RENDERING (THE) VISIBLE III: LIQUIDITY (2016)
Introduction | liquid blackness in Conversation with Thomas DeFrantz | Special Guests | Event Schedule | Figuring Suspension Research Project | About Storyboard P | Support
Introduction
The graduate program in Moving Image Studies at GSU presents “Rendering (the) Visible III: Liquidity,” February 8-10, 2018. Conference panels, film and dance performances, and keynote lecture will explore the concept of liquidity as an innovative critical approach to the image’s relation to space, sensoriality, and digitality, as well as an aesthetic sensibility attuned to the political ontology of motion, form, matter, and noise.
Over the past several years, our research group “liquid blackness.” has been exploring some of the implications of these ideas, specifically in relation to race. “Rendering (the) Visible III: Liquidity” connects this concept more broadly with an increasing turn within the study of moving image culture toward affective relations, plasticity, resonances and flows, whereby images and sounds—no longer grounded in an analogical relation to the real—are seen variously as malleable, untethered, “viral,” or fluid.
The conference opens Thursday evening with a screening of 3-D video work by Marc Downie and Paul Kaiser (OpenEndedGroup).
Friday evening the research group liquid blackness will host a reception and conversation with Professor Thomas F. DeFrantz about its research project “Figuring Suspension: A Study of Visual Recording Artist Storyboard P,” a study of movement, affect, synchronization, black performance theory and animation. Storyboard’s previous work includes collaborations with Arthur Jafa, Kahlil Joseph, Jay-Z, and Erykah Badu.
Saturday evening, Professor Grant Farred (Africana Studies Research Center, Cornell University) presents the keynote lecture, followed by a closing reception.
liquid blackness in Conversation with Thomas DeFrantz
Special Guests
Grant Farred
Grant Farred is Professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University. He is the author of Midfielder’s Moment: Coloured Literature and Culture in Contemporary South Africa (Westview Press, 1999), What’s My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), Phantom Calls: Race and the Globalization of the NBA (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2006), Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008), In Motion, At Rest: The Event of the Athletic Body (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and, most recently, Martin Heidegger Saved My Life (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). He is the author of many articles, and the editor of several essay collections and journal special issues, including:
“Stuart Hall.” South Atlantic Quarterly 115(4) (October 1, 2016).
“Fanon: Imperative of the Now.” South Atlantic Quarterly 112(1) (Winter, 2013).
“After the Thrill Is Gone: A Decade of Post-Apartheid South Africa.” South Atlantic Quarterly. 103(4) (Fall 2004) (with Rita Barnard).
Rethinking C.L.R. James. Cambridge: Blackwell. 1996.
Thomas F. DeFrantz
Thomas F. DeFrantz is Professor in the Departments of African American Studies, Dance, Theater Studies, and Women’s Studies at Duke University. He is author of Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004) and editor of Dancing Many Drums (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002) and Black Performance Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). He is also director of SLIPPAGE: PERFORMANCE|CULTURE|TECHNOLOGY, a performance research group based at Duke University. His recent edited special issues, book chapters and articles include:
Defrantz, T. F. “White privilege.” Theater 48, no. 3 (November 1, 2018): 23–37. https://doi.org/10.1215/01610775-7084669.
DeFrantz, T. F. “Them: Recombinant aesthetics of restaging experimental performance.” In The Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory, 268–92, 2018.
DeFrantz, T. F., and P. Badejo. “Forewords,” vii–xii, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70314-5.
DeFrantz, Thomas F. “Identifying the Endgame.” Theater 47, no. 1 (2017): 3-15.
DeFrantz, Thomas F. “I am Black: (you have to be willing to not know).” Theater 47, no. 2 (2017): 9-21.
DeFrantz, Thomas F., and Tara Aisha Willis, eds. “Black Moves: New Research in Black Dance Studies.” Black Scholar 46, no. 1 (January 1, 2016).
De Frantz, Thomas, Bone-Breaking, Black Social Dance, and Queer Corporeal Orature.” Black Scholar 46, no. 1 (January 1, 2016): 66-74.
DeFrantz, Thomas F. “Hip Hop in Hollywood: Encounter, Community, Resistance.” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen, ed. Melissa Blanco Borelli. Oxford University Press, July 30, 2014.
DeFrantz, Thomas F. “Hip Hop Habitus v.2.0.” In Black Performance Theory: An Anthology of Critical Readings, ed. Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez, 223-242. Duke University Press, April 14, 2014.
