Future Street: Los Angeles in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

• Friday, October 31, 2025
• 2:00 p.m. - 3:15 p.m.
• Schoenberg Hall

Registration link

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. 

What's the universe made of?

• Friday, April 24, 2026
• 2:00 p.m. - 3:15 p.m.
• Schoenberg Hall

Details and registration information for Professor Treu’s lecture are forthcoming.