Can Media Depict Reality in the Age of AI? Did It Ever, Really? Discussing the Interplay of Fact & Fiction in ‘Reality Frictions’ - Steve Anderson | #57
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Cinéma vérité
12 min read
The article's central theme explores how media constructs rather than depicts reality, and cinéma vérité is a pivotal documentary movement that grappled with this exact tension between authenticity and representation in film. Understanding this movement provides essential historical context for the discussion of 'Capital-T Truth' in media.
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Digital commons
1 min read
Explicitly mentioned in the article as a topic they discuss, relating to Anderson's work with Critical Commons, a public media archive. This concept is increasingly relevant to understanding how shared digital resources and appropriation-friendly archives function in the age of AI-generated media.
Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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My guest this week is Steve Anderson.
Steve F. Anderson is a scholar-practitioner working at the intersection of media, history, technology and culture. He is currently a Professor of Digital Media at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. He is the author of Technologies of Vision: The War Between Data and Images (MIT 2017) and Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past (Dartmouth 2011) and co-editor of the anthology Reclaiming Popular Documentary (Indiana 2021). Anderson is also the founder of the appropriation-friendly public media archive Critical Commons and co-PI on the electronic authoring platform Scalar. His recent creative work includes the mixed reality installation Live-VR Corridor (2021), which won the award for Best Mixed Reality at the New Media Film Festival and premiered internationally at the Beijing International Film Festival. His feature-length video essay Reality Frictions premiered at the Madrid International Film Festival in 2024. He received a Ph.D. in Film, Literature and Culture from USC and an M.F.A. in Film and Video from CalArts.
A couple plot twists to note with this episode!
First: instead of my usual intro, you’ll notice we’re showing a clip from Steve’s new feature-length video essay/doc Reality Frictions. So if you typically only listen to the show, I’d strongly recommend that you watch at least the first few minutes on Substack or YouTube. My hope is that doing it this way gives you the best context for what he and I dive into in our conversation. Moreover, I hope it whets your appetite to go see the film—it’s a nourishing and thought-provoking journey (the combination of Steve’s voice, cadence, ideas, and editing chops have a sort of ASMR-delight effect for my brain, and I’m sure I won’t be the only one).
Second: you’ll notice that this episode was filmed in my former Los Angeles location. We’ve actually been holding onto this
...This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.