UCR ARTSblock presents the exhibition:
Geographies of Detention: From Guantánamo to the Golden Gulag
June 1 – September 7, 2013*
California Museum of Photography, UCR ARTSblock
UCR ARTSblock presents Geographies of Detention: From Guantánamo to the Golden Gulag, on view at the California Museum of Photography from June 1 through September 7, 2013. The exhibition is guest curated by Catherine Gudis, Molly McGarry, and graduate students from the UCR Public History Program: Leann Do, Jay Hartzell, Kristen Hayashi, Corinne Knight, Sean Milanovich, Karen Raines, Carolyn Schutten, Megan Suster, Jennifer Thornton, David Wagner, and Jennifer Weed.
Presented on two floors of the California Museum of Photography, Geographies of Detention offers a nuanced investigation into incarceration and its architectures. One portion of the exhibition highlights work by artists Sandow Birk, Alyse Emdur, and Richard Ross, each of whom explores different aspects of imprisonment. Geographies of Detention also includes the traveling exhibit the “Guantánamo Public Memory Project,” an examination of the over 100-year history of the US naval station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The main gallery of the museum is devoted to the contemporary context and landscape of California’s own “golden gulag.” Prison populations in California have grown 500% in the last decades even as crime rates subside, and prison spending continues to outweigh state funding for public education. A selection of hauntingly evocative paintings by Sandow Birk from his series “Prisonation” (2001) reflects on the growth of California’s prison industrial complex by engaging its geographic context. Taking inspiration from pictorial genres of landscape painting, including those popularized by the Hudson River School in the 19th century, each of Birk’s paintings depicts one of California’s state prisons, from Pelican Bay in Northern California to Centinela State Prison at the US–Mexico border.
While Birk’s work shows the prisons from afar, Richard Ross and Alyse Emdur take the viewer inside these structures. In his series of photographs “Architecture of Authority” (2007), Ross explores the built environment of prisons, revealing the spatial logic used to exert power over the bodies incarcerated within. Emdur’s large-scale photographs of prison visiting rooms and collected letters and snapshots (some of which appear in her 2013 book, Prison Landscapes) offer a more intimate vision of inmates posing with their visitors against murals in fantasy landscapes of freedom. Presented together, the works of Birk, Ross, and Emdur meditate on the “carceral state” of California.
The “Guantánamo Public Memory Project” combines historical and contemporary photography, film, and first-person audio interviews to examine how the naval base has been “closed” and reopened for more than a century leading up to the attacks on September 11, 2001. These new perspectives on Guantánamo’s history as a “legal black hole” provoke discussions about the limits of democracy and the meaning of mass incarceration in a global present and future.
Collaboratively curated by eleven universities (including UCR), the “Guantánamo Public Memory Project” is comprised of a deeply researched traveling exhibit, as well as a website (www.gitmomemory.org), blog, and ongoing public conversation. The panel produced by graduate students in UCR’s Public History Program examines Guantánamo as an international symbol of America’s War on Terror and a lightning rod for debates about torture, detention, national security, and human rights.
Visit artsblock.ucr.edu for the schedule of related programs.
*The “Guantánamo Public Memory Project” will be on view as part of Geographies of Detention through August 10, 2013.
This exhibition was made possible in part by the generous support of Dean Stephen Cullenberg, UCR College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and the UCR History Department’s Friends of Public History.
California Museum of Photography Sweeney Art Gallery
Culver Center of the Arts University of California, Riverside
3834 Main Street Riverside, CA 92501 951.827.3755
Cindy Keefer, Archivist, Curator & Director . Center for Visual Music
Preserving Visual Music : The Archives of the Center for Visual Music
THURSDAY . May 30 . 4:30 PM . INTN 1113 . Refreshments served .
Cindy Keefer, Director of the Center for Visual Music Los Angeles, will discuss and screen work by pioneers of kinetic art, abstract animation and pre-digital cinema from CVM’s archives. CVM is a Los Angeles archive dedicated to visual music, experimental animation and abstract media. CVM preserves and promotes films by Oskar Fischinger, Jordan Belson, Charles Dockum, Mary Ellen Bute, Jules Engel, Harry Smith and others, as well as contemporary artists. Keefer will screen work from CVM’s archives by Fischinger and Belson, plus Dockum’s Mobilcolor Projections, Bute’s Abstronics (an early oscilloscope film), a short Bute documentary, and more. She will also discuss Belson’s now legendary 1950s Vortex Concerts, CVM’s work with the Fischinger legacy, current preservation work, and Raumlichtkunst, the new HD 3-screen reconstruction of Fischinger’s 1920s multiple-projector performances, recently exhibited at the Whitney Museum, the Tate Modern, and scheduled for exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in summer 2013.
