The exhibition takes place in The Media Arts, Data, and Design (MADD) Center on the first floor of the John Crerar Library (5730 S Ellis Ave, Chicago) 

• Open to the public Mondays – Fridays, 10am – 5pm, from September 27 – December 8, 2021
• A closing party will be held, COVID-19 protocol permitting, on Wednesday, December 8 at 5pm local time, at which point the posters will be dispersed.

All individuals are required to wear a face-covering over the nose and the mouth at all times while in the John Crerar Library and while viewing the exhibition.

Please note: this exhibition is open to all invitees who are compliant with UChicago vaccination requirements regardless of vaccination status and, because of ongoing health risks particularly to the unvaccinated, participants are expected to adopt the risk mitigation measures (masking and social distancing, etc.) appropriate to their vaccination status as advised by public health officials or to their individual vulnerabilities as advised by a medical professional. Public convening may not be safe for all and carries a risk for contracting COVID-19, particularly for those unvaccinated. Participants will not know the vaccination status of others and should follow appropriate risk mitigation measures.

The Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry promotes in-depth engagement with the Smart Museum’s collections and exhibitions by supporting the use of art as a pedagogical resource, developing curricular exhibitions, and providing a range of unique student opportunities, both undergraduate and graduate The Feitler Center advances connections—across the University of Chicago’s fields and disciplines—through which all students and faculty can powerfully experience and study works of art. The Center fosters interdisciplinary scholarship, highlights the many ways that art can animate that scholarship, and supports the University's core commitment to free and open discourse. Learn more 

• Introduction by W.J.T. Mitchell
• Hillary Chute on "MetaComics"
• Response by Bill Brown
• Patrick Jagoda on "MetaGames"
• Response by Ashlyn Sparrow
• Break
• W.J.T. Mitchell on "MetaMedia"
• Response from Hillary Chute and Patrick Jagoda

W. J. T. Mitchell, Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Professor of English, Art History, and Cinema Studies, University of Chicago
I teach in the English, Art History, and Cinema Studies departments and am the Senior Editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. I work particularly on the history and theories of media, visual art, and literature, from the eighteenth century to the present. My work explores the relations of visual and verbal representations in the culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). In addition to publications resulting from my own research, under my editorship Critical Inquiry has published special issues on public art, psychoanalysis, pluralism, feminism, the sociology of literature, canons, race and identity, narrative, the politics of interpretation, postcolonial theory, and many other topics. As a teacher I try to encourage students from a variety of disciplinary locations to think about such topics as: "Space, Place, and Landscape," "Fetishism, Totemism, Idolatry," "The Eye and the Gaze," "Violence and Representation," and "The Arts of Memory." A few years ago, I developed what has proven an especially successful course in "Theories of Media." My books have received the Morey Prize (for Art History), the Lowell Prize (for Literature) and the Laing Prize for Best Book of the Year by a Chicago author, twice.

Hillary Chute, Distinguished Professor of English and Art + Design, Northeastern University
Hillary Chute’s work focuses on comics and graphic novels, contemporary fiction, visual studies, American literature, gender and sexuality studies, literature and the arts, critical theory, and media studies. She is the author of Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (Columbia University Press, 2010), Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Harvard University Press, 2016), and Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere (Harper, 2017). She is also associate editor of Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus (Pantheon, 2011), which won a National Jewish Book Award, among other prizes. She recently co-edited the Critical Inquiry special issue “Comics & Media” (University of Chicago Press, 2014), and in 2006 she co-edited the MFS: Modern Fiction Studies special issue “Graphic Narrative,” the first issue of a journal in the field of literature devoted to analyzing comics. She has written for publications including Artforum, Bookforum, The Believer, and Poetry. She was associate professor of English, and an associate faculty member in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago before joining the Northeastern faculty. Chute serves on the Executive Committee of Northeastern’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. She is a comics and graphic novels columnist for the The New York Times Book Review.

