Imperfect Machines: Mind, Body, and Simulation Audiovisual Multi-campus Working Group

Emily Cohen
Film and Digital Media
UC Santa Cruz

Irene Lusztig
Film and Digital Media
UC Santa Cruz

We are a group of filmmakers and humanities scholars who teach and work within the UC system and engage with a wide range of critical studies–queer theory, disability studies, anthropology, and film. Together we created a digital humanities series of short critical films and texts on simulation, medicine, and daily life. Our projects collectively examined how bodies and minds – both real and simulated—come to be seen, manifest, or felt in the space of medical practice. At its grandest, the project sought to refute the classical conception of our bodies as perfect machines, utopic visions of human and animal life constructed as repairable, mechanical, and uniform. Rather, our films and texts examined how bodies and minds–normative and non-normative, exceptional and disabled–are produced at the intersection of biological and cultural systems–where language, history, and materiality shape the very epistemological framing of the body and mind itself.