/Virtual Reality exhibition immerses you in alternate realities crafted by leading researchers and artists at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS).
Take a cyber shaman’s hand and be led through his layered childhood dreamscape. Explore the Australian landscape reimagined through new eyes as pasts and futures collide. Engage with 3D humans and AI-driven interactive exhibits that confront urgent questions about climate, technology and human nature.
Every experience is a question hanging in the air, a glimpse of a possible tomorrow. Walk away wondering: What was real? What was a dream? And does the line between them even matter?
SSAAANZ Conference
December 3-6 2024
Flinders University, Adelaide
In all aspects of Screen Studies there are elements of the seen and the unseen, the visible and the invisible, the recognised (canonised) and the forgotten and overlooked. Whether in the screen practices of producing images for the screen, in the industrial circumstances of funding, training, casting, and location scouting that occur behind the scenes, or as a consequence of regulation and censorship, the end result is a text that is made to be seen but which is an effect of invisible processes and events. Within screen texts there are narratives, visual and audio techniques, and conventions that toy with our perceptions of seen/unseen. Screen history itself has shed light on and elevated certain careers and texts and neglected others. These dynamics are core to Screen Studies research, where a key aim, underpinned by decolonising and feminist approaches, has been to bring ‘unseen’ histories, practices, and theories to the fore.
Visualisation Institute
HDR Symposium
2024 - 2025
University of Technology Sydney
Visualisation Institute + CPRG HDR Project Shares is an opportunity for students from FDS and FEIT to share a prototype, an artefact or a WIP from their creative practice / practice-based research. Rather than a presentation format, each student will have a space to set up their work in a common area and all students and guests will have time to walk around, experience and discuss their prototypes/artefacts with each other. This is an opportunity to connect with research students and supervisors working in similar ways or on similar topics across UTS.
Music Science Symposium
November 13 2023
Newcastle Conservatorium of Music
Following the successful 2022 Music Science Symposium at Western Sydney University, the University of Newcastle is hosting a second symposium this year. It is a one-day symposium on Monday 13 November 9am-5pm at the University of Newcastle Conservatorium of Music. The symposium will be fully catered thanks to generous support from the Musicological Society of Australia.
The symposium is aimed at HDR students (Honours also welcome) and ECRs, with the intention of encouraging and supporting emerging researchers. The event is free and we hope academics and students will come and enjoy some Newcastle hospitality! Music and Science is a broad term and might include music and cognition, health, wellbeing, sociology, performance science, composition and much more.