Event
Photo courtesy from Mr. Ruben Östlund (The Square, 2017)
Yearning for the World: Mediating Proximity after Distanced Times
The University of Pennsylvania Cinema and Media Studies graduate conference on "Yearning for the World: Mediating Proximity after Distanced Times" has been organized by Joseph Coppola (Penn, ENGL), Anat Dan (Penn, COML), and Dahlia Li (Penn, ENGL).
The conference takes place on Saturday, February 19, 2022, at the Kislak Center on Penn Campus.
The conference is presently planned in-person. Penn community must complete a daily PennOpen Pass. Visitors must complete a PennOpen Campus pre-screening on the day they visit. They must present their Green Pass on request.
Conference is free and open to all.
______________________________________
PROGRAM
10-10:15am | Breakfast (Grab & Go)
10:15-10:30am | Welcoming Remarks
Joseph Coppola, Anat Dan, Dahlia Li
10:30-11:30am | Opening Keynote
Brandy Monk-Payton | Media in the Interval: On Survival
This talk reflects on encounters with film and media, and especially television, during the continuing Covid-19 global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter global protests in summer 2020. It seeks to explore desires for the televisual in times of sociopolitical crisis and change. In particular, I use the interval as a paradigm to describe the intervening time and space formed by the pandemic in which differential media transmissions, flows, and experiences have emerged. Within such an interval, the talk ruminates on the radical perceptual potential of black creative work, per Katherine McKittrick, through an analysis of Random Acts of Flyness (HBO, 2018-) with Terence Nance’s statement upon the occasion of the first season’s brief re-release for free on YouTube in June 2020, as well as a close reading of the character of Miranda Carroll in the apocalyptic limited series Station Eleven (HBO Max, 2021-2022). Ultimately, I hope to elucidate the importance of acts of watching, thinking, reading, writing, making, and doing for the purposes of sustainability and survival as scholars in the current moment.
11:45am-1:15pm | First Panel | Black Mediation, Different Embodiments | Moderator: Ian Fleishman (Penn, CIMS & GRMN)
Anthony Dominguez | Advertising at the Apocalypse: COVID-19 and Consuming the Black Spectacle in I am Legend
By creating a scenario ripped from science-fiction, the COVID-19 virus transformed Times Square from the real into the fantastic. I argue that in the absence of people, the content of Times Square’s urban-screens adapted so as to combine the signaling of the virus’s presence with the advertising of regular products. Through a close textual reading of I am Legend (2007), I contrast the fantasy of fictional apocalyptic depictions of Times Square with the reality of Times Square as it was during May of 2020 to demonstrate how Times Square does not need people to function as a commercialized space, thereby limiting the opportunity to engage with the area erotically.
Amber Rose Johnson | No Theories for the Liquidity of this Desire
No Theories for the Liquidity of This Desire (run time 5:55) is a short film I directed and shot in Anguilla, a 35-square-foot island in the Caribbean archipelago, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prompted by Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ critical-poetic text Dub: Finding Ceremony, the film visualizes ritual practices of anti-colonial place-making for displaced subjects and wrestles with questions of (un)belonging in the African Diaspora. Taking cue from Sylvia Wynter’s formulation of “senses as theoreticians,” in the accompanying paper I meditate on the autoethnography and desire as sensorial methods of knowledge production and anti-colonial tools for navigating urgent geographic and geological precarity.
Dahlia Li | A Swirl of Silver, A Stretch of Cloth: Jaamil Olawale Kosoko and Dance’s Virtual Black Body Politic
In the spring of 2020, experimental performance artist Jaamil Olawale Kosoko quickly converted an evening-length live concert dance piece, American Chameleon, into an expanded virtual platform performance to accommodate emergent pandemic distance protocol. My conference paper situates American Chameleon’s theory of virtual Black bodily presence in conversation with critiques of concert dance’s colonial history (Bench 2007, Preston 2017) and sentimentalist objectifications of Black pain (Hartman 1997). Engaging with ways that American Chameleon draws on dance to respond to the pressure that ongoing histories of racial biopolitics exert on theories of aesthetic form (Bradley 2017, Ferreira da Silva, 2007, Wynter 2013) I develop an account of the raced dancing body’s imbrication with political theories of the body politic.
