SPRING 2014
5/16: H.D. and Jean Epstein: Queer Modernism, Spectatorship, and The Specimen. Mal Ahern, David A. Gerstner. 7PM. The Morbid Anatomy Library.
Join us at the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn to consider two queer film theorists alongside one another: the French filmmaker Jean Epstein, and the Anglo-American poet H.D. Both wrote prolifically about cinema in the interwar period, and both were filmmakers as well as critics. Both privileged the visual and tactile sensations that cinema offers its viewer. And, perhaps most interestingly, both evince a keen interest in the idea of cinema—as well as the cinematic spectator—as a specimen: a body subjected to a probing, scientific gaze.
The Morbid Anatomy Museum and Library
424A Third Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11215
4/9: From Topos to Virus: A Media Archaeology of Networked Visual Culture. Erkki Huhtamo. 6:30PM, The James Gallery.
The Internet is a viral image disseminator-generator. Its enormous, nearly instantaneous “traffic” of imagery is in a state of constant flux. This is a major challenge for visual cultural analysis. We don’t have effective tools for analyzing it, especially when it comes to the transmission, transformation, and migration of meanings. Software tools may help to visualize “Big Data” but shed little light on issues of semantics. Yet, as Erkki Huhtamo (UCLA) will illustrate, media archaeological topos analysis can grant us insight into this transformative cultural sphere.
4/29: The Datalogical Turn. Patricia Ticineto Clough, Karen Gregory, Benjamin Haber, Josh Scannell. 6:30PM, The James Gallery.
Does data want to be visualized? What queer new capacities are emerging as sociology’s datalogical unconscious finds expression in the visual, running at the speed of capital? JoinPatricia Clough, Karen Gregory, Benjamin Haber andJosh Scannell for a presentation on “Big Data” visualizations, non-representational method, and the emergence of a new onto-logic of sociality.
http://centerforthehumanities.org/james-gallery/events/The-Datalogical-Turn
Past Events
FALL 2013:
11/22: Tara Mateik, Friends of Dorothy, Screen Test #1 and #2
In the lip-sync performance Friends of Dorothy, I conduct auditions in drag as Victor Fleming (director, The Wizard of Oz) and Sidney Lumet (director, The Wiz). Auditions are for the role of Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz and The Wiz and feature real life Judy Garland and Diana Ross impersonators reenacting excerpts from the movies. The same characters, dialogues, and visual references from the films appear repeatedly. These citations and repetitions—misplaced, replaced, and displaced–produce a transfeminist battle cry and construct a complex notion of home through queer iconography.
http://centerforthehumanities.org/events/Friends-of-Dorothy-Screen-Test-1-and-2
12/12: Make Sure You’re Not Being Watched: An Evening of Anarchist Film. Natalie Musteata, Sherry Millner and Ernie Larsen. Interference Archive 131 8th St., Brooklyn
An evening of anarchist films with screenings of Shoplifting: It’s a Crime (16 min., 1978, Sherry Millner and Ernie Larsen) and Born in Flames (80 min., 1983, Lizzie Borden). The screenings will be followed by a conversation between Sherry Millner, Ernie Larsen and Natalie Musteata on the relationship between the history of anarcha-feminism and experimental film.
Supplementary readings for the seminar
Interview with filmmaker Lizzie Borden: http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/video/review/lizzie_borden.html
Article written by Sherry Millner and Ernie Larsen for Jump Cut in 1979:http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC20folder/LarsenMillnerEdl….
Reading on Born in Flames in Volume 23, Issue 1 of the journal Women & Performancehttp://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0740770X.2013.786305#preview
