A+RC Virtual Lecture by Esther Leslie: Animation as Turbid Media – On New Ethers, Dusts and Particles
- wgclients01
- Oct 11
- 1 min read
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?