Laura U. Marks

Dr. Laura U. Marks is known for her innovative work on embodied aesthetics, using a philosophical approach that draws primarily on the work of Gilles Deleuze and also on existential phenomenology. Her work arises from close engagement with art, not applying concepts to art but drawing concepts from it. Her cross-cultural research aims to expand the Western intellectual vocabulary with concepts and artworks from minor traditions and other places, in particular the Arab world.

Marks is a dual citizen of the United States and Canada. After earning a B.A. in Art History and Sociology and Anthropology at Swarthmore College in 1987, she worked for several years as assistant editor of the journal Afterimage. The non-profit art world nurtured her as a critic and curator, and she began to publish art criticism and curate programs of experimental media art. She earned an M.A. (1994) and Ph.D. (1996) in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester. She took the post of Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa for several years, where she was also a media programmer with the Available Light Collective. Marks is presently the Dena Wosk University Professor of Art and Culture Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Her doctoral thesis became the book The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Duke University Press, 2000), which proved extremely influential in the "embodied turn" in humanities scholarship.

A collection of her more experimental writings, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (University of Minnesota, 2002) expanded into the senses, particularly smell, eroticism, and electronic media. She continues to develop intercultural perspectives on new media art and philosophical approaches to materiality and information culture. Several years of research in these and in Islamic art history and philosophy and Arabic gave rise to Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (MIT Press, 2010). This book brings Deleuze's thought into contact with points in the history of Islamic philosophy and theology, and draws on Islamic art to shed new light on contemporary media art. The analysis in Enfoldment and Infinity is based on Marks' theory of enfolding-unfolding aesthetics, which she has developed in writings since 2002.

Since 1990 she has written about and curated programs of the media arts of the Arab and Muslim world. This research takes her to Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus and gives her the opportunity to improve her Arabic. She is preparing a book on experimental media in the Arab world and finishing another on enfolding-unfolding aesthetics.

Marks has been invited to lecture around the world. Her writings have been translated into Czech, Flemish, French, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish. She has curated programs of experimental and independent media art for festivals, collectives, and art spaces worldwide, including the Images Festival (Toronto), the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, the Argos Festival (Brussels), the Pacific Cinemathèque (San Francisco), and the Seoul Net and Experimental Film Festival.

www.sfu.ca/~lmarks