Events

In this seminar Tony Xiang Ren will begin by presenting a paper on emerging cultural and industrial practices of Chinese Online Literature in the age of platformisation and transmediality. Chinese Online Literature started to boom in the 1990s and has evolved into a large scale, born-digital, publishing and transmedia entertainment industry. This storytelling industry has disrupted the established literary system. It further explores the paradoxical roles of platforms in the liberalisation of literature and the commercialisation of participatory literary production in the Chinese context. The paper highlights the changing practices of platforms, storytellers and fans in a transmedia and transcultural literary world and the interplay between the Chinese and global models of online publishing. After his presentation a panel consisting of A/Prof Kim Wilkins, Dr Helen Marshall and Emily Baulch will respond drawing on their experience of English language publishing dynamics and its transmedial and platformising literary worlds.

To honour and commemorate the life of one of Queensland’s most prominent artists and arts educators, the School of Communication and Arts at The University of Queensland, has established the biennial Daphne Mayo Visiting Professorship in Visual Culture.

In 2020 Professor Murray Smith will be presenting the Daphne Mayo Public Lecture entitled: Remain in Light: Philosophical Naturalism, Aesthetic Value, and Cultural Crosstalk.

Digital publishing is broadly defined in industry and policy contexts in China as including eBooks, digital newspapers, mobile publishing, blogging, internet advertising, digital music, online games, online animation and online education. According to the 2017/8 Annual Report of the Chinese Digital Publishing Industry, the total digital publishing revenue is 833 billion RMB (AU$ 170 billion), but the sectors closely related to print publishing like eBooks only account for 1.03%. What does this broad digital content system mean for publishers? What are the new opportunities in the age of disruption and convergence? And what are the unique digital publishing practices in China? In this lecture, I will give you a brief introduction of China’s digital publishing transformation through the case studies of initiatives in eBooks, audiobooks, social reading and transmedia adaptation. I will also discuss how China’s digital publishing innovation shed new light on the global understanding of publishing futures and the new opportunities for Australian publishers and writers in China’s emergent digital content markets. This seminar will be presented by Dr Tony Xiang Ren, University of Western Sydney and is timed so Writing, Editing and Publishing students are able to attend.

Join Professor Murray Smith from the University of Kent, UK, who will discuss the vast space of character design, within which there is room enough for the comic and the dramatic, the realist and the reflexive, the good, the bad, the ugly, and all points in between. Co-presented with the School of Communications and Arts, University of Queensland, this talk will be followed by a free screening of Chloé Zhao's The Rider 2017.

Presented by Doreen Busolo, this seminar exchange session will discuss if rural community radio contributes to the delivery of political, economic and social empowerment for women in Kenya. This study will also investigate the role of radio in communication for social change.

Over the last three decades, a network of globally distributed digital visual effects (VFX) companies have arisen from Hollywood’s traditional base in Los Angeles. What started out as a branch of computer sciences and their IT industry correlates hybridized into entities that are neither ‘inside’ the Hollywood studios traditional financial structures, nor entirely outside the value chains attached to Hollywood’s film output. The global VFX industries have functioned as networks of precarious creative industries, offering work for hire on a film by film, contract by contract basis. All of this has led to an industry defined by the migration of labour to an extent that has dwarfed even traditional Hollywood production.

Are you a first year Journalism or Communication student?
Make sure to register for our 1st Year Bootcamp where you will learn everything you need to know about radio, video and digital media! It is also a great way to meet new friends in your program!

We have some great prizes to give away and will be providing a free BBQ!

Want to know why we love UQ and life in Brisbane? Come along to our Welcome Celebration.
You can meet new friends, learn more about your program, and discuss job opportunities with School experts and other international students.

Hear Dr Leon Gurevitch talk through three main data visualisation projects undertaken in the last ten years including the unexpected positive outcomes and challenges to visualising data across different subject matters and industries.

The relationship between neuro-diversity and creativity has long been referred to but seldom understood. Conditions such as autism, dyslexia and ADHD have often been observed to play a part in creative and innovative thinking at the same time as there is an increasing body of research linking these same conditions to stark disparities in life chances. Neuro-diversity, it seems, has been a boon for creative thinkers. With computational models mimicking the logic of neural networks on the rise, this talk will consider the ways neural networks are currently being created and implemented to simulate and produce neuro-typical results. There are dangers in privileging neurotypicality over neuro-atypical serendipity. Building AI systems that ignore human neurological atypicality could be dangerous. In order to avoid replicating neuro-atypical invisibility neural-network research and more complex AI systems research must start addressing the role neurodiversity plays in producing novel and innovative breakthroughs.

