Sensate Cinema

In 2018, artist and archivist Cori Olinghouse and UMBC Assistant Professor of Visual Art Jules Rosskam formed a long-term research collaboration, Practices for Slow Encounters. Bringing their respective forms of documentary filmmaking and performance into conversation they ask: “How do we look with the body, not at the body?” Rosskam and Olinghouse will engage the diverse learning community of UMBC in their praxis-based research through a series of public programs including a screening of short film/video works and an experimental lecture. These events follow their workshop Camera-Body, a workshop for cinematic arts and dance makers presented through CIRCA in spring 2020.

Sensate Cinema is a program of contemporary short film and video works that use the cinema as a space for exploring connections between sensation and perception. Works by AM Baggs, Sky Hopinka, Steffani Jemison, Simon Liu, Eliot Montague, and Jordan Lord stage a multiplicity of interventions between subject/object, orality/textuality, and legibility/illegibility. Collectively they chart varied and distinct explorations on a co-present horizon.

Organizers Cori Olinghouse and Jules Rosskam say this about the program:

This program exists as part of our on-going research project, Practices for Slow Encounters. As such, we have created--in collaboration with other artists and scholars--supplementary ‘playlists’ for each of the works in the above program. We do this, in part, to highlight the interdisciplinary thinking that undergirds our research methodologies, and as an offering to the filmmakers for participating in this program. These playlists are a practice (and process) of world-making; one we hope you will join in building. Each film currently has a Google Folder, where you will find materials that relate--sometimes explicitly, sometimes obliquely--to the work.

After the screening, instructions for participation will be made available.

Image credit: Photograph by Simon Liu, pictured: Fallen Arches (2018)