[Abstract]
Thomas Wilfred’s light shone brightly in a variety of media forms and practices throughout the twentieth century, and it continues to illuminate others in the twenty-first. Lumia’s legacy reveals a shared desire among artists working across decades and in a variety of media to create, modify, or rethink technology in an effort to produce transcendent art. This paper illustrates how Wilfred functions as an aesthetic connector, linking wide-ranging developments across film, kinetic art, painting, performance, video, and installation art.
[Speaker Bio]
Gregory Zinman is an Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His writing on film and media has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Film History, MIRAJ, and Millennium Film Journal, among other publications. He served as a curatorial consultant to the exhibition Lumia: Thomas Wilfred and the Art of Light and has programmed film and media art at the Film-makers’ Co-op, the Museum of the Moving Image, Asia Society New York, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, as well as a number of venues in Atlanta. He is currently completing a book, Handmade: The Moving Image Without Photography, and is co-editing, with John Hanhardt, Nam June Paik: Selected Writings (forthcoming from The MIT Press).
Thomas Wilfred’s light shone brightly in a variety of media forms and practices throughout the twentieth century, and it continues to illuminate others in the twenty-first. Lumia’s legacy reveals a shared desire among artists working across decades and in a variety of media to create, modify, or rethink technology in an effort to produce transcendent art. This paper illustrates how Wilfred functions as an aesthetic connector, linking wide-ranging developments across film, kinetic art, painting, performance, video, and installation art.
[Speaker Bio]
Gregory Zinman is an Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His writing on film and media has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Film History, MIRAJ, and Millennium Film Journal, among other publications. He served as a curatorial consultant to the exhibition Lumia: Thomas Wilfred and the Art of Light and has programmed film and media art at the Film-makers’ Co-op, the Museum of the Moving Image, Asia Society New York, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, as well as a number of venues in Atlanta. He is currently completing a book, Handmade: The Moving Image Without Photography, and is co-editing, with John Hanhardt, Nam June Paik: Selected Writings (forthcoming from The MIT Press).