
At Kathy Slade's "As the sun disappears and the shadows descend from the mountaintop” at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. Photo by Joni Low
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. 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.
Call for work, Fourth Annual Small File Media Festival! New this year: no length limit, but size is limited to 1.44 MB/minute—the storage size of a floppy disk!
My book The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos is in press at Duke University Press. See some of its early iterations here
Talks
“Small-File Elegance for a Smaller Carbon Footprint,” keynote talk, 34th Annual Society for Animation Studies conference, Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ. June 12-15.
Talk in e-flux lecture series "Film beyond Film," e-flux Screening Room, Brooklyn.Postponed to fall
"Small Files for a Small World," masterclass in Adi Kuntsman’s Digital Politics online school. June 5.
“The Small File Media Festival,” talk in the roundtable “Sustainable Feminism? Queer-feminist film and media studies as sustainable practice,” Screenwise: Debates of Contemporary Queer Feminist Film and Media (Studies), Vienna. June 2. By videoconference.
“Small-file media, compression aesthetics, nonorganic life,” talk in the roundtable “Abstraction and the Aesthetics of Movement,” SCMS annual conference, Denver. April 13.
"Bill Viola: Immanence and Unfolding,” talk in the symposium “Bill Viola and Mysticism,” Monterrey Museum of Contemporary Art. April 1. By videoconference.
“The Small File Media Festival,” at the Small File Photo Festival, Photographers Gallery, London. January 28, 2023. By videoconference.
"Soul-assemblage media," Kracauer Lectures in Film and Media Theory, Institut für Theater-, Film und Medienwissenschaft, Goethe Universität, Frankfurt. January 10, 2023.
“Talismanic Cinema,” talk on the panel “Redistributed Temporalities: Thinking Arab Presenters and Futures through Mediated Pasts,” Middle East Studies Association, Denver. December 2, 2022.
“Thinking Like a Carpet,” The School of Casablanca project. November 10, 2022. By videoconference.
”Theorizing diasporan cinema,” keynote talk at “Moroccan Diasporic Cinema,” Moroccan Association of Film Critics and Couaib Doukkali University, El Jadida, Morocco. October 11, 2022. By videoconference.
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.
See documentation of our massive June 2022 event A Light Footprint in the Cosmos here
The Small File Media Festival
We're gearing of for the fourth annual festival in October 2023 at Vancouver's legendary Cinemathèque, and streaming at low bandwidth worldwide! Call for work coming soon, deadline July 1and past programs, creative small-file tips, and more here
Tackling the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media
New publications!
Dr. Anne Foerster: The Restorative Brain: my neuroscientist mother's research on spontaneous regeneration in the central nervous system!
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