A Brief History of Loss

A Brief History of Loss is a heavily mediated performative lecture that is not only an extension of deep repetition and radical sameness, but a form of (non)reading put at odds with itself. How might these differences of reading information and meaning not be reduced, but contradicted? How might a text engage the form of the page and document as a space that provides platforms for close readings as well as keeping those readings at a distance, not something to read insofar as something to be looked at and thought about. Best situated within the “Translation” strand, ABHoL aims to expose and conflate mediatic and literary reading/writing practices with an unstoppable real time. The performance itself is a translation and shifting between codes, both textual and computational. Framed as an investigation into personal mediatic histories, ABHoL aims to conflate and contradict photographic images, as objects framed to be narrated, with corresponding narration that calls on the document as a performative object and artifact. How might the agent and agency of time, assumed in the aesthetic expressions and conceptual underpinnings of a document, lend itself to a cinematic or mediatic time? A deep and unstoppable real time? What new dialogues/forms Thursday, July 20 • 549 might this tension produce/generate/negate? Loss, like all affects, is held in the face, and a face, like all surfaces, may often be read like a book. As someone else once said, the matter of reading disrupts the continuity between the theoretical and phenomenal and thus forces a certain recognition of incompatibility.