During the October National Holiday, DKU faculty Benjamin Bacon, Ziv Ze’ev Cohen, and Vivian Xu traveled to Duke University for the inaugural IGHE Duke-DKU Presence Lab Annual Symposium.
Alongside Duke colleagues, the group attended presentations by students in the Presence Lab’s Bass Connections Portal Project, student-centered research that seeks to bridge campuses, disciplines, and time zones.
Additionally, faculty collaborative pairs between the two campuses shared research developed over the past year under the Presence Lab Fellowship, showing what cross-campus research can produce in practice.
The symposium also marked the announcement of a global art, science, and technology network, initiated at DKU in November 2025 during the Entangled Cartographies Conference supported by the Humanities Research Center, that unites four institutions across three continents: Duke Kunshan University (China), Duke University (USA), V2_Lab for the Unstable Media (Netherlands), and SymbioticA at the University of Western Australia (Australia).
The gathering closed with a panel on Model Collapse, the network’s first collective project and the opening chapter of a collaboration that crosses institutional, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries in exploration of new ways of knowing.