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In person: UCLA Cinema and Media Studies Professor Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli and Université Paris Cité Visual Studies Professor Martine Beugnet
The history of photography, film and television is so populated by ghosts that we can forget what is uniquely strange about them. The ghost is a troubling figure that points to the limit of thought — to death and nothingness. Yet, phantoms need an audience and a medium to make their appearance in the form of the sound of knocking, audiovisual noise, an eerie feeling, a white sheet with two cut out holes for eyes. What is a ghost without its sheet, or medium through which it speaks? In the process of taking new forms, they test the boundaries between the human, the machine and the non-human, stirring up new anxieties. Even if said to be non-beings, ghosts are granted supernatural sight (a maniacal gaze) and power (to possess bodies and to touch the living). At the same time, they interrupt communications, and images of the dead continue to be circulated as exploitable brands. While endlessly occupying the archive of contemporary digital media, certain ghostly images, memories and dreams are privileged over others. For lack of political will, or even just lack of images, witnesses and sound recordings, some ghosts do not and will not see the light of day. The Trouble With Ghosts explores what is so conceptually and figuratively unsettling about the ghost and the media that host it. The series is an attempt to understand the politics of ghosting in an age that is so preoccupied with specters (past, present and future).
Series programmed by UCLA Cinema and Media Studies Professor Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, Université Paris Cité Visual Studies Professor Martine Beugnet and Archive Research and Public Access Coordinator Nicole Ucedo. Notes written by Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli and Martine Beugnet.
