MEDIEN | DENKEN WiSe 2020/21

In 2007, Okwui Enwezor argued that Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs could be understood as a ‘historically inflected dub cinema whose spatial, temporal and psychic dynamics’ that ‘relays the scattered trajectories of immigrant communities.’ Lecture One expands on Enwezor’s formulation by treating dub cinema as an aesthetic methodology that explains the Black Audio Film Collective’s notion of black audio as an ecology for theorising what constitutes black filmand black collectivity within the informally segregated cine-culture of the British Left. In focusing on the Collective’s use of Mark Stewart and the Mafia’s 1982 version of the imperialist hymn Jerusalem, popularly described as the United Kingdom’s ‘unofficial national anthem’, it becomes possible to analyse the ways in which Handsworth Songs mobilises the aesthetic sociality of post-punk within and against the signification spirals of control culture that criminalize black settlement in the postwar British state.

dienstags | 18:00 Uhr | via Zoom

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Dr. Kodwo Eshun is Lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory at Department of Visual Culture, Goldsmiths, University of London, Visiting Professor, Haut Ecole d’Art et Design, Genève and co-founder of The Otolith Group. He is co-editor of The Fisher Function, 2017, Post Punk Then and Now, 2016, The Militant Image: A Cine-Geography: Third Text Vol 25 Issue, 2011, Harun Farocki Against What? Against Whom, 2010 and The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective 1982–1998, 2007 and author of Dan Graham: Rock My Religion, Afterall, 2012, and More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction forthcoming on Verso, 2021.

In conversation with Kobena Mercer in 2016, John Akomfrah and Trevor Mathison of Black Audio Film Collective characterised the Collective’s 1982 slide tape work Expeditions: Signs of Empire and Images of Nationality in terms of ‘a sonic back- drop which one could only call “black industrial’. In the Second Lecture, this notion is extended beyond Expeditions so to argue that the Collective continued to pursue the notion of a black industrial aesthetic towards Handsworth Songs and beyond. To hear Handsworth Songs from the perspective of the British industrial music culture of the late 1970s and 1980s is to rethink the parameters of audio in the Collective’s theorization of the becoming of black audio film collectivity. The idea of black audio can be heard as a cinesonic ecology in which the seditionary effects of punk, the mutational effect of post-punk and the blacklessness of industrial music converge to constitute an aesthetic sociality that works to reconfigure the frontier effects that reproduced the cine-culture of the British Left along the informally segregated racialised aesthetics of twentieth century British cinema.  

dienstags | 18:00 Uhr | via Zoom

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Dr. Kodwo Eshun is Lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory at Department of Visual Culture, Goldsmiths, University of London, Visiting Professor, Haut Ecole d’Art et Design, Genève and co-founder of The Otolith Group. He is co-editor of The Fisher Function, 2017, Post Punk Then and Now, 2016, The Militant Image: A Cine-Geography: Third Text Vol 25 Issue, 2011, Harun Farocki Against What? Against Whom, 2010 and The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective 1982–1998, 2007 and author of Dan Graham: Rock My Religion, Afterall, 2012, and More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction forthcoming on Verso, 2021.

In this talk, I extend and expand upon the formulation that closes my book Queer Times, Black Futures, that of „an empiricism that invites surprises.“ I suggest that as a mode of „poetic knowledge,“ „an empiricism that invites surprises“ might serve as a method that can anchor knowledge production and truth claims in a time when the very terms through which what facts constitute our shared reality seem contested. In a context characterized by anti-Black racism and violence, I develop the concept of „an empiricism that invites surprises“ in order to suggest that our efforts to anchor Black feminism today might itself be an enactment of those Black feminist futures that retain the potential to surprise us.

dienstags | 18:00 Uhr | via Zoom

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Kara Keeling is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at The University of Chicago. Keeling is author of Queer Times, Black Futures (New York University Press, 2019) and The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007) and coeditor (with Josh Kun) of a selection of writings about sound and American Studies entitled Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), and (with Colin MacCabe and Cornel West) a selection of writings by the late James A. Snead entitled European Pedigrees/African Contagions: Racist Traces and Other Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

Three days after Trump (along with many other far-right actors) has been banned from digital platforms, the messaging application Telegram registers a record number of 25 million new users in the last 72 hours (now at over 500 million users in total). At the same time, the fascist-facilitating app Parler is deplatformed from major app stores and a courageous hacktivist has released 56 Terabyte of sensitive data from its users, some of which reveals details about the crowd that stormed the Capitol Building in Washington on January 6.This talk will seize this current, confusing and precarious moment, to offer some speculation about the futures of digital fascism and how it might endure and further mutate within digital environments. The visual, media-specific and memetic registers that online activists of the Alternative Right use in their highly effective communication will be discussed. Introducing analytical concepts like „reflexive fascism“, „participatory propaganda“, and „memetic protest“, various figures, memes, and styles of fascist agitation and media practice will be analysed for affect, gender, meanings, and possible intervention points.

dienstags | 18:00 Uhr | via Zoom

Vortragssprache: Englisch | Language of presentation: English

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Simon Strick is a scholar of Cultural, Media and Gender Studies. He received his phD from Humboldt University with a thesis on pain, sentimentalism and biopolitics; the book American Dolorologies was published with SUNY Press in 2014. He has held positions at Humboldt University, Paderborn University, JFK-Institute Berlin, ZfL Berlin and the University of Virginia.  In 2018 he received a grant by the VW-Foundation for his research projekt Feeling (Alt)Right: Affective and Identity Politics of Online Extremism. The monograph Rechte Gefühle: Affekte und Strategien des digitalen Faschismus will be published by transcript in May 2021. He currently works at the ZeM Brandenburg. Together with Susann Neuenfeldt and Werner Türk, he founded the performance group PKRK, which is active in Berlin theatres since 2009.