The Body Digital: Vanessa Chang in Conversation with Scott Bukatman

Join writer, curator, and Stanford alum Vanessa Chang (MTL Ph.D. 2017) as she discusses her new book, The Body Digital, with Film and Media Studies Professor Scott Bukatman. The book traces how our bodies, our senses, and everyday technologies have always shaped one another — from writing to player pianos to AI voice clones. In the gestures that guide our devices and the algorithmic playlists that score our lives, humans and machines choreograph each other in a drama of flesh, bone, rhythm, and power. Chang and Bukatman will explore fundamental questions about perception, embodiment, and the history and future of human-technology entanglement, from the sensory to the social. They’ll also consider how art and design might help us reimagine technologies that nurture, rather than numb, human life.

Vanessa Chang builds communities and conversations about art, technology, people, and planet. She is Director of Programs at Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology. She earned a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. She's also taught in Visual & Critical Studies at California College of the Arts and was lead curator with CODAME Art & Tech. She has appeared on NPR’s On the Media and State of the Art  and her curatorial work has been profiled in such venues as Art in America and KQED Arts. Her writing has been published in Wired, Slate, Noema, Los Angeles Review of Books, Journal of Visual Culture, among other publications. Her first book, The Body Digital: A Brief History of Humans and Machines, from Cuckoo Clocks to ChatGPT, will be published in November 2025.

Scott Bukatman is a cultural theorist and Professor of Film and Media Studies at Stanford University. His research explores how such popular media as film, comics, and animation mediate between new technologies and human perceptual and bodily experience.

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