Opening Screening Event: David Thorne
David Thorne lives and works in Los Angeles. He is he recipient of a 2007 Art Matters grant and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award, and a 2004 recipient of a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship. He completed his MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2004. In spring 2006 David was a visiting artist at The Cooper Union in New York City. He recently collaborated with Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, and Katya Sander on the project 9 Scripts from a Nation at War for documenta 12.
From 1999 to 2003, his projects with Julia Meltzer centered on state secrecy and the production of the past. Current works focus on the ways in which visions of the future are imagined, claimed and realized, specifically in relation to faith and global politics. Recent projects have been exhibited in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Akbank Sanat Gallery (Istanbul), the 2006 California Biennial, Apex Art (New York), Momenta (New York), and as part of the Hayward Gallery’s (London) travelling exhibition program. Video work has been screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The New York Video Festival, the Margaret Mead Film Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival, among many others.
We will live to see these things, or, five pictures of what may come to pass (2007)
single-channel videotape, 47:04 minutes, color, NTSC, stereo
Julia Meltzer and David Thorne
We will live to see these things is a documentary video in five parts about competing visions of an uncertain future. Shot in 2005–06 in Damascus, Syria, each section of the piece—the chronicle of a building in downtown Damascus, a recitation anticipating the arrival of a perfect leader, an interview with a dissident intellectual, a portrait of a Qur’an school for young girls, and an imagining of the world made anew—offers a different perspective on what might come to pass in a place where people live between the competing forces of a repressive regime, a growing conservative Islamic movement, and intense pressure from the United States.
Produced by Julia Meltzer
Directed by Julia Meltzer and David Thorne
Written by David Thorne
Edited by Catherine Hollander
Music and Sound Design by Chris Kubick
Camera by Raed Sandeed
Winner, “Best New International Video,” 2007 Images Festival, Toronto
It’s not my memory of it: three recollected documents (2003) single-channel video, 25 minutes, color, NTSC
Produced and directed by Julia Meltzer
Written and directed by David Thorne
Sound design by Chris Kubick
Funded by The Paul Robeson Fund for Independent Media
Distributed by the Video Data Bank, info@vdb.org
“It’s not my memory of it” is a documentary about secrecy, memory, and documents. A former CIA source recounts his disappearance through shredded classified documents that were painstakingly reassembled by radical fundamentalist students in Iran in 1979 following the takeover of the U.S embassy. A CIA film—recorded in 1974 but unacknowledged until 1992—documents the burial at sea of six Soviet sailors, in a ceremony which collapses Cold War antagonisms in a moment of death and honor. A single photograph pertaining to a publicly acknowledged but top secret U.S. missile strike in Yemen in 2002 is the source of a reflection on the role of images in the dynamic of knowing and not knowing.
Cara Finnegan
Associate Professor, Department of Communication
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Professor Cara Finnegan (Ph.D. Northwestern) teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in rhetorical criticism, gender and rhetoric, contemporary rhetorical theory, public sphere theory, and visual rhetoric. She is the author of Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Smithsonian Books, 2003), which won the National Communication Association’s Diamond Anniversary Book Award in 2004. Finnegan is also co-editor with Lester Olson and Diane Hope of Visual Rhetoric: A Reader in Communication and American Culture (Sage, 2008). Finnegan’s current book project explores how Americans imagined photography’s inventional possibilities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
"Speaking of Photography: Recognition and the Art of Imagining Visual Politics"
My current research is interested in the rhetorical practices of photography’s historical viewers. Focusing on the medium’s second fifty years, a period in which photography increasingly was integrated into a burgeoning mass culture of print, I explore publicly-circulated readings of photographs in order to show how photography has served as a locus of critical engagement about public questions in the United States. The viewers whose rhetoric I study are for the most part non-specialists with little investment in photography itself. That is, they are not professional photographers, art critics, or literary figures, but simply citizens who, for a variety of reasons, constructed close readings of photographs in order to make broader arguments about social and political issues. The rhetorical practices of such ordinary (though by no means marginalized or powerless) viewers are worth examining, because it is precisely in their responses to photographs that we may locate and explore crucial relationships between visual culture and questions of agency, deliberation, and judgment in public life.
