O
ur conversation this month examines Laura Marks’ leading scholarship and empirical work on creative infrastructures and experimental media arts in the contemporary Arab World. In her characteristically Spinozist and joyful mode, Marks reflects on the conceptual contours and lines of inquiry that have animated her research since the 1990s, namely: 1. the importance of the Writing Culture debates in anthropology on her conception of an experimental cinema and haptic visuality, 2. her pioneering advocacy for and recent critiques of a sensuous, multi-sensory scholarship, 3. her provocative genealogy of new media arts, an “enfolded-unfolded aesthetics” grounded in a combination and modulation of Islamic aesthetics, philosophy, and architecture (with its aniconic tendencies), Charles Peirce’s semiotics, Gregory Bateson’s cybernetic theory of information, and Gilles Deleuze’s work on Leibniz.
L
aura U. Marks is the Grant State University Professor of Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. A scholar, theorist, and curator of independent and experimental media arts, she is the author of The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Duke University Press, 2000),Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minnesota University Press, 2002), and many essays. Several years of research in Islamic art history and philosophy gave rise to Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (MIT Press, 2010). Her recent book, Hanan-al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving-Image (MIT Press, 2015) examines the media arts of the Arab and Muslim world and philosophical approaches to materiality and information culture.
CONVERSATION PODCAST