Wendesday, November 16th, 6:00pm
Video, Water, and Social Ontology: Biotechnology and Ecopolitics ca. 1970
Ina Blom
Respondent: Devin Fore
Within the context of early analog video art, video technology presented itself as a quasi-biological life system endowed with particular capacities for sharing the sensations and perceptions of a nature in crisis. Alongside the burgeoning ecological movement of the 1960’s and 70’s, video instigated a distinctly aesthetic mode of political organization that countered traditional deliberative procedures as well as the guerilla tactics of the activist underground. In this lecture Blom will discuss how video, as an ecopolitical agent, thus also came to produce alternative understandings of social memory and social ontology.
Ina Blom is an art historian and art critic whose elds of research are modernism/avant-garde studies and contemporary art, with a particular focus on media aesthetics, media archaeology and the relationship between art, technology, media, and politics. Recent publications include On The Style Site: Art Sociality and Media Culture (2007) and The Autobiography of Video: The Life and Times of a Memory Technology (2016). The edited volume Memory in Motion: Archives, Technology and the Social is forthcoming in December 2016.
