Peter Lunenfeld

Professor of Design Media Arts

Peter Lunenfeld is a professor in the UCLA Design Media Arts department, and affiliated faculty in Digital Humanities. He works at the intersection of media philosophy, design theory, art criticism, urban history and digital humanities. Founder and director of the Institute for Technology & Aesthetics (The ITA), his books include City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined; Digital_Humanities (co-authored with Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp); The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine; USER: InfoTechnoDemo; Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media & Cultures; and the edited volume, The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media. Creator and editorial director of the MIT Press’ multi-award-winning Mediawork project, he’s won the International Awards for Art Criticism and the Dorothy Lee Award from the Media Ecology Association. He’s held fellowships at the Huntington Library, the Ingmar Bergman Estate on Fårö, and the Columbia University Institute for Scholars in Paris. He holds a B.A. in history from Columbia University, an M.A. in Media Studies from SUNY Buffalo, and a Ph.D. from UCLA in Film, Television and New Media. For additional information, visit Professor Lunenfeld's website.

Future Street: Los Angeles in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

Twenty-first century Los Angeles is a city rife with self-driving cabs, self-authoring scripts, and self-resurrecting avatars. It’s also long been mocked for teetering on the razor’s edge between the real and the artificial. But that history makes LA the perfect test case for the rest of the world as we all navigate an increasingly uncanny AI future. In this talk, Peter Lunenfeld, a media theorist turned urban storyteller, weaves his research on the cultural impact of artificial intelligence into a connectionist narrative about LA’s beguiling complexities. Follow him as he leaps from 1953 West Hollywood, where Aldous Huxley - high on mescaline - dreamed of non-verbal humanities; to Sunset Boulevard today where delivery robots designed to look like anime characters roll past homeless encampments; to a future in which machine learning and generative media either swallows whole our mythmakers or empowers vastly more people to craft their own tales - or both.