Symposium: Friday, September 19, 2014
Location: NYU Department of Media, Culture and Communication, 239 Greene Street, 8th Floor; Free and open to the public.
Screening Series: September 19 – 21
Location: Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue (at 2nd St.)
This symposium and screening series will bring together artists and scholars to examine the mediated and aesthetic dimensions of extraction and infrastructure. In the last decade, we have seen an explosion of artistic and scholarly interest in resource extraction, its cultural geographies, and the infrastructures that support it. We convene this event to interrogate the relationships between the representations of such dynamics and the larger forces that they condense: globalization, transmission, digitization, territorialization, labor migration, displacement, sustainability, security.
We aim to facilitate an idea-exchange between scholars and media artists whose practices critically assess the function, meaning and representation of lines, nodes and grids that undergird the energy, resource and information-dependent global economy, from oil pipelines to mining pits, and from undersea fiber optic cables to digital archives. What are the juridical, economic, bio-political and aesthetic dimensions of this accelerating age of extraction and consumption? How are these connections materialized in mediated works?
Scholars from a range of disciplines are invited, including: Media Studies, Architecture and Design and Geography. We also solicit media makers whose work operates in documentary, experimental and art contexts. The symposium’s keynote presenter will be Swiss filmmaker/researcher Ursula Biemann, who has for the past twenty years produced a respected body of essay films that interrogate global relations under the impact of the accelerated mobility of people, resources and information.
This project is supported in part by a grant from the New York University Arts Council, with additional support from the NYU Metropolitan Studies Program; the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute; and the NYU Departments of English; Social and Cultural Analysis; and Media, Culture and Communication.