There are many historical examples of art responding to imperatives from outside of art. AI seems set to have this kind of influence. There are examples of plausible-appearing AI-produced art. AI-written screenplays show that the machines still have a long way to go but they should alert us to possible futures in which our most celebrated artists are machines. I connect this issue with the long-running debate about whether it’s possible for a machine to think. This could make it rational for us to respond to AI art not with amusement, but with hostility.

Do you have a passion for writing?
Be one of the first to see the beautiful new space for students - The Writers Studio. At this welcome event you will meet like-minded students, listen to world-class readings and discover all the ways you can study writing at UQ!

A delicious spread of afternoon treats will also be provided.

What can philosophy bring to debates about how humans will inhabit the digital age? The particular debate I focus on concerns the role of humans in the economies of the future. We frequently hear that human workers face a threat from more efficient machines. What can we offer to compensate for the decline in the economic value of our efforts? There are too many overconfident forecasts about what the digital future offers us as social beings. Philosophers can bring the attitude of Socrates who said he knew nothing but at least knew that. Philosophers should be like Socrates challenging the overconfident forecasts of economists and technologists. When philosophers perform this service we should also avoid our own variety of overconfidence that comes from placing too much credence on what we take to be the most rationally coercive argument. In this context I argue for a significant expansion of the category of social work to protect against the divisive influences of social media and its filter bubbles.

Social media and search now dominate Australian media advertising expenditures and advertiser and marketer attention. However this advertising is some distance from our traditional advertising forms in that it is neither public nor visible. Instead it is taking place in a largely unregulated media space that lacks public visibility and scrutinising oversight. Presentations by: Tom O’Regan, Sam Kininmoth, Mark Andrejevic, Sven Broedmerkel, Richie Barker, and Jane Johnson. Discussants Katie Brennan, Franzisca Weder, Caroline Wilson-Barnao.
VIDEO AVAILABLE

Bodies and Devices: Geolocative Media explores the networked body as fundamental to understandings of both the body and the digital economy. The geolocated body is tracked, networked, coded, monitored and represented on a range of digital media platforms. This involves making available the body to the algorithmic and participatory logics of digital media platforms and an entangling of its experiences with these architectures. Presentations by: Peta Mitchell, Frederico Fialho Teixeira, Sarah Barns, Thao Phan, and Scott McQuire.
VIDEO AVAILABLE

Instagram’s large and engaged user base and distinctive everyday visual cultures have eluded intensive study due to the scarcity of methods for data collection and analysis. Instamancer is an Instagram data gathering tool developed for collecting and processing Instagram posts and media files without requiring access to an API. It was developed through both the "Platform Media: Algorithms, Accountability and Design" and is a key outcome of the Visual Social Media stream of the "Platform Media" initiative. It represents the experimental media and research ambitions of those involved in the Platform Media initiative focusing as it does on the developing and testing of new ideas for the media industry as well as critical scholarship in our respective fields of research. Presented by Nicholas Carah and Dan Angus.
VIDEO AVAILABLE

This presentation explores Instagram’s impact on art and visual culture by considering how it has shaped the production and consumption of street art in the public domain, sometimes affecting its appearance but also changing its context, production, audiences and meaning. While shaping these dynamics, the architecture of Instagram yields data that can help map and describe the contours and networks of graffiti and street art as a global system. Presented by Lachlan MacDowell.
VIDEO AVAILABLE

Since the introductions of YouTube (2005), Netflix (streaming since 2007) and Spotify (2008), users are increasingly accessing cultural products via streaming services instead of owning them. This on-demand access to vast digital catalogues of works combines technologies and business models in ways that are profoundly shaping cultural practice. Presenter Arnt Maasø discusses this shift towards streaming and the major international research project on streaming of which he is a part.
VIDEO AVAILABLE

This fascinating public lecture will take the form of a one-hour performance of Famished by Cherry Smyth, with accompanying soundtrack of music by composer Ed Bennett and expanded singing by Lauren Kinsella to draw on the power of collective lament. 

Processes of platformisation are the elephant in the room for not only cultural creators—whether they be film and TV producers, journalists, PR professionals, authors and publishers, theatre and visual artists--but also for each of the School of Communication and Arts’ aesthetic fields and disciplines. But we often don’t see it as a systemic process working its way in related ways across the entire architecture of our cultural fields bringing these cultural fields into new, contingent relations to each other. In this roundtable, presenter David Nieborg discusses these new configurations.

There is an incredible richness and nuance in the social functions, affect, localized norms, and experienced control in these visual practices of sharing and consuming selfies on visually oriented online platforms. Based on material gathered on and about Tumblr, Instagram and Snapchat over the past 7 years, this talk proposes some patterns about how people behave, how they make sense of what they are doing, and how that is imminent to discourses, norms and power hierarchies in the case of visual self-presentation on social media. Presenter: Katrin Tiidenberg.
VIDEO AVAILABLE