Patricia Ciccone
academic researcher, translator and indexer
I am a Ph.D Candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. I hold a BA and an MA in Film Studies from Concordia University in Montreal, and a degree in Library and Information Studies (MLIS) with a focus on born-digital archiving from UCLA. I'm currently adjuncting in Film Studies at Loyola Marymount University and in the MLIS program at UCLA.In my dissertation project, Continuous Flows: A Mediated History of the L.A. River, I position Los Angeles River as a media figure that can help us reimagine the stakes of place-making under the current (and concurrent) climate, social and economic crises. To do so, I analyze how the river becomes visible to us through three mediated representational processes (live-streaming, the action films, and architectural renderings) and how these different epistemic modalities extend and habituate our perception of these crises. My scholarship, at large, is concerned by the overlapping infrastructural, environmental, and political crises produced by neoliberalism and by reassessing the roles that aesthetic can play in our understanding of them.My research also expands into an experimental documentary practice, and my latest project, For we grasp at all, to catch nothing but wind, centers around the tenuous relationship between the communities of the Coachella Valley and the private wind farms of the San Gorgonio Pass.Since 2011, I've been a member of the pop collective Donzelle. A fixture of the Montréal art scene, we've performed at a variety of venues and events around the city, and have toured Québec, Ontario, and the United States. Our music video for Festival appeared as part of the Word is Bond: The Sound of Rap Queb exhibition at the Musée de la Civilisation in Québec City.
Selected Publications and Conference Papers“Geysers in the Desert: Mediating the Unfinished City in Victoria (2020)”. To be delivered at the Real and Imagined Spaces in Film conference in Zaragoza, Spain. May 2025." How to Keep A City Alive? Mierle Ukeles’ For→Forever... (2020)” in Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture, no 2:vol 9 (June 2024). Special Dossier on Media In-Between.“Pipe Dreams: Sustainability and Speculation in Metabolic Studio’s that Bending the River (2020-...)”. Delivered at The Narrative Environments of Los Angeles: A Research Forum. Los Angeles, USA. April 2024.“Seeing Energy Infrastructures: The Windmill Farm Tours in the Coachella Valley”. Invited speaker in Christina Ceisel’s Tourism graduate seminar at Cal State, Fullerton. April 10th, 2024.“Geysers in the Desert: Environmental Maintenance in Victoria (2020)”. Delivered at Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) Annual Meeting. Seattle, October 2023.“To Maintain or to Destroy: Mapping the Unfinished City in Victoria (2020)”. Delivered at Visible Evidence. Udine, Italy. September 2023.“Keeping the City Alive: Urban Screens and Lateral Vision in Mierle Ukeles’ For ➝ forever (2020).” Delivered as part of the “Im/materiality: Media in between” panel at Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Annual Meeting, Denver. April 2023.“Keeping the city alive: metro art and maintenance work in Mielke Ukeles’ For --> Forever”. Delivered at PAMLA Annual Meeting. Los Angeles, November 2022.Q&A Moderator, “The Still Side/El Lado Quieto” with filmmakers Miko Revereza and Carolina Fusilier, for Rotations Film Series. 2220 Arts & Archives in Los Angeles. March 2022“Visual Speculations: environmental crises and the new Global in “The Wandering Earth”.” Delivered at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Annual Meeting, Online. April 2022Moderator, “Post-ness as/in Academia – A First Forum Roundtable,” First Forum 2021, Online. October 2021“Distal Intimacy: the ASMR community and the transformation of care.” Delivered as part of the “Commodified Relationships: The Politics of Intimacy and Resistance” panel at Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Annual Meeting, Online. October 2021“Capturing the Quotidian: The Navigational Economy of Baidu’s AI Park.” Delivered as part of the “Legibility, Intelligibility, and Perception in Smart City Paradigms” panel at Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Annual Meeting, Online. April 2021“Capturing the Quotidian: The Navigational Economy of Baidu’s AI Park.” Delivered as part of the “Legibility, Intelligibility, and Perception in Smart City Paradigms” panel at Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Annual Meeting, Denver. April 2020. (Cancelled due to COVID-19)“Visual Speculations: mapping the new Global in “The Wandering Earth”.” Delivered at First Forum. Los Angeles, October 2019.“Distal Relations: ASMR and the interfacing of sensations.” Delivered at Theorizing the Web, New York City. April 2019.“Cheryl Sim's Un jour, Un jour: Imagining potential futures in the fragmented archives of Expo67” in InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, Volume 15, Issue 2 (Spring 2019). pp.147-166.“Book Review: Lee Humphreys’ The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of the Everyday.” in Spectator 39:2 (Fall 2019). pp.69-71.“Sensational Labour: defining and performing sensations on commercial social networking platforms.” Delivered as part of the “Digital Embodiment: Theoretical and Methodological Interventions into Data, Race, Sensation and the Corporeal” panel at Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Annual Meeting, Toronto. March 2018“Representing the Universal: Cheryl Sim’s “Un jour, un jour” and the new national imaginary of Expo67”. Delivered at “[dis]memory, [mis]representation & [re]figuring the archival lens: A Symposium on Visual Archives & Forms of Representation”. UCLA, Los Angeles. January 2018.“Data as Byproduct of Neoliberal Politics.” Summary of Mél Hogan’s talk Data Center Industrial Complex at UCLA for Les Fourchettes: Critical Methods in Technoculture. February 2017.“Reclaiming anti-productivity: feminist stoner humor and the (post)work imaginary of Broad City.” Invited speaker in Gada Mahrouse’s Feminist and Humour class at Concordia University. January 2017.“PUMPing Up the (data)Base: Who + What is Missing from the Queer Archive.” Workshop facilitator. Video Fag, Toronto, January 2016. (media coverage of event here)