Ken Ueno: Video Across the Arts: Secret Meridians and Somatic Films

Ken Ueno: Video Across the Arts: Secret Meridians and Somatic Films
Recorded at BAMPFA on February 16, 2023
Ken Ueno’s somatic films (and secret meridians-a Uenoian term for temporally specific video captures) extend his practice as a musician and performer, a practice that resists the neoliberal surveillance mode that datafies our bodies. Datafication flattens ontologies, whereas Ueno champions the unique experience of each individual life as sacred.
A recipient of the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize, Ken Ueno (b. 1970) is a composer/vocalist/sound artist who currently holds the Jerry and Evelyn Hemmings Chambers Distinguished Professor Chair in Music at UC Berkeley. Ensembles and performers who have played Ueno’s music include Kim Kashkashian and Robyn Schulkowsky, Mayumi Miyata, Teodoro Anzellotti, Aki Takahashi, Wendy Richman, Greg Oakes, BMOP, Alarm Will Sound, Steve Schick and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Nieuw Ensemble, and Frances-Marie Uitti. His music has been performed at such venues as Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MusikTriennale Köln Festival, the Muziekgebouw, Ars Musica, Warsaw Autumn, Other Minds, the Hopkins Center, Spoleto USA, Steim, and at the Norfolk Music Festival.
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Arts + Design Thursdays: Video Art in Context
How have artists made use of the screen? What are the opportunities and hazards of using the screen as a vehicle for connection?
A stunning roster of artists, curators, designers, and critics consider these questions and more. Developed from mixed media experiments of the 1960s through to new digital and virtual aesthetics of our current moment, video and media artists cross-pollinate amongst many art forms-including cinema, photography, painting, sculpture, dance, theater, performance art, design, and even in literature. In addition to experimenting artistically, video artists have also intervened politically, often addressing pressing issues such as climate change, racial equity, gendered power, and the ethics of technology itself. Join us every Thursday noon to hear from cross-disciplinary speakers. For more information, visit bampfa.org/pro....
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This public course and lecture series is funded entirely by a generous grant from the Kramlich Art Foundation, including funds for event programming and the tuition and salaries of Graduate Student Instructors.
Arts + Design Thursdays is made possible thanks to support from the Big Ideas Courses Program in the College of Letters & Science at UC Berkeley. In-kind technical support and presentation offered by BAMPFA and the UC Berkeley College of Letters & Science, Division of Arts & Humanities.