@emestudiofilms Slow Fashion will be screened November 30th at the Edward James Museum venue in Xilitla, San Luis Potosí. @ficxilitla @museoedwardjames

Aaron Lehman and Timmy Simonds: Prepositions Artists Aaron Lehman and Timmy Simonds join Rail contributor Alice Centamore for a conversation on their forthcoming book Prepositions (Montez Press, 2024). Thursday, November 14, 2024 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific Registration: https://brooklynrail.org/event/2024/11/14/prepositions/?br=events&utm_source=Brooklyn+Rail+List+One%3A+Mailing+List&utm_campaign=48b65d8535-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_03_16_01_54_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a44895fefe-48b65d8535-518337547&mc_cid=48b65d8535&mc_eid=f6f7cb36ca

If I Loved Life, I Wouldn’t Make Movies: Revisiting Situationist Film, a four-part screening program guest curated by Ethan Spigland and Paul Grant at E-Flux, November 14, 16 and 17. Founded in 1957, the Situationist International brought together multiple strands of avant-garde art and radical socio-economic critique to explore new approaches to revolutionary praxis. The SI leveled a trenchant attack on the commodification of culture and the alienating effects of modern capitalism with a focus on the concept of the “spectacle,” which they defined as the mediation of social relationships by images. Cinema was an ongoing and central concern for the Situationists. For Guy Debord, one of the SI’s founding members, it was not inevitable that the cinematic medium would adopt a spectacular form. The culpability for this development is not the technological apparatus of cinema but the society in which it arose. This program groups together films created predominantly by members of the Situationist International and films that fall under their influence. Alongside recent restorations of well-known works by Guy Debord and René Viénet, it also presents rarely screened films by the Scandinavian Situationists, the Scandinavian group that broke away from the SI in 1962, and contributions from Groupe Cinéthique, a Marxist-Leninist film collective primarily recognized for their journal of the same name. For more information, please see https://www.e-flux.com/events/programs/636252/if-i-loved-life-i-wouldn-t-make-movies-revisiting-situationist-film/ and @e_flux.

On Tuesday 10/29, Bengaluru-based, virtuoso kathakali performer Maya Krishna Rao visited Karin Shankar’s and Jennifer Miller’s Performance Studies classes to offer an artist talk and demonstration titled “Kathakali for the Contemporary Performer.” Kathakali is a 16th century dance drama form from Kerala, India, with roots in martial arts and the ancient Sanskrit theater form of koodiyatam. Rao has been active on the Indian artistic and political landscapes for four decades. Her work spans street theater, kathakali, experimental performance, and feminist cabaret. In 2010 she was awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, India’s highest honor for performing artists. She returned the award in 2015 in protest of the government’s treatment of minorities. In post-visit discussions, students expressed how Rao’s phenomenal presence moved them, how kathakali gesture might be mobilized to highlight the expansive aspects of even quotidian life, and how rhythm can be both creative and critical when crafting contemporary work. Shankar has previously published on Rao’s work in Women and Performance: https://www.womenandperformance.org/bonus-articles-1//29-2/ Image 4 photo credit: mayakrishnarao.in @karinshankar @jmmillie3

On Monday, October 21, Karin Shankar took her writing class to “Foraging for Photograms.” A workshop led by Ghanaian artist Eric Gyamfi to create cyanotype photograms using plants and objects found on campus, foster teamwork, creativity, and storytelling. The workshop was a part of the School of Art Dean’s Workshop Series. Shankar’s class engaged the workshop in conversation with a text they had read on the theme of land as pedagogy and Indigenous resurgence, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. 📷 Dahlia Dandashi

“We look forward to performances of three iconic works by Ben Patterson, by Holland Andrews @holland.andrews and Lester St. Louis @lesterst.louis; Brandon Lopez @bantlopez; and Timmy Simonds @simmytimonds with students from Pratt Institute @prattinstitute. Curated by Sanna Almajedi@sanna.nyc. Get your tickets and stay tuned to upcoming programs via the link in our bio.” via @e_flux and @efluxscreeningroom

CINEMA and NEW MEDIA HMS 340D | Professor Paul Haacke Spring 2025 | Wed. 2-4:50pm Once upon a time, cinema was new media - and then it became the dominant form of aesthetic experience and entertainment worldwide. Reflecting on its evolution over the last 125 years, this course will focus on relations between cinema and other forms of new (and aging) media, from radio and television to video art and gaming as well as the rise of CGI, online networks and streaming platforms, portable devices, Al, and more. Throughout the course, we will consider: How have new media technologies led to forms of cultural conformism or experimentation, psycho-social disorders or releases, and ideological and industrial domination or democratization and resistance? Our critical and theoretical readings will engage with concerns about cinematic attraction, expansion, hybridization, and relocation with particular regard for the aesthetics and politics of framing, exposing, concealing, masking, and protecting. In turn, we will consider the technics of memory, remediation, and immediacy; forms of indexical recording, synthetic realism, and virtual reality; shifts in ideology, industrial control, corporate commodification, and audience participation; and changing relations between social spaces and public and private spheres.

HMS 440C: CONTEMPORARY MEDIA THEORY Prof. Paul Haacke / Spring 2025 / Tues. 2-4:50pm Does media connect or divide us? Is all media social media? This course provides a theoretical, critical, and historical introduction to these questions (and more) by examining how different kinds of mediation transform culture and society. Focusing on media theory in relation to examples from the past and the ever-changing present, we will rethink our roles as creative individuals and social collectives in our increasingly mediated world. Intersecting topics of study include: Technology, representation, and reproduction; power, paranoia, and control; entertainment, politics, and ideology; mediations of race, gender, sexuality, and class; tensions between publicity, privacy, and surveillance from the local and national to the global; and modes of framing, distribution, and manipulation from the development of print and photography to the rise of film, television, the internet, mobile devices, and more.... [open to all majors; fulfills core requirement for the Media Studies Minor] Image: Nam June Paik, “TV Rodin (Le Penseur)” (1976-78)

Christian Breed’s work is featured in a group show in Rome, at Galleria Russo. The show, curated by Carlo Maria Lolli Ghetti, asked 10 gallery artists to respond to the fall of the Berlin Wall on the 35th Anniversary of the event. The gallery has also published an exhibition catalogue.