Events

This book talk explores how contemporary American culture constructs youth in the era of digital media as inextricable from creativity, which is the subject of The Digital Is Kid Stuff: Making Creative Laborers for a Precarious Economy (UMN Press, Dec 2021). Rather than taking creative digital youth as a natural fact, however, The Digital Is Kid Stuff shows how youth are instrumental to the creative economy not solely as the future labor force but also as cultural sites for negotiating…

This talk explores the production of racial difference and the policing of black men in the US through A Natural Born Gambler (1916), a predominantly black-cast silent film featuring Caribbean American star Bert Williams. By paying particular attention to film form and archival evidence, I reclaim the importance of Williams’s first Biograph comedy. I argue that through its attention to modes of policing and strategies of avoiding detection, A Natural Born Gambler interrogates the discursive production of black masculinity, illuminates…

In the wake of the women-led uprising of 2020, women artists from Belarus have responded to the ongoing challenges of the past year and a half with a substantial corpus of protest embroidery and ornamental digital artworks, drawing their inspiration from recent trends in Western contemporary art but also grounding their practices in the region’s rich folk heritage. The talk by Sasha Razor will explore these artworks' connection to digital activism, feminism, collective labor, memory, and trauma. An emphasis will…

“Media of Extraction and Abstraction” begins with a discussion of the medium of clothing, more specifically of textile waste; its industrial reprocessing shaped forms of meaning and me­­dia making in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries. The talk then turns to the nexus of industrial mining and solar astrophysics, excavating the space – literal and figurative, aesthetic and technological – of the so-called Climax High Altitude Observatory. Built on the Continental Divide at 11,500 feet above sea level, on…

Beginning in the 1920s, audiences around the globe were seduced not only by Hollywood films but also by lavish movie theaters that were owned and operated by major U.S. film companies. In his new book, Hollywood’s Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World, Ross Melnick considers these movie houses as “cultural embassies” and examines the operation of U.S.-owned and operated cinemas in nearly three dozen countries on four continents between 1923-2013. A truly global account, Hollywood’s Embassies…

Timothy Murray explores how global media art resists and rewires the political and economic structures that govern technology. In dialogue with his most recent book, Technics Improvised: Activating Touch in Global Media Art, he explores the intersections of philosophies of touch and technology in dialogue with historical and contemporary practices of tactical media. In view of the combined risks of digital sovereignty and the Anthropocene, he will discuss how a wide range of critical texts, from Verena Andermatt Conley to…