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About Me
Cindy Poremba
Contact them through their faculty email found here.
Cindy Poremba has maintained an experimental gamemaking and curatorial practice for almost two decades with a particular interest in captured media practices, and emerging technologies. They are an Associate Professor in Digital Futures at OCAD University (Tkaranto), Co-Director of OCAD’s game:play Lab, and a 2023/24 Massey Visiting Fellow. Their award-winning game, curation, and “New Arcade'' work (independently and as a member of the kokoromi collective), has been featured in both game and digital art exhibitions internationally. Download CV
Writing
A quicklist of recent and key writing (books, articles, magazines etc.) For a comprehensive list, please refer to my C.V. (under About).
The holographic recording, the mocap performance, the in-game photograph, the deepfake— all involve elements that appear captured from the actual world. But they are complex images, combining “created” and “captured” processes that are traditionally understood as distinct. Across all forms of digital media, representational modalities are rapidly converging, mutating into hybrid forms where it is impossible to untangle recorded, synthesized and constructed elements. But despite this destabilization, capture persists. From immersive documentary to cinematic videogames, creators maintain a vested interest in the affordances of capture, and emerging practices take advantage of capture’s new transformability. Capture has found new ways to instance itself within digital postmedia contexts, motivated by rhetorical currents we still find compelling. But in doing so, it has become a multiplicity of captures, assembled within distinct creative contexts each enacting capture in their own way. Capture Matters looks at the new ways capture comes to matter, using new materialist rhetoric to tease out the ways in which the entities evoked by capture are used to do powerful, playful, provocative, and sometimes problematic things. It invites creators and audiences to envision capture in radically new ways— not only to create new forms of hybrid capture, but as part of an essential renewal of our relationship with captured images.
Books
(Forthcoming, Bloomsbury) Capture Matters: Postmedia and the Real ImageThe holographic recording, the mocap performance, the in-game photograph, the deepfake— all involve elements that appear captured from the actual world. But they are complex images, combining “created” and “captured” processes that are traditionally understood as distinct. Across all forms of digital media, representational modalities are rapidly converging, mutating into hybrid forms where it is impossible to untangle recorded, synthesized and constructed elements. But despite this destabilization, capture persists. From immersive documentary to cinematic videogames, creators maintain a vested interest in the affordances of capture, and emerging practices take advantage of capture’s new transformability. Capture has found new ways to instance itself within digital postmedia contexts, motivated by rhetorical currents we still find compelling. But in doing so, it has become a multiplicity of captures, assembled within distinct creative contexts each enacting capture in their own way. Capture Matters looks at the new ways capture comes to matter, using new materialist rhetoric to tease out the ways in which the entities evoked by capture are used to do powerful, playful, provocative, and sometimes problematic things. It invites creators and audiences to envision capture in radically new ways— not only to create new forms of hybrid capture, but as part of an essential renewal of our relationship with captured images.
Book Chapters
Poremba, Cindy, and Amy Seigel. “Going Deep: Hybrid Capture in Documentary.” In The Interactive Documentary in Canada, edited by Michael Brendan Baker and Jessica Mulvogue. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024: 284–302.
Poremba, Cindy. “Ansel and the (T/M)aking of Amateur Game Photography,” in Screen Images: In-Game Photography, Screenshot, Screencast. eds. Winfried Gerling, Sebastian Möring and Marco De Mutiis. Kadmos Berlin, 2024: 223-244.
Bogost, Ian and Cindy Poremba. "Can Games get Real? A Closer Look at 'Documentary' Digital Games." Computer Games as a Sociocultural Phenomenon: Games Without Frontiers - War Without Tears. Eds. Andreas Jahn-Sudmann and Ralf Stockman. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 12-21.
Articles
Therrien, Carl, Cindy Poremba, and Jean-Charles Ray. “From Dead-end to Cutting Edge: Using FMV Design Patterns to Jumpstart a Video Revival,” Game Studies, Vol 20 (4) December 2020.
Poremba, Cindy. "Discourse Engines for Art Mods.” Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture. 2010, Volume 4, Issue 1. 41-56.
Poremba, Cindy. “On the Brink of the Magic Circle.” Proceedings of Situated Play: Digital Games Research Conference 2007, Tokyo, JP, 24-28 Sept 2007. 772-778.
Poremba, Cindy. “Point and Shoot: Remediating Photography in Gamespace.” Games and Culture. Volume 2, Number 1, Sage Publications, Jan 2007. 49-58.