The Andy Warhol Foundation has lost its suit against photographer Lynn Goldsmith. The Supreme Court’s May 18, 2023, ruling positioned the decision as a defense of lesser known artists against famous ones. The majority argued that Fair Use was not applicable when...
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Motherhood, Technology, and Natalia Almada’s “Users”
Natalia Almada’s documentary essay film “Users” (2021) questions a mother’s deep ambivalence about technology. But the film’s aesthetics makes clear that she has already chosen technology. The film is the binational Mexican American director’s first shot in the United...
The Republican Debt Ceiling Proposal Saves the Economy on the Backs of Latinas
It is May. In the U.S., Italy, Japan, Mexico, and many other countries, it is a month that celebrates mothers. Deconstructed, it heralds women bearing and caring for children to ensure the health and welfare of the family. For many, celebrating Mother’s Day means...
How Bill Morrison’s “Incident” Accesses Police Body Cams to Give Voice to a Crime
Bill Morrison is known for his often-magical transformations of archival film in various states of decay into new works that speak to both past and present. Until the recent success of “Dawson City: Frozen Time” (2016), “Decasia” (2002), which was admitted to the...
Resets, Rethinkings, Rewirings: Reflections on a Roundtable Discussion about AI
I found myself seated at the front of a lecture hall on the campus of Ithaca College in New York. It was March 30, 2023. Philosopher Craig Duncan of Ithaca College and Raza Rumi, Director of the Park Center for Independent Media (PCIM), were there with me to...
The Epistemology of Ignorance in DeSantis World
“What is happening in Florida?” asked a recent headline in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Since the New Year, Gov. Ron DeSantis and his Republican allies have ramped up efforts to eradicate ‘woke’ ideology from public colleges,” its reporters responded. This...
The End of the Latin American Migrant Trope
Myriad films across the history of Latin American cinema explore the trope of the migrant. These films document the trek from Latin America to the U.S. and migrants’ lives afterwards. Classic films such as “Espaldas mojadas” (Alejandro Galindo, 1995) and “El Norte”...
The Migrating Documentary Cinema of Yi Cui
Augmentation is not defined exclusively by emerging digital media forms, software, and interfaces. Instead, augmentation explores how to generate new processes about how to think through, with, and within place that spans the digital, the analog, and the embodied. Not...
AI and the Fears of Being Thrown Away: Reflections on a Classroom Incident in Dallas
The day: Monday, February 27, 2023. The place: A large lecture class in the new Engineering and Computer Science West building at the University of Texas-Dallas. It’s a wide space, accommodating 300 students. Great windows and elegant wood window treatments allow for...
Teaching the War in Ukraine
It wasn’t long after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, that I knew I would need to teach a course on it. Six months later, with the war in full force, I launched a semester-long course titled “The Global Politics of the War in Ukraine.” I am an...