The New Media Caucus (NMC) presented the 2019 Symposium and Exhibition, Border Control at the University of Michigan, Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design and the Stamps Gallery. They had over one hundred and fifty attendees at the symposium and we collectively developed two and a half days of energizing programming that included panels, presentations, artist walks, workshops and performances. The Border Control Symposium was their first stand alone national event and represented a question to the field: is there a value for the New Media Caucus to convene independently of our annual host conference? The answer was a resounding “yes”. By coming together, they were able to consider the timely theme of borders in their myriad forms, through the lens of new media art and theory.

Because COSA is reaching out to New Media educators in their roles as curators and teachers of open-source tools, we were a major sponsor of the event. We led several small discussions about the use of open source tools in creative classrooms.