Event Details
Date & Time:
Thu May 28, 2020
4 PM CST
Location:
The Block Museum of Art
40 Arts Circle Drive
Evanston, IL 60208
Audience:
Open to the public
Details:
Block Cinema inaugurates its Desktop Cinema Working Group screening series with an online presentation of filmmaker and scholar Ben Mendelsohn’s AS IF SAND WERE STONE… (35 min, 2019), an essay film examining the making and remaking of urban waterfronts in New York City. Narrated by landscape architect Gena Wirth, the film analyzes dredging and sand filling as key infrastructural processes in the production of urban space. The film combines observational footage of New York’s massive harbor deepening project with a series of self-reflexive research spirals about human earth moving in the region. Mendelsohn’s documentary will screen alongside two episodes of WHAT IS DEEP SEA MINING? (12 min, 2018-2019), a series of innovative web documentaries by the Portuguese media collective Inhabitants.
Following the screening, Mendelsohn and Inhabitants collaborator Margarida Mendes will appear in conversation with Jacob Leveton, PhD candidate in Art History at Northwestern University.
Various Artists, USA and Portugal, Digital, approx. 60 min
Co-sponsored by the Environmental Humanities Working Group, the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, and the Program in Critical Theory at Northwestern.
RSVP THROUGH EVENTBRITE FOR THE LIVESTREAM LINK AND ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Beginning at 3:45pm CDT you will be able to access the Block live video stream at https://vimeo.com/423736800/754d297a51.
Technical notes:
If you experience technical difficulties with the live stream, or if your time zone makes live viewing of the film difficult, you can access Ben Mendelsohn's film AS IF SAND WERE STONE... at https://vimeo.com/422959288 (password: sandstone) as well as Episodes 1 and 4 of Inhabitants' videos, WHAT IS DEEP SEA MINING?, at https://vimeo.com/254977838 and https://vimeo.com/376958677.
The link to Mendelsohn's film will be made active at 3:30pm CDT on Thursday and will be active for a few weeks period after the program concludes. The episodes from Inhabitants are available on their Vimeo and are currently ready to watch.
If you are interested in joining the Desktop Cinema Working Group, please fill out this sign-up form to tell us more about yourself and your interest. You are also encouraged to get in touch with the filmmaker of AS IF SAND WERE STONE... at benmendelsohn.com or twitter.com/bamendelsohn.
ABOUT THE DESKTOP CINEMA WORKING GROUP:
The Desktop Cinema Working Group is a nascent collective of scholar-filmmaker-curators committed to the significance of computer screen capture in moving-image practices. As more of our lives become hypermediated by the computer desktop, what insights can we glean from the wide range of contemporary works that deploy (or destroy) the space of the computer screen? What predictions, explanations, or possibilities can we find in the prehistory of this genre, in the longstanding interactions between graphical user interfaces and "cinema"? How do working artists exploit the genre’s possibilities to interrogate critical social, political, and environmental issues beyond the computer screen?
Contact The Block Museum of Art for more information: (847) 491-4000 or email us at block-museum@northwestern.edu