The long-running Media Arts & Culture (MAC) event series is curated this year by Adrienne Adams ’17, incoming visiting instructor for MAC.
MAC Cinematheque, an innovative yearlong event series featuring film screenings, conversations and demonstrations, brings together the College and Los Angeles communities around a chosen topic, representational issue, or media form.
Through a series of four events, “Analog@Oxy: Race, Sex, Technological Obsolescence” asks, when is something or someone truly gone? While technological obsolescence refers to the rapid outdatedness of different technologies, this program grapples with how so-called dead technology remains suspended between ‘still here’ and ‘long gone.’
“What energizes me about this lineup of artists, practitioners, and scholars is that they take seriously the use of a pencil to wind the cassette tape, the smell of the purple ink fresh off the ditto machine, and the cart with the VHS player rolling into a classroom,” Adams says. “Each event mobilizes seemingly mundane aspects of technology to think through larger questions about Black lives gone too soon, the Transpacific and Transatlantic underbelly of the turntable, plastic-based technologies’ role in ecological catastrophe, and what it was like to teach film at Oxy in the past.”
Co-presented with Invisibility: Powers and Perils, Oxy Arts’ Getty PST exhibition, each of this year’s events will also feature an Occidental alum. All events take place in Choi Auditorium at 7:30 p.m. on Thursdays and are free and open to the public. Directions to campus are accessible here.
This event series is co-organized by the Department of Media Arts & Culture and Oxy Arts, and co-sponsored by the Center for Community-Based Learning and American Studies Department, with generous support from the Remsen Bird Fund and Mellon Foundation.
EVENTS:
Losing Ground:A Screening and Talk-back with Nina Collins
Thursday, September 5th, 7:30–9:45 p.m., Choi Auditorium
Featuring Adrienne Adams ’17 (Critical Theory & Social Justice)
Co-presented with the Black Alumni Organization
Co-sponsored by the Black Student Alliance, Intercultural Community Center, and Spanish & French Studies Department
Originally filmed in 16mm, Kathleen Collins’ Losing Ground (1982; runtime: 86 minutes) chronicles the troubled marriage of a Black female philosophy professor and her abstract painter husband as they explore disparate notions of ecstasy. One of the first feature-length motion pictures directed by a Black American woman and a National Film Registry Inductee, the film never received a commercial release. In 1988, Kathleen Collins died of breast cancer at the age of 46 and the film was rarely screened. The recent 4K restoration and DVD/Blu-Ray commercial release has enabled a new wave of screenings for this work of art, also Collins’ first film. Nina Collins, the literary executor of her mother's estate, will discuss the stakes of the restoration process with Adrienne Adams ’17 after the screening.
This event is co-presented with the Black Alumni Organization and co-sponsored by the Black Student Alliance, Intercultural Community Center, and the Spanish and French Studies Department.
Transpacific Analog: The Aesthetics & Technical Mechanics of Sound Recording Technology
Thursday, September 26th, 7:30–9 p.m., Choi Auditorium
Featuring Micah Garrido ’17 (Cognitive Science)
This live technological demonstration and in-person conversation explores how sound recording and reproduction technology shape aesthetic practices and vice versa across the Pacific. Chamorro audio creative Micah Garrido ’17 and turntablist Takuro Mizuta Lippit, known as dj sniff, will showcase the mechanical features, social dimensions, and historical contexts that underwrite the phonograph, NAGRA recorder, turntable, and ’80s sampling keyboard. Topics like proto-turntablist Shizuto Haruna mixing and playing Emperor Hirohito’s surrender of Japan in 1945, Chamorro festival performance circuits, cognitive scientific theories of sound, and DJ Grandmaster Flash’s role in the history of turntablism open up opportunities to think through the sonic conditions of militarism, perception, tourism, and diasporic circulation.
When Gone is Still Here: A Panel On Electronic Waste
Thursday, January 30th, 7:30–9 p.m., Choi Auditorium
Featuring Kai Knight ’17 (Biochemistry)
It takes 400 to 1,000 years for a single toner cartridge to decompose. Although electronic waste (e-waste) refers to a discarded product at the end of its useful life, the conundrum underpinning electronic devices—both digital and analog—like the toner cartridge is that their toxic imprint on the environment extends long after their stated usefulness. Anthropologist Dr. Kwame Edwin Otu, environmental studies scholar Jaden Morales, and chemist Kai Knight will share their respective work on the social and sexual logics of e-waste across Ghana and Puerto Rico, and discuss why plastic does not degrade. Bringing together humanistic and scientific approaches to e-waste, this panel foregrounds the quandary that what many love and miss—analog technology—also inaugurated irreparable forms of toxicity and waste.
Eyewitness in 16mm: The Early Life of Film and Activism at Oxy
Thursday, February 20th, 7:30–9 p.m., Choi Auditorium
Featuring Jesús Salvador Treviño ’68 (Philosophy)
This film screening and talk-back celebrates the life and work of three individuals critical to Oxy’s film history—Chicano filmmaker Jesús Salvador Treviño ’68, Dr. Marsha Kinder, and the late Chick Strand. Treviño, a student in Kinder’s Global Cinema course, filmed critical moments in the Chicano Civil Rights Movement and directed films like Raices de Sangre (Roots of Blood, 1978) and One Out of Ten (1979). Kinder co-developed the first cinema classes at Oxy in the 1960s, while the late Mildred “Chick” Strand led what is now the Media Arts & Culture Department from 1970 to 1995. The event will begin with a screening of short works by Strand and Treviño, followed by a conversation with the latter.
