Brian R. Jacobson, Professor of Visual Culture, Caltech
Response by Brian Larkin, Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College, Columbia University
Center for the Study of Social Difference
Brian R. Jacobson will speak about a portion of his current book project, The Art of Oil in France: A Global History, 1945-1975, which explores the material and conceptual connections between oil and gas prospecting, art finding missions, and archaeological digs conducted in the Algerian Sahara during the 1950s. Resource extraction, especially in a time of decolonization, required a delicate balance between future-oriented economic discourse and competing forms of historicity that alternately buttressed and challenged French state and industry claims to that future and to the past upon which its arguments rested. New media could give those arguments temporal form, but in the meantime, old media resurfaced to disrupt the oil and gas industry’s Janus-faced extractive epistemology.
This event is part of the project "Extractive Media: Infrastructures & Aesthetics of Depletion", co-directed by CCM faculty Debashree Mukherjee and Zeynep Çelik Alexander at the Center for the Study of Social Difference.
RSVP to cssdmedia@columbia.edu to receive pre-circulated material and join the mailing list.