The Department of English presents the 2015 Goldtrap Lecture
Guest speaker: Sarah Kanouse: “My Electric Geneaology”
The network of high-voltage transmission lines connecting Los Angeles to its far-flung sources of power evolved over decades. For nearly forty years my grandfather was intimately involved with the planning, design, and management of this system. An engineer with an artist’s eye, he photographed in- novations in electrical delivery with one foot in the aesthetic and another in the techno-scientific sublime. These images project into a future of their own obsolescence, and transmis- sion towers now stand as monuments to climate change, even as it escalates and unfolds. This performative presentation weaves together images, objects, and auto/biography to ex- plore aging electrical infrastructure as inter-generational cli- mate debt.
Sarah Kanouse is Associate Professor of Intermedia and College of Liberal Arts Dean’s Scholar at the University of Iowa. Her research-based creative projects trace the production and contestation of landscape through material, legal, and ecological forces. She has published on performative and site-based contemporary art practices in Art Journal, Acme, Leonardo, Parallax and in the forthcoming volume Critical Landscapes (University of California Press).
Monday, March 9 4 p.m. South Ballroom, Memorial Union Free and open to the public