Corporate consulting, a one-time seemingly marvelous mixture of bare-knuckle rationalization, esoterica, and visionary futurism, is invariably deployed when business structures threaten to lose their equilibrium. What it actually means to be consulted, the part played by film and media in consulting, and how the branch of corporate consulting became a system of knowledge with such a socially important role is the object of this talk. It develops a new, interdisciplinary approach, situated between film, media and business history, media archeology,…

This talk outlines the conditions of loving in technoculture and explains the ways and manners of "practicing of togetherness" in high tech environments. It will show what technologies tell us about the way we love and critically rereads late modern paradigms of emotional and affective experiences, challenging the existing critical approaches to technological and technologized love. Ania Malinowska is an author, cultural theorist, and associate professor in media and cultural studies at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Silesia (Poland),…

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…

Taiwan New Cinema (first wave, 1982–1989; second wave, 1990 onward) has its unique history regarding film festivals, particularly in the way that these films are circulated in major European film festivals. On one hand, Taiwan New Cinema shares a common formalist concern about cinematic modernism with its Western counterparts, departing from previous modes of filmmaking that were preoccupied with nostalgically romanticizing China’s image. On the other hand, Taiwan New Cinema represents a struggling configuration of the "nation," brought forth by…

This talk investigates the historical entanglement of capital, culture, and leisure by mapping the local Iraqi capitalist and entrepreneurial elites, many of whom were upper-class Iraqi Jews with international outlooks, who invested in exhibition and production technology. In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, the Iraqi Jewish Sawda’i family pioneered the construction of cinemas, import of films, and established Iraq’s first film studio, Studio Baghdad. Examining the history of Iraqi cinema and film production and distribution through the Sawda’i family brings…

A presentation about the experience of co-creating a digital space about sex and desire in India.   Paromita Vohra is a media artist and writer who works with a range of forms, including film, comics, digital media, installation art, and writing, to explore themes of feminism, desire, urban life and popular culture. Her films as director include the documentaries Partners in Crime (to be screened on April 27, 7 pm, Pollock Theater), Unlimited Girls, Q2P, and Morality TV and the…

In this presentation, Ricardo Cedeño Montaña will describe some of the particular principles, mechanisms, and techniques by which color film functioned in its formative years and the coding schemes for (re)producing, storing, and transmitting color information in electronic and digital media. Using a media archaeological approach to technical media, Cedeño Montaña will show that color in technical media is anything but stable and such instability implies different contexts of sensory data processing and storage. Dr. Ricardo Cedeño Montaña is professor,…

On April 15, 2020, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) released 19 wrestlers (and furloughed approximately 25 employees) just days after being designated an essential business by the state of Florida. While this designation allowed the WWE to continue to produce live televised shows and PPVS during the COVID-19 shutdown, these firings were only the beginning as they continued to release wrestlers on regular intervals until the summer of 2022. Following the story of a Black male wrestler who was released but…

Lucas Hilderbrand is Professor and Chair of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of the books The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After; Paris is Burning: A Queer Film Classic; and Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright. Gay bars have operated as the most visible institutions of the LGBTQ+ public life in the United States for the better part of a century, from before gay…

With the climate crisis and its repercussions becoming more and more tangible, the media are increasingly participating in the production, circulation, and interrogation of environmental assumptions, using both explicit and implicit ways of framing the crisis. In this lecture, I will present an overview of my research on green media/ecogames/VR. I will first present our ‘Green Media Studies initiative,’ the four thematic sections of our book Ecogames: Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis, and our Horizon Europe project STRATEGIES: Sustainable…

How do digital infrastructures shape the experiences of those positioned as living ‘on the margins’? This has been the central question guiding my research over the past five years, which has focused on sea-cables, wi-fi networks, mobile plans, satellites, and other infrastructures of telecommunication in Greenland. Another big question has been: How can we study these systems, which are both pervasive and deeply personal, using ethnographic methods? In this talk, I will present some of my methodological and theoretical approaches…

In this talk I use light as a way of opening up questions about the relation of aesthetics to racial capitalism. Drawing from research in Nigeria, but thinking more generally, I move between structures of political economy and the everyday techniques and experience of living with and in light. Brian Larkin is co-director of the Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities and Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University. His research, broadly conceived, examines the operations of media…