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Marc Da Costa is an anthropologist and artist whose work engages the relationship between archives, data and lived experience. Da Costa will discuss a series of recent artistic works that have taken artificial intelligence as both a medium and subject as well as elicit conversation from the group about a new commission that will explore the vast historical video archives of a colonial news agency. Of particular interest will be questions pertaining to the phenomenology of history as well as the political-economic and emotional relationships circulating around and enabled by AI.

Da Costa’s most recent work, The Golden Key, which won the Jury Prize at SxSW 2024 and was recently featured in The New York Times, explored questions of  mythmaking, community and artificial narrative, drawing heavily from work done in the field of folklore studies. Prior to this, his 2023 The Border Line (text | video) was an experimental documentary produced from an archive scraped from Instagram of all the video posts along the Turkey - Syria border between 2017-2019 in the midst of a mass migration.

Da Costa’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Venice Film Festival, SxSW, the Phi Center in Montreal, Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Geneva International Film Festival and elsewhere.

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This seminar is the first in a new Center for Ethnography seminar series, "Form Anthropology." Recognizing form as object, method and modes of ethnographic expression, the series will offer new perspectives on ethnography and anthropology, past and future.

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Zoom registration is done via email to abayonet@uci.edu. 

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