Laura U Marks

Biographic Data

ID139202
NAMELaura U Marks
GIVEN NAMESLaura U
FAMILY NAMEMarks
SIGNATUREMARKS L U
AFFILIATIONSSimon Fraser University
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS56
TOTAL CITATIONS10
AUTHOR COUNT56
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1970
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX1

  • Living labs as transformative incrementalism

    Tammara Soma, K Park et al.ARTICLELocal Environment2026Cited by: 1References: 36

    The Living Lab approach is an opportunity for diverse actors to co-create solutions to solve real-world issues. Simon Fraser University, situated on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, Katzie, Kwikwetlem, Qayqayt, Kwantlen, Semiahmoo and Tsawwassen peoples in British Columbia, Canada developed a Living Lab program to apply the university's leading climate research expertise to solve its own infrastructure, operation…

  • Small-file conferencing

    Laura U MarksARTICLEJournal of Environmental Media2025

    Online conferencing, while better for the environment than meeting in person, has a footprint due to the energy use of devices, networks and servers. In this commentary, Laura Marks offers tips for small-file conferencing

  • Haptic Cinema

    Laura U MarksCHAPTERVisual Sense2024

    Whether cinema is perceived as haptic may be an effect of the work itself, or it may be a function of the viewer&s;s predisposition. Any of us with moderately impaired vision can have a haptic viewing experience by removing our glasses when we go to the movies. More seriously, a viewer may be disposed to see haptically because of individual or cultural learning. The works I describe here have intrinsic haptic qualities, to which a viewer may or m…

  • Two Films about Becoming Plant

    Open AccessLaura U MarksARTICLEAnthropologica2021

    Becoming like a plant involves spending time with plants, studying them, mindfully ingesting them, and changing one's scale-both shrinking and diffusing-to occupy the scale of a plant. A fiction film from Korea, Yim Soon-Rye's Little Forest ( In both movies, the protagonists develop self-sufficient, earth-friendly ways of living and, more or less emphatically, reject the capitalist social order. Each film is supported by beautiful cinematography,…

  • Lively Up Your Ontology

    Laura U MarksARTICLEQui Parle2018

    This essay brings a process approach to the One-Many problem as treated in Gilles Deleuze’s thought, by focusing on the work of Ṣadr al-Dīn Muhammad al-Shīrāzī (Shiraz, 1571–1640). First acknowledging Avicenna’s concept of the univocity of being (attributed to John Duns Scotus) that influenced Deleuze, this essay examines how later Islamic philosophy, only recently transmitted to the West, provides methods for a lively process-based ontology. It …

  • Real Images Flow

    Open AccessLaura U MarksARTICLEFilm-Philosophy2016

    The eastern Islamic concept of the imaginal realm, which explains how supra-sensory realities present themselves to imaginative perception, can enrich the imagination of film-philosophy. The imaginal realm, in Arabic ‘alam al-mithal, world of images, or ‘alam al-khayal, imaginative world, is part of a triadic ontology of sensible, imaginal, and intelligible realms. Diverging from roots shared with Western thought in the concept of the imaginative…

  • Circulation d'œuvres expérimentales

    Laura U MarksARTICLEAfricultures2016

  • The Taming of the Haptic Space, from Málaga to Valencia to Florence

    Laura U MarksARTICLEMuqarnas Online2015

    This essay proposes that an Islamic aesthetics and the modes of visuality to which they appeal can be characterized by the use of haptic space and abstract line, terms that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari derived from the work of late nineteenth-century art historians. It argues that abstract line and haptic space traveled in ceramics on the Iberian Peninsula and in the western Mediterranean basin. I examine how Andalusian ceramics engage hapti…

  • What Can a Body Do? Answers from Trablus, Cairo, Beirut and Algiers

    Open AccessLaura U MarksARTICLEParagraph2015References: 1

    The essay examines contemporary Arab films that express the body's forces. One strategy, common with other world cinemas, is that films carry out different operations at the molar and molecular levels, which correspond to different levels of embodiment and body politics. Another, more unique to Arab cinema, is to cultivate strategies of protecting and enfolding bodies, similar to what Foucault termed ars erotica. Third, they enlist the audience i…

  • Arab Glitch

    Laura U MarksCHAPTERUncommon Grounds2014

  • Moving Images

    Laura U MarksARTICLEAfterimage2012

    Research Article| July 01 2012 Moving Images Laura U. Marks Laura U. Marks LAURA U. MARKS a scholar and curator of media art, teaches at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2012) 40 (1): 4–5. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2012.40.1.4 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Tw…

  • Lebanese Cinema

    Laura U Marks, Laura MarksARTICLEHistorical Journal Of Film Radio…2011

  • Can Cinema Slow the Flow of Blood

    Laura U MarksARTICLEThe Senses and Society2011References: 1

    2011). Can Cinema Slow the Flow of Blood? The Senses and Society: Vol. 6, Noise of the Past: Sensing the Post-Colonial, pp. 350-357

