Month: September 2014
Two-credit undergraduate course: ARTH 284F–Technology, Religion, Ritual
Next VizCult: Nancy Appelbaum, Binghamton University
“Mapping the ‘Country of Regions’: How the Nineteenth-Century Chorographic Commission of Colombia Envisioned the Nation”
Wednesday, October 1, 5:15 pm
FA 218
FA 218
Carmelo Fernández. Soto. Tejedoras i mercaderas de sombreros nacuma en Bucaramanga.– Tipos blanco, mestizo y zambo. Ca. 1851. Watercolor.
This paper explores how an ambitious nineteenth-century geographic expedition known as the Chorographic Commission envisioned the nation of New Granada (now Colombia) as a hierarchy of regions and races. Tensions evident in the commission’s images, texts, and maps reflected contradictions that undermined the nation-building project of the mid-century elite.
Nancy Appelbaum is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Area Studies Program (LACAS) at Binghamton University.
Binghamton alumnus to speak on the crisis in the humanities
Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, PhD ’83, Chancellor’s Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of California–Irvine, will speak on “Untangling the Crisis in the Humanities: A Binghamton Prophet” from 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 23, in AA-330, the Fernand Braudel Center. Radhakrishnan has authored five books, co-edited three more and published about 100 articles in journals and collections, including a volume of poems in English. He has translated contemporary Tamil fiction into English and won a number of fellowships, including a Fulbright.
The lecture is co-sponsored by the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations; the Department of English, General Literature and Rhetoric; and the Department of Comparative Literature.
Binghamton University Art Museum launches new website
Detail from Thomas Doughty, South Branch of the Potomac, c. 1840. Museum purchase.
Visit http://www.binghamton.edu/art-museum/ to see the museum’s newly launched website and to learn more about current programs and exhibitions!
Faculty Activities: Jeffrey Kirkwood at the German Studies Association
Frank Gilbreth, Motion Study, 1913.
This weekend, Assistant Professor Jeffrey Kirkwood will be attending the annual meeting of the German Studies Association, held this year in Kansas City, MO.
On Sunday, Sept. 21, he will present his paper “Mittel Managers: Psychotechnics, Cinema, and the Narrative of Scientific Management” as part of the panel Technologies of Narrative: Technik in the Machine Age (abstract below). He will also moderate the panel Hidden Violence in Twentieth-Century German-Language Culture at 8:00AM, Sept. 20.
“Thus, technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training. There came a day when a new and urgent need for stimuli was met by film. In a film, perception conditioned by shock [chockförmige Wahrnehmung] was established as a formal principle. What determines the rhythm of production on a conveyor belt is the same thing that underlies the rhythm of reception in film.”
—Walter Benjamin, “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire,” 1939
By the time that Walter Benjamin remarked on film’s close affinity with modes of industrial production in its education of the human sensorium, cinema was already an established tool deployed in the fields of “psychotechnics” and “scientific management.” In Germany, early industrial films and experimental devices for training workers emphasized the sequence and pace of industrial work, dividing tasks along breaks or “cuts” that were edited together as total depictions of optimized efficiency. As but one instance of this historical nexus between cinema and industrial efficiency, Hugo Münsterberg, the founder of psychotechnics and one of the first film theorists, claimed that streetcar accidents could be greatly reduced through scientific testing and education, suggesting “the use of cinematographic images as stimuli to that end” [kinematographische Bilder als Reize dafür zu benutzen] (Münsterberg, 1914). What such experiments and testing methodologies that relied on cinematographic technologies indicate is early film’s profound involvement in the emergence of a scientific and industrial conception of the psyche as an “apparatus”—an apparatus whose operations could be coordinated according to a mechanical protocol. By exploring the historical and media-technological variability of scientific models of the psyche, particularly those accompanying the rise of scientific management, the paper examines the ways in which understandings of the psyche were conditioned by cinematic technologies, but also the degree to which the earliest films were psychological. To this end, the paper argues that rather than a “classical narrativity” associated with the mature editing techniques developed during the Weimar period and formalized in “classical Hollywood narrative,” early cinema instituted what I have termed an “industrial narrativity.” This was a narrativity derived from the protocols of psychotechnical experimentation that accorded with a mode of vision that was already essentially governed by industrial sequence.
