Julian Kilker | selected projects

Julian Kilker My research focuses on the intersection of social interaction, technology, and design, particularly in emerging media. See my academic site at UNLV. My most recent work explores digital and data imaging under extreme conditions. I am interested in how media innovations emerge from exploring workflows, problem solving, and reconstructing technology. Not only do I study these topics, I also participate in practicing them.
Contact
julian.kilker@unlv.edu
Projects (most recent first)
	Can creative edge cases reveal AI training biases? The case of the Mojave Joshua Tree, a2ru research poster, Rochester Institute of Technology, November 2024.
	Directed multi-stakeholder experiential project involving students, Nevada Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities, Brookings, UNLV Special Collections, and Greenspun College in researching and documenting labor in 22 contexts.
	Authored Implications of photography's computational turn for visual methods. Published in SintAxis journal.
	Authored editorial for special AI in the Arts issue and co-edited inaugural rollout of Tradition Innovations journal.
	Presented "Insights from using 'distant reading hyper-photography' to explore photojournalism" at AEJMC 2023 conference (Washington, DC).
	Presented on current and proposed methods for creating data-rich "provocative artifacts" visualizing sound and light pollution at the 2023 Visual Modi Visual Research Methods conference at La Laguna-Tenerife (Spain).
	My article "A Light in the Darkness" in the Barrick Museum's journal Dry Heat is accompanied by this time-compressed 360 tour of an abandoned building.
	"Reframing research as a collaborative practice," presented at ASN and T4L conferences and based on using Zotero and guided collaboration techniques. This presentation and workshop build on my Best Teaching Practices Poster "Modeling Collaborative Research Practices With Zotero."
	Creative public engagement collaboration (with Tom Bjelic) "A Stillness in the Desert?" exploring and documenting visual and audio ecologies through immersive media.
	"How to identify and address exclusionary user experience designs in health contexts" presented at the 2022 Southern Nevada Diversity Summit. (The Nevada System of Higher Education holds diversity summits each year to promote inclusive policies and practices across its member institutions.)
	Contributions to collaborative "Spirit of the Land" exhibit at The Barrick Museum of Art and three other locations in support of declaring Avi Kwa Ame as a National Monument. This photograph is also the cover of Legacy 23(1), the magazine of the National Association for Interpretation, a special issue on interpreting under-appreciated landscapes.
	Peer-reviewed panel "The Future of Visual Research and Visual Sensemaking: Shaping our Tools, Techniques, Methodologies, and Partnerships" 2022 AEJMC Visual Communication panel (co-organized with Shannon Zenner).
	Co-produced (with Yvonne Houy) live shadow puppetry, photojournalism, and commentary multimedia presentation "Light and Shadow" at 2021 a2ru conference dramatizing the the intersection of isolation and connection, online technology and education during the pandemic.
	Peer-reviewed "Best Teaching Practices" posters published online 2019-2022 focusing on my explorations with structured and playful remote-teaching techniques.
	Peer-reviewed article "Beyond accessibility: Design ethics, edge users, and the role of active proxies in unwinding the spiral of exclusion" published 2020 in First Monday.
	Vehicles of the Mojave photo essay in World Health Organization's 2019-20 Art Gallery, Geneva, Switzerland. (I developed early hypertext field reference prototypes for WHO's Health for the Elderly Programme.)
	Mentor and presenter on The Ethics of Design at Las Vegas Make-a-thon 2.0 "The Future of Experience Design."
	Peer-reviewed article "The Soft Power of Ephemeral Communities: A Short History of Las Vegas Technology Conventions, 1959-2019" published 2019 in Nevada Historical Society Quarterly.
	"10 minutes, 1,000 years" for Las Vegas Library exhibit "Monuments" about the how nature is used and appreciated by different groups of people, in their own ways. This work's two photographs are taken 10 minutes apart of two activities separated by a millennium that have left different traces in the Gold Butte National Monument.
	"Young Photographer: Then, Now, Soon" for Nevada Humanities exhibit about the fate of our media and memories. Large format triptych shows an old camera; a slide negative taken in 1949 using the same camera, now damaged; and a slide from the same era that's already unrecognizably decayed.
	Light printing workshop for Explore. Learn. Inspire. This collaboration among 12 STEM educators raised funds for Three Square Food Bank to feed local families in need.
	Low-light and aerial landscapes for 2017 "National Monuments" cover story in the Parks & Recreation Conservation issue.
	"Exploring Data via Provocative Artifacts" in MIT's Leonardo.
	"Camping Shaman, Dusk" at "Home Means Nevada" exhibit in U.S. Senate Russell Rotunda in Washington, DC, September 2016. Participation funded in part by the Nevada Arts Council.
	On tour: "Annie and the Shaman", 2016-2018. Listen to audio tracks here.
	"Photographing place, context, and process" lecture at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) photography club, Geneva, Switzerland, Summer 2016.
	Peer-reviewed article "All About Whom? Stock Photos, Interactive Narratives and How News About Governmental Surveillance Is Visualized" published 2016 in Visual Communication Quarterly 23.
	Peer-reviewed paper "The Race for the Better Workflow" presented at 2016 AEJMC conference in Minneapolis, MN.
	STEM Higher-Education Outreach Coordinator, Mini-Maker Faire Las Vegas. Part of team behind the successful 2016 event.
	"Aesthetic Evidence," Winter 2015, exploring visual evidence and data analysis. Sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
	Basin and Range exhibit at UNLV's Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery, Summer 2015, on the occasion of President Obama designating Basin & Range a national monument.
	Peer-reviewed article "Visualizing What Happened Near Vegas: Experiences in Photographing a Public History Project" in The Public Historian 36(3).
	"American Safari" in the On Great Drives issue of Vegas Seven magazine, Fall 2014.
	Selected photography in Walking Box Ranch booklet by the Public Lands Institute, Spring 2014.
	My Nevada 5 photo essay published on the occasion of Nevada's 150th anniversary, Spring 2014.
	Twelve-page photo essay in the On The Road issue of Vegas Seven magazine, Fall 2013. (Placed 3rd, NV Press Assoc's 2014 Photo Essay Contest.)
	"Seeing another way: Night photography, the Mojave, and the exploration of technology" University of Nevada Forum Lecture, Spring 2013.
	Peer-reviewed article "Deadly and Barren, or Beautiful and Fragile? Exploring the Nighttime Mojave Desert" in Visual Communication Quarterly 19.
	Grant project "Documenting Mojave Cultural Artifacts Using Night/Low Light Techniques" at Walking Box Ranch, former home of Clara Bow and Rex Bell.
	"Time in the Mojave" Exhibit at Cité du Temps Geneva, Switzerland (See information about the Mojave Preserve.)
	"Lost Places in the Mojave" Exhibit at Barrick Museum University of Nevada.
	"Mojave after Sunset" Exhibit supported by the U.S. National Park Service at Kelso Depot, Mojave Preserve, California