Creativity Summit: Alex Garland in Conversation

Description

The 2018 Creativity Summit at the SFFILM Festival foregrounds a suite of programming interrogating the intersection of film and technology-issues that reach into how technology impacts us and our ability to create and connect. Our speakers and panelists represent a breadth of perspectives drawn from the arts, academia, and technology. We are focusing this year’s panels on discussions of “presence,” or how technology broadly (and VR & AR in particular) is impacting artistic and cultural practice. The Summit’s first presentation features an in-depth conversation between filmmaker Alex Garland and film scholar Tara McPherson.

This is a free community event in partnership with WIRED. Advance registration is required. 

Alexander Medawar Garland is a novelist, screenwriter, video game writer, film producer, and director. Garland’s first novel, The Beach (1996), led critics to dub him a key voice of Generation X. He subsequently penned screenplays for, amongst others, 28 Days Later (2002) and Never Let Me Go (2011). With Ex Machina (2015), Garland directed his own screenplay to an Academy Award nomination. His most recent project is Annihilation (2018). Garland’s work is deeply rooted in analyses of human- machine interaction and science and technology’s impact on human survival.

Tara McPherson is a Professor in USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and Director of the Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Studies. She studies the intersection of digital technologies and cultural systems and also develops new tools and paradigms for digital publishing and learning. She is the author or editor of five books including the recent Feminist in a Software Lab: Difference + Design (Harvard) and Transmedia Frictions (California).