Past Events

This lecture traces the history of "anti-commodity" video art (from the 1970s to the 1990s) and links this to the flowering of poststructural philosophy and the rise of open source discourse and computing movements, bringing them altogether with reflections on 'tactical media.'

While the popularity of web sites like Facebook and YouTube allows us to broadcast our lives for the world to see, few people have carried the idea as far as Josh Harris. An internet pioneer, Harris founded Quiet, a project in which 150 people lived together and broadcast their every movement. Shot over a fifteen year period, We Live in Public follows Harris’ rise and fall, from his status as poster child for the dot-com mania of the late 1990s to his eventual retreat from technology altogether.

Elsa Dorlin is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Panthéon-Sorbonne University (Paris 1). She received her Ph.D in the History of Philosophy from Sorbonne University (Paris 4) in 2004. In 2009, she was awarded the Bronze Medal for research in philosophy by the CNRS (French National Center For Scientific Research). Her main field of research is the relation between body, violence and subjectivity in classical political theory, the historical epistemology of sex and race in medical thought and queer and feminist studies.

Etienne Balibar was born in 1942. He graduated at the Sorbonne in Paris, later took his Ph.D. from the University of Nijmegen (Netherlands). He is now Emeritus Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at the University of Paris 10 Nanterre and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine.

Diana Taylor is professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. She is also Founding Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, an organization working at the intersection of scholarship, artistic expression, and politics to explore performance as a vehicle for the creation of new meaning and the transmission of cultural values, memory, and identity.

To launch its new Course Thread in Human-Centered Design, the Townsend Center Course Threads team will host a discussion about the values and costs of design, considering the example of the cupcake: Is it an icon of luxury and obesity, or is it a source of community building, a connection point for non-competitive socialization, a source of relaxed and harmless pleasure? Does the design of the cupcake affect its potential for excess or comfort?

While few will have shared director Terence Davies’ childhood experience of growing up in postwar Liverpool, many will empathize with the complex feelings of nostalgia, affection, and repulsion for the place he once called home. Essayistic in the best sense, the film earns its near unanimous critical praise by approaching the universal experience of growing up through an intense focus on an individual journey through a gritty, urban environment into adulthood.

Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. A specialist in 19th and 20th century literature, she has also written articles in the area of gender studies, psychoanalysis, film, cultural theory and visual culture.

Panel Discussants: Peter Greenaway, Darcy Grigsby (History of Art) and Abigail de Kosnik (Theater, Dance & Performance Studies)
Moderator: Anthony J. Cascardi (Townsend Center Director)

Peter Greenaway, who trained as a painter for four years, started making films in 1966. His first narrative feature film, The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), earned him international acclaim as an original filmmaker, a reputation consolidated by The Cook, the Thief, his Wife & her Lover (1989), Prospero’s Books (1991), The Pillow Book (1996), The Tulse Luper Suitcases (2003-2004), and more recently, Nightwatching (2007).