The paper intervenes in both histories of cinema and histories of perception that have regarded “actualities” and films prior to 1910 as largely “attractions” (Tom Gunning), which employed a “primitive mode of representation” (Noel Burch). Whereas theorizations of early cinema traditionally emphasize the exteriority of cinematographic presentations, rather than the subjective identification associated with the editing techniques of later long-format, “narrative” films, the paper argues that many early films instituted principles of order, sequence, and mechanical syntax that were both industrial and psychological. By investigating the logic governing the construction of early actualities and returning to German treatises in psychotechnics and scientific management by figures such as Hugo Münsterberg, Karl Marbe, and Narziß Ach, the paper contends that early films did indeed produce subjective identification—even though it was a subject understood as a machine.
Alumni Activities: Hala Auji and Shriya Sridharan
Congratulations to Hala Auji (PhD 2013), who was recently named Assistant Professor at the American University Beirut, and to Shriya Sridharan (PhD 2012), a new faculty member at the Center for Public History at the Srishti School of Art, Design, and Technology, in Bangalore.
First VizCult of the year: Nancy Um, Binghamton University, TODAY
“Flags, Robes, and Horses: Objects of Commercial Initiation at Mocha’s Maritime Threshold”
Wednesday, September 17, 5:15 pm
FA 218
FA 218
Military exercises of Arabs in Yemen, in Carsten Niebuhr, Beschreibung von Arabien (Copenhagen, 1772), pl. 16.
In the early eighteenth century before the rise of colonial coffee cultivation, Yemen sat at the center of an increasingly caffeinated world. Merchants from India, the Persian Gulf, and Europe flocked to its shores in order to procure coffee beans and many other goods, both local and imported. This paper explores the lavish ceremonial receptions that were staged yearly to welcome crews at the Red Sea port of Mocha, a key hub of the western Indian Ocean trade. While previous scholars have generally perceived these practices as inconsequential to commercial life because of their seemingly non-transactional character, I contend that they were key rites of commercial initiation and essential stages within the extended processes of trade (rather than external to them). Moreover, the goods that appeared in these ceremonial rites were not mere commodities or simple status symbols, rather they derived their significance and value from their place within a complex local system of commercial privilege.
Nancy Um is Associate Professor of Art History at Binghamton University.
Harpur Cinema presents Visiting Artist series for Fall 2014
FALL 2014
Visiting Film & Video Artists & Speakers Series
Binghamton University
Lecture Hall 6 at 7:30 (Free)
Sponsored by Cinema Dept & Harpur College Dean’s Speakers Series
Join Foundations: the Binghamton University Society of Architecture
Interested in architecture or urbanism? Join Foundations, the Binghamton University Society of Architecture!
Foundations will hold a general interest meeting on Tuesday, September 16 at 7:30 in FA 218. To stay up-to-date on the group’s activities, you can like Foundations on Facebook.
First VizCult of the year: Nancy Um, Binghamton University
“Flags, Robes, and Horses: Objects of Commercial Initiation at Mocha’s Maritime Threshold”
Wednesday, September 17, 5:15 pm
FA 218
FA 218
Military exercises of Arabs in Yemen, in Carsten Niebuhr, Beschreibung von Arabien (Copenhagen, 1772), pl. 16.
In the early eighteenth century before the rise of colonial coffee cultivation, Yemen sat at the center of an increasingly caffeinated world. Merchants from India, the Persian Gulf, and Europe flocked to its shores in order to procure coffee beans and many other goods, both local and imported. This paper explores the lavish ceremonial receptions that were staged yearly to welcome crews at the Red Sea port of Mocha, a key hub of the western Indian Ocean trade. While previous scholars have generally perceived these practices as inconsequential to commercial life because of their seemingly non-transactional character, I contend that they were key rites of commercial initiation and essential stages within the extended processes of trade (rather than external to them). Moreover, the goods that appeared in these ceremonial rites were not mere commodities or simple status symbols, rather they derived their significance and value from their place within a complex local system of commercial privilege.
Nancy Um is Associate Professor of Art History at Binghamton University.
Alumni Art Show opens at University Art Museum next week
Binghamton Art History 