Visual Culture Event: Screening of Begin Again Again

Artist Leslie Thornton is a distinguished and influential pioneer of media as a contemporary art form. In 2019, she was the first artist in residence in the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture and also completed a residency at CERN. She will return to campus to present work originating during these residencies, along with earlier related films and videos. Thornton grew up in a family involved in the Manhattan Project and subsequent secret projects. Much of her early work embodies an apprehension about the scale of human developments exceeding the scale of humankind, as epitomized by the atom bomb and AI. More recently her focus has been on tracing tangible processes of research that are sealed off from the public imagination. Her 2023 film HANDMADE, filmed at Caltech, is currently featured in an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art. A Guggenheim fellow, Thornton has exhibited widely at venues such as documenta, Centre Pompidou, Vienna Secession, and the Whitney Biennial.

The Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture, which is funded by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and based in the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), features new undergraduate course offerings, guest lecturers, and other programming to foster conversations between humanists and scientists. Its activities are organized by HSS and other Caltech faculty in collaboration with scholars at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.