David Joselit: Time Batteries: April 8

Time Batteries
Presented by David Joselit
Wednesday, April 8, 7:30pm
Light Industry
220 36th Street, 5th Floor, Brooklyn
Tickets $7, available at door.

"Data storage is one of our fundamental economic, political and historical challenges. Data is collected from us whenever we click, charge, or swipe—it helps politicians decide who “we” are and what “we” want. Wal-mart knows how to use it to sell us things and Obama knows how to read it to take the nation’s temperature. But is there an aesthetics of data storage? Now that anybody can record almost anything, can this form of primitive image accumulation be a kind of art?

"'Time Batteries' handle duration differently from classic video works by artists like Peter Campus, Bruce Nauman or Joan Jonas where the dilation of time was tied to the expansion of perception. Duration is now linked to the banal but fundamental ethos of storage. I will test this thesis by presenting two works: Mary Ellen Carroll’s film “Alas poor YORICK!” (2008) in which the artist’s drawing made from her hand transcription of the entire text of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy on a single sheet is burned on a beach in Truro, and Rachel Harrison’s “Roman Holiday,” a found moment of slapstick recorded from a restaurant table in Rome. I’ll discuss questions of media transfer and consumption (in fire, in boredom, and even of products) as manifest in these works, and I’ll draw a historical genealogy for a possible aesthetics of data storage." - DJ

http://www.lightindustry.org