Home | Navigating Digital Futures

You are invited to KU’s Summit on Navigating Digital Futures, an interdisciplinary symposium sponsored by the Office of the Provost and organized by faculty from the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications, and School of the Arts. The summit is aimed at encouraging research collaborations in digital-related areas.

The summit will be held in The Commons at KU from 9 a.m.-1 p.m. on Friday, September 18, 2015.

Please join us for this opportunity to share ongoing research and make interdisciplinary connections within the KU community that could lead to collaboration, innovation, and grant funding.

The summit will feature two keynote speakers—Wendy Guillies, President and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and Golan Levin, a digital media artist, professor and Director of the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University. Following the speakers, the symposium will proceed as an “unconference,” an interactive, collaborative format designed to generate ideas for future research projects and collaborations.

We hope you will join us for this exciting opportunity. See the full conference schedule

Navigating Digital Futures Planning Committee

Associate Professor Genelle Belmas I gbelmas@ku.edu
William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications

Assistant Professor Germaine Halegoua I grhalegoua@ku.edu
College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, Department of Film and Media Studies

Featured Speaker - Golan Levin

Golan Levin is an artist, researcher and educator interested in new modes of interactive expression and nonverbal communication. Through performances, responsive artifacts, and virtual environments, Levin applies creative twists to digital technologies that highlight our relationship with machines, expand the vocabulary of human action, and awaken participants to their own potential as creative actors. Levin’s current research, a form of speculative HCI, explores the artistic potential of interactive robotics, gesture analysis/synthesis, and the theme of gaze as a primary new mode for human-to-artwork communication.

Levin is presently Associate Professor of Electronic Art at Carnegie Mellon University, where his pedagogy is concerned with reclaiming computation as a medium of personal expression. He teaches code-oriented “studio arts courses in computer science” on themes like participatory art, generative form, information visualization, and audiovisual interaction. Levin holds courtesy appointments in Design and Computer Science, and since January 2009 has also served as Director of CMU’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, a “meta-laboratory” and media kitchen dedicated to the support of atypical, interdisciplinary and inter- institutional research at the intersection of arts, science, technology and culture.

Levin has spent more than 20 years as an artist embedded within high-technology research environments, including the MIT Media Laboratory, Ars Electronica Futurelab, Interval Research Corporation, and the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology. His work has appeared in the Whitney Biennial, and has been recognized with grants from Creative Capital, the Rockefeller MAP Fund, Arts Council England, and others. Levin exhibits and lectures widely in Europe, the Americas and Asia; his work is represented by the Bitforms Gallery, New York City.

Featured Speaker - Wendy Guillies

Wendy Guillies is the president and chief executive officer of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Established in Kansas City, Missouri, by the late entrepreneur and philanthropist, Ewing Marion Kauffman, the Foundation is one of the largest private foundations in the United States with an asset base of more than $2 billion.

In her role, Guillies works in close partnership with the Foundation’s Board of Trustees and senior leadership team to realize Ewing Kauffman’s vision of fostering a society of economically independent individuals who are engaged citizens in their communities. In service of this vision, the Foundation focuses grantmaking and operations on two areas – education and entrepreneurship – that Ewing Kauffman saw as two ends of a continuum.

Guillies joined the Foundation in April 2000, and has played an instrumental role in not only leading the Foundation team, but also building the Foundation’s local, national and global reputation as a thought leader and innovator in its fields. Among her accomplishments, she developed, launched and has overseen the growth of one of the Kauffman Foundation’s most far-reaching and highly-leveraged initiatives in Global Entrepreneurship Week, now in its eighth year and involving a big effort in Kansas City and in communities in 150 countries around the world.

Guillies serves on the board of Kauffman FastTrac, the Foundation’s longest-running entrepreneurship education program. She was appointed in 2014 to the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce’s Board of Directors and Executive Committee. She also was selected for the 2014 class of Women Executives in Kansas City by Ingram’s magazine. She is an alumnus of Kansas City Centurions, a civic leadership program of the Chamber of Commerce.

Search form

Featured Speaker - Golan Levin

Featured Speaker - Wendy Guillies

@kudigifutures