This is the last event CDH will host for the 2012-2013 season. Please join us for this exciting presentation.
http://www.dichtung-digital.
The Critical Digital Humanities presents a CDH research panel with presentations by April Durham and Kimberly Hall. They will present drafts of recent research in digital humanities for discussion and comment.
Wednesday . April 10 . 12:30 – 2
English Department Conference Room
Refreshments will be served.
CDH event with media artist and scholar, Kristy Kang
The Seoul of Los Angeles: Contested Identities and Transnationalism in Immigrant Space
Thursday, April 4th at 3pm
Room: INTS 1113
Refreshments provided.
A presentation of interdisciplinary work in the digital humanities that explores narratives of identity formation and cultural memory.
Ms. Kang is an internationally recognized artist and has served as researcher, project director, and designer on a range of collaborative projects at the Labyrinth Project at USC.
This event is sponsored by the Center for Ideas and Society through a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Workshops in the Humanities. For more information on this and other events, please visit ideasandsociety.ucr.edu
New CDH Talk : Production & Pedagogy with Professor James S. Tobias
February 25th, 2013
April Durham
Production and Pedagogy: Design in the Digital Humanities Classroom
Dr. James S. Tobias . Associate Professor . Department of English . UC Riverside
Thursday . March 14 . 3-4:30 pm . English Department Conference Room
Refreshments provided.
This event is sponsored by the Center for Ideas and Society through a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information on this and other events, please visit the website at ideasandsociaty.ucr.edu
The Museum of Modern Art launches post, a participatory digital platform for global research
February 20th, 2013
April Durham
 Photographs in MoMA’s Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection. Photo: Paula Court. The Museum of Modern Art launches post, |
||
| The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is pleased to announce the launch of post: notes on modern and contemporary art around the globe, an online initiative for collaborative research and artistic exchange. post grows out of C-MAP (Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives), a cross-departmental research program begun in 2009 to facilitate a museum-wide study that reflects the multiplicity of “modernities” and histories of contemporary and modern art.
post is a site for encounters between the established and the experimental, the historical and the emerging, the local and the global, the scholarly and the artistic, the formal and the informal. Adapting the attributes of an online journal, archive, exhibition space, and social-networking platform, post uses the non-hierarchical characteristics of the Web to spark in-depth explorations of the ways in which modernism is being redefined, and to link those topics to the ways in which artists and institutions are working today. post is an open forum for sharing research and circulating works in progress, offering a platform for critical response and an instrument for increasing expertise through exposure to ideas from around the globe. It is a place for conversation and debate, for building a nuanced understanding of the histories that shape our present. As a Web platform, post provides an alternative to the model of a unified art-historical narrative. post instead allows a malleable, layered understanding of multiple notions of modernity to emerge over time, as more people from more places participate. Emerging out of research undertaken at MoMA, post develops a network of partners and users whose complementary research and concerns will shape future approaches and content. Starting with a specific thematic focus, the site regularly releases essays, interviews, reports, reflections, archival materials, and artists’ commissions, ensuring that new voices are constantly entering the discussion. The site is designed to encourage active participation; users and institutional partners are encouraged to upload their own findings and share their questions, together gaining broader exposure and expertise. In time, and depending upon the interest of the partners, post will broaden its focus. Committed to investigating artistic practices that have historically been overlooked in MoMA’s collection and exhibitions, post initially explores sites of experimental practices in regions that are the focus of C-MAP research: East Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean. Upon its launch, post will present its first case study, in partnership with Keio University Art Center, featuring the archival materials of Sogetsu Art Center, an epicenter of avant-garde artistic experiments in Tokyo in the 1960s that hosted an exciting, rapid-fire series of programs in experimental music, jazz, and cinema. The initial presentation features essays, interviews, and works by artists related to Sogetsu Art Center—Shiomi Mieko, Yokoo Tadanori, Matsumoto Toshio, andYamaguchi Katsuhiro—and artists who have been the subject of C-MAP research—Geta Brătescu, Chim↑Pom, and Jikken Kobo, among others. About C-MAP The Museum of Modern Art’s Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives in a Global Age Initiative (C-MAP) is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art. Additional funding is provided by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Adriana Cisneros de Griffin, and Marlene Hess. post was designed and developed by TC Labs. Creative direction by Caleb Waldorf. |
||
Professor Angel David Nieves to present:
“Soweto ‘76 Archive: Spatial Narratives and Historical GIS in the ‘New’ South Africa”
Thursday, February 14
4:00 – 5:00pm
2212 HMNSS
This is a wonderful conference with many luminaries and many non-luminous but brilliant people. I highly recommend it.