During this period, Americans did not just speak of photography; they spoke about photography as a way of speaking about politics. Indeed, Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries possessed an implicit, yet readily available, repertoire of ways of speaking about public life “photographically.” In the longer project on which this talk is based, I study several instances of publicly circulated readings of photographs in order to (1) tease out the elements of that repertoire; and (2) illustrate how viewers mobilized that repertoire in a range of public discursive encounters about issues ranging from war, eugenics, national identity, and imperialism to child labor, race, poverty, propaganda, and the New Deal. One might describe my critical approach as one that engages in “close readings of close readings” of photographs in order to understand the rhetorical work those readings performed in turn-of-the-century U.S. public culture.
Emerging from this general framework, my talk explores specifically how the trope of "recognition" frequently framed the ways Americans imagined visual politics during this period. Across the cases I have examined, recognition emerges as a key component of Americans’ repertoire of photographic speech. But what recognition means and how it functions in each case is far from consistent or stable. Those who believed in the phenomenon of spirit photography, for example, framed the moment of recognition as the ultimate warrant in their arguments about a spirit photograph’s authenticity. Those speaking about portrait photographs of Abraham Lincoln, on the other hand, were interested not in authenticity but in character: they mobilized the trope of recognition to tie their arguments about Lincoln to broader cultural practices of phrenology and physiognomy, which held that observers could “see” invisible elements of character and morality if only they learned the science of reading them in photographic portraits. In these and other cases, recognition is framed variously as alternately temporal and spatial; fallible and infallible; and activated by forces both visible and invisible. Ultimately, recognition may be understood as a complex and contingent platform from which photography’s viewers speak about photography.
Gregory Sholette
Assistant Professor of Sculpture, Department of Art and Art History
Queens College
Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, and founding member of the artists’ collectives Political Art Documentation/Distribution and REPOhistory, as well as co-editor of The Interventionists: A Users Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (MassMoCA/MIT Press, 2004, 2006) with Nato Thompson, and of Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 with Blake Stimson, (University of Minnesota, 2007). He frequently collaborates with the artist Janet Koenig and is currently working on a book about the political economy of the art world and his concept of creative dark matter for Pluto Press.
History That Disturbs The Present: NYC, REPOhistory, and the Rise of Neoliberal Urban Amnesia
From 1989 to 2000 a group of informally organized artists, educators, and political activists known as REPOhistory installed dozens of legally-permitted, temporary street markers commemorating such unconventional historical subject matter as Nelson Mandella’s 1990 post-Apartheid victory parade up Broadway; the street corner where ACT-UP’s first AIDS-awareness demonstration took place in 1987; the site of Manhattan’s first slave market on Wall Street; the former offices of a successful 19th century abortionist whose pseudonym was Madame Restell; and a modern-day sweat shop that was employing under-aged garment workers to produce Lord and Taylor’s "petite" line of children’s sleepwear. In 1992 Mayor David Dinkins embraced REPOhistory’s initial street-sign project. Several years later the group met with resolute opposition from the administration of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, as well as illegal de-installations of their work by real estate interests. Presented by a founding member of the group this paper will focus on the way REPOhistory’s urban interventions briefly interrupted the erasure of the city’s little known and frequently radical past at a time of increasing privatization, demographic homogenization, and ubiquitous police surveillance.
Phaedra Pezzullo
Assistant Professor, Department of Communication & Culture
Indiana University
Phaedra C. Pezzullo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture, as well as adjunct faculty of Cultural Studies and American Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, U.S.A. Her book, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice (University of Alabama, 2007), won the James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric/Public Address, the Christine L. Oravec Research Award in Environmental Communication, and the National Communication Association’s Critical and Cultural Studies Division Book of the Year Award–as well as inspired an Indie Rock band, The Holland Dutch, to write a song called “Toxic Tour.” She also has published Environmental Justice and Environmentalism: The Social Justice Challenge to the Environmental Movement (MIT Press, 2007, co-edited with Ronald Sandler), a special issue of the journal Cultural Studies (2008) on the environment, and several chapters and essays. For more about her activism, teaching, and scholarship, see her website: http://www.indiana.edu/~envtrhet/ .
