News/Research

Conference Grants: KC Forcier on Reframing Moving Images in the Digital Age

27 Nov, 2019

Conference Grants: KC Forcier on Reframing Moving Images in the Digital Age

KC Forcier received a Fall 2019 BCNM Conference Grant to help cover her costs attending The Picturesque: Visual Pleasure and Intermediality between Contemporary Cinema, Art and Digital Culture​ in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Forcier presented "White Cube, Black Mirror: Reframing Moving Images in the Digital Age." Read more about her experience in her own words below!

KC Forcier attended The Picturesque: Visual Pleasure and Intermediality between Contemporary Cinema, Art and Digital Culture, an international film and media studies conference hosted by the Sapientia University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Bringing together art history, cinema and media scholars from four continents, the conference sought to rethink media convergences in contemporary cinema and visual culture. The organizers wrote, “The picturesque directs our attention to the sensuous aspects of intermediality and their relevance in our so-called postmedia age, when the ‘photographic’, ‘the cinematic’ or the ‘painterly’ can be seamlessly merged through digital technologies.” Keynote speakers included film scholar Laura Mulvey, who spoke on the use of rear projection in the work of contemporary video art as a folding of time and space within one image; and art historian Steven Jacobs, who addressed the use of the painterly landscape in film.

Forcier presented a paper entitled “White Cube, Black Mirror: Reframing Moving Images in the Digital Age,” which examined a trend in contemporary art that fuses traditions of canvas painting with digital moving images. These works involve moving images projected onto painted frames or paint applied directly to screens. In their fusion of moving image and painterly canvas, these works speak to the increased blurring of the White Cube of the gallery and the Black Box of the cinema. By invoking the materiality of painting, they insist on their status as unique objects in a digital image economy more often characterized by ephemerality, movement, or flux. In their emphasis on tactile surface, these pieces reveal a friction between the material supports of digital culture, and the moving, distributed, images it produces.