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A+RC Virtual Lecture by Esther Leslie: Animation as Turbid Media – On New Ethers, Dusts and Particles
ICA Miami welcomes Esther Leslie, Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London, to the Art + Research Center 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 2025 semester on Animation and the Future of the Image in dialogue with the museum’s landmark exhibition Joyce Pensato (1941–2019).
Ethers come and go. Dusts become pixels. Inside the atom we now see worlds of turbulence. Devices make present spectacular and sublime incomprehensibilities, the tiniest shudders in space and time, a glimmer from something so distant its seeming existence might just be an effect of the mechanism – lending significance to Adorno’s line about the splinter in one’s eye being the best magnifying glass. Our media eyes are directed towards a cosmic turbidity that swirls offworld, but we have our clouds, fogs, ethers on Earth too and they equally present conundrums to the unaided eye. This talk explores a realm of animations that articulate galactic and earthbound desires, new ethers designed to capture and communicate the business of the world. It asks what nature, what new enlivened nature, is seen through new and old lenses. What do we see in – and through – the robot eyes that replace human ones? In the lens of telescopes? What do they see in us? Can we speak of a subsumption by the pro-visional – in the age of turbid media, which would be a name for contemporary animated form?
About Esther Leslie
Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her books include various studies of Walter Benjamin, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (2002); Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (2005); Derelicts (2014), Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (2016) and The Rise and Fall of Imperial Chemical Industries: Synthetics, Sensism and the Environment (2023). Work on the biopolitical economy of dairy, with Melanie Jackson, includes Deeper in the Pyramid (2018/2023). A study of anti-fascist radio pioneer Ernst Schoen (written with Sam Dolbear) appeared in 2023: Dissonant Waves: Ernst Schoen and Experimental Sound in the Twentieth Century.