School of Film/Video Opens Wintersession 2021 Virtual Conference

CalArts School of Film/Video holds a virtual conference, Approaching the Near Distance, during the Institute’s Wintersession term from Jan. 11 to 22. The sessions are open to the broader CalArts community, including all current students, alums, and prospective students.

The conference keynote, supported by a CalArts Nick England Intercultural Arts Project grant, will be delivered on Tuesday, Jan. 19 by Reece Auguiste, a documentary filmmaker, scholar, and associate professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Auguiste is also a founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective (UK, 1982-98), a group of young, mostly immigrant filmmakers who challenged existing cinematic forms of expression to comment on and examine contemporary social emergencies.

In addition to his own art practice and the creation of the Black Audio Film Collective, Auguiste will discuss the intricacies of a media archive, the use of archival materials in documentary moving image art, and the urgent need of considering new pedagogical models.

In a discussion group on Unsettling Documentary in September 2020, Auguiste commented:  “The coronavirus is unsettling, and it has unsettled all of us including our institutional affiliations…Our job, I think, is to not only develop new pedagogical models in the context of Covid-19 but to encourage our students to explore new epistemic territory, to develop their own models of creative practice and central to this transformation is co-creative practices…It’s going to be a slow burn—Covid-19 has lit the fuse of this decolonial project.”

The online conference sessions begin on Tuesday, Jan. 12 at 12:30 pm PST with the panel discussion Animation as Queer Practice. Guests include Lily Husbands, lecturer in Animation & Visual Culture, Middlesex University in London; Steve Reinke, associate professor of Art, Theory & Practice, Northwestern University in Chicago; Jordan Wong, CalArts special faculty; and Lorelei Pepi, assistant professor of Animation, Emily Carr University in Vancouver, BC). The session is moderated by Alexander Stewart, co-director of the Experimental Animation Program at CalArts.

Then on Thursday, Jan. 21 at 7:30 pm, the panel Art by Mail includes presenters April Sheridan, special collections manager, Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Pablo de Ocampo of the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland, Oregon; and curator at Western Front, Vancouver BC); and Austin English, publisher of Domino Books and a comics artist. The panel will once again be moderated by Stewart.