Lunch On Fridays: Erica Levin
The Ecstatic Interface

Spend a lunch hour learning about the latest in art and design during these Friday lectures. Each lecture features a variety of artists and designers from around the world, including CIA faculty and visiting artists. This event is free and open to the public. Pizza and beverages will be provided.

In "need ideas!?!PLZ!!" (2011), a short video by Elisa Giardina Papa made from clips appropriated from YouTube, a sample set of pre-adolescents plead for help coming up with ideas for content to provide their viewers. One after another they proclaim their willingness to do just about anything, clumsily entering into a social world governed by interfaces that demand the endless production of content. We watch them watching themselves, faces illuminated by the cool light of the monitor. The webcam allows for the registration of one’s own existence, measured as an index of one’s willingness to participate, to perform as a member of the digital crowd. The joke here of course, is that the crowdsourcers now make up a crowd, while the crowd they hope to source is nowhere in sight. This talk considers what Alex Galloway calls the “interface effect” generated by this obscene willingness to ask for ideas. For Galloway, interfaces are best understood not as a surface or screen that stands between the user and code, but rather as an effect produced wherever two different dimensions are mediated. In his own words: "An interface is not a thing; an interface is a relation effect. One must look at local relationships within the image and ask: how does this specific local relationship create an externalization, an incoherence, an edging, or a framing?"

Erica Levin recently joined the faculty of the Cleveland Institute of Art as an assistant professor of film and art history. She has been developing new courses on World Cinemas, Cinematic Time, and will soon offer a course on Social Cinemas dealing with the politics of representation and engagement. She has a Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on points of connection between film, performance, and politics, particularly where the social dimensions of experimental moving image practices come to the fore. She's working on a book that explores the way artists and filmmakers since the 1960s have taken up newsreel, both as material and an experimental form, offering a new account of the rise of documentary aesthetics as it relates to what has been called the “social turn” in contemporary art.

Cleveland Institute of Art is supported in part by the residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.

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