Rick Prelinger on the lost landscapes of San Francisco

Footage collector Rick Prelinger takes us on a tour of the forces that built the vernacular sinews of twentieth-century experience in San Francisco: ethnic migration, infrastructure on the an enormous scale, mass transport, and consumer videography.

His presentation draws attention to how vulnerable are the landscapes, experiences, and even memory of those landscapes not linked directly to the needs of the state.

Broadcasting from Tokyo

How do you channel experimental mastermind Chris Marker and higher-level mathematics at once? Transplanted from Chicago to Tokyo, astrophysicist Simon DeDeo started looking around him in the cafes of Tokyo, watching eye-contact and subtle variations in light, trying to make sense of the subtle aesthetics that govern everyday interaction. The result: a semiotics of the smallest boundaries and gestures that reconcile and divide in Japan.