1:15-2:30 | Lunch (Grab & Go)
2:30-4:15pm | Second Panel | Place-Making in Distanced Times | Moderator: Chenshu Zhou (Penn, CIMS & ARTH)
Ifeanyi Awachie | Vivid Escapisms for an Interior: Curating and Archiving a Virtual Festival in Quarantine
This paper will explore how global contemporary arts festival AFRICA SALON UK curated and archived its virtual programming in 2020. The paper will reflect on the impact of the live-stream format on the curatorial process and its relationship to current discourses on rest. The paper will show how AFRICA SALON UK arrived at its archiving methods, examine relevant issues, and assess the success of these methods. By contextualizing AFRICA SALON UK’s archiving practices among those of other film festivals that were held virtually during COVID-19, the paper will contribute original research on archiving and preservation issues particular to the quarantine period.
Xiaoyang Pan | Animation as Strategy: Aesthetic Mode Exploration of Documentary in the Post-Pandemic
Documentary filmmakers faithfully record the ever-changing space around us. As virtual platforms play a more critical role in people's daily lives, how to document cyberspace? The virtual environment is invisible, and shooting the "cloud" directly is useless for the audience to understand cyberspace further. By analyzing the 2018 documentary People's Republic of Desire, I elaborate on filmmaker Hao Wu's strategy of using animation to display cyberspace. Furthermore, I want to consider if fiction is the sole method to display cyberspace? If so, is the dilemma signaling that it would be harder to separate "fiction" from documentary in this digital era?
Adetobi Moses | A New Digital World: Voice, Affect and Community in Times of Covid
"Corona Diaries" is an open access site that allows participants to record a voice entry related to the pandemic, has received thousands of responses globally by providing a platform for spatially dispersed voices to discuss the shared complexities of living within an ongoing crisis. Using a combination of grounded theory and narrative inquiry, this project engages with this digital archive to understand the four categories of voice diaries that have emerged. The first three categories pertain to isolation, community, and uncertainty, while the last category deals with how the affective nature of the speakers’ voices expand our understanding of digital commiseration.
Hemantika Singh | Comedy in the times of COVID - 19: Online Performances, Innovations and Proximity
While multiple social media platforms were experimenting with integrating live streaming and other novel digital features for a while before the Covid-19 pandemic, in the context of the lockdown these became a swelling trend as far as contemporary digital viewership practices are concerned. My presentation investigates these shifts, specifically in the Indian comedy scenario, in this moment of a global crisis, when performances moved from physical spaces to computer and mobile screens and several stand-up comedians began to host regular live streams. The paper explores how through live streams, physical proximity is simulated between the comedians and their audiences online. Could we possibly argue that the new practice of live streams is pointing to generic shifts where stand-up comedians venture into new territories of gaming, quizzing, channel raids, reaction videos with their online fan base.
4:15-4:30pm | Break
4:30-5:30pm | Closing Keynote
Nicholas Mirzoeff | The Murmuration of Stares
This talk frames the 2020 Central Park bird-watching incident, in which a white financial analyst called police on a Black bird-watcher, in the context of histories of settler colonialism, extraction, and white supremacy. Situating ornithology as a white way of seeing, it considers the extermination and extinction of birds in terms of fugitivity, necrography, and eugenics, engaging the work of Audubon and the collection and display of birds at the American Museum of Natural History. It reflects on the assembly of birds in Aotearoa New Zealand, as depicted by painter Bill Hammond, and the work of decolonizing extinction. As a counterpoint to white ways of seeing it offers the murmuration, specifically that of “stares” or starlings.
5:30-5:45pm | Closing Remarks
Rahul Mukherjee (Penn, CIMS & ENGL)
______________________________________
PARTICIPANTS
Ifeanyi Awachie is a Nigerian-American writer and curator based in New York. She is Founder, Director, and Chief Curator of AFRICA SALON UK, a global contemporary African arts festival. She is currently a Ph.D. student in Cinema Studies and a Corrigan Fellow at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
Anthony Dominguez is a PhD candidate in Cinema Studies at NYU Tisch. His dissertation focuses on Times Square and the influence of global capitalism on public space, architecture, corporate advertising, and military powers. His research includes urban screens; Japanese media; and the late-cinema of Jean-Luc Godard.
