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Kara Keