Doors 7:30p
Program 8:00p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

In the lead up to the 2024 presidential election and looking back on high-profile races of the past several years, it’s striking to consider how both legacy forms of media and emerging tech are being harnessed to shape voting outcomes. From the seismic impact of the CNN debate to the movement power of TikTok, and both the real and imagined influence of AI, old and new media forms continue to prove consequential this election cycle.

While it has long been typical of candidates to wield contemporary media to their advantage, this presidential race has seen nonfiction media forms take on major importance as a means of ideological signaling. Between the spectacular staging of the National Conventions, the Harris campaign’s understanding of TikTok and meme culture, and accusations about AI-generated crowds and malicious deepfakes, emerging tech is transforming the conscience of our electorate.

With this tumultuous reality in mind, we ask: what are the critical forms of media this election cycle? How do they influence our understanding of the candidates and, importantly, the candidates’ ability to communicate with and mobilize viewers?

This event brings together three disparate voices to help explore the critical place of emerging tech in the 2024 presidential election, as well as its resonances with elections happening around the world. We’ll also reflect on the ways that past electoral uses of “new media” might help us understand this race.

The three panelists — Professor Joshua Glick of Bard College, Sam Cole of 404 Media, and writer Chloe Lizotte of MUBI — will each offer a different perspective on how media is shaping and being shaped by this current presidential race. We’ll move beyond the hype and headlines to create some common understanding of the major media forms in play, provide a sense of their history, and collectively speculate as to what might be coming down the road as we head into November.

Come with burning questions, crackpot theories, and sober concerns — we’re excited to hash it out!

Bios

Samantha Cole is a technology journalist based in NYC who has worked in journalism for more than ten years. Her writing centers on sexuality, the adult industry, online culture, and AI. She’s the author of How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex and a former senior editor at Motherboard, Vice’s tech outline. Her work appears in Popular Science, Fast Company, Al Jazeera, and elsewhere. She is co-founder of 404 Media.

Joshua Glick teaches film and media at Bard College. He is the author of Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History (University of California Press 2018) and co-curated the exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image: Deepfake Unstable Evidence on Screen. He is currently working on a new book project that explores the rising investment in documentary from both the left and right of the political spectrum.

Chloe Lizotte is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor specializing in moving-image topics. She is the deputy editor of MUBI’s online publication Notebook and writes the “Event Horizon” column for Reverse Shot. She is also a co-organizer of the Locarno Critics Academy, a summer workshop for emerging film critics. Previously, she was a contributing editor at Le Cinéma Club.