Hi, I'm Scott.
I am associate professor of cinema and digital media and Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. I teach, write, and work at the intersection of the history of computing, film and media theory, queer and affect theory, and experimental and avant-garde film and media art. I have written two books, Cinema's Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating, and Hallucinating (Minnesota, 2016), and Find Each Other: Networks, Affects, and Other Queer Encounters.
I'm currently at work on a weird, slowly unfolding, and frankly sprawling third project, "Thinking with Computers." Broadly speaking, this is a history of how computers came to organize subjectivity and experience as they became interactive, graphical systems across the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. At a specific level, it is an intellectual history of Seymour Papert, his Logo pedagogical programming environment, and the programming and computing cultures at MIT in the 1970s. My collaborator on this project is the inimitable Matt Nish-Lapidus.
As part of this project, I have written a programming language, Ludus, that's a free translation of Logo for the 2020s, designed to make the history of computing and computational aesthetics newly available to humanists and artists. The Ludus web environment is up at https://web.ludus.dev. We're running a series of workshops called "Computer Class" at the Centre that combine primary document work in the history of computing with creative coding lessons in Ludus. The next one of these will run in June, 2027.
Ongoing and recent work
- A book series called Sense Ratios, which documents our work over the last 5 years at the Centre for Culture and Technology, including our first book, Our Sefies, Our Selves.
- A series of plotted prints of random walks, as a way of exploring the history of computational randomness. My first artist monograph, States of Sin, is part of this work.
- "The Critique of Instrumental Reason Circa 1976," about Seymour Papert and Joseph Weizenbaum, published in JCMS.
Social medias
I'm not very active on social media, but if you want to find me, you can do so on:
- Mastodon: @scr@assemblag.es
- Bsky: @scottrichmond.me