Keynote Addresses
Opening Keynote: The Future of Entertainment
Source: Microsoft.com
Robert J. Bach, Microsoft
President, Entertainment & Devices
3:30 to 4:30 p.m.*
Hill Hall Auditorium
*Festival welcome and speaker introductions commence at 3:00 p.m. in Hill Hall Auditorium
President of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division and UNC alum Robbie Bach will discuss the exciting convergence of technology, entertainment and digital media. Breakthroughs in computing, innovations in storytelling and breathtaking advances in digital art are combining to create a new generation of entertainment. Bach will share his vision for the Future of Entertainment and his advice for the industry’s most promising creators: today’s digital arts and humanities students.
As president of the Entertainment & Devices (E&D) Division at Microsoft Corp., Robbie Bach, a Carolina alum, drives the company's Connected Entertainment vision, offering consumers new and compelling, branded entertainment experiences across music, gaming, video and mobile communications. Bach's responsibilities include guiding software, services and hardware innovation throughout Microsoft's entertainment and mobility platforms, and bringing those solutions to market with retailers and partners. Bach also manages Microsoft's worldwide retail relationships as well as media and entertainment partner relationships.
Bach has worked on a variety of Microsoft products, including managing the global launches of Xbox and Xbox 360 in his dual role as chief Xbox officer and head of the Home and Entertainment Group - a global division that was responsible for Xbox, Games for Windows, the Microsoft TV platform, and consumer hardware and software products.
Bach has a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MBA from Stanford University. (Source: Microsoft.com)
President, Entertainment & Devices
3:30 to 4:30 p.m.*
Hill Hall Auditorium
*Festival welcome and speaker introductions commence at 3:00 p.m. in Hill Hall Auditorium
President of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division and UNC alum Robbie Bach will discuss the exciting convergence of technology, entertainment and digital media. Breakthroughs in computing, innovations in storytelling and breathtaking advances in digital art are combining to create a new generation of entertainment. Bach will share his vision for the Future of Entertainment and his advice for the industry’s most promising creators: today’s digital arts and humanities students.
As president of the Entertainment & Devices (E&D) Division at Microsoft Corp., Robbie Bach, a Carolina alum, drives the company's Connected Entertainment vision, offering consumers new and compelling, branded entertainment experiences across music, gaming, video and mobile communications. Bach's responsibilities include guiding software, services and hardware innovation throughout Microsoft's entertainment and mobility platforms, and bringing those solutions to market with retailers and partners. Bach also manages Microsoft's worldwide retail relationships as well as media and entertainment partner relationships.
Bach has worked on a variety of Microsoft products, including managing the global launches of Xbox and Xbox 360 in his dual role as chief Xbox officer and head of the Home and Entertainment Group - a global division that was responsible for Xbox, Games for Windows, the Microsoft TV platform, and consumer hardware and software products.
Bach has a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MBA from Stanford University. (Source: Microsoft.com)
Keynote Conversation: Collaborative Authorship: Writing Zombies into Austen
By Jane Austen and Steve Hockensmith
Steve Hockensmith and Jason Rekulak
1:00 to 2:00 p.m.
Hyde Hall University Room
This keynote conversation will explore the changing meaning of "authorship" that technology in particular has enabled by examining remix and mashup in literature and art. During this intimate conversation, the creative director behind the Austen mash-up hits, Rekulak, will discuss collaborative authorship with Hockensmith, author of the forthcoming prequel to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Hockensmith also will read excerpts from Dawn of the Dreadfuls.
1:00 to 2:00 p.m.
Hyde Hall University Room
This keynote conversation will explore the changing meaning of "authorship" that technology in particular has enabled by examining remix and mashup in literature and art. During this intimate conversation, the creative director behind the Austen mash-up hits, Rekulak, will discuss collaborative authorship with Hockensmith, author of the forthcoming prequel to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Hockensmith also will read excerpts from Dawn of the Dreadfuls.
- Jason Rekulak is associate publisher and creative director of Quirk Books, where he conceived, acquired, and edited the novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. The book has spent more than 40 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List and is currently in development as a motion picture starring Natalie Portman. He lives in Philadelphia.
- Steve Hockensmith - the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls, a prequel to the bestselling horror/martial arts/Regency romance mash-up. He also writes the Holmes on the Range mystery series, which stars two cowboy brothers who set out to solve crimes using the methods of their hero, Sherlock Holmes.
Keynote: From Knowledge to Knowledge-able
Source: Kansas State U. Anthropology
Michael Wesch
Cultural Anthropologist, Kansas State University
4:00 to 5:30 p.m.
Hill Hall Auditorium
The new media environment can be disruptive to our current teaching methods and philosophies. As we increasingly move toward an environment of instant and infinite information, it becomes less important for students to know, memorize or recall information, and more important for them to be able to find, sort, analyze, share, discuss, critique and create information and knowledge.
They need to move from being simply knowledgeable to being knowledge-able. This “knowledge-ability” is not simply a skill set as implied by the “21st Century Skills” movement, but a way of being-in-the-world in which people recognize and actively examine, question and even re-create the (increasingly digital) structures that shape our world.
Knowledge-ability must begin with the recognition that new media are not “just tools” but new ways of relating to one another that entail disruptive changes in economic, social and political structures.
This presentation explores what knowledge-ability needs to be, why it is important and how education can and must change to foster the forms of knowledge-building, epistemology and self-understanding we need.
