Vera Molnar’s Drawing Machines: A Media Archaeology of Early Computer Graphics

Zsofi Valyi-Nagy, Ph.D Visiting Assistant Professor in Art History at Scripps College
Wednesday, May 14 at 5:30pm, INTS 1128

How do you draw a line with a computer? When the Hungarian-born, Paris-based artist Vera Molnar (1924-2023) began exper-imenting with electronic computers in 1968, this task was not as simple as the click of a mouse or the swipe of a finger. Molnar had to translate her visual language of geometric abstraction into alphanumeric instructions that a computer would understand. Though she generated thousands of computer plotter “drawings” over the next two decades, she left behind limited technical documentation from this period, leaving it up to viewers to imagine the algorithms behind her compositions. This lecture presents a media archeology of the artist’s work –– a hands-on approach that engages not only with her drawings but also her process of drawing with a computer. I will recount my “reenactment” of Molnar’s series Lettres de ma mère (My mother’s letters, 1988) using obsolete hardware and software that the artist once used. This practice-led approach foregrounds the artist’s process and historically contextualizes the material history and user experience of early interactive computing, which have been all but forgotten.

 

 

Book Talk: Leaving Legacies and the Making of Early Modern South Asia

Book Talk: Leaving Legacies and the Making of Early Modern South Asia

Shayan Rajani, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of History, Michigan State University
Monday, May 5 at 4:00pm, CHASS INTS 1111

Shayan Rajani is an Assistant Professor of History at Michigan State University. He is the author of Leaving Legacies: The Individual in Early Modern South Asia published by Cambridge University Press in 2024. His research interests include early modern South Asia, particularly the region of Sindh, the history of the individual and self-representation, and gender and sexuality.

Co-Sponsored by the Department of History, the Asian Studies Program, and the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program.

 

Yong Soon Min: Reimagining the Inheritances of Empire

Kylie Ching Talk, April 17, 2025

Kylie Ching, Ph.D.
UCR Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow

How does one remember an unending war? Within U.S. history, the Korean War remains the “forgotten war,” overshadowed by World War II and the Vietnam War. For the late artist, activist, and educator Yong Soon Min, this contradiction makes the Korean War an important site to parse through its history and meaning. Rather than focusing on scenes of spectacular militarized violence, she draws attention to how the civil war continues to shape everyday life in Korea and its diaspora. Centering personal and embodied experiences as a form of history, Min repurposes photographs across family and state archives to reimagine alternative kinships that disrupt U.S. Cold War historiographies. This talk will explore two works — a photomontage called Talking Herstory from 1990 and a multi-media installation entitled Mother Load from 1996 that was later remade in 2014. Within these works, Min reveals the visible and invisible inheritances of war, such as memories, physical objects like photographs and clothes, and family relations.

PLEASE NOTE: THIS TALK HAS BEEN RESCHEDUED FOR APRIL 17

In-person
Thursday, April, 17, 2025 at 5:00pm
CHASS Interdisciplinary South, 1111

Work in Progress Lecture Series

Crafting Kashmir: Painting & Stitching Place in the Nineteenth Century
Fatima Quraishi, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Art History

Crafting Kashmir: Painting & Stitching Place in the Nineteenth CenturyThe verdant Kashmir Valley, a place of unearthly beauty, has long been a subject of praise and description. The history and geography of Kashmir appeared in multiple literary genres, including Sanskrit sources which claimed the valley to be a sacred landscape and Persian courtly literature which characterised Kashmir as being jannat nazir (paradise like). Recent scholarship has highlighted the connections between Mughal literary imaginings, political discourse, and the construction of gardens in Kashmir, interpreting these landscaped spaces as a means to claim sovereignty over the land. In the nineteenth century, the region was again the subject of an imperial discourse, that of the British empire, a discourse shaped by a particular interest in the production of Kashmiri shawls, a highly sought after commodity in Victorian England. Among the shawls were a small set of embroidered ‘map’ shawls which depicted the city of Srinagar and its significant landmarks, both natural and manmade, one of which was sent as a gift to Queen Victoria. Large-scale painted cotton maps of the entire valley were also produced in the mid-nineteenth century, often employing the same visual conventions as the shawls. This paper explores the image-making practices which underlay the production of these textiles, departing from existing scholarship which has emphasized their imbrication within the colonial enterprise. I instead approach their resistance of the colonial gaze and highlight how the craftsmen creating them were informed by a distinctly South Asian, perhaps even Kashmiri, sense of place. 

Wednesday, April 9, 2025 at 5:30PM in ARTS 333

 

The Huntington Library hosts

Music in the Early Spanish Americas, Performance Spaces, and Archives

Missale romanum ordinarium (Mexico City: Antonio de Espinosa, 1561). RB 32667. | The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

Ma huel cenquiza, ma nechicaui
(May they come together, may they assemble)

These opening lines of a Nahuatl garden canticle from the Psalmodia Christiana (Mexico City, 1583) set the stage for a conference focusing on the musical sounds, performance spaces, and sonic traces of the early modern Hispanic world. The Huntington Library is the ideal venue for an interdisciplinary conference that aims to examine the musical sounds that once reverberated across the Spanish Americas. Today, these musical and sonic legacies are preserved at the Huntington Library. To highlight these little-studied collections and encourage their value in pushing musical-humanistic research forward, this conference will bring together interdisciplinary scholars to discuss their current, cutting-edge research on the performances, performance spaces, and archives of this music.

Two-day conference | General: $35, Students and Huntington Fellows: Free | Optional lunch: $20 each day. Register at the Huntington Library website.

Conference registration includes general admission to The Huntington. Lunch reservations will close on March 17 at noon.

Friday, March 21, 2025, 8:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m.
Saturday, March 22, 2025, 9:30 a.m.–3:30 p.m.
Education and Visitor Center, Haaga Hall
Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Rd. San Marino, CA 91108
For questions about this event, please email researchconference@huntington.org or call 626-405-3432.

Join Us for an Alumni Lecture!

The Sacred Enclosure of the Himorogi at Hiroshima

Christopher Mead Talk, 2025Christopher Mead, Ph.D.
Emeritus Regents’ Professor, University of New Mexico

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial was designed and built between 1949 and 1955 as a permanent monument to world peace by the great Japanese modernist, Tange Kenzō. The monument seems so complete and self-evident that few visitors stop to ask an obvious if overlooked question: Why is the Peace Memorial not located at the hypocenter, the elevated site where the atomic bomb Little Boy detonated 1903 feet in the air and annihilated an entire city in less than a second on August 6, 1945? Why is the Peace Memorial in fact located some 1200 feet distant from the hypocenter on another of Hiroshima’s many islands? It is as if we had decided to erect the 9/11 Memorial, not where the World Trade Center Towers stood until September 11, 2001, but elsewhere in New York City, on Wall Street for example. In this talk, I take on this question by locating Tange Kenzō’s design at the intersection of Western paradigms of architecture and planning codified by Le Corbusier with Japanese traditions of cultural space and architecture. These traditions engage both Shintō and Buddhist beliefs and are rooted ultimately in the himorogi — the sacred Shintō enclosure where earth meets sky, and humans gather to welcome spirits called kami. Shaped by a sense of time and space unlike what we in the West assume when speaking of place, the himorogi answers our question in ways that we do not expect.

Wednesday, March 5, 2025 at 5:00pm
The Barbara and Art Culver Screening Room at UCR ARTS
3834 Main Street, Riverside