Operativity and Digital Capture is a public symposium with media archeologist, Dr. Jussi Parikka, the first Visiting Professor at UCR’s Center for Ideas and Society. At this event, theorists, artists, scholars and practitioners from Southern California will discuss the operations of machine vision, especially relating to agency, culpability and connection in an image world functioning at a remove from human engagement. The symposium is presented as a part of Digital Capture: Southern California and the Pixel-Based Image World on view at UCR ARTS California Museum of Photography and Culver Center of the Arts from September 21, 2024 to February 2, 2025.

Jussi Parikka is Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University in Denmark where he leads the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (DARC) as well as being the founding co-director of the Environmental Media and Aesthetics research program. He also holds a visiting professorship at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). In 2021 he was elected as member of Academia Europaea. His published books include Insect Media (2010), Digital Contagions (2007/2016), What is Media Archaeology? (2012), A Geology of Media (2015), and A Slow, Contemporary Violence (2016). Recently, he co-edited Photography Off the Scale (2021) and is the co-author of The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies (2022).  His book Operational Images was published in 2023, and most recently, the co-authored Living Surfaces: Images, Plants, and Environments of Media (with Abelardo Gil-Fournier) in June 2024. Parikka’s books have been translated into 12 languages including Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Czech, Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. He has also worked as curator, including as part of the curatorial team of transmediale 2023 and Helsinki Biennial 2023, as well as the co-curator of the Motores del Clima (Laboral, Gijon, 2023-2045). https://pure.au.dk/portal/en/persons/parikka%40cc.au.dk

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Presenter Bios:

Ron Broglio writes books and essays on nonhuman phenomenology, post-rational knowing, and animal studies. He curates and produces environmental art and experiences. Broglio is director of the Humanities Institute at Arizona State University.

andré carrington is associate professor of English and director of the Speculative Fiction and Cultures of Science program at UC Riverside. His first book, Speculative Blackness, interrogates the cultural politics of race in the fantastic genres and fan cultures. He is editor of The Black Fantastic, a Library of America anthology of contemporary fiction by Black authors. His scholarship and teaching focus on African American literature, science fiction, comics, and gender and sexuality studies.

Alenda Y. Chang is an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her book, Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games, developed environmentally informed frameworks for understanding and designing digital games. She is a founding co-editor of the UC Press open-access journal, Media+Environment, and co-directs Wireframe, a studio that fosters collaborative theory and creative media practice invested in global social and environmental justice. 

Debbie Duarte is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Scholar in the English Department at UC Riverside. They received a PhD in Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Their current project, Borderland Ghosts: Necropolitics at the Colonial Wound examines the role of ghosts and hauntings in literary and cultural productions in and about the Mexico-U.S. border. Their recent publication “How to Undocument a Narrative,” is featured in the Borderlands section for Public Books. Their interests include migration, border studies, decolonization, indigenous, mexican, chicanx and black feminist critique, and science and technology studies.

Lisa Yin Han is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College. Her research is situated at the intersections of environmental media studies, critical infrastructure studies, and science and technology studies. Her book, Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor (2024), examines how media operations in deep ocean environments pave the way for extractive industry. Lisa’s current project explores biofouling and remediations of living waste through emergent media platforms and tools. She has also published work on environmental media in journals such as Resistance: A Journal of Radical Environmental Humanities, Configurations, and Media + Environment. 

Brian Jacobson is Professor of Visual Culture at Caltech and Director of the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture. He is the author of The Cinema of Extractions: Film Materials and Their Forms (Columbia, 2025) and Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space (Columbia, 2015) and has edited the multi-award-winning book, In the Studio: Visual Creation and Its Material Environments (California, 2020), and “Media Climates,” the Winter 2022 issue of Representations.

Laila Shereen Sakr is an Associate Professor at the UC Santa Barbara. A media theory and practice pioneer, she demonstrates how digital platforms can predict and influence socio-political change. Her 2011 Twitter analysis predicted the fall of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. Her exhibitions like Rosetta Stones Resurrected and the book Arabic Glitch explore the fractures within digital systems, using glitches as a metaphor to reveal cultural and political disruptions in the US and globally. As VJ Um Amel (moniker), she combines artistic innovation with critical inquiry, using data visualization and digital art to transform how we understand politics and culture. 

James Tobias is co-editor of Beyond Mimesis (2023), an anthology of essays exploring aesthetic experience, computational media, and digital cultures, and author of Sync: Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time (2010), a study of musicality across media from early cinema to digital installation art. He is editor of special volumes from the journals liquid blackness, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, and Television and New Media, and author of many essays in the areas of hypertext and digital arts; musicality and synchronization; avant-garde aesthetics; and sexuality studies. He holds a doctorate from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts.

Anuradha Vikram is a writer, curator, and educator in Los Angeles. They recently curated the 2024 Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial and the Getty PST Art exhibition Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption (2024–25) at UCLA Art Sci Center. Vikram’s book Decolonizing Culture (Sming Sming Books, 2017) helped initiate a global movement to decolonize arts institutions and monuments. Their latest book is Use Me At Your Own Risk: Visions from the Darkest Timeline (X Artists’ Books, 2023), using speculative fiction to address current and future social conditions from a techno-critical point of view. 

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Location & Parking:

UCR ARTS
California Museum of Photography
Culver Center of the Arts
3824 + 3834 Main Street
Riverside, CA 92501
ucrarts.ucr.edu

Parking Map

Although UCR ARTS California Museum of Photography is a part of the University of California, Riverside, we are located in downtown Riverside. We are at 3824 and 3834 Main Street, a pedestrian-protected street, between Market St. and Orange St.

We do not have a parking lot but there is generally plenty of parking in surrounding parking decks or street parking. Typically, you can find free parking on the weekends but occasionally there are parking fees due to other events downtown.
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Credits

Digital Capture: Southern California and the Pixel-Based Image World is co-curated by Nikolay Maslov and April Baca. Exhibition concept by Douglas McCulloh.

This symposium is co-presented by University of California, Riverside’s California Museum of Photography, Center for Ideas and Society, History of Art Department, and Media and Cultural Studies Department. Additional support provided by the English Department at UCR. Support for the Inaugural CIS Visiting Professor is generously funded by UCR’s Office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs, Marko Princeva.

Digital Capture: Southern California and the Pixel-Based Image World is made possible with leading support from Getty through the PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative. Programs at UCR ARTS are supported by the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (CHASS) at UCR and by the City of Riverside.