A+RC Virtual Lecture by Zabet Patterson
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A+RC Virtual Lecture by Domietta Torlasco: Quantum Cinema: For a New Politics of Location
ICA Miami welcomes Domietta Torlasco, Professor of Comparative Literature at Northwestern University, for a virtual lecture. This lecture is free and open to the public with advance RSVP and is presented in conjunction with A +RC Fall 2026 semester: New Approaches to Cinema.
Film and photography have traditionally been understood as media of indexicality, capable of providing a veritable trace of what is in front of the camera. The camera, especially in its mechanical version, has long been hailed as the guarantor of evidence. Even today, audiovisual recordings hold the power to bear witness to momentous but otherwise fugitive events. On the other hand, new technologies—from Augmented Reality (AR) to Artificial Intelligence (AI)—seem to erode or even undo this capacity to record what really happened in a specific place at a specific point in time. This lecture is an invitation to step back and ask what we mean by location—to move beyond the constraints of classical physics and explore cinema’s historical capacity to bear witness to a more complex reality. What claims of truth and justice can be made in this other location opened up by technology? How can we reconceive of our responsibility as both spectators and makers of images?
Domietta Torlasco
Domietta Torlasco is a critical theorist and filmmaker. In her transdisciplinary and transmedial practice, she investigates questions of memory and technology, life and labor, queer materialities, and cinema’s potential to reimagine histories and forms of life.
She is the author of four books: The Time of the Crime: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian Film (Stanford University Press, 2008), The Heretical Archive: Digital Memory at the End of Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), The Rhythm of Images: Cinema Beyond Measure (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), and Futures of the Flesh: An Experiment in Film Writing (Northwestern University Press, 2026). Her film essays have appeared in online journals and screened at national and international venues, including the Kino Arsenal in Berlin, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
Torlasco is core faculty in the Comparative Literary Studies Program at Northwestern and holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Radio/Television/Film. She lives in Chicago and Berlin.