I work on media art and philosophy with an intercultural focus, and on small-footprint media. I program experimental media for venues around the world. I'm a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. As Grant Strate University Professor, I teach in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, on unceded Coast Salish territory of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō, Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) nations. I am proud to be active on SFU Faculty for Palestine and SFU Council on Islamophobia.
My book Graceful Collapse: Why the Internet Has to Get Small (tentative title) is under contract with MIT Press.
I got a Guggenheim fellowship to support the book. It helped me sponsor international small-file workshops in Dhaka, Mexico City, Cairo, and Tehran. See updates at smallfile.ca
Check out my book The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos! Great reviews here and here. See some of The Fold's early iterations here
Events
“Low-fi video, the lovable solution in times of precarity and collapse,” Hong Kong 2026 Conference on Environmental Media and Public Value, The Research Centre for Creative Arts and Public Value, November 11-13, 2026
Laura U. Marks, Jess MacCormack, and Kehui Li, “Modest, artistic, and radical solutions to the environmental impact of image-generating machine learning,” Workshop on Computing within Limits. Online. June 25, 2026. DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.19957
TechArt Online Conference, Seoul.
““From Your Body to the Cosmos: Practical Methods,” talks and workshops at Agora: A Gathering of Art and Philosophy, Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, January 27 and February 5, 2026. Compressed recordings here
“Lapidary Media,” talk at Cinema and Media Studies in Solidarity with Palestine (our excellent alternative event to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies). March 27, 2026
“Lapidary Media,” Museum of Anthropology Visual + Material Culture Research Seminar, Vancouver. February 12, 2026
“J*nn Media,” talk on the panel “Secret Histories (and Possible Futures) of Middle Eastern and Islamic Media” sponsored by The Substantial Motion Research Network (SMRN). Middle East Studies Association, Washington, DC. November 23, 2025
New publications
My book The Skin of the Film has been translated into Arabic by Jesour Al-Thaqafa for Publishing and Distribution, Dammam. Coming soon.
“Cinematic friendships: intercessors, collectives, and collaborations,” from Hanan Al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image, excerpt in MA21
“Streaming, precarity, and invention in the Arab world,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Arab Film and Media, ed. Samirah Alkassim. Forthcoming.
“Smaller-file streaming and the archive,” forthcoming, The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists
"Islamic Art Performs the Hidden into Being," catalogue essay for “Deviant Ornaments,” National Museum for Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway
“Collapse Informatics, Small Files, and the Light Infrastructure of the Future,” Ibraaz
(Older writings on Selected writings page)
The Small File Media Festival
We're #toosmalltofail! Check out our low-carbon small-file web site designed by Joni Schinkel. @smallfile
The Substantial Motion Research Network
Inspired by process philosopher Sadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī, Azadeh Emadi and I founded SMRN in 2018 for scholars and practitioners interested in cross-cultural exploration of digital media, art and philosophy. We meet bimonthly to share work in progress. See documentation of our massive June 2022 event A Light Footprint in the Cosmos here
"Evil Eye Media Theory," edited by Farshid Kazemi, Radek Przedpełski, and me and featuring articles by SMRN members, is forthcoming in Film-Philosophy
Tackling the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media
Dr. Anne Foerster: The Restorative Brain
My neuroscientist mother's research on spontaneous regeneration in the central nervous system!
lmarks [ ] sfu [ ] ca
@lauraumarks
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