Online video distribution platforms have ushered in new modes of amateur and public pedagogy. They circulate knowledge through user-generated tutorials, produced and accessed using “always on” networked technologies. Two recent video works by Hito Steyerl explore the visual logic of such ubiquitous pedagogical output while probing the media infrastructures that undergird it: How Not To Be Seen, A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013) and Is The Museum a Battlefield? (2013). Extending the pedagogical premises of these works, this talk maps the webs of relation among Steyerl’s “didactic educational” video files toward a set of tactics for the critical use of ordinary media.
Mashinka Firunts is a PhD candidate in the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the co-editor of Present Tense Pamphlets, published through the Block Museum and Northwestern University. In 2015, she co-curated the video program “Vulnerable Systems” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. She is a member of the group Research Service, co-founded with Avi Alpert and Danny Snelson. Their projects explore performative scholarship and media pedagogy, and have been presented at venues including the Palais de Tokyo, Judson Church, and the Drawing Center. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Performance Research Journal, Art in America, and Shifter.
Please join us this Wednesday, October 5th, at 4pm for the second meeting of the Ordinary Media Research Workshop. We will be atypically meeting in the Hagstrum Room (University Hall, Room 201). Refreshments, conversation, and a screening will be provided.