Forum Lectures #10: Shannon Jackson

Time-based Art and Ecological Time

Abstract

Media and video art of the last twenty years coincided with the harrowing expansion of climate degradation. This lecture gathers a range of artists and artworks to chronicle the central themes of ecologically-responsive time-based media art practice of the last twenty years.  It finds artists using old and new aesthetic resources – from pre-2000 techniques of abstract documentary and information visualization to more recent strategies drawing on data management, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality – to address a range of environmental issues. Whether tracking the racially disparate effects of environmental dumping or recalling a feminist understanding of environmental care, artists track the links between ecological degradation and historic systems of inequity.  Time-based media art thus becomes a particularly potent vehicle for addressing the most urgent crisis of our time. 

Stills from Cycedo

Still from To Stop Being a Threat and To Become a Promise (Carolina Caycedo, 2017), 2 channel HD Video, color and sound.

About Shannon Jackson

Shannon Jackson is Hadidi Professor in the departments of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, at UC Berkeley, with appointments in History of Art, Art Practice, and the Center for New Media. Most recently, she served for six years as Associate Vice Chancellor for the Arts + Design. Publications include: Lines of Activity (2000); Professing Performance (2004); Social Works (2011); The Builders Association (2015); Public Servants (2016), along with numerous journal essays and catalogue essays. Jackson has won several awards, including the 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship, and serves on the boards of various organizations, including the Kramlich Art Foundation, Tippet Rise Art Center, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Oakland Museum of California. Her career survey book, Back Stages: Essays Across Art, Performance, and Public Life, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press (2022). 

Forum Lectures

Forum Lectures is a series of lectures by Danish and international thinkers and cultural workers reflecting on how art co-forms communality. FORUM LECTURES brings thinking and shared study back to the university and invites for public lectures the last Tuesday every month at 17:00 - 19:00.

The initiative is hosted by the research group of the New Carlsberg Foundation research center Art as Forum. Our researchers are occupied by a.o. the infrastructures of the arts, collective modes of production, the entanglement of political theory and aesthetic theory, assembling strategies of curation, dematerialized art, acts of strategic separatism and temporality in digital art.

This Forum Lecture is presented in collaboration with the Inter Arts Center and Malmö Theatre Academy.

The lecture is for free and open for everyone interested.