DELIRIUM
DELIRIUM
Delirium points to what might want our attention. To phenomena at the limits of perception and language. Appearing in multiple discourses without one prescribed history or meaning, delirium evokes epistemological questions, can serve as a model for crisis, and be analyzed as a formal principle. We seek to approach delirium as a productive force, and to put it to work in its relationship to politics and aesthetics. For First Forum 2026, we seek to bring our many deliriums together.
October 23-24
Friday, October 23rd
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM
SCA 112
Theory Today Book Discussion with Eugenie Brinkema
hosted by First Forum
Join the Theory Today Working Group for a discussion of Life-Destroying Diagrams (Duke University Press, 2022), with the author in attendance. Eugenie Brinkema is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of The Forms of the Affects, also published by Duke University Press.
Friday, October 23rd
11:30 AM - 12:30 PM
SCI Lobby
Lunch & First Forum Opening Remarks
Vlada Lodesk and Amy Poncher - University of Southern California
Mad Excisions, Ife Olarewaju, University of Southern California
Critique and/as Delirium, or: Media Theory’s Addictions, Elizabeth Berman, Brown University
Passage à L'acte in the Post-colonial milieu of Claire Denis's S'en Fout la Mort (No Fear No Die), Amira Olingou, Brown University
Seen Before: On the Déjà Vu of Synthetic Images, Firdosi Noor Nizam, Goldsmiths, University of London
Respondent: Dr. Matthew Ellis
Friday, October 23rd
12:45 PM - 2:15 PM
SCA 110
PRACTICES UNBOUND
Friday, October 23rd
2:30 PM - 2:50 PM
SCA 110
Performance: 0th aubade
by alex cruse, University of California, Santa Cruz
an evolving multimedia work first conceived of as a play for one voice.
Friday, October 23rd
3:00 PM - 4:45 PM
SCA 110
IMAGES IN TIME
Delirious Collecting: A Case Study of A Filmic Ruin in Shanghai, Ann Lyuwenyu Zhang, New York University
Speaking As a Clam: Forms of Self-Estrangement in Anelise Chen’s Clam Down, A Metamorphosis, River Ngu, Northwestern University
Anarchiving the Spectral City: Material Ethnofiction as Delirious Urban Practices, David de Rozas, University of Southern California
Becoming an Image Among Images: The Mediated Home in Post-1980’s Turkey Su Baloglu, University of Toronto
Respondent: Dr. Michael Renov
Friday, October 23rd
5:00 PM - 5:30 PM
SCI 106
Screening: L-għajn
By Jeffrey Stuker
23min
Friday, October 23rd
5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
SCI 106
On Reading, Criticism, and Theory
Akira Mizuta Lippit (USC), Holly Willis (USC), Tom Leeser (CalArts), Kara Keeling (USC)
Moderated by Tania Safraz (PhD candidate, USC)
Saturday, October 24th
10:30 AM - 12:15 PM
SCA 110
INFORMATION SLUR
Terabusters: Hollywood’s New Capitalist Delirium Disrupting the Mechanics of Circulation, and Cultural Digital Labor, Pau Brunet Fuertes, University of Southern California
Critical Climate Modeling and Capitalist Delirium: Will Postgrowth Modeling break the fever dream? Harlin/Hayley Steele, University of California, Davis
Sensitivity to Form”: Gregory Bateson qua Film Editor and the Rise of Wartime Visual Anthropology, Tara Murray, Yale University
Pynchon as Method–Delirium and Paranoia in Inherent Vice and Under the Silver Lake, Yousef Alghawi, University of Southern California
Respondent: Dr. Thomas Pringle
AESTHETICS AND POLITICS
Saturday, October 24th
12:30 PM - 2:15 PM
SCA 110
"I am the martyr...": Constructions and (Re)Enactments of Martyrdom in Contemporary Lebanon, Reina Akkouche Halabi, University of Iowa
The Calendar of Delirium: Vanguard Time and the Colonization of Erotic Temporality in Wakamatsu Kōji's Ecstasy of the Angels (1972), Erik Yichen Tan, University of California, San Diego
Footage of What Never Happened: Generative AI and China's Unlived Pasts and Futures, Zhiyuan Tan, The New School
A Squib’s Discourse: Delirium, Diplomacy, and Death in the Action Cinema of Cannon Films, 1979-89, Ev Amaral, University of Southern California
Respondent: Dr. Nitin Govil
ENCLOSURE AS FORM, AND FORMAL ENCLOSURES
Saturday, October 24th
3:15 PM - 5:00 PM
SCA 110
"Watch out for the crazies:" Regional Delirium Wielded Against the State in George A. Romero’s The Crazies , Rachel Pittman, University of Southern California
Fūkeiron or Landscape Theory in Masao Adachi's Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971) and Arab Loutfi's Tell Your Tale Little Bird (1993) , Harry Ikue Mizumoto, University of California, Berkely
Dreams, Delirium, and Other Postcolonial Passions, Nisarg Patel, University of Southern California
Respondent: Dr. J.D. Connor
Eugenie Brinkema: Color and the Frenzy of Difference
Saturday, October 24th
5:30 PM - 7:00 PM
SCA 112
Eugenie Brinkema is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, status-only Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto, and affiliated faculty at the University of Amsterdam. Her research in film and media studies focuses on violence, affect, sexuality, aesthetics, and ethics. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals, artist monographs, and exhibition catalogues, and her books include The Forms of the Affects (2014) and Life-Destroying Diagrams (2022), both with Duke University Press. She is currently writing a book about color.