Patrick Jagoda, Professor of English and Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago
I am Professor of English and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. I specialize in media theory, game studies and design, and twentieth and twenty-first century American literature and culture. Alongside this position, I am the co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and the Transmedia Story Lab. I also serve as Executive Editor of the interdisciplinary journal Critical Inquiry. I am faculty director of the Weston Game Lab and the Media Arts and Design minor at the University of Chicago. I have helped develop game studies and game design at the University of Chicago.

Additionally, I am the author of Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Network Aesthetics (University of Chicago Press, 2016), and co-author with Michael Maizels of The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (MIT Press, 2016). I am currently working on a collaborative multimedia book, Story Lab: Collaborative Narrative Methods for a Transmedia Era (under contract with Stanford University Press). Along with these books, I have edited several books and special issues; published over thirty essays in humanistic journals such as American Journal of Play, American Literary History, American Literature, boundary 2, Critical Inquiry, differences, Modern Philology, PMLA, and Social Text; multimedia journals such as Audiovisual Thinking, hyperrhiz, Kairos, and Thresholds; and scientific journals such as Journal of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology, Journal of STEM Education, and Sex Education. I have co-directed a number of board, card, video, and alternate reality game projects. 

Bill Brown, Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture, University of Chicago
In the past, my research has focused on popular literary genres (e.g. science fiction, the Western), on recreational forms (baseball, kung fu), and on the ways that mass-cultural phenomena (from roller coasters to Kodak cameras) impress themselves on the literary imagination. Rather than assuming that historical contexts explain a particular literary text, I assume that literature provides access to an otherwise irrecuperable history. In other words, I believe that the act of literary analysis (including formal analysis) can become an historiographical operation all its own.

More recently, I have worked at the intersection of literary, visual, and material cultures, with an emphasis on whatI call "object relations in an expanded field." I ask how inanimate objects enable human subjects (individually and collectively) to form and transform themselves—and indeed how objects and subjects transform one another. In a short piece called "Thing Theory," I began to point out how things and thingness might become new objects of critical analysis. InOther Things—focusing such analysis through ‘The Matter of Modernism,’ ‘Unhuman History,’ and ‘Kitsch Kulchur’—I engage a very wide range of work: Bergson, Bachelard, Arendt, Latour; Homer, Virginia Woolf, Philip K. Dick, Shawn Wong; Man Ray, Spike Lee, Dan Flavin, Brian Jungen. Dislodging the object-thing distinction from fundamental ontology (Heidegger) and from psychoanalysis (Lacan), I use it as a toolfor apprehending the unanticipated force of an object, however banal that object may be. This is a new materialism within which the thingness of an object cannot be abstracted from the fields of culture and history. Currently I’m at work on a project called “Re-Assemblage,” which asks how assemblage practices (across the literary, visual, and plastic arts) might contribute to assemblage theory in the social sciences.

Ashlyn Sparrow, Assistant Director of the Weston Game Lab, University of Chicago
I am a game designer. I am an experience designer. I am a person whose trajectory in games has been the road less traveled. And, honestly? That in itself has allowed me to think about interactions, designs, and frameworks in a way that’s a little more playful. Now, you may (or may not) be asking, “how is a game designer also an interaction designer ?” That is an excellent question!

I have had the pleasure of creating socially impactful games and apps for health interventions. I move between interaction design and game design every other day and have come to the conclusion that game design is just a hyper-specialized version of interaction design. Games are built around mechanics, microinteractions a player has with a rule-based system. These interactions combine to create in-game actions and behaviors to which a player will have an affective response.

Interactions happens at a variety of scales. At its smallest scales, I focus on microinteractions. As we change scales, these microinteractions move from simple tasks to activities to large-interconnected services (macrointeractions). However, devices are continuously evolving: desktops, laptops, smartphones, virtual reality, augmented reality, and now the internet of things. The world becomes our interface, a possibility space for interactions not only with content, but environments, and other individuals. It is from this space I draw my inspirations.

I am currently the Assistant Director of the Weston Game Lab at the University of Chicago and Creative Director at Sunflake Studios.