SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2007
Transmodernities/Translocalities: Panel Discussion
12:30 p.m. – 3 p.m. Polycentric sessions and screenings, San Francisco
Art Institute, Lecture hall and classrooms
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Apartment 9K began as a meditation on social
phobias—specifically, the fear of racial, religious, and sexual
terrors—that shape our current public discourse regarding notions
like the Axis of Evil, the War on Terrorism, Defense of Marriage Act
and border control. We realized very quickly that the power of public
discourse is such that it seeps into our individual consciousness only
to be externalized again in our everyday conversations and cultural
and political practices. Thus, the Culture of Fear we now live in is
both an external and social phobia as well as, and perhaps more perniciously,
an internal and internalized phobia.
Apartment 9K explores the interplay and the
inevitable tensions between these phobias as well as between neighboring,
overlapping, and sometimes interconstitutive tensions. Some of these
include the tensions between the hypervisibility of marked others and
their simultaneous un-visiblilty; between the notions of intimacy and
invasiveness (especially in relation to cultural representationality);
between being captured by the gaze and confounding it; between the cultural
work of the spectator and the social work of the reader; between the
image and the text; and between our public and private memories.
Participant Bios:
Brian J. Camarao is a graphic designer and photographer from the San
Francisco Bay Area who is now based in New York City. He got his Bachelor’s
degree in Applied Art and Design at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 1996
and has most recently shown his work at APAture 2006, Kearny Street
Workshop’s multimedia arts festival in San Francisco. As an artist,
he is interested in photographic techniques that defamiliarize the familiar,
in the interplay of multimedia formats, and the ways in which still
images can imbue a feeling of movement.
Minh-Ha T. Pham is an Assistant Professor/Faculty
Fellow in the Asian Pacific American Studies program in the Social and
Cultural Analysis department at New York University. She is working
on a book that explores sonic markers of difference—that is, the
ways in which the otic informs scopic knowledge about race, gender,
class, sexuality, and citizenship.