From reproduction to AI collapse: October events

This October at e-flux, our Screening Room and space at 172 Classon Ave will become a stage for urgent conversations and cinematic experiments. Across talks, films, and readings, artists and thinkers will consider reproduction, technology, memory, war, ecology, and the futures we inherit and invent. Featuring Leopoldina Fortunati, Arlen Austin, and Andreas Petrossiants; Laura Huertas Millán with work by Gleidys Salgado, Colectivo Kuchá Suto, and Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo; work by Yorgos Lanthimos, Lucy Beech, and Edward Thomasson; R.H. Lossin; Luke Fowler; Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and Nouf Aljowaysir, with work by Kamee Abrahamian, Nouf Aljowaysir, Morehshin Allahyari, Yazan Khalili, and Sadia Quddus; Minh Nguyen, Catherine Quan Damman, Kaleem Hawa, Yasmina Price, and Mark Tseng-Putterman; Asha Bukojemsky, Daryna Mamaisur, Oleksiy Radynski, Darya Tsymbalyuk, and ruїns collective; Matteo Pasquinelli, Jonathan Beller, and Brian Kuan Wood.

Thursday, October 2, 2025
Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcana of Reproduction
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Join us at e-flux on Thursday, October 2, at 7pm for a talk and conversation with Leopoldina Fortunati about her classic work, The Arcana of Reproduction. Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers, and Capital, released for the first time in an unabridged English translation by Verso Books. Fortunati is joined by Arlen Austin, media studies scholar and co-translator, who will discuss the work in the context of Fortunati's oeuvre and her recent analyses of digital labor. The conversation will be moderated by Andreas Petrossiants, associate editor of e-flux journal. Read more here.

Saturday, October 4, 2025
Curanderxs: Spectral Archives
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Join us on the afternoon of Saturday, October 4 for a book presentation and screening with artist and filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán. In dialogue with a new publication on the occasion of the Ulrike Crespo After Nature Prize ’24, Huertas Millán has curated a two-film program featuring Gleidys Salgado and Colectivo Kuchá Suto’s Plan de fuga (2018) and Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo’s The Calm After the Storm (2020). The program considers image-making as situated and embodied knowledge—where oral tradition, plant knowledge, and family memory can operate as counter-archives. It will open with an introduction to the framework of Huertas Millán’s book and her most recent moving-image installation, Curanderxs. Read more here.

Tuesday, October 7, 2025
Economies of Love. Part 6: Rituals of Replacement
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For the sixth installment of the ongoing Economies of Love series, e-flux Screening Room presents Yorgos Lanthimos’s Alps (2011) preceded by Lucy Beech & Edward Thomasson’s Together (2017). This screening turns to situations when emotional and physical attachment is carried by stand-ins. Both works stage rituals of replacement in which what cannot truly be exchanged—desire or grief—is nonetheless acted out. Read more here.

Thursday, October 9, 2025
R.H. Lossin, “Artificial Intelligence: A Meaningless and Hazardous Concept”
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Join us on Thursday, October 9 for a talk by writer and scholar R.H. Lossin. In her description for the talk Lossin writes, “What happens when we stop to consider the gap between what the proponents of A.I. say about it and what it actually does? And what political and theoretical possibilities appear when we reject the premises of industrial capitalism and Silicon Valley and question the inevitability of technological progress? Conversely, what possibilities are foreclosed by the assumption that technology is redemptive and its forward march a necessary component of social progress? I consider these and other questions in an attempt to locate a language for resisting this process that is anything but natural and fatal to democracy.” Read more here.

Thursday, October 16, 2025
Weaving Memory: Luke Fowler’s Recent Works
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Join us for a screening of four recent films by Luke Fowler, followed by a discussion with the artist. In his films, Fowler builds portraits from fragments: spaces lived in, voices remembered, music recorded, and the rhythms of work and everyday life. Rather than tracing linear biographies, the artist turns to the atmospheres and residues that creative practices leave behind. The four works on this program, made between 2020 and 2025, each weave memory of rhythms of place and sound—whether in a modernist home designed for textile production, a Paris apartment animated by musique concrète, or the post-industrial streets of San Francisco’s South of Market district. Read more here.

Tuesday, October 21, 2025
Ancestral Computation
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Curated by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and presented in collaboration with ArteEast, “Ancestral Computation” assembles films that counter the epistemes of Western technoscience, from across the SWANA region and its diasporic time-spaces. These works call forth ancestral intelligences, inheriting forms of worldmaking surfaced from the lacunae of omissive datasets and archives of dispossession. They traverse algorithmic dream divination; develop tools for upending classificatory protocols; evade technologies of capture; and conjure precolonial deities through radio transmissions. They invoke alternate temporalities, rejecting the consignment of non-Western technologies to the dustbins of media history. Read more here.

Tuesday, October 23, 2025
Minh Nguyen, Memorial Park: Revisiting Vietnam 
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Join us for a reading and conversation with Minh Nguyen on the occasion of her new book, Memorial Park: Revisiting Vietnam, released by Art Metropole and Wendy’s Subway. Fifty years after the Fall of Saigon and twenty years after her family’s emigration to America, Minh Nguyen returns to her native Vietnam to find out what’s left of the old revolutionary project. In Memorial Park, a collection of essays pairing travelogue and criticism, Nguyen encounters relics of proletarian romance and vestiges of authoritarian control amid an evermore corporatized society. Along the way, she considers how contemporary artspeak confuses state censors, the rise of luxury “Smart Cities” as they supplant socialist housing complexes, and the enduring appeal of propaganda signs that once promised utopia. Nguyen’s reading will be followed by remarks and a conversation with Catherine Quan Damman, Kaleem Hawa, Yasmina Price, and Mark Tseng-Putterman. Read more here.

Saturday, October 25, 2025
Kyiv to LA: Swamps, Steppes, and Souvenirs
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Kyiv to LA presents “Swamps, Steppes and Souvenirs,” a screening program exploring the vastness of Ukraine’s ecology and the powers—both real and imagined—that have shaped its landscape. The screening will feature six short films by Ukrainian artists Daryna Mamaisur, Oleksiy Radynski, Darya Tsymbalyuk, and ruїns collective (Teta Tsybulnyk and Elias Parvulesco). The films unearth deeply layered histories and personal narratives linked to Russian imperialism, western romanticization, and memories rooted in loss and discovery. The screening will be followed by a conversation with the artists. This program is organized by Kyiv to LA curator Asha Bukojemsky and hosted by the Ukrainian Cultural Festival in collaboration with e-flux Screening Room. Read more here.

Monday, October 27, 2025
“World Collapse and the Limits of AI Extractivism”: Matteo Pasquinelli with Jonathan Beller and Brian Kuan Wood
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Join us for a conversation between Matteo Pasquinelli, Jonathan Beller, and Brian Kuan Wood on the topic of knowledge extractivism and collapsing global systems. As a starting point for the discussion, Pasquinelli writes, “US cultural hegemony reaches the historical limits of its sphere of influence with the imposition of Global English as lingua franca, whose peak and downfall, at the same time, is represented today by Large Language Models (LLMs) and their powerful capacity for translation and text generation in all idioms. [...] The collapse of LLMs can be taken as a metaphor of the crisis of knowledge extractivism and the global trade system as a whole. Economies in decline indeed generate monsters, such as military expansions, authoritarian personalities, and toxic culture. But through the fissures of this collapsing system, alternative social movements glimmer.” Read more here.

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For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.