Amber Rose Johnson is a scholar and artist pursuing a PhD in English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has edited two exhibition catalogues, Colored People Time (ICA Philadelphia, 2020) and Great Force (ICA VCU, 2020). Her writing can be found in Artforum, Jacket2, BOMB, and BookForum.
Dahlia Li (she/they) is an artist and doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of English with certificates from the Program in Cinema and Media Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. Her dissertation explores 20th and 21st-century experimental dance as it intersects with histories of diaspora, race, and theories of technological mediation. In addition to her scholarly writing, she is working on a series of nonfiction essays on the gendered afterlives of diasporic revolution and is a practicing dance artist who collaborates with Be Heintzman Hope, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Ogemdi Ude, and Elisa Zuppini.
Nicholas Mirzoeff is a visual activist, working at the intersection of politics, race and global/visual culture. In 2020-21 he is ACLS/Mellon Scholar and Society fellow in residence at the Magnum Foundation, New York. Among his many publications, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (2011) won the Anne Friedberg Award for Innovative Scholarship from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies in 2013..
Brandy Monk-Payton is a media and black cultural studies scholar specializing in the history and theory of African American media representation and cultural production. Broadly, her research engages with questions concerning critical race theory as they relate to topics in television, film, and new media studies, gender and sexuality studies, performance studies, as well as United States public and popular culture.
Adetobi Moses is second-year doctoral student at Penn Annenberg School for Communication, studies transnational media practices during crises and emergent events, with diverse geographical interests in sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and the US. Her research questions engage with the social, digital, and personal ramifications of an increasingly digitally oriented world.
Xiaoyang Pan is a second-year MA student from Columbia University School of the Arts, majoring in Film and Media studies. I am interested in researching time and space in film, affect theory and media theory. I am a keen writer and documentary filmmaker as well.
Hemantika Singh is a doctoral candidate at the Women’s and Gender Studies program at Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD) and her research engages with the intricate interconnections between the popular and the political in the context of the digital. Her doctoral thesis specifically focuses on contemporary web shorts which strategically employ popular media imagery as referents to pose questions on/of gender in the Indian context.
______________________________________
As we emerge from an intensive pandemic lockdown marked by global civil unrest and increasing climate precarity, how might our scholarly endeavors within the field of Cinema and Media Studies help navigate what it means to come back together after so long apart? From the cries for a more just world that re-surfaced histories of anti- colonial, global solidarity, and Marxist movements, to the ways screens mediated taken- for-granted physical co-presence, the pandemic of 2020-2021 dramatically reshaped the sensorial experience of what it means to be together in the world. Bodies bound by pathogenic danger zones suddenly found life mediated by screens and media networks that increasingly became social infrastructure itself. The increased rendering of life into data—already a fraught arena—became an unavoidable necessity for most.
This loss of normalcy found communities of all types turning to new ways of understanding resources already at hand. Mutual aid projects and resistant media practices proliferated through social media while the relative stall in new entertainment led to revisiting and revising already-existing canons. All this while fluctuating temperatures and markets pressed upon bodies already-bewildered by isolation. In this pivotal moment, this conference asks: what’s been lost, what’s been found, and what intractably remains the same? How might the projects of Cinema and Media Studies scholars engage the 'before," "during," and "after" of a pandemic whose unevenly distributed effects have deeply unsettled our senses of being and belonging? How have distant times re-shaped the politics and exigencies of our fields of knowledge and practice? How do our projects as scholars, artists, and teachers already elaborate a much needed different world?
______________________________________
This conference is made possible thanks to the sponsorship of Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
We also acknowledge Prof. Rahul Mukherjee (CIMS Director) and Mr. Nicola M Gentili (CIMS Associate Director) for their assistance, support, and guidance in organizing the event.