Creative Works on Display
SCI Lobby October 19 - October 23
Thought So Lonely
One-channel video, 2 min 30 sec
Every interaction, decisions, efforts and the drama around that is driven by the force of an effort to survive or exist against the certain oppressing forces. We can see that in a complex living being such as humans and animals to vegetation to microbes to a small cell. If so, does an atomic particle also possess the same reasoning behind its nature and behaviour, and the video raises questions on what we think about consciousness in both living and non-livings, and(or) Is it just a matter of a boundary that defines that ?
Shashank S is a PhD student in the Media Arts and Technology (MAT) program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research and practice span physical computing, human-computer interaction, tangible media, wearable technology, and data visualization, with a particular interest in interactive systems. Shashank's work bridges technical experimentation and creative production, extending into filmmaking and experimental video art as parallel modes of inquiry.
the underloved
Multi-channel video, 3 min 4 sec
a haunting 16mm film that reimagines Downtown Los Angeles through the windows of "wandering homes" that physically and conceptually move across a district shaped by erasure and redevelopment. Weaving together archival and contemporary footage, the project creates a sensory and poetic encounter, inviting viewers to experience and inhabit the district's built environment from within a ghostly shifting dwelling. Drawing on "spectral ethnography," the film treats haunting not as metaphor but as methodology—a framework for sensorially and spatially interrogating the past-present traces of lived environments rendered invisible in Downtown.
David de Rozas is a filmmaker, media artist, and educator based in Los Angeles, California. His work inquires how memory practices invoke real or imagined places, spaces, documents, or events to manifest plural ways of knowing, experiencing, and being. His films have been screened in festivals and film-curated series worldwide, such as Visions du Réel, Sheffield Doc/Fest, True/False, or Kassel DocFest. De Rozas has been a Flaherty Seminar Fellow (2019), VIA Art Fund Production Grantee (2020), pursuing a PhD in the Media Arts and Practice program at USC.
Fever Dreams and Machine Hallucinations
Multi-channel video, 2 min
This series is composed of digital collage dreamscapes that I physically assembled from a dataset of abstract images generated through machine hallucination using an early AI visualization program. Rather than allowing the algorithm to determine the final composition, I manually construct each uncanny scene by breaking apart hallucinated images, treating AI output as raw material to be cut, shaped, and reconfigured. I then digitally paint over parts of the image as a secondary act of embodied artistic intervention. Finally, I feed these collages into a different AI model and prompt it to animate the scenes, bringing motion to these surreal images. This process allows for a perceptual re-entering into the oneiric space of the original dream, thereby opening an altered state of consciousness between algorithmic hallucination and subconscious memory. Fever-induced visions: where bodies dissolve and spaces mutate, where AI hallucinations not only function as symbols of computational failure but as a visual state of delirium.
Julia Rose Camus is an artist and researcher working at the intersection of synthetic image culture, embodiment, and computational visuality. Her current research investigates how Al-generated imagery restructures the human body through processes of fragmentation, abstraction, and machinic recomposition. Drawing from film theory, phenomenology, body horror, and media archaeology, her work examines what happens to sensation, flesh, and materiality under increasingly synthetic visual regimes. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Division of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. Her broader research interests include bodily representations on screen, videographic criticism, and critical/creative media practice.
The Line of Sight: Spatial Delirium at the Edge of the Knowable
Multi-channel video, 1 h 7 min 16 sec
a durational performance work set near Urad Rear Banner in Inner Mongolia, tracing the geopolitical boundary between Inner Mongolia, China and Mongolia. Working within the contested landscape of the Gobi Desert, the work investigates the tension between nomadic heritage and state territoriality, between ancestral patterns of movement and the hard restrictions of contemporary borders.
Sichong Xie is a multidisciplinary artist and Ph.D. candidate in Media Arts and Practice at USC School of Cinematic Arts. Her practice combines movement and material in body-based sculptural forms. By placing traditional sculptural forms within new sites, materials, and social constructs, Xie investigates these forms and movements within global communities to re-consider and re-envision shared spaces and performative practices. She raises questions about identity, politics, cross-culturalism, and the body in ever-changing environments. Xie received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and is the recipient of the 2022 MAP Fund Award and the 2021 Artadia Los Angeles Award.
There are no upcoming events at this time.