Dubbed "the explainer" by Wired magazine, Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist exploring the effects of new media on society and culture. After two years studying the implications of writing on a remote indigenous culture in the rain forest of Papua New Guinea, he has turned his attention to the effects of social media and digital technology on global society.
His videos on culture, technology, education and information have been viewed by millions, translated in more than 15 languages, and are frequently featured at international film festivals and major academic conferences worldwide. Click here to view Wesch's "The Machine is Us/ing Us" on YouTube.
Wesch has won several major awards for his work, including a Wired Magazine Rave Award, the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in Media Ecology, and he was recently named an Emerging Explorer by National Geographic. He has also won several teaching awards, including the 2008 CASE/Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year for Doctoral and Research Universities. (Source: Kansas State University Anthropology Web site)
Cultural Anthropologist, Kansas State University
4:00 to 5:30 p.m.
Hill Hall Auditorium
The new media environment can be disruptive to our current teaching methods and philosophies. As we increasingly move toward an environment of instant and infinite information, it becomes less important for students to know, memorize or recall information, and more important for them to be able to find, sort, analyze, share, discuss, critique and create information and knowledge.
They need to move from being simply knowledgeable to being knowledge-able. This “knowledge-ability” is not simply a skill set as implied by the “21st Century Skills” movement, but a way of being-in-the-world in which people recognize and actively examine, question and even re-create the (increasingly digital) structures that shape our world.
Knowledge-ability must begin with the recognition that new media are not “just tools” but new ways of relating to one another that entail disruptive changes in economic, social and political structures.
This presentation explores what knowledge-ability needs to be, why it is important and how education can and must change to foster the forms of knowledge-building, epistemology and self-understanding we need.
Dubbed "the explainer" by Wired magazine, Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist exploring the effects of new media on society and culture. After two years studying the implications of writing on a remote indigenous culture in the rain forest of Papua New Guinea, he has turned his attention to the effects of social media and digital technology on global society.
His videos on culture, technology, education and information have been viewed by millions, translated in more than 15 languages, and are frequently featured at international film festivals and major academic conferences worldwide. Click here to view Wesch's "The Machine is Us/ing Us" on YouTube.
Wesch has won several major awards for his work, including a Wired Magazine Rave Award, the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in Media Ecology, and he was recently named an Emerging Explorer by National Geographic. He has also won several teaching awards, including the 2008 CASE/Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year for Doctoral and Research Universities. (Source: Kansas State University Anthropology Web site)
Keynote: Gaming and the Future of the Arts and Humanities
Jesper Juul
Game Theorist, Visiting Professor at the NYU Game Center
2:30 to 4:00 p.m.
Frank Porter Graham Student Union, Auditorium
As of 2010, more than 50% of the general population plays digital games on a regular basis. To play video games has become the norm, not to play is the exception. In this talk, Juul argues that video games derive their power from the way they fit into our everyday lives. The meaning of a video game comes not just from its theme, but from the way it fits into social situations and the way it lets players experience personal development, failure and success, firsthand. This is what makes video games the most emotional of all art forms, this is the secret of their success, and this shows us what they are going to become.
Jesper Juul is an influential theorist in the field of video game studies. A visiting professor at the New York University Game Center, Juul holds a Ph.D. in video game theory from the Center for Computer Games Research in Copenhagen, where he held a position as an assistant professor until mid-2007.
Though his 1998 thesis work concerned the rejection of narrative as a useful tool for understanding video games, and though Jesper Juul is often considered a ludologist, his more recent work deals with the fictional aspects of video games as well.
Juul's book on video game theory, Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds was published by MIT Press in 2005. Half-Real was named by designer Ernest Adams as one of the 50 Books for Everyone in the Game Industry.
Juul has also worked as a designer and programmer in video game and chat development, and participated in the Indie Game Jam.
Juul runs a blog on video game theory, The Ludologist. (Source: Wikipedia as of Nov. 18, 2009)
Game Theorist, Visiting Professor at the NYU Game Center
2:30 to 4:00 p.m.
Frank Porter Graham Student Union, Auditorium
As of 2010, more than 50% of the general population plays digital games on a regular basis. To play video games has become the norm, not to play is the exception. In this talk, Juul argues that video games derive their power from the way they fit into our everyday lives. The meaning of a video game comes not just from its theme, but from the way it fits into social situations and the way it lets players experience personal development, failure and success, firsthand. This is what makes video games the most emotional of all art forms, this is the secret of their success, and this shows us what they are going to become.
Jesper Juul is an influential theorist in the field of video game studies. A visiting professor at the New York University Game Center, Juul holds a Ph.D. in video game theory from the Center for Computer Games Research in Copenhagen, where he held a position as an assistant professor until mid-2007.
Though his 1998 thesis work concerned the rejection of narrative as a useful tool for understanding video games, and though Jesper Juul is often considered a ludologist, his more recent work deals with the fictional aspects of video games as well.
Juul's book on video game theory, Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds was published by MIT Press in 2005. Half-Real was named by designer Ernest Adams as one of the 50 Books for Everyone in the Game Industry.
Juul has also worked as a designer and programmer in video game and chat development, and participated in the Indie Game Jam.
Juul runs a blog on video game theory, The Ludologist. (Source: Wikipedia as of Nov. 18, 2009)
Interested in sponsorship opportunities? Contact Megan Granda, IAH executive director and festival director, at (919) 843-2653 or mgranda@unc.edu.