Featured Project:
Futures of Digital Media Art HistoriesThe Future of Digital Media Histories (FDHM) is propelled by an urgent and daunting cultural heritage crisis: the rapid loss of digital art and media from the past 40 years to changing technology. Across Canada, the first decades of digital art and media production saw a flourishing of projects by artists and activists from diverse communities: Indigenous, racialized, feminist, queer, diasporic.
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Under the Shadow of the Empire
Registration Open: Under the Shadow of Empire: Minor Archives and Distribution Networks Conference.
Under the Shadow of Empire: Minor Archives and Distribution Networks brings together researchers, media archivists, curators, and filmmakers from across the Americas to address critical and urgent questions about and propose solutions to current crises in media heritage.
Between August 26-29, 2026, we will meet at Queen’s University for a series of curated conversations, workshops, and screenings to address how climate emergency, dictatorships, struggles for sovereignty, forced migration, and economic inequities produce extreme precarity for audio-visual heritage.
Facing the deteriorating and inaccessible cultural heritage of time-based audio-visual media in the Americas, the conference is centred around three questions: 1) How do we face that urgency with a method that is underpinned and shaped by principles of decolonization and sovereignty? 2) How do we produce best practices in the face of extreme instability of social, political, and environmental contexts that condition specific archives and collections? 3) How do we create conditions of access to cultural heritage that acknowledge intersectional forms of oppression and struggles for liberation and cultural sovereignty? Based on the understanding that minor archives (Suárez) are very much tied to community and cultural memory, and that the movement of media is about the expansion of that memory and its activations, Under the Shadow of Empire seeks to contribute to the theory and practice of the living archive (Hall, 2001).
The conference is hosted by the Vulnerable Media Lab and is organized by Susan Lord, produced by Isabella Altoé, and supported by the conference advisory committee: Juana Suárez, Amalia Córdova, Gabriel Menotti, Tamara Lang, Zaira Zarza, and Lesley Foster.
When: August 26-29, 2026
Where: Vulnerable Media Lab, located at the Film & Media Department, Queen’s University
Full program coming soon at vulnerablemedialab.ca
Register HereVulnerable Media Lab
The Vulnerable Media Lab (VML) is a state-of-the-art historic media transfer, remediation, and restoration research lab located in the Isabel Bader Centre for the Arts at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. The Lab is involved in a variety of projects such as the Sara Gómez Project, the Kingston Film Heritage Project, the Arnait Digitization Project, the Digital Born Artworks Restoration Project (with artist Cheryl L’Hirondelle), amongst other client-focused projects with a focus on the digitization and restoration of various forms of media.
The work in the Vulnerable Media Lab is grounded in the understanding that audio-visual cultural heritage has been unequally cared for and that the cultural practices of women and Indigenous peoples are in particular need of a dedicated archival focus and framework.
A key objective of the project is to work with “born digital media” alongside a variety of “obsolete” and “marginal” media, all of which share their own kinds of material vulnerabilities. The researchers aim to develop methods and processes to ensure this media art history is preserved and made available according to culturally specific and ethically driven forms of access, thus engaging in new conversations about cultural heritage.
Featured project:
Arnait Inuit Women’s Video: Artists in Residence →Arnait Video Productions is the world’s leading women-centered Inuit filmmaking collective.
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