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Sponsored Programming:
MASTS is proud to support a series of wonderful programming at USC and beyond:
other others〰️ a place for skin thinking is a distributed, hybrid symposium that explores touch imaginaries across disciplines and practices. Organized by Touch Praxis (Nina Sarnelle + Selwa Sweidan), Other Others brings together artists, facilitators, and scholars to explore embodied connection, anti-colonial touch, and collective care through interactive installations, performances, workshops, conversations, a zine publication, and screenings.
For Fall 2025, they will be hosting a series of in-person and online convenings on Sundays. Contributors include: Kyooeun Jang, Petra Kuppers, Joshua Wicke, Tyra Wigg, Ryat Yezbick, and Mlondi Zondi (more tba).
See here for further information. For further questions, please reach out to touchpraxis [at] gmail [dot] com.
2. First Forum 2025: SPEED
First Forum is the annual conference curated by graduate students of the Division of Cinema and Media Studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. For 2025, the conference theme is SPEED:
The contemporary moment is often thought of synonymously with the idea of speed. The 20th and 21st centuries were marked by rapidly ascending rates of movement: the movement of capital, of goods, of ideas, and of information, as illustrated by the works of Arjun Appadurai, Manuel Castells, et al. While the information economy’s accelerated pace points to a culture of speed, it is also marked by an increased sense of fatigue, meaninglessness, and ennui. The solutions posited for either of these pronouncements—a radical suspension of our current pace, or an even greater impetus towards a high-speed culture.
Amid these diagnoses, and concomitant prescriptions of our current moment, we ask you to explore instead—what happens if we engage with speed as an experience, ontology, infrastructure, aesthetics, value, fantasy, consciousness, affect, or, as a way of being? We contend that art, images, and media objects offer us ways to dismantle speed as an ontologically stable category and as a unified mode of experience. Such objects often defy the notion of speed as a linear spectrum, challenging the binary opposition of fastness and slowness as fundamentally disparate. Further, they open up new ways of engaging with the speed of our world(s)—sometimes through forms of sluggishness or boredom. We ask, for example: does the speed we have come to associate with computation exist on the same spectrum as the temporality of burnout? Of micro-trends? How do we think about bodily experiences of speed—on roller coasters, high speed trains, and the DMV, where the promise of speed clashes with the sluggishness of bureaucracy? Does speed imply a positive movement toward improvement/development, or a negative impulse toward extinction?
For further information, see the full conference program and their Instagram page.
Interlocutors, Partners, Supporters:
MASTS also receives support from, and is in conversation with, several initiatives and groups at the University of Southern California, including the:
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