My Way: Youtube Performance and Remaking
Amie Siegel, Harvard Visual and Environmental Studies
Tuesday, May 4, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
Artist Amie Siegel will discuss and show works from her "My Way" series. Her videos appropriate amateur performance videos posted on Youtube, reconstructing how image posting and response -- and the online communities dedicated to their propagation -- performs the mass-identified narrative of individualism that capitalism proposes. The "My Way" videos reveal issues of gender-specificity, sexual orientation, race, globalization and marketing within the larger codings of belonging and isolation, sameness and difference this vast aggregation of online video documents evokes.
About Amie
Amie Siegel is Assistant Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University.
Born 1974 in Chicago, Illinois, Amie lives and works in Berlin, New York and Cambridge, MA. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BA from Bard College.
Amie Siegel works variously in 16mm and 35mm film, video, sound and writing. Siegel uses the cinematic image as material means to a conceptual end. Her work mines the voyeuristic gaze, direct address and interview to consider how these repetitions shape cultural memory. In multi-channel video and film installations, Siegel reformulates cinematic enterprises—including the establishing shot, the remake and the tracking shot—as uncanny reflections on absence, historical disorientation and nostalgia. Longer videos and feature films move between spontaneous and scripted spaces, truth and fiction, shifting performance from identification to parody and estrangement.