  • Taking a Line for a Walk, from the Abbasid Caliphate to Vector Graphics

    Laura U MarksARTICLEThird Text2009

    One of the common qualities of both classical Islamic art and contemporary computer‐based art is that the work of art plays out in time, in the performance of algorithms and/or the attentive recognition of observers. This article will illustrate this performativity in terms of the relationship between point and line. From Islamic calligraphy to vector graphics – with a long pause in the linear abstraction of modern artists such as Paul Klee – the…

  • Thinking Multisensory Culture

    Open AccessLaura U MarksARTICLEParagraph2008Cited by: 7References: 1

    The scholarly turn toward visual culture has left in place the sensory hierarchy that subtends Western philosophy. Yet given the commodification of sense experience, an inversion of the sensory hierarchy with the proximal senses of touch, taste, and smell at the top is not necessarily any more conducive to knowledge or justice. I argue that proximal sense experience may be a vehicle of knowledge, beauty and even ethics. Operating at a membrane be…

  • Infinity and Accident

    Laura U MarksARTICLELeonardo2006

    Computer art and Islamic art, the two largest bodies of aniconic art, share a surprising number of formal properties, two of which are explored here. The common properties of computer art and classical Islamic art can be understood in light of moments in the history of Islamic philosophy. In these two cases, Islamic Neoplatonism and Mu'tazili atomism are shown to parallel, respectively, the logic of relations between one and infinity, and the bas…

  • What Is That and between Arab Women and Video? The Case of Beirut

    Laura U MarksARTICLECamera Obscura Feminism Culture…2003Cited by: 1

    Laura U. Marks, a theorist and curator of independent and experimental media, is the author of The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000) and Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). She has curated numerous programs for festivals and art spaces in North America and Europe. She is the Dena Wosk University Professor of Art…

  • The Skin of the Film

    Open AccessLaura U Marks, Dana PolanBOOKSkin of the Film2000

    Memories that evoke the physical awareness of touch, smell, and bodily presence can be vital links to home for people living in diaspora from their culture of origin. How can filmmakers working between cultures use cinema, a visual medium, to transmit that physical sense of place and culture? In The Skin of the Film Laura U. Marks offers an answer, building on the theories of Gilles Deleuze and others to explain how and why intercultural cinema r…

  • Toronto with a Dash of Diop

    Laura U MarksARTICLEAfterimage2000

    Toronto International Film Festival Toronto, Ontario, Canada September 9-18, 1999 It is best to arrive at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) with a careful road map that includes room for diversion. My map this year took me to the Planet Africa program with detours into documentary, experimental work and a few tailgate picnics of international cinema. Planet Africa was programmed again this year by British curator and writer June Giva…

  • Images of Intermedia

    Laura U MarksARTICLEAfterimage2000

    13th Annual Images Festival of Independent Film and Video Toronto, Ontario, Canada April 13-22, 2000 This year's Images Festival of Independent Film and Video lived up to the challenge of moving across media, featuring installations, performances, a smart-art conference and numerous other live events in addition to its usual screening programs. Images dealt seriously with the question of how to run a film and video festival in the age of intermed…

  • Outtakes at the Flaherty

    Laura U MarksARTICLEAfterimage1999

    The Robert Flaherty Seminar Duke University Durham, North Carolina June 4-10, 1999 This year's Robert Flaherty Seminar, Outtakes Are History, cohered around the theme of editing, with all its interesting aesthetic, political and technical ramifications. Programming was shared by Richard Herskowitz of the Virginia Festival of American Film, whose selections tended toward international and experimental work, and Orlando Bagwell of Blackside Product…

  • Beyond The Glitz

    Laura U MarksARTICLEAfterimage1998

    Review| February 01 1998 Beyond The Glitz 22nd Toronto International Film Festival, Toronto, Ontario, Canada September 4-13, 1997 Laura U. Marks Laura U. Marks Laura U. Marks, a writer and curator, is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Carieton University, Ottawa. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (1998) 25 (4): 8–9. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1998.25.4.8 Views Icon Views Article contents Fi…

  • The Quays’ Institute Benjamenta

    Laura U MarksARTICLEAfterimage1997

    Essay| October 01 1997 The Quays’ Institute Benjamenta: An Olfactory View Laura U. Marks Laura U. Marks Laura U. Marks, a writer and curator, is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (1997) 25 (2): 11–13. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1997.25.2.11 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Re…

  • Agnostic Witness

    Laura U MarksARTICLEAfterimage1994

    Review| September 01 1994 Agnostic Witness Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, Loews Village Theater, New York City April 29-May 12 Laura U. Marks Laura U. Marks Laura U. Marks is a writer and curator living in Rochester, NY. She is pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Rochester. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (1994) 22 (2): 5–6. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1994.22.2.5 Views Icon …

  • Reconfigured Nationhood

    Laura U MarksARTICLEAfterimage1994

    Essay| March 01 1994 Reconfigured Nationhood: A Partisan History of the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation Laura U. Marks Laura U. Marks Laura U. Marks is a writer and film programmer who is also pursuing a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (1994) 21 (8): 4–8. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1994.21.8.4 Views Icon Views Article contents…