"Resisting Environmental Disaster Fatigue through Sustainable Memory Work: The Cultural Politics of Katrina Tourism in Post-8/29 New Orleans”
Since 1998, Pezzullo’s primary research project has been a multi-sited ethnography in North America of “toxic tours,” noncommercial expeditions organized as a mode of advocacy to achieve environmental justice. This talk will expand on that research to consider Pezzullo’s ongoing fieldwork in New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.A. in the context of what appears to be a growing sense of disaster fatigue. Instead of focusing on nonprofit tours by grassroots advocates, Pezzullo turns her attention to the Grayline Tour Company’s for-profit “Katrina Tours: America’s Worst Catastrophe.” These tours travel into neighborhoods previously missing from commercial tourist imaginaries of the region in order to show the people and places most impacted by what locals call “the storm.” In a relatively sophisticated era of mass media and “new” technologies, as well as increased academic publishing, it seems particularly pressing to consider when and how people are moved to believe that the spatial and material politics of witnessing disaster face-to-face bears significance to transforming public culture. Weighing the rhetorical possibilities and limitations of commercial Katrina tours, Pezzullo reflects on tourism, environmental justice, and New Orleans to explore the possibilities for the sustainable memory work that seems necessary for the city to rebuild. More than countering memories of Katrina as an ahistorical, isolated, and unavoidable event in the recent past, the long-term goal of the region must also be to identify ways to reaffirm and to reinvent memories for years to come.
Andrea Hammer
Senior Lecturer, Department of Landscape Architecture
Cornell University
Memory Lines: The Mapping of Central New York
My presentation focuses on the very visible remains in the landscape of Simeon DeWitt’s original 1790 survey of central New York State. By geo-rectifying the original township maps and superimposing them upon current infrared satellite imagery, I reveal how lines have evolved into roads, field boundaries, edge conditions, fence and tree lines—in other words, as mnemonic traces of the past. In so doing I also take up the suggestive question posed by literary theorist Peter Brooks, who asks whether a “subterranean logic” links the disparate meanings of plot: (a) a plot of ground or land; (b) an illegal scheme; (3) the act of mapping terrain; and (4) the dramatic arc of narrative. Using New York’s New Military Tract as a case study, I propose to make this subterranean logic apparent.
Patricia Zimmermann
Professor, Department of Cinema and Photography
Ithaca College
Patricia R. Zimmermann is professor in the Department of Cinema and Photography at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York, USA. She is the author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Indiana, 1995) and States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (Minnesota, 2000). She was coeditor with Erik Barnouw of The Flaherty: Four Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema (Wide Angle, 1996). Her forthcoming book, coedited with Karen Ishizuka, is Mining the Home Movie: Excavations into Histories and Memories (University of California Press). Her book on digital art, Digital Memories: Cinemas, Histories, Visualities (Temple University Press, forthcoming), explores the relationship between historiography, political trauma, and digital art practices.
George Legrady
Professor of Interactive Media in the Media Arts & Technology
University of California, Santa Barbara
George Legrady is Professor of Interactive Media in the Media Arts & Technology Doctoral program at UC Santa Barbara. George Legrady is one of the first generation of artists in the 1980’s to integrate computer processes into his artistic work, producing pioneering prizewinning projects in the early 1990’s such as the “Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War” (1993), “Slippery Traces” (1995), “Sensing Speaking Space” (2002), “Pockets Full of Memories” (2001-2007) and more recently data visualizations at the Seattle Public Library, with NASA, and the CEB corporation. His contribution to the digital media field since the early stages of its formation into a discipline in the early 1990’s has been in intersecting cultural content with data processing as a means of creating new forms of aesthetic representations and socio-cultural narrative experiences. His digital interactive installations have been exhibited internationally.
Aesthetic & Cultural Perspectives Through Data Visualization
To activate information is to build knowledge. The aggregate processing of dynamically generated data, with resultant output through visualizations allow for a form of artistic experimentation that engages methodologies commonly associated with Computer Science, Social Sciences, Statistics and Information Sciences.
The Experimental Visualization Lab of the Media Arts and Technology Program at UC Santa Barbara explores this question through research and production in data visualization. Since 2005, we have been parsing and visualizing a steady stream of data generated hourly, consisting of the titles of books, films, music, and miscellaneous items checked out by patrons at the Seattle Central Library. We feel fortunate in having access to this flow of data as it makes visible a community’s aggregate interests without bias, in essence allowing the data to “speak for itself”.
The presentation will trace the intersection of data organization and visualization in a number of the artist’s projects such as "Pockets Full of Memories" inaugurated at the Centre Pompidou, and "Making Visible the Invisible" a public arts commission for the Seattle Central Library, and the Cell Tango (Global Collaborative Visual Mapping Archive) visual archive exhibited at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC. These projects consist of visualizations generated by custom designed software that dynamically organize data.