BIMI-Pitt Research Student Exchange
When:
—
Venue:
Online
BIMI PITT RESEARCH STUDENT EXCHANGE (PROGRAMME): Friday 24 September 2021
As part of the ongoing research collaboration between BIMI (Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image) and the Film Program at University of Pittsburgh, we invite you to join us for this work-in-progress research student exchange, to be held online, Friday 24 September 2021, 15:30-19:00 (London time), 10:30-14:00 (Pittsburgh time).
You can now join this event directly, without registration, via this COLLABORATE link (active 30 minutes before the start): Collaborate link
The aim of this event is to facilitate dialogue between students engaged in research at the two institutions, Birkbeck and Pittsburgh, with a view to fostering longer term relationships and collaborative projects in the future.
The format will be simple and conversational. Each participant will give a 10-minute presentation of their work-in-progress: ‘What is my project? Where am I at? How am I doing my research? Why is it interesting to others?’ – to be followed by discussion between the contributors and questions from the audience.
Here is the programme schedule:
WELCOME/INTRODUCTION: 15:30-15:40 London//10:30-10:40 Pittsburgh
(1) First conversation: Katherine MITCHELL (Birkbeck) and Vuk VUKOVÍC (Pittsburgh)
15:40-16:30 London//10:40-11:30 Pittsburgh
Moderators: Barbara McCloskey (Pittsburgh) and Joel McKim (Birkbeck)
Katherine MITCHELL (Birkbeck)
Title: Synthetic Ecologies and Material Entanglements: Mobile AR ‘in the wild’
Abstract: Working with the V&A Museum, my research centres on collecting mobile augmented reality (AR) apps, using mobile AR as a lens through which to explore implications including platformativity and site-specificity for contemporary collecting. Overall, my research moves through an entanglement of scales and materialities, starting at ground level as a formal dependency and site of live performance, before framing software, data, and the exhibition space in this way.
For this talk, I will take physical site as a formal dependency for location-based AR to ask how the museum might acquire a work fundamentally displaced from the museum’s spaces of exhibition, accessible only on land not owned by the museum and subject to changes in ownership and form over time. Here, I will frame a discussion of openness, access, and distributed stewardship through a hypothetical case study to ask how we might understand an acquisition ‘in the wild’, in the light of the museum as a public body and steward for publicly owned collections. In asking these questions, I will look to land art where multi-layered stewardship networks assemble around a site, and where the care of the land bleeds into the care of the artwork. Despite obvious material differences, this comparison also helpfully centres notions of presence/absence, and the temporal and material entanglements of mobile AR. But beyond questions of ownership and care, this comparison also begins to ask how we might approach curation for a work that exceeds the museum walls.
Vuk VUKOVÍC (Pittsburgh)
Title: Institutionalization of Video Art: Barbara London’s Curatorial Practice and Rockefeller Foundation Grants at the Museum of Modern Art (1975–1978)
Abstract: Detailing the history of video art poses innumerable challenges due to the evolution of its technology through multiple mediums. However, one of its origins can be traced through an individual who pioneered video's integration within an art institution such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). By analyzing the curatorial practice of Barbara London, I argue how the first study grant MoMA obtained from the Rockefeller Foundation (February 1, 1977–January 31, 1978) not only expanded the video program as initially proposed in 1975; it also laid the foundation for its institutionalization. In this way, London carved space for the exhibition of video art by introducing it with the same objectives of other art forms, consequently creating a roadmap for art institutions in the United States and abroad – something her counterparts struggled to achieve in the early days of the field.
{Short break: 20 minutes}
(2) Second conversation: Mary NEWBOLD (Birkbeck)/Gabriel GUEDES (Pittsburgh)
16:50-17:40 London//11:50-12:40 Pittsburgh
Moderators: Mark Lynn Anderson (Pittsburgh) and Lily Ford (Derek Jarman Lab/Birkbeck)
Mary NEWBOLD (Birkbeck)
Title: Phantoms That Exist: 'The Political Aesthetics of the Algorithm’
Abstract: My research title is ‘Making Sense: Technologies of Vision and the Human Sensorium’. It has long been an assumption that an image is an imitation or representation of someone or something. Yet, we are at a time when the photographic image can no longer be assumed to be an objective account of a past event. By asking how present-day visual experience is redefined by digital culture, my research seeks to understand what new modes of perception emerge from an algorithmically technologized culture. Drawing on a variety of historical materials together with literary and visual texts from various cultural spheres, my thesis critically interrogates the interactions between contemporary image-making practices, the culture industry and capitalism at large. In this presentation I will outline the way in which Walter Benjamin’s figure of phantasmagoria serves as a conceptual tool for two case studies in my thesis. Taking the example of Google’s PageRank algorithm, I critique the visual character of contemporary mass culture, its procedures of commodification and the modes of perception that emerge as the narratives surrounding these technologies are internalised. Through the figure of phantasmagoria, I unveil the ways in which Google’s hegemony of the world-wide web relies upon procedures of hiding, made possible by evoking a mode of thought that consists in a series of reversals. My second case study explores the role of medical imaging in constellation with the human body and the culture industry. I will present a work in progress account of the ways in which the networked image relies upon a form of reified consciousness that, I suggest, can also be illuminated through the figure of phantasmagoria.
