Just a quick word about our next presentation in the colloquia series, Interactivities. I am very excited about this event since it brings together in conversation Mary Lucier, a video/installation artist currently teaching at UWM, and Melinda Barlow, a film theorist/critic at the University of Colorado-Boulder. This is the kind of dialogue the Conceptual Studies crew lives for since we believe strongly not only in the collaborative process but also in the intersection of creative and critical practice. There is a long standing and esteemed tradition in the cinema of the merger of theory/practice (e.g., in the work of Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac, Dziga Vertov not to mention their contemporary counterparts in Jean-Luc Godard, Anne Marie Mieville, and within the new media world, Carroll Parrott Blue, Lev Manovich, and Norman Klein). Nonetheless, there is also a counter narrative in media discourse that would have us believe that these things exist only in isolation from each other or are best understood only through highly specialized training. Such a view undercuts the very radicality that visual thinking/writing represented -- a "language" whose open form escapes the confines of institutionalized speech/discourse. In some ways, the idea of interactivity is already in place once the image is initiated as the primary instrument of "interface" for us. Certainly images can be "read" or manipulated and framed to produce a "passive" response, but images and especially moving images begin with an uncanny gesture toward the past, present, and future simultaneously. It is in that moment of the now/not quite now that opens the image to the viewer and draws us into an opportunity for "interactivity." Hope to see you at the colloquia, DJ Zoe Trop (aka V. Callahan)
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