Transmedial Exposure: Toward an Experimental Humanities
This talk outlines the main argument and central concepts of Graff Zivin’s forthcoming book, Transmedial Exposure, which asks what happens when an artistic creation in one medium is exposed to, adapted, translated, or distorted by one in another. Taking as its point of departure Emmanuel Levinas’s account of ethical experience as the exposure of the same to the other, the book approaches artistic media, disciplines, and sensory experiences as constitutively relational and heteronomous. Examining experimental film, video, music, installation, poetry, narrative, dance, and performance from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Spain, the United Kingdom, Italy, and the United States, and drawing on continental philosophy, critical theory, Black thought, and media, film, music, and sound studies, it advances an experimental, indisciplinary approach to the humanities that foregrounds embodied, sensorial thought and its ethico-political consequences. The talk will consider a case study of artistic production exposed across media: Narcisa Hirsch’s 1970 experimental short Come Out, a filmic adaptation of Steve Reich’s sound piece, which itself recalls and distorts the voice of Daniel Hamm and is visually, musically, and poetically echoed in contemporary projects by Glenn Ligon, Immanuel Wilkins, and Joshua Myers. Through this constellation, the talk considers how transmedial exposure might help us imagine a future for an experimental humanities—one that, amid the present crisis of the university and the broader threats of xenophobia, neo-fascism, and genocide, embraces experimentation, improvisation, and risk as vital ethico-political practices.
Erin Graff Zivin is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California, where she is Director of the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab.
Phil Hoskins
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