Technopolitical discourse about AI is pervaded by “the China Argument”—that the direction and speed of American innovation is best left to an unchecked private sector due to the threat posed by China, whose values are seen as antithetical to the West. Resultant media framings of the US-China AI race are rife with techno-Orientalist tropes. This talk by Gerald Sim will focus on visual media whose power derives from being uniquely vivid, engaging, and visceral.

Gerald Sim is the Professor of Film and Media Studies and I-SENSE Ethics and Society Fellow at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of Screening Big Data: Films that Shape Our Algorithmic Literacy (Routledge 2024), Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability (Amsterdam UP 2020), and The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema (Bloomsbury 2014).

Sponsored by the Film Department, the Program in Asian Studies, and the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) Program.

Campus community only, please.