Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

What do we see if we attune our vision to waves rather than rays, diffraction – superimpositions of and interferences between images – rather than reflection? This seminar investigates the aesthetic and political shifts that occur when cinematic practices, old and new, privilege difference, errantry, momentum in their worldmaking activity. Here the term quantum expresses the attempt to move beyond the constraints of classical physics and see/think/feel in relation to indeterminacy and the world’s constitutive potential to be other than what it is. We will consider sci-fi and experimental films and readings in film-philosophy, new materialisms, and Afrofuturism, while also asking questions of truth, evidence, and historicity.

Seminar 1 – The Wave and the Index

• • Read: Karen Barad, “Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-turning, Re-membering, and Facing the Incalculable,” New Formations 92 (2017): 56–86.
  • Read: Karen Barad, “What Is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice,” in Posthumanism in Art and Science: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).
  • View: Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972, 166 min)

Seminar 2 – Montage as Cinematography

• Read: Sergei M. Eisenstein, “Montage and Architecture,” trans. by Michael Glenny. Assemblage, No. 10 (December 1989): 110-131.
• Read: Lakshmi Padmanabhan, ed., Forms of Errantry (New York: UnionDocs Editions, 2024).
• View: This House (Miryam Charles, 2022, 75 min)

Seminar 3 – Theory Underwater

• Read: John Akomfrah, “Digitopia and the Specters of Diaspora,” Journal of Media Practice 11, no. 1 (2010): 21–29.
• Read: Domietta Torlasco, “Vertigo Sea: Suspension, Errantry, Flesh,” Liquid Blackness: Journal of Aesthetics and Black Studies, vol. 7, no. 2 (October 2023)
• View: Theory Underwater (Domietta Torlasco, 2026, 19 min)

Lecture

Quantum Cinema: For a New Politics of Location

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?