Face Up (2015)

Kempadoo’s research focused on smartphone imagery in order to reflect multicultural urban life and the experiences of the diasporised self, addressing imagery deploying smartphone aesthetics in artistic production. Overheard dialogue on smartphones shaped the diasporic story lines, and led to technical research with a programmer in order to develop a novel visual approach. The methodological approach explored in written form considers the seductive, hypervisualised space of self and screen associated with the city, as a perpetual line of sight, a physical and virtual urban experience and environment. Central to this space is the racialised and diasporised networked body on the move, precarious in her condition and affective in the performative encounter with herself and others. These insights developed across the visual/written artwork reflect London as a supercity in which migration for work opportunities or to escape danger abroad is commonplace yet, for many, remains precarious. Exhibition venues included Lethaby Gallery, Central Saint Martins (2015), Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, New Jersey (2016) and others

Archives that Matter: Infrastructures for Sharing Unshared Histories. An Introduction

Introductio

The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age

Essays reflecting on the development of the first wave of digital American literature scholarshi

TOME: Interactive TOpic Model and MEtadata Visualization

As archives are being digitized at an increasing rate, scholars will require new tools to make sense of this expanding amount of material. We propose to build TOME, a tool to support the interactive exploration and visualization of text-based archives. Drawing upon the technique of topic modeling--a computational method for identifying themes that recur across a collection--TOME will visualize the topics that characterize each archive, as well as the relationships between specific topics and related metadata, such as publication date. An archive of 19th-century antislavery newspapers, characterized by diverse authors and shifting political alliances, will serve as our initial dataset; it promises to motivate new methods for visualizing topic models and extending their impact. In turn, by applying our new methods to these texts, we will illuminate how issues of gender and racial identity affect the development of political ideology in the nineteenth century, and into the present day

Cinematic explorations of the Italian High Renaissance : Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti’s critofilm ‘Michelangiolo’ (1964)

Italian art critic and philosopher Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti (1910-1987) was one of the first art historians to explore the relationship between cinema and the visual arts. Not only did he publish widely on this subject, he also produced films on art, creating a new form of art criticism using the language and mechanisms of cinema. Developing his concept of the critofilm, he created twenty-one art documentaries between 1948 and 1964 that carefully analyzed the formal and stylistic characteristics of major artworks. His last and most ambitious critofilm, released in 1964, is dedicated to the Italian artist Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564). Created for the commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the artist’s death, this feature-length film shows an impressive range of Michelangelo’s paintings, sculptures, architecture, and drawings, . Using bold cinematic strategies of dynamic camera movements, chiaroscuro light effects, and animation techniques, Ragghianti transposes Michelangelo’s complex artistic language into the visual language of film. Comparing this 1964 film to other cinematic explorations of Michelangelo throughout the twentieth century, this paper examines how Ragghianti translates the critical discipline of art history into this critofilm. It investigates how Ragghianti creates a specific cinematic syntax to analyze the formal elements of Michelangelo’s artworks by drawing on theories of prominent scholars such as Benedetto Croce, Konrad Fiedler, and Heinrich Wölfflin. Finally, this paper demonstrates how Ragghianti’s film Michelangelo functions as an innovative art historiographic tool, influencing later films and art historical writings

Blanket stories and blurring binaries: contemporary Native American art and the discourse of authorship

M.A. in Art History--University of Oklahoma, 2015Includes bibliographical references.This thesis explores the relationship between Native American art and the recent rise in participatory art. In this thesis I question the precedents for the subversion of single authorship and collective creation, how Native American artists assert and articulate indigenous epistemologies through contemporary practices, and what form it takes when Native artists internalize Euro-American artistic practices and blur the influences between indigenous and Western backgrounds. The current discourse on participatory art and social engagement construes it as an unprecedented phenomenon, which fails to take into account intercultural exchange between Western art and art from other cultural traditions. I argue that contemporary participatory art and traditional Native American art share a subversion of the solo artist and invoke contemporary Native participatory artists to demonstrate how the lack of a Great Artist tradition allows for more fluid--authorship in order to destabilize the binary opposition between collective and individual artistic production. This fluid authorship also articulates visual sovereignty for contemporary Native artists who are free to explore more traditional artistic practices. This thesis seeks to locate contemporary Native American art within a broader global contemporary context by investigating how cross-cultural exchange shapes contemporary art

Urban Candy: Screens, Selfies and Imaginings

"The essays in this book chart how women’s profound and turbulent experiences of migration have been articulated in writing, photography, art and film. As a whole, the volume gives an impression of a wide range of migratory events from women’s perspectives, covering the Caribbean Diaspora, refugees and slavery through the various lenses of politics and war, love and family. The contributors, which include academics and artists, offer both personal and critical points of view on the artistic and historical repositories of these experiences. Selfies, motherhood, violence and Hollywood all feature in this substantial treasure-trove of women’s joy and suffering, disaster and delight, place, memory and identity. This collection appeals to artists and scholars of the humanities, particularly within the social sciences; though there is much to recommend it to creatives seeking inspiration or counsel on the issue of migratory experiences.

A Nation of Fur, Fish, and Fuel: Documenting Resource Extraction in Canada

As concerns about the environmental and uneven social impacts of human industry mount, humanities scholarship has sought to re-examine assemblages of energy cultures, Western epistemologies of the nature-culture divide, colonialism, and ecology. Against these considerations, this thesis seeks to historicize natural resource extraction as a localized, national, and imperial phenomenon within twentieth-century capitalism. The project focuses on Canadian moving image production in relation to the country’s historical resource economy and cultural attachment to landscape. Examining a range of private- and public-sector nontheatrical and documentary films released between 1920 and 1985, the thesis theorizes these productions as examples of “resource cinema,” given their entanglements with industrial-scale resource extraction on the level of production, narrative, and discourse. The notion of “entanglement” emerges as a framing concept for the project, expressing the shifting yet intimate relations between cultural production, economy, and environments. This term derives from Anna Tsing’s theorization of environmental-economic entanglements within late capitalism. Each chapter of this comparative study concentrates on films from a different historical period to trace the changing depictions of the geographies, infrastructures, and social practices entwined with natural resource extraction. These include sponsored films about the Northern fur trade (Chapter 2); petroleum, geology, and mining films in Western Canada (Chapter 3); and films interrogating community, sustainability, and energy futures in the Atlantic offshore oil and fishing industries (Chapter 4). The thesis is also invested in contributing to broader interdisciplinary conversations about media and environments. Each chapter theorizes the ways in which these cinematic histories help constitute geo-biological materials as “natural” resource commodities, as a microcosm of capitalism’s wider engagements with nature. The thesis also argues that fur, petroleum, and fish function concomitantly as fuels, in that they power not only the movement of human and nonhuman bodies, but also cinematic imaginaries and the emergence of social, political, and infrastructural practices. In demonstrating how cinema was used as a communication technology and documentary practice, as well as a resource in itself, the project contributes to the emergent fields of energy and environmental humanities, Canadian cultural studies, and Canadian and settler colonial cinemas