Other Events at UVA
See the list below of other events from other research centers and programs happening around UVA Grounds. IHGC staff will populate this page as events approach, and will remove events after they have taken place:
Automation Ecologies' Film Screening of Ancestral Clouds, Ancestral Claims
- Friday, November 7, 2025
- 7:30 to 9:30 pm
- Location TBA
From the assembly line to the chatbot, what are the consequences of speeding up and doing more? How are technological reconfigurations of work entangled with new spatial practices, accelerations in material throughput, and elemental displacements? The ecological impacts of mechanization and mass (re)production have long cascaded outward across time and space, unevenly registering in bodies and landscapes. Yet automation—as a concept that spans industrial mechanization and more recent developments in information processing and synthetic cultural production—has generally been conceptualized as a transformation in labor relations, rather than as a change in environmental relations.To explore how the arts and humanities can shape these conversations, as well as to engage audiences at UVA and in the wider community of Charlottesville, the workshop presents a screening of the film Ancestral Clouds, Ancestral Claims, a new film by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman. The film addresses the costs of industrial and digital technology on global landscapes and their inhabitants and coincides with a paper workshop earlier in the day, which brings together scholars from across History of Technology, Science and Technology Studies, and Media Studies to exchange perspectives and build speculative new vocabularies for thinking about the ecological significance of technologies of automation. The film screening will be be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers and is open to the public.For more information about the screening and the Automation Ecologies project, please contact Megan Weissner, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab: wiessner@virginia.edu. "IHGC is pleased to co-sponsor the event along with the Page-Barbour Committee, the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab, and other UVA partners.
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