<nettime-ann> atc @ ucb: kaja silverman mon night, 7:30pm

[Ken Goldberg <goldberg@ieor.berkeley.edu>]

.

The Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium of UC Berkeley's Center
for New Media announces:

The Twilight of Posterity
 	Kaja Silverman, Rhetoric and Film Studies, UC Berkeley

Monday, March 12, 7:30-9:00
Location:  105 Northgate Hall **
 	** http://www.berkeley.edu/map/maps/AB45.html
ATC Lectures are free and open to the public

=====================================================
In the summer of 2003, the Louvre mounted a large exhibition of
Leonardo da Vinci¹s paintings, drawings and manuscripts. Within this
exhibition there were several curious objects: four pairs of video
editing monitors and a large-screen projection of digital images of
The Last Supper. These objects constituted an "intervention" by Irish
artist James Coleman. The video monitors displayed drawings from
Leonardo¹s notebooks, which return us to a moment prior to the
division of art from science, technology, education, warfare, or even
life itself. The projection figured Leonardo¹s famous, and famously
deteriorating, fresco through a constantly shifting series of slow
pans across its sumptuous surface, detailed close-ups, and images of
the full painting as it resides in the refectory of a Milanese
monastery. Software randomly decided what images to show, and how to
show them. Coleman's "intervention" ceased to exist the day the
exhibition closed. While the Louvre may have expected Coleman to
create a work of art that could be added to the museum collection to
be preserved for posterity, Coleman, instead, created an "ephemeral
memorial" for da Vinci.

In "The Twilight of Posterity," Kaja Silverman argues that Coleman¹s
intervention "transmits" da Vinci¹s work through a radical
reconfiguration of artistic posterity: Coleman ceded pride of place to
the images he chose, and his agency to the numerical projection and
video monitors; he refused to step into the position of author or
symbolic "father;" he built decay and expiration into the work of art
even during the tenure of its existence, and protected his images from
posthumous entification by making the human psyche the only possible
agency of their memorialization.  Drawing upon the work of Sigmund
Freud, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the writings of
Leonardo da Vinci, Silverman stages her own intervention into our
commonly held notions of artistic legacy, authorship, and immortality,
to reimagine the artist not just as a "transmitter" but as a
"receiver" of images that hinge upon affective, reversible,
potentially transformative correspondences and analogies between
objects in the world. Coleman and da Vinci¹s works are, Silverman
writes, ontologically unstable ­ they decay and die, and are reborn,
continually generating fresh variants of themselves, and it is analogy
that bridges the distance between these forms and allows them to
perdure.

=====================================================
Kaja Silverman is Class of l940 Professor of Rhetoric and Film, and
the author of seven books: James Coleman (Hatje Cantz, 2002); World
Spectators (Stanford University Press, 2000); Speaking About Godard
(New York University Press, l998; with Harun Farocki); The Threshold
of the Visual World (Routledge, l996); Male Subjectivity at the
Margins (Routledge, 1992); The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in
Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Indiana University Press, l988); and The
Subject of Semiotics (Oxford University Press, l982).

Her writing and teaching are concentrated at the moment primarily on
phenomenology, psychoanalysis, photography, and time-based visual art,
but she continues to write about and teach courses on cinema, and has
a developing interest in painting. She maintains a continuing
commitment to feminist theory, post-structuralist theory, queer
studies, masculinity, and theories of "race."  She is currently
working on two new books, Flesh of My Flesh (which is almost
complete), and The Miracle of Analogy.

http://rhetoric.berkeley.edu/faculty_bios/kaja_silverman.html

=====================================================
ATC Primary Sponsors: UC Berkeley Center for New Media (CNM), Center
for Information Technology in the Interest of Society (CITRIS),
College of Engineering Interdisciplinary Studies Program (IDS), and
the Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost.

Additional Sponsors: Intel Research, BAM/PFA, Townsend Center for the
Humanities, and the Berkeley Consortium for the Arts.

ATC Director: Ken Goldberg
ATC Associate Director: Greg Niemeyer
ATC Graduate Associate: Irene Chien
Curated with ATC Advisory Board

* ATC's new archival website with info on all 99 speakers and
* history, joinable mailing list, images, videos, and podcasts:

   http://atc.berkeley.edu/

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