The Visual Arts, Culture, and Media Series presents "Fugitive Video: Art in 1980s NYC Nightclubs" lecture by Dr. Gregory Zinman
Join the Visual Arts, Culture and Media Series for a zoom lecture by Dr. Gregory Zinman: "Fugitive Video: Art in 1980s Nightclubs." Open to the campus community. Preregistration via the link is required to obtain the event zoom link: https://rit.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMqd-qhqzouHtcB7ZG5lALV6JTVlRJ5WA…
Fugitive Video: Art in 1980s NYC Nightclubs From the dance floor at the Palladium nightclub in New York City, to Dara Birnbaum’s public video artwork in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward, to Nam June Paik’s global satellite broadcasts, there exists a raft of moving image art that has escaped scholarly consideration. This work took shape in queer and multiracial spaces. It was designed for mass audiences and was observed in everyday locales. And this work has had as pronounced a cultural impact as any video exhibition or art world display. By combining archival research with interviews with artists, programmers, and promoters, this talk will confirm how communities—and not only visionary individuals—have long been central to art-making practice, and how innovative art-making has long been enjoyed in spaces outside of traditional art institutions. Using the example of video art in the NYC nightclubs of the 1980s, this talk will affirm how media artifacts are made meaningful by the energies, ideas, and contexts that surround them. The goal of “Fugitive Video,” as is the goal of the larger project from which this talk is drawn, is to recover these artifacts and to do more: to identify the specific social conditions that gave rise to their making, to articulate how those communities helped shape contemporary artistic practice, and to model a new approach to writing media histories.
Gregory Zinman is Associate Chair of and Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and this fall he will be joining the faculty in the Department of Film and Media at Emory University. His writing on film and media has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and October, among other publications. He has also programmed film and media art at the Film-makers’ Co-op, the Museum of the Moving Image, Asia Society New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and several venues in Atlanta, where he lives. He recently served as a technical consultant for Ad Astra (James Gray, 20th Century Fox, 2019), and is currently an archival producer for Universe in a Grain of Sand, a documentary about the future of art and computing for IBM. He is the author of Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts (University of California Press, 2020) and co-editor, with John Hanhardt and Edith Decker-Phillips, of We Are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik (The MIT Press, 2019).
Event Snapshot
When and Where
Who
Open to the Public
Interpreter Requested?
No