Join the Critical Media Lab for the 2026 showcase featuring interactive, geo-electro-sensor projects by students enrolled in ENGL 799: Media Geologies. The event will open with a guest talk by Guelph-based media and surveillance scholar, Stephen J. Neville on copper cultures. No registration necessary, families and friends welcome, refreshments will be served.
About the course:
ENGL 799 (Media Geologies, Dr. Marcel O'Gorman) acknowledges the deep geological histories and futures of media technologies, building new ways of understanding human co-evolution with more-than-human agents. The topic will be informed by media theory, philosophy, speculative fiction, sculpture, installation, and media art.
Projects by: Sophia Heidebrecht, Robert MacIsaac, Juliana Stacey, Kc Dickson, Mélika Hashemi.
Guest talk: Stephen J. Neville: On the conductivity of technical survivance: An introductory dialogue between old copper cultures.
About the talk:
Copper landlines are having a comeback! While this might be hastily written off as media nostalgia, discourse around landline telephones includes nodes of survivalism and intentional rejection of digital culture. In this presentation, I interpret landline discourse in terms of technical survivance to better understand the political and cultural motivations that underlie people’s efforts to return to outdated circuits. This framing updates Leroi-Gourhan’s concept of technical survivals in conversation with Vizenor’s survivance, which describes Indigenous people’s active and creative resistance against oppression. From this, I suggest that the reassertion of older tools despite the availability of ‘high-tech’ alternatives be interpreted as a form of resistance to dominant technocultural power. In challenge to a narrative of technological devolution, technical survivance is positioned as the basis for dialogue across Indigenous and Western histories, environments, and worldviews. Towards that end, technical survivance is used to reframe the contemporary renaissance of copper landlines while relaying with the much older Indigenous copper culture of North America’s Archaic Period that ended with the return of stone tools. Rather than interpreting the decline of Indigenous copper culture as an archaeological conundrum, I aim to repatch it as a conductive connection for technological inquiry and intercultural exchange.
Speaker bio:
Stephen J. Neville is a media and surveillance scholar based in Guelph. He is currently a Fellow at the Infoscape Research Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University and an affiliate researcher at the Institute for Research on Digital Literacies at York University. Supported by a SSHRC doctoral award and a Data Fluencies grant from the Social Science Research Council, Neville received his PhD in 2026 from the joint-program of Communication & Culture at York University and Toronto Metropolitan University. Neville is also a citizen of the Métis Nation of Ontario. His research into Indigenous sound archives and land-based research creation was awarded the 2025 Mahmoud Eid prize for research into media and diversity by the Canadian Communication Association. With Greg Elmer, he is the coauthor of The Politics of Media Scarcity (Routledge 2024) which foregrounds marginalized histories and storytelling as a challenge to dominant narratives of abundance and digital divides in media studies.