SLSA CONFERENCE 2013: UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME
The 27th Annual Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts
Location Notre Dame, Indiana. Venue University of Notre Dame. Dates October 3–6, 2013.
Site Coordinator: Laura Dassow Walls, Department of English, University of Notre Dame.
Program Chair: Ron Broglio, Department of English, Arizona State University.
Paper Proposal Due Date May 1, 2013. Notification of Acceptance June 15, 2013.
SLSA Membership Participants in the 2013 conference must be 2013 members of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. For more information about SLSA, please visit the organization website at www.litsci.org.
Conference theme: PostNatural. What does it mean to come “after” nature? In 2012, Arctic ice melted to the lowest level in human history; with ice everywhere in retreat, island nations are disappearing, species vectors are shifting, tropical diseases are moving north, northern natures-cultures are moving into extinction. Acidification of ocean water already threatens Northwest shellfish farms, while historic wildfires, droughts, floods, and shoreline erosion are the norm. Reality overshoots computer models of global warming even as CO2 emissions escalate. Yet none of this has altered our way of living or our way of thinking: as Fredric Jameson noted, we can imagine the collapse of the planet more easily than the fall of capitalism. What fundamental reorientations of theory—of posthumanity and animality, of agency, actants, and aporias, of bodies, objects, assemblages and networks, of computing and cognition, of media and bioart—are needed to articulate the simple fact that our most mundane and ordinary lives are, even in the span of our own lifetimes, unsustainable? If we have never been natural, are we now, at last, ecological?
Topics and Questions include:
Resilience Theory and Panarchy Symbiosis after Margulis
Geological Time: Pliocene, Holocene, Anthropocene Ecologies of Mind
Literature, Theology & the New Ecology Simulated Ecosystems
Animality, Vegetality, & Somatic Natures Cosmopolitical Projects
Environmental Gaming & Gaming Environments Imagined Eco-Futures
Feminist & Diffractive Materialisms Beyond Gaia
the Language of Engineering, Control, Hacking and Techno-fixes Ecoterrorism and Nature Noir
Waste Lands: Stains, Toxins, Dumps, Refuse, Pollutions Globality vs. Planetarity
Nature, Post-Nature, and the Politics of Ecology
Unsustainability: in biological terms, can we “stain” to make the “unsustainable” visible?
Plenary Speakers include Timothy Morton and Subhankar Banerjee
Please Note: Like all SLSA conferences, this is an open conference where a wide range of work will be welcome. Proposed topics may take up any work in literature and science, history of science, philosophy of science, science and art, or science studies. “PostNatural” has been chosen as a theme to organize ongoing conference threads and invite a range of proposals from various dimensions of ecocriticism and environmental literature and history. For panel contributions, submit a 250-word abstract with title. Pre-organized panels for consideration may include an additional summary paragraph along with proposed session title. Roundtable and alternative format panels are encouraged. Submit all proposals and register for the conference athttp://www.litsci.org/slsa13, starting in February 2013.
Submissions: For panel contributions, submit a 250-word abstract with title. Pre-organized panels for consideration may include an additional summary paragraph along with proposed session title. Roundtable and alternative format panels are encouraged. Submit all proposals and register for the conference athttp://www.litsci.org/slsa13 starting in February 2013.
Travel Awards
SLSA provides a limited number of travel awards for underfunded individuals attending the annual conference. Members of SLSA who present at the annual conference may apply for travel subventions. An applicant should email name, title of SLSA presentation, an indication of how long one has been a member of SLSA, and any information about funding for the conference to the Executive Director at carol.colatrella@lmc.gatech.
Post-Graduate Program in New Zealand: Geographies of Media Convergence
January 27th, 2013
April Durham
The School of English and Media Studies is currently seeking applicants for postgraduate scholarships at Massey University Wellington (New Zealand) for a research project that is externally funded by the Marsden Fund of the New Zealand Royal Society and entitled, “Geographies of Media Convergence: Spaces of Democracy, Connectivity and the Reconfiguration of Cultural Citizenship.”
