April 15
Geert Lovink
Lunch Talk
11:30-1 p.m., Founders Room, McConnell Center
“Politics of Mask Design: Critical Internet Culture after Snowden”
RSVPs are required. Please mail Rachel Durkin in the Dean of Faculty’s Office at [email protected]
4-6 p.m., Honnold Library
LA hactivists/gamers at DH@CC Studio
LA-Based Activist Gamers
Adam Sulzdorf-Liszkiewicz – RUST LTD & USC Media Arts + Practice PhD candidate
Luke Noonan – RUST LTD
Emilia Yang Rappaccioli – USC Media Arts + Practice PhD student
San Francisco-based Activist Gamer
Cayden Mak – 18 Million Rising
Snacks and drinks provided.
Geert Lovink is a media theorist, internet critic and author of Zero Comments (2007) and Networks Without a Cause (2012). He is a researcher in the School for Communication and Media Design at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, where he is the founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures. The institute organizes conferences, publications and research networks, such as Video Vortex (the politics and aesthetics of online video), Unlike Us (alternatives in social media), Critical Point of View (Wikipedia), Society of the Query (the culture of search), MoneyLab (bitcoins, crowdfunding & internet revenue models) and digital publishing strategies. He is also a professor at the European Graduate School, where he supervises PhD students, and he serves as an advisory board member of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT University in Australia.
Friday, March 4, 2016
#watermelonwoman: Making our histories
A queer/black archiving and activism workshop
11:30-2:30, Grove House
Workshop participants, please bring your own object(s) to add to the archive and make our histories.
If you’d like to take a Pitzer van to see the 20th anniversary of The Watermelon Woman at Outfest Fusion at the Egyptian theater on Friday, March 4 (leaving at 5 pm), you need to RSVP.
Cheryl Dunye at the Berlin Film Festival premier of The Watermelon Woman, 1996 photo by Michael Light
Cheryl Dunye’s film, The Watermelon Woman (1996) is about a young filmmaker who attempts to make a documentary about an unnamed black woman that appears in 1930s films.
This event focuses on the experience of black, trans, and queer people, asking us to reflect on how we create personal and public records of underrepresented peoples. The contemporary practices of searching, researching, and creating an identity have taken on a life of its own through Internet-based platforms and applications. What would the protagonist, Cheryl, find if she used hashtags and Google analytics to trace the history of the “Watermelon Woman”?
Workshop participants will have an opportunity to work with the Watermelon Woman 3.0 curatorial team on how to enliven objects and ephemera that the participants deem valuable, sentimental, or historical in nature. Participants will have a chance to engage with archival material from the film’s original development as well as new objects brought to and made at this workshop, in order to consider how histories – both real and imagined – come to be documented and preserved. The workshop will enable quick creative responses based on the work of Cheryl Dunye. Participants will be encouraged to use different forms of social media and photographic platforms to produce their own creative works.
Curatorial Team and Workshop Leaders
Erin Christovale is a curator and film programmer based in Los Angeles focusing on film/video within the African Diaspora. Her ongoing project; Black Radical Imagination is a touring film program of visual shorts that delve into the worlds of new media, video art, and experimental narrative.
Vivian Crockett is a PhD candidate in art history at Columbia University. She is an independent researcher, scholar, and curator focusing largely on art of African diasporas, (Afro)Latinx diasporas, and Latin America at the varied intersections of race, gender, and queer theory.*
Dorothy R. Santos is a Bay Area-based writer, editor, curator, and educator. She serves as executive staff for the Bay Area Society for Art & Activism, board member for SOMArts Cultural Center, and teaches in the Digital Art and New Media department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Melorra Green, M.A.Ed, Curator/Radio Show Host/Community Activist/Designer
A native of Memphis, TN, Melorra Green graduated magna cum laude from Tennessee State University in Nashville before moving to San Francisco to study Motion Pictures & Television at the Academy of Art University. She began volunteering for the San Francisco Black Film Festival in 2002 and became a Co-Executive Producer in 2005. She is currently a member of the Arts Providers Alliance of San Francisco Executive Committee and the San Francisco Graffiti Advisory Board.
Melonie J. Green, Curator/Artist/Radio Show Host/Community Activist
Melonie began volunteering for the San Francisco Black Film Festival in 2002 and became Co-Executive Producer with her twin sister, Melorra Green in 2005. The film festival experience paved the way for Melonie and Melorra’s previous business venture, Infin8 Sync, LLC, a creative events and production company that uses “out of the box” techniques to promote student and independent artists, as well as create platforms for networking.
Natasha R. Johnson, J.D. is an academic, activist, artist and attorney. As an Assistant Professor she teaches under a social justice framework and as an attorney she founded Globalizing Gender, a non-profit organization committed to creating a gender-just world. Both her curatorial and artworks sit at the intersection of educating and advocating for gender justice.
