📢 Graduate student opportunity! Join our team this Fall 2025 to support website management, communications, and research development at the Humanities Institute.

📩 For details, contact Jeff Meserve: [email protected]

On Monday night, DFMI sponsored an event at Dadalab's MeMerMo focused on energy, which included three performances from local sound artists.

This morning, on Day 3, Claire Fitch led another workshop titled "Co/lapse: Lasering Fields," which figured the field as a volume and temporal process, positioning our research as happening within.

Thanks to Rachel for some of these photos!

And DWRL AD Claire Fitch led part two of the workshop: "Distances & Depths" at the Tom Miller dam. We used EMF, hydrophones, thermal imaging, handheld scanners, and microscopes to explore the energetic lifeline of Austin.

We recapped at Mozart's on the river.

On Tuesday morning, DWRL ADs @hannahhopkins.bsky.social and @trentwintermeier.bsky.social led a workshop at the Seaholm Power Plant, which explored the scales required to investigate energy's contours and expose its capacities.

Finally, Dr. Craig Campbell, Associate Professor of Anthropology, delivered our first of two talks: "Retrieving the Solar from the Anus: Mazing Zines to Explore the Banal Energetics of the Sun."

DWRL ADs Claire Fitch and Kimber Harrison led our first workshop, "Kinetic Chaos: (Un)Direction in Motion," which explored chaos not as a disorder to be directed, but as a dynamic, generative force.

@caseyboyle.fail opened up the week on Monday morning, and participants also had the chance to snatch some propulsions in windroom: our first circulation of the week.

Today marks the halfway point of on-site week during DFMI 2025! Here's a thread of what we've been up to for the past few days 🧵

DFMI 2025: ENERGY - DAY 4

On Thursday, DFMI participants logged and introduced energy through cyanotyping. Check out what @martheawebber.bsky.social, @mez-rperez.bsky.social, and Jered Mabaquiao are working on!

DFMI 2025: ENERGY - DAY 3

Today we start off with a talk by @melhogan.bsky.social titled "The Carbon Costs of AI Companionship."

Drawing on critical media theory and the environmental humanities, the talk situates the fantasy of scalable AI companionship within logics of platform capitalism.

🤖💡💸

And in our second exercise of the week, "Wayfinding: From Nodes to Pathways," participants explored energy and energetic systems as methods for situating fields.

Each assignment is printed out on seed paper, growing into wildflowers.

"Your impulses are their own kinds of energy: follow them."

DFMI 2025: ENERGY – DAY 2

Today we heard from our first speaker, @apasek.bsky.social. “Energy is the Raw Material of the Cloud” focused on mapping where data is housed, alongside discussion of local land use conflicts, wobbling climate pledges, and the utopian hopes for a digital future.

⚡️🖥️🛜🔌

This July 7th MeMerMo has paired up with the Digital Field Methods Institute at UT Austin to host a night of soundscapes crafted around the theme of energetic soundscapes – the acoustic reverberations, resonances, and traces of energy composing our fields.

All are invited to attend! See you there!

DFMI 2025: ENERGY kickoff begins at 1pm! Stay tuned for more updates from our online week.

The fine folks of UT Austin's Digital Field Methods Institute are hosting me as a keynote this year. This means that I get the coolest mail! Y'all are setting quite the feast.