with Janine Marchessault

Susan Lord is Associate Professor in Film Studies and holds cross-appointments with the Departments of Art and Women’s Studies. She serves as an Adjunct Professor for Carleton University’s SSAC/Film program. Her main teaching and research areas are feminist theory and film culture, cultural studies of media and technology, and Cuba film and visual culture. She has published on gender and technology, as well as on feminist film culture in several recent anthologies. She edited a special section of WestCoast Line on “Global Screens,” and is currently co-editing two collections of essays: with Janine Marchessault, Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinemas; and with Annette Burfoot, Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence (forthcoming from Wilfrid Laurier University Press). She is midway through a manuscript on the Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez.

Abstract

Trans-Local Connectivities and Citizenship Practices in the New Media Arts

Our contribution to Public 31: digipopo, outlines a project we are beginning to research about artists’ collectives and global citizenship. In particular, we are interested in the ways in which artists are forming collective projects across localities, the use of new technologies to facilitate and become material for such projects, and how the projects themselves materialize the local as a theatre of publicity. We are interested in the fact that a profound shift is taking place in and for art in the context of globalization. This is notable in the relationship between art and everyday life, between artists and political life, and between artists themselves. Globalization changes the nature of capital, the way in which national governments govern, and the experience of everyday life. George Yudice, in The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era, argues that culture in the era of globalization is a resource. For Yudice the expediency of culture is destructive and productive for social justice, citizenship, and histories: on the one hand everything is commodified, including local cultures for export, and on the other the new expediency has enabled new expressions of global citizenship and responsibility.

Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord are in the beginning stages of a SSHRC-funded project on translocal artist collectives and new citizenship practices.