Past event
Prosthetic Performances: Technologies of the Black Mutative Body CIMS seminar with Global Fellow Professor Shelleen Greene (UCLA)
The Cultural Identity and Memory Institute (CIMS) welcomes everyone to join the research seminar by Global Fellow Professor Shelleen Greene (UCLA) on ‘Prosthetic Performances: Technologies of the Black Mutative Body'.
In this presentation, Professor Greene will explore surgical, prosthetic and digital performance as an aesthetics of mutation in both mainstream and experimental black art practice. As Marquard Smilth and Joanne Morra argue, prosthesis, an artificial replacement or augmentation to the body, has become a primary metaphor in discourses ranging from post-humanism, cultural studies, and new media theory in the analysis of “interactions in general between the body and technology in modernity”.
Specifically, Professor Greene will examine the posthumous performances and afterlives of Michael Jackson, through his ‘holographic' appearance at the 2014 Billboard Music Awards, a spectacle which has its origins in the 19th century pre-cinematic Pepper's Ghost illusion. Exploring the overlap between the racial and digital “uncanny valley”, Professor Greene contextualizes the performance within a broader history of the artist's controversial cosmetic transformation and emergent visual media technologies of the early 1990s, such as digital morphing and other computer-generated imagery (CGI).
As a further meditation on somatic mutation, Professor Greene will turn to the Teddy Perkins episode of season two of the US television programme Atlanta (FX, from 2016). The episode's titular character references Michael Jackson and offers a reflection upon trauma as manifested through epidermal transformation. These prosthetic performances comment upon the black body as mutative, in flex, moving from stable to contingent, from fixed to partiality. Professor Greene argues that, while these performances can be read as indexical of the intersections of race, gender, science and technology, they are also indicative of the continued commoditization of black bodies.