Digital intimate publics express that the “vibe is off”, a sense that things aren’t quite right as we doom scroll on and on and on. A state of precarity and instability has left ruin and decay in its wake. From failed political systems, burnt-out utopias and bombed out landscapes, to the eerie and empty urban spaces of the mass industrial era, the persistent rubble left from (neo)colonisation and cultures threatened by climate crises, to recently obsolescent technologies, hyperlinks rotting away, and glitchy automated systems.

Despite the rubble seeming dead and inert, Anna Tsing (2015) reminds us that ruins are lively places where new multi-species and multi-cultures thrive. From a flattened out, ruined landscape, new possibilities grow. Ruins can be enclaves of hope as much as mourning, loss, and longing: they not only invoke nostalgic reflections, but open up space to dream and imagine the future.

Digital intimate publics share the affective experience of life amid the ruin. They are formed in circumstances of something being ‘off’, of being squeezed, constituted from positions of non-dominance. Digital intimacies come to be not in the gleaming corporate towers and cathedrals, but in the messy in-between spaces where resilient, creative practices of ‘making do’ emerge.

For Digital Intimacies 9, we ask: in what ways are digital intimacies reckoning with the ruined structures they find themselves in?

Join us in person or online on 14-15 December 2023 for two days of incredible panels, keynotes, and more, exploring life among the ruins.

Note: the event will also be shared via Zoom. A Zoom link will be sent to registered participants closer to the date.

Digital Intimacies 9 is being hosted by the QUT Digital Media Research Centre (https://research.qut.edu.au/dm...) and UQ Digital Cultures and Societies (https://hass.uq.edu.au/Digital...). The conference website is: https://research.qut.edu.au/dm....