An attempt towards the Autistic Image
A History & Theory of New Media lecture
with Perwana Nazif
Visiting Faculty, California Institute of the Arts, and Artistic Director, Los Angeles Review of Books
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Monday, December 7, 2026
5:00 — 6:30 PM
Eugene Jarvis Auditorium,
Grimes Engineering Center
RSVP here! Save the event to your bCal here!
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It’s here that the two attempts—allowing autistic children to exist and camering— have a trait in common: to evade intention, which requires a strange rigour that can’t be intentional.
“Miscreating” (1979)
Just as tracing is not drawing, camering is not filming.
“Miscreating” (1979)
An attempt lays itself bare—and you can certainly hear all the connotations of that word. It does not present itself as a request.
Le Croire et le Craindre (1978)
In 1968, French educator and writer Fernand Deligny began the “Cévennes network,” also known as the attempt. The Cévennes attempt was an informal, non-clinical collective of autistic children and (non-autistic) “close presences,” who together enabled autistic existence. The Cévennes experiment attempted to work within a non-verbal and non-institutional framework, to respond to what Deligny marked as the autistic children’s needs to experience life in the absence of language and neurotypical relation. The network both followed and radically departed from Deligny’s prior para-clinical and social work with neurodivergent, psychotic, “troubled” or “delinquent,” children, many of whom would have otherwise been incarcerated or permanently institutionalized. Here, in the attempt, they experimented with collective aesthetic and/or media practices outside of language: purposeless objects and common actions, non-representational cartography, tracing (unlike drawing), and camering (unlike filming). So, what or how is the collective attempt—when its conditions of emergence are indeterminacy, precarity, non-relation, and detours from if not a total outside to language and the subject? To hazard a presentation of the (Cévennes) attempt is to present it through what Deligny calls the autistic image—that which means nothing, says nothing, or does anything. This talk, then, will explore the apparatus of the autistic image, its point of seeing, and what it enables to come into the world.
About Perwana Nazif
Perwana Nazif teaches at the California Institute of the Arts and serves as the artistic director of the Los Angeles Review of Books. She recently edited Everybody Wants to Be a Fascist: Institutional Psychotherapy as a Resistance Movement (semiotext(e), 2025) and is a contributing editor at Parapraxis Magazine. She recently curated François Pain, Psychiatry is what Psychiatrists do at JOAN, Los Angeles and is currently working on an exhibition at CAC Brétigny in France.
About History & Theory of New Media Lecture Series
The History & Theory of New Media Lecture Series brings to campus leading humanities scholars working on issues of media transition and technological emergence. The series promotes new, interdisciplinary approaches to questions about the uses, meanings, causes, and effects of rapid or dramatic shifts in techno-infrastructure, information management, and forms of mediated expression. Presented by BCNM, these events are free and open to the public.
Accessibility
BCNM events are free and open to the public. This event will be held in-person, on the UC Berkeley campus. We strive to meet all access and accommodation needs. Please contact (raphaelcohen [at] berkeley.edu) with requests or questions.
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