We are privileged to welcome Professor Hartmut Koenitz to our DM Talks series, a distinguished figure in the domain of interactive digital narratives.

• Date: Monday, Sept 18th
• Time: 11 am
• Venue: TSRB 118 & Teams

About the Lecture:

Hartmut Koenitz is Professor (full) in Media Technology at Södertörn University in Sweden, a visiting researcher at the University of Amsterdam, and a visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin. His latest book “Understanding Interactive Digital Narratives” was published by Routledge in April 2023.

His research is concerned with the theory, practice, education and societal impact of interactive narratives and games. He has published over 70 scholarly publications including the co-edited volume Interactive Digital Narrative – history, theory and practice (Routledge 2015).

Koenitz is the chair of the EU COST Action 18230 INDCOR (Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representations – https://indcor.eu), a project connecting more then 200 scholars from 40 countries and one of the editors of the upcoming Routledge Encyclopedia of Interactive Digital Narrative.

He is also the president of ARDIN, the Association for Research in Digital Interactive Narratives (https://ardin.online) which organizes the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS) and is partnered with the ZIP Scene conference. Koenitz is also the founding Editor-In-Chief of the upcoming Journal of Interactive Narrative Research, a joint venture between Carnegie Mellon University Press and ARDIN, which will be the first academic journal specific to the topic.

Koenitz is a member of several academic and professional societies, including DIGRA (Digital Games Research Association), ACM, European Council member of HEVGA (Higher Education Video Game Alliance), RealTime Society’s Interactive Storytelling Group, ELO (Electronic Literature Organization), International Society for the Study of Narrative and the European Narratology Network.

Koenitz holds a PhD from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Digital Media on the theory and practice of Interactive Digital Narrative.

Koenitz is the creator of the ASAPS authoring tool, which has been used to create more than 150 works.

Previously, Koenitz was the CTO of the Berlin-based startup Designnet, worked as a tech journalist writing more than 150 articles, consulted for clients like Stanford in Berlin and co-founded a tech company.

He is also a visual artist, and his works have been shown in Atlanta, Paris, Istanbul, Seoul, Copenhagen and Porto. His latest artwork, The Multiple Lives of Walter B. is a physical installation that explores virtual biographies of Walter Benjamin.