There are scholarships available at both Masters (one year fulltime) and PhD (three years fulltime) levels. We welcome applicants who wish to develop their research interests within our overall project theme. We welcome applications from indigenous scholars and Latin American(ist) scholars and scholars working at the intersection of human geography and media studies.
Master’s Scholarship
This scholarship is for a 1-year fulltime Master’s degree (MA or MPhil) by thesis (i.e., no coursework is involved). It will be awarded to an applicant with a high GPA and a Bachelor’s degree in Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Geography, or a cognate discipline. It covers living costs as well as the full domestic component of tuition fees. The total value of the scholarship is NZD $16,000 plus up to $6,000 in fees. It is open to New Zealand domestic and international students (though international students would be required to provide their own source of funding to make up the shortfall between the domestic and international tuition fees).
PhD Scholarship
This scholarship is for a fulltime 3-year PhD degree (which in New Zealand is a degree by research that does not include a coursework component). It will be awarded to an applicant with a high GPA and a Master’s degree in Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Geography, or a cognate discipline. It covers living costs as well as full domestic tuition fees. It is open to New Zealand domestic as well as international students. The total value of the scholarship is NZD75,000 (NZD25,000 pa) plus fees of up to $6,000 per annum for three years.
Project Summary
We are currently living through a period in which centralized forms of media, such as national television and mainstream journalism, are perceived to be in crisis. This crisis is creating new spaces for the development of alternative ways of knowing, watching and making media. Along with them, media convergence has emerged as a multidimensional concept that references expanding interconnections and interactivity between media technologies, sites, users and production processes, as well as increasingly interactive relationships between politics and popular media cultures. Technological development, media convergence, and attendant transformations of everyday media production, circulation and consumption practices are giving rise to new forms of political discourse and involvement. The proposed research seeks to delineate the possibilities and limitations for contemporary social transformation within this new media ecology. We will do this by exploring a series of media forms, discourses, practices and technologies (including indigenous people’s media as well as contemporary developments in entertainment television) whereby new kinds of cultural citizenship are being actively forged.
This project is thus designed to advance incipient dialogues between human geography and media studies by asking how practices within popular cultures of media convergence can contribute to the construction or renovation of democratic citizenship. The researchers involved with this project will analyze processes of media convergence whereby diverse groups in different parts of the world are actively fashioning new forms of political engagement, identity production and cultural citizenship. The research team will thus explore significant sites of media activity for the production of new political imaginaries within the current global historical conjuncture, which is characterized by four key interrelated elements: 1) the appearance and expansion throughout the world of resurgent and increasingly networked indigenous social movements; 2) the emergence of a highly elaborated and complex convergent media ecology marked by rapid technological development, digitalization, miniaturization and mobilization; 3) the rise and spread of neoliberalism, which is increasingly subject to growing contestation, particularly within Latin America; and 4) increased securitization and militarization organized at multiple levels of social life particularly since September 11, 2001. Within this broad historical conjuncture, areas of focus within our project include 1) the expansion of indigenous television in different parts of the world; and 2) the ongoing transformation of entertainment TV and concomitant proliferation of new modes of interactive engagement with such media by digitally empowered citizens. We propose to examine the processes of convergence culture at work within these phenomena in order to identify and analyze citizenship and citizen-like practices that are occurring across different media formats and platforms.
Application Details
• The closing date for applications is Tuesday, 22 February, 2013
• The preferred starting date for the scholarship is 1 April 2013 (though this is negotiable)
• All applications must be submitted in paper form to and must be postmarked no later than the application closing date. To expedite the review of applications, we encourage you to also submit an electronic version of your application to this email address: j.a.mckenzie@massey.ac.nz
• Your application should include the following:
1. A brief cover letter that contains contact details and your preferred starting date
2. A 1000-word proposal outlining your proposed thesis research and how it fits with the aims of the project
3. Your CV
4. A sample of your academic writing (e.g., for PhD applicants, a published article from an academic journal, Masters thesis chapter, seminar paper, etc.; for Masters applicants, a paper from an upper division undergraduate or Honours-level course).
• Two letters of recommendation from persons competent to speak about your academic record at University level must be sent separately to the project supervisors via the email addresses below.
Further information and instructions on how to apply can be found at:
http://www.massey.ac.nz/?
Informal enquiries about the scholarships prior to the deadline can also be directed to the project supervisors: julie.cupples@ed.ac.uk and K.T.Glynn@massey.ac.nz
