About the project
This series of events will present screenings and dialogues between artists and filmmakers, who engage documentary in forms that evoke the camera (and documentary) as apparatuses of capture. These artists variably produce or reproduce a set of conditions, where subjects might resist, elude or escape capture. The frames of these works are also stretched or extended to situations of liveness.
The events in this series are:
- Fri, Mar 17, 2017, 6:30pm in Martin E. Segal Theatre: Interventions in the Interview, Fugitive Subjects: Amber Hawk Swanson & Stephen Winter
- Wed, Apr 5, 2017, 7:00pm in Martin E. Segal Theatre: Behind the Camera, Covering the Image: Caroline Key & Shelly Silver
- Fri, Oct 20, 2017, 6:30pm in Martin E. Segal Theatre: Dependency and Instruction, Expanded Cinema: Carolyn Lazard, Park McArthur, and Constantina Zavitsanos
Each group of artists will be invited both to discuss their engagement with documentary forms and to intervene in a situation of liveness. Each artist will have 30 minutes to present work, deliver an artist’s talk, engage the audience, or perform, followed by a half-hour moderated conversation. This discussion will be accompanied and periodically interrupted by a live feed of video from the simultaneously dystopian and radically utilitarian app, Periscope, which allows users to drop into other people’s livestreams from across the world, broadcasting from any situation from the mundane to matters of life and death.
This series of events largely emerges from a reading group that has gathered around the work of the late artist, writer, curator, and teacher Ian White and his 2008 text, “Recording and Performing: Cinema as Live Art/Becoming Object.” He wrote, “Live art and artists’ film and video refute the institution as a containing system because, as inconclusive forms, they do not cohere into a system of collection as easily containable objects, or as strictly repeatable experiences, without breaking the controls upon which this system is dependent [...].” The format of the event seeks to reinstitute a form that White practiced with many of the artists on whom he wrote.
There are questions to be asked about the production of accounts and accountability and whether an apparatus of capture can ever hold itself accountable.
The concept or feeling of liveness will not to be a given. The concept or feeling of liveness will not be distinct from the presence of ghosts.
Co-sponsored by the Film Studies Certificate Program and IRADAC.
