CEMA hosts workshops and public screenings that feature visiting artists at the forefront of the audiovisual field. Free and open to the public, these events bring together the USC and local community, fostering dialogue and knowledge exchange
LONDON
LONDON a film by Sebastian Brameshuber
Bobby drives back and forth between Vienna and Salzburg, picking up strangers along the way and sharing conversations that drift from the everyday to the deeply personal. In this tender portrait of today’s Europe, anonymity and warmth still go hand in hand.
Sebastian Brameshuber in-person with a discussion to follow the film.
Friday, September 25th, 2026
Doors at 4:30 PM, film begins at 5:00 PM.
Runtime 124 min.
USC School of Cinematic Arts Complex
900 W 34th St, Los Angeles, CA 90007
FREE ADMISSION. OPEN TO ALL USC STUDENTS, FACULTY, STAFF, ALUMNI, AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC.
RSVP to CEMA@usc.edu
This event is co-sponsored by USC Center for Ethnographic Media Arts, USC School of Cinematic Arts, and the Austrian Consulate General in Los Angeles.
THE PRESENT, THE ABSENT
How can a place become visible through the everyday conversations of the people who inhabit it? In this workshop, participants collaboratively explore how a film about their shared experience might emerge from fragments collected across campus. How far can the idea of a “conversation” be pushed—into memory, imagination, silence, presence, and absence? Letting the process shape the form, the workshop invites participants to find and create scenes on camera that delineate the place as much by what is withheld as by what is shown.
Thursday, September 24th, 2026
10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Space in this workshop is limited. RSVP to CEMA@usc.edu
This event is co-sponsored by USC Center for Ethnographic Media Arts and the Austrian Consulate General in Los Angeles.
ATMOSPHERES with Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
Atomspheres is a series of performances on elemental listening engagement and meditative environmental attunement, leading to a participatory performance with the co-listeners. The performances attune to the macro-scale crises of the climate and ecology in a planetary context and bridges its intersection with micro-level coping strategies to the crises in a regenerative gathering. The performances resonate with the tradition of free improvisation as well as communal and participatory sonic gatherings for affective and discursive engagement with crises and conflict, practiced in many Global Souths cultures. These performance gatherings involve field recordings of climate variables like wind, water, and woods, comprovised by chance generative processes, accompanied by radio interferences transducing situated weather patterns, weaved together by meditative instrumental interventions of traditional instruments, as well as live electronics and algorithmic interpretation of data and assemblages embracing free improvisational techniques and ethos. As an invocation, the series invites the co-listeners into an exercise of slow listening and slow breathing that try to suspend time, control, ego, and individuality to tap into a humbler mode of fatalism and a distributed self-hood. This philosophical positioning stresses the subjugation of events or actions to fate or destiny and is commonly associated with an attitude of acceptance in the face of future events, which are thought to be inevitable. This approach manifests into yielding control by an emergent form of togetherness, intersubjectivity, and kinship when listening transcends an overt causality, and the psychosomatic condition embraces slow breathing to contemplate, and affective attunement. The project is inspired by the micro-level entanglements of human, more-than-human, and other life forms in a survival context, and explores sensory transduction of environmental conditions to figure how to make them post-immersive and attuning experiences in an openly circular, collaborative performance setting.
Thursday, April 2nd, 2026
7:30 – 8:30 PM
USC School of Cinematic Arts Complex
Room SCA 120A
900 W 34th St, Los Angeles, CA 90007
FREE ADMISSION. OPEN TO ALL USC STUDENTS, FACULTY, STAFF, ALUMNI, AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC.
RSVP to CEMA@usc.edu
This event is co-sponsored by USC Center for Ethnographic Media Arts and USC School of Cinematic Arts.
Spring 2026 Visiting Artist Series
