SPIRAL: Rise of the Machines
FRIDAY, MAY 23 — SATURDAY, MAY 24, 2025
▶︎ Download the program ◀︎
ALL PANELS AND PRESENTATIONS HELD AT Cinecycle,
down the lane behind 129 Spadina Ave.
– – – EACH PRESENTATION IS 20 MINUTES IN LENGTH – – –
DAY I – FRIDAY, MAY 23
CONFERENCE CHECK-IN
8:30am
CONFERENCE INTRODUCTION
8:45am-9:00am
PANEL I — AESTHETICS-POLITICS
9:00am—10:30am
◆ Anders BERGSTROM, University of Waterloo
Movies for No One: Post-Cinematic Spectatorship and Capitalist Desire
◆ Filip ANDJELKOVIC, University of Toronto
Psychoanalysis in Reverse: Minds, Machines, and Algorithmic Aesthetics
◆ Joshua Harold WIEBE, University of Toronto
50 Different (Cat) Massage Techniques: Frederick Wiseman’s Dialectics of the Concrete
PANEL II — POST-CINEMA
10:45am—12:15pm
◆ Desirée DE JESÚS, York University
Utopian Black Girlhoods and Liberal Structures of Antiblackness Onscreen
◆ Emelia STEENEKAMP, Concordia University
Screen Objects and Screen Subjects in Recent Art Cinema
◆ Clint ENNS and Mike ZRYD, York University
Displaced Authorship: Deepfaking Hollis Frampton’s Ordinary Matter
LUNCH BREAK
12:15pm-1:30pm
PANEL III — HUMAN-MACHINE
1:30pm—3:00pm
◆ Arnaud MERY, Université de Montréal
Discorrelated Diffusions: Aberrant Workflows Against the Stereotypical Preformatting of Text-Image Models
◆ Rakesh SENGUPTA, University of Toronto
Beyond the Binary: Generative AI and the Computational Capture of Storytelling in Indian Cinema
◆ Phil KAFFEN, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
In-Between Machines: Vtubers and the Collective Impersonal
PANEL IV — ATTACHMENT
3:15pm—4:45pm
◆ Roshaya RODNESS, University of Toronto
Gay Voice: The Hearing Cinema of RSVP
◆ Justin CARPENTER, University of Utah
Generative Authorship: Interpassivity and/or Interactivity?
◆ Cassilyn OSTRANDER, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
‘Are you still watching?’: Streaming Platform as Apparatus and Platformizing Dispositifs
JOIN US FOR FOOD!
5:30pm
Dim Sum King Seafood Restaurant, 421 Dundas St W 3rd floor.
▶︎Directions
DAY 2 – SATURDAY, MAY 24
PANEL V — PROCESS
9:30am—11:00am
◆Mynt MARSELLUS, University of Toronto
Imprisoned by Calculation/Technicity/Grammar: Reading Joseph Weizenbaum with Stanley Cavell
◆ Ahmet Emin BÜLBÜL, Kırşehir Ahi Evran University
Pixelating Heights: A Posthuman Phenomenology of Compression Glitch in Before the Collapse of Mont-Blanc
◆ Erin OBODIAC, SUNY Albany
Husserl’s Comet and Operational Cinema: From Passage de Venus to Cosmic Zoom
PANEL VI — AVANT-GARDE
11:15am—12:15pm
◆ Sangyoung NAM, Stony Brook University
Mutant Machines: Experimental Apparatuses in Avant-Garde Cinema
◆ Grant LEUNING, University of California San Diego
Abstraction and Realization: On the Epistemologies of Zen for Film
LUNCH BREAK
12:15pm-1:30pm
PANEL VII — AI & AUTOMATION
1:30pm—3:00pm
◆ Scott BIRDWISE, OCAD University
Automatic Factories and Affectionate Machine-Tickling Aphids: Imaginative Materialism in Pandaemonium
◆ Owen LYONS, Toronto Metropolitan University
How Heavy This Camera: Tracking, Virtual Viewpoints, and Predictive Framing
◆ Paulina DUDZIŃSKA, University of Warsaw
Augmented Voyeur: Visual economy of Drone Gaze in Drone Boning (2014) and The Drone (2019)
PANEL VIII — TEMPORALITY
3:15pm—4:45pm
◆ Kanika LAWTON, University of Toronto
Ruminating Rage: The Digital Layering and Reinscription of (White Female) Violence in Claudia Rankine and John Lucas’ Situation 11
◆ William T. JENNINGS, Queen’s University
You Have a New Memory: On Hauntology, Mnemonic Implants, and the Problem of Memory in the Digital Age
◆ Fan WU, Queen’s University, and Mike HOOLBOOM, Independent
The Wind William Tells
BREAK
4:45pm-5:00pm
KEYNOTE
5:00pm
“AI and the Automated Imagination”
Shane Denson, Stanford University
JOIN US FOR FOOD!
7pm
Free Times Cafe, 320 College St.
▶︎Directions