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 – – –
Spiral recognizes that Toronto is situated on the unceded traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. We acknowledge that the city is within the territory governed by the Dish with One Spoon Wampum treaty, an agreement to peaceably share and care for the land and its resources.
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