Gathering ‘round Third Measure

This seminar series brings together artists, scholars, researchers and organizers from South Africa, Mexico, U.S., Iran, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Botswana, Peru and Sweden, to share the interdisciplinary, aesthetic and transcultural nature of Black Study. 

The liquidblackness project

Gathering ‘round Third Measure (Vimeo) 

As a research group that models its praxis on the jazz ensemble and gathers to practice a form of study that mirrors the processes of those we study, liquid blackness members will gather around an object – Third Measure, a short art film composed by Anna Winter, Josh Cleveland, and Cedric Simmons that draws inspirations from Julius Eastman’s concept of organic music—to invite a conversation that reflects on the ensemblic, intergenerational pedagogies and the futural archives that sustain our collectively shared work.

Composed of insights from a number of liquid blackness members about their own relationship to its process, practice, and praxis, Third Measure offers itself as a gathering place that refuses closure, ownership, and individuation. Just like we pass on and pass through each other’s insights, intuitions, and research, within an ethical commitment to always play the music we hear in each other’s voices, Third Measure too opens onto that “other dimension,” where Fumi Okiji tells us that a jazz piece continues to play for a future generation who can pick up the song where it was left, and where, as Jenn Nkiru insists, the archive is something constantly created and recreated. An archive in the making as much as it is an archive of the making, Third Measure is more invested in sharing than in explaining: images and sounds come together as jurisgenerative ensembles that never conclusively land but produce instead a constant folding and unfolding, a careful and grateful sliding forward that calls upon “lineages to come” –the visionary practices of artists “known and unknown.”

Presenters:
Alessandra Raengo
Anna Winter
Derrick Jones (artistically known as djones)

Alessandra Raengo is Georgia State University Distinguished Professor of Moving Image Studies, the Founding Editor-in-Chief of liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies (at Duke University Press) and founder of the liquid blackness research group that initiated the journal in 2013. She is the author of On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value (Dartmouth College Press, 2013) and of Critical Race Theory and Bamboozled (Bloomsbury Press, 2016). She has published widely on the visual arts and filmmaking of the Black diaspora, racial capitalism, and modes of black “liquidity” in the contemporary arts. Her work has appeared in Camera Obscura, Discourse, Adaptation, The World Picture Journal, Black Camera, The Black Scholar, Flash Art, Refract, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and several anthologies, including the award-wining collections LA Rebellion: Creating a New Black American Cinema (2015) and Deep Mediations: Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures (2021). She is the recipient of a Fall 2022 Paul Mellon Senior Fellowship at CASVA (Centre for Advanced Study in the Visual Art, National Gallery of Art), a Terra Foundation of American Art Grant for the liquid blackness Symposium: “Music Video as Black Art: Claiming the B-Side,” Sept. 21-23, 2023 at Georgia State University and a Phoenix Award for Significant Editorial or Design Achievement from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals for editorial and design excellence for the liquid blackness journal she co-edits with Lauren McLeod Cramer. 

djones (Derrick Jones) holds a PhD from teh School of Film, Media & Theatre at Georgia State University. He also holds an MFA in Filmmaking from Ohio University. His research explores blackness as archival, social, and creative practice. djones' academic and artistic interests tend towards the study of blackness as practice and the practice of blackness as study. A member of liquid blackness since 2018, djones has served as webmaster, archivist, and Art Director for liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies (at Duke University Press).

Anna Winter is a MFA student in Film Production at Georgia State University. She’s led many different lives and had different relationships with cinema throughout the years. Right now she enjoys making films with people and not just about them. This means the films take time and also that she often films with close family and friends, where the trust and knowledge of each other's gestures, body movements, fragilities, strengths, and embarrassments are known. With a deep discomfort of assuming the role of directorial authority, she prefers instead to find routes and moments of play in her filmmaking. She hopes to create cinematic environments where people, including herself, have the time and space to bring parts of themselves that feel honest, fragile, chaotic, fragmented, dishonest, confusing, clear, quiet, shy, loud, eager, defiant, etc. to films and projects. She’s very happy to be part of liquid blackness and study the works of filmmakers and artists who are radically thinking and reimagining their processes through filmmaking.

Study Material:

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/116/379446/refusing-completion-a-conversation/
And George Lipsitz’s introduction to “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness”
 
For context, we also recommend the following collective presentation:

https://vimeo.com/893084968