Lecture “Arthur Jafa: Seeing is Believing in the Age of AI”
In the last decade, Arthur Jafa has incomparably advanced our understanding of art and visual culture at the intersections of technology, race, and history. Works like Love is the Message and The Message is Death (2016) capture the swells of Black joy and pain as they undulate in and through distributed technology networks enabled by camera phones and social media. In ***** (pronounced “redacted,” 2024), Jafa restores the harrowing conclusion of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) to its original but ultimately redacted racial animus. The 73-minute video is much more than an exercise in film history. It is an education in racial vision, a meditation on the visible and the invisible in the US, and the most compelling exploration to date of the possibilities for art in the age of artificial intelligence.
This talk is part of the ongoing lecture series Film Beyond Film: Art and the Moving Image at e-flux Screening Room by researchers whose work has contributed to shaping the discourse at the intersection of modern/contemporary art and cinema, focusing on the histories of artists’ films and situating them within broader aesthetic, political, and economic contexts.
Noam M. Elcott is an associate professor for the history of modern art and director of the Center for Comparative Media at Columbia University. He is also an editor of the journal Grey Room. Elcott is the author of the award-winning book Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (University of Chicago Press, 2016; paperback 2018), as well as essays on art, film, and media published in leading journals, anthologies, and exhibition catalogs. His current book projects are ArtTM: A History of Modern Art, Authenticity, and Trademarks and Photography, Identity, Status: August Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century.
For more information, contact [email protected].
Accessibility:
- Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
- For elevator access, RSVP to [email protected]. The building has a freight elevator that leads into the e-flux office space. The entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
- e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.
Time: 7:00 pm EDT
Free!