Event Schedule
Thursday, February 8, 6:30pm
3D Screening of works by OpenEndedGroup
Discussion with Openendedgroup artists Marc Downie and Paul Kaiser
Kopleff Recital Hall: 10 Peachtree Center Ave NE, Atlanta, GA 30303
Friday, February 9
Creative Media Industries Institute: 25 Park Place, Atlanta, GA 30302
10:00-11:30am -Rendering Across Scale
Bishnupriya Ghosh, University of California, Santa Barbara, “Viral Mutation as Biological Flux and the Fluidity of Micro-Processing DNA Streams”
Dan Reynolds, Emory University, “A Taste for Cinema: Chemoreception and Media”
Laurel Ahnert, Georgia State University, “Phenomenology of the Flood: The Ambivalence of Grids and Flows in Aerial Imagery of Environmental Destruction”
11:45-1:30am- Flows of the Political (Panel A)
Chuck Jackson, University of Houston-Downtown, “Eye Slide over Borders: Grave Looks in Willie Varela’s Early Super-8s (1974-1985)”
Giuseppe Fidotta and Sima Kokotovic, Concordia University, “Tactical Liquidity: A Method for Studying Alternative Culture Industries”
Chip Linscott, Ohio University, “Black Art in the Hour of Chaos, or, Noisy Liquidity Spills on the Street, the Screen, and the Speaker”
Daren Fowler, Georgia State University, “Taking a Piss: The Waiting, Glancing, Negotiating of Queer Life”
Engaging the Elemental (Panel B)
Lauren Eldridge, Spelman College, “Lòt bò dlo – the Other Side of the Water: Haitian-Americans Compose Nation and the Self”
Jessica Bardsley, Harvard University, “Liquid History and the Vitalist Materiality of Chick Strand’s Kristallnacht (1979)”
Arzu Karaduman, Georgia State University, “The “crystal-sounds” of Moonlight”
Cameron Kunzelman, Georgia State University, “Liquidity and Order: Assemblages Between Kapoor and Lynch”
1:30 -2:45 pm- Lunch and Art Installations
“Points of Presence” (Adam Fish, Lancaster University)
“Rover” (Robert Twomey, University of Washington)
“ARP: Absorbing red photons 2016” (Michelle Atherton, Sheffield Hallam University) (beginning at 1:45, 2:00, 2:15, 2:30)
2:45-4:15pm - Figures of the Geopolitical
Bhaskar Sarkar, University of California, Santa Barbara, “Going Global as gesture (Bollywood)”
Gregory Flaxman, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “The Incredible Shrinking Planet: The Long History of Globalization”
John Roberts, Georgia State University, “Speculations of Violence: Rendering Race, Space, and Value in Nightcrawler”
6:00pm - Reception curated by liquid blackness
A discussion with Professor Thomas F. DeFrantz, Duke University facilitated by Lauren Cramer, Pace University and Alessandra Raengo, Georgia State University
Saturday, October 7
Creative Media Industries Institute: 25 Park Place, Atlanta, GA 3030
10am – 11:30am- Liquidity as Reading Practice (Panel A)
Dan Fineman, Occidental College, “Film as Confluence: The Haptic and Phatic in Mr. Arkadin”
Sarah Jonckheere, University of Lille/South Atlantic Centre of the Institute of the America, “From TV Flex to TV Flux: Channelling TV Affects and Archiving the Future in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome”
Jenny Gunn, Georgia State University, “Film Aesthetics as Appropriation: Liquefying Blackness in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers”
Temporal Flows (Panel B)
Adam Cottrel, Georgia Gwinnett College, “Liquid Realism: Aesthetic Fluidity as Subjective Assemblage in 2046 and Holy Motors”
Miguel Penabella, University of California, Santa Barbara, “Cinema Set Adrift: Los Muertos and the Free-Flowing Temporality of Slow Cinema”
Ahmet Yuce, Georgia State University, “Echo-image in Caché”
11:45am – 1:15pm - Mysteries of the Deep (Panel A)
Michelle Atherton, Sheffield Hallam University, “ARP: Absorbing red photons 2016”
Lisa Han, University of California, Santa Barbara, “Theorizing Transduction: Flow, Translation, and Propagation in Sonar Imaging”
Lou Ruprecht, Georgia State University, “Liquidity Under Pressure”
Metamorphoses (Panel B)
Tanine Allison, Emory University, “Acting Posthuman: Performance Capture and Video Games”
Drew Ayers, Eastern Washington University, “Game of Thrones’ Walk of Atonement: Digital Nudity and the Liquidity of the Composite Body”
Steven Pustay, Independent Scholar, “9 out of Human: The Uncomfortably-Fluid Bodies of Monster Factory”
1:15 – 2:45pm- Lunch and Art Installations
“Points of Presence” (Adam Fish, Lancaster University)
“Rover” (Robert Twomey, University of Washington)
“ARP: Absorbing red photons 2016” (Michelle Atherton, Sheffield Hallam University) (beginning at 1:45, 2:00, 2:15, 2:30)
3:00 pm – 4:15pm - Rhythms, Affect, Intensities
Elena del Río, University of Alberta, “Bill Viola’s Affective Ecologies”
Domietta Torlasco, Northwestern University, “What is the Rhythm of Water? On Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante”
Agustin Zarzosa, SUNY Purchase, “Rain and the Matter of Speculative Realism”
Thomas DeFrantz, Duke University, “Dancing Among the Watery Folds”
5:45pm – 7pm Keynote Address
Grant Farred, Cornell University, “Daseinstufe: Liquidity As a (Distinct) Stage of Being”
7:30pm Closing Reception
Support
Organized by Jennifer Barker, Alessandra Raengo, Angelo Restivo, and Ethan Tussey for the School of Film, Media & Theatre.
The Conference is made possible through the Center for Collaborative and International Arts (CENCIA), the School of Film, Media & Theatre, and the Creative Media Industries Institute (CMII), the Atlanta Media Project and the Center for Hellenic Studies.