August 2014: my activist, academic, and journalistic lives collided in a digitized split-second. Online, I came face-to-surreal-face with ISIS’ execution of a colleague, terrified for the haunting film’s second captive—a friend. Although immersed professionally and personally in graphic image wars, this video proved especially disturbing, but why? Marketing’s analytical frame, strategic deployment of popular culture, and the intended audience of young, digitally networked “global citizens” best contextualizes the ISIS phenomenon: a propaganda blitzkrieg rooted in commodified rebellion’s consumption (Che t-shirts), not theology. ISIS exemplifies the paradoxical power of cultural production in contemporary geopolitical combat theater—war’s increasingly symbolic terrain.

Amanda E. Rogers holds a PhD from Emory (2013). She is an academic, journalist, artist, and political analyst whose work appears in numerous forums, including the BBC, Al-Jazeera, and the New York Times. Her forthcoming monograph, Semiotics of Rebellion From Morocco to Egypt: Advertising Revolution and Marketing Allegiance, focuses on the critical use of politicized cultural discourse for international alliances, regional stability, and intra nation-state image warfare.

With funding from Chellgren Center.

http://finearts.uky.edu/events/art/black-flags-isis-%E2%80%9Cswag%E2%80…;

For decades, many linguists have framed the study of language in terms of a language faculty, a specialized cognitive ‘organ’ unique to humans.  In the last decade, even the most stalwart proponents of this view have come to acknowledge the existence of other factors in the organization of human languages. In this talk, I will concentrate on two of these factors, embodiment and competition, drawing examples from the morphology of spoken and signed languages. Neither is unique to language, nor especially human or cognitive in nature.  Their role in the structuring of languages points to a new research paradigm in the study of language, in which no single factor is privileged and the importance of any one of them is gauged only by the insights it provided, not by its uniqueness to language.

Israel is a microcosm of the sign language world.  Within a country about equal in area to New Jersey, Israel contains both a widely dispersed deaf community sign language used in schools, Israeli Sign Language, and a number of much smaller village sign languages, each confined to a single community and used only within its confines.  Our research team was formed to study Israeli Sign Language, but we have also spent the last decade studying and documenting the sign language of the Bedouin village of Al-Sayyid, located near Be’er Sheva, the ancestral home of Abraham.  I will compare the history and structure of these two languages and show how the study of their emergence has provided a variety of insights into language and human nature.

Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist Katherine Behar will present E-Waste, an exhibition of new work at UK’s Tuska Center for Contemporary Art. 

Behar’s installation centers on a new series of sculptures inspired by a science fiction scenario in which commonplace USB devices continue working, long after the humans they were designed to serve have gone extinct. The gadgets are transformed into mutant fossils, encased in stone with lights blinking, speakers chirping, and fans spinning eternally. The exhibition also includes a video series, Modeling Big Data, in which the artist inhabits an obese, over-grown data body, to humorous and poignant effect. 

Behar’s work challenges digital culture’s intense escalation of productivity. Wavering between poetry and parody, her works elicit sympathy for the devices we exploit, suggesting that we ourselves are becoming increasingly device-like: ensnared in compulsory productivity, whether “working” in the traditional sense for our own gain, or generating value for distant corporations each time we search the web or click “like.” Combining machine-made, handmade, and organic forms, including a “fossilized” 3D printer, E-Waste offers a physical parallel to the excesses of big data, highlighting the counterpart surplus of consumer media artifacts, and drawing attention to its environmental impact. 

E-Waste is co-produced by the College of Fine Arts and the College of Arts and Sciences, and supported in part by a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by The Professional Staff Congress and The City University of New York.

This will count as a Wired Event!!

This Spanish–Moroccan war, known in Spain as the War of Africa, was a colonial military operation that resulted in the surrender of the city of Tetouan. A political victory with no tangible gains, the African War formed part of a persuasive rhetoric and a stirring propaganda used by the Spanish government to heighten the national pride of the people. The patriotic delirium surrounding this war marks the beginnings —and also the death throes— of Spanish colonialism on Moroccan territory in modern times. Spain’s military intervention in Morocco inspired an abundant literature whose aim was to glorify the war. Professor Rueda examines one-act plays on the topic of the War of Africa to reveal how war was staged and orchestrated politically through theatrical and musical performance. Burlesque musical re-presentations of the War of Africa reinforce collective yet conflictive notions of national identity, still unresolved at the threshold of Modernity, while exposing Spain’s impracticable political aspirations to regain its lost colonial power and the nation’s hesitancy to refashion itself as a modern nation.