Gabriel GUEDES (Pittsburgh)
Title: Stereoscopic Viewing of Aerial Photography
Abstract: In 1955, the U.S. Air Force published a manual titled Aerial Photographic Reconnaissance, devoted entirely to the practice of taking photographs from airplanes for military purposes. Such a document indicates an interest in airplane photography dating back to at least the 1910s, a period in which Caren Kaplan has described the importance of aerial reconnaissance for British violence against the residents of the Mandate of Iraq. However, Kaplan and other scholars of aerial photography have devoted relatively little space to the importance of stereoscopy in the process of examining the resulting photographs and converting them to legible products. The aim of my current research is to see how viewing stereoscopically played a role in the U.S. governmental use of aerial photography, especially during the post-WWII period, when a concurrent stereoscopic boom and bust took place in Hollywood. I look to documents of the time, such as military manuals, technical journals, and the photographs themselves, to analyze how stereoscopy was discussed and how it was weaponized for or complicated the process of extracting information from the image. We can see in these writings not only the application of stereoscopy but debates over the nature of vision and the brain’s processing of visual information. My goal is to identify places where stereoscopy was applied in the mid-century outside of the fictional motion picture in order to see where aerial photography fits in a broader history of stereoscopic displays and the mobilization of image technologies for aesthetic purposes.
{Short break: 20 minutes}
(3) Third conversation: Mariana MILLECCO (Birkbeck)/Genevieve NEWMAN (Pitt)
18:00-18:50 London//13:00-13:50 Pittsburgh
Moderators: Adam Lowenstein (Pittsburgh) and Janet McCabe (Birkbeck)
Geneveive Newman (Pittsburgh)
Title: Victimization and Survival: Existing Literature, Interventions
Abstract: For this conversational work-in-progress presentation, I will very briefly gloss the existing scholarly literature theorizing film trauma studies, with an emphasis on rape in film. However, the primary focus of this presentation will be developing working definitions for the terms ‘victim’, ‘survivor’, and ‘victim-survivor’ in relation to rape in horror media, literature, and poetry. These terms are currently defined primarily in legislative, political, and social scientific fields, so part of this project is to move them into the realm of media and literary criticism. For the larger project at hand, I will need to develop a definition that accounts primarily with the ways that these terms are constructed rhetorically via media and written work.
Mariana Millecco (Birkbeck)
Title: Women in The Maias novel, a visual and cultural journey from nineteenth-century literature to the modern audio-visual
An analysis of the visual narrative construction of the female characters Maria Monforte and Maria Eduarda (mother and daughter) in two audiovisual adaptations of the nineteenth-century homonymous book, The Maias (1888), by the Portuguese writer Eça de Queiróz: a Brazilian television series from Rede Globo de Televisão and a Portuguese movie. Comparing these women’s visual narratives, considering their role in the novel’s plot, the particularities of the media characteristics and observing the difference between the Brazilian and the Portuguese visual narratives to create a base to discuss the use of the costumes and visual characterization as a symbolic tool for the construction of the characters. In particular, the presence of the Brazilian female body in Portuguese society, its objectification, and associations; as the dichotomy between these women’s Greek-goddess-like visual description and the Brazilian phenotype. To understand the meaning of the productions for both societies and their interaction from a historic colony-metropolis relationship, inside and outside the visual narratives, from the past to the present. The research and analysis process works to understand When, For Whom, How and Why a visual narrative is constructed and communicated.
CONCLUSION/END: 18:50-19:00 London//13:50-14:00 Pittsburgh
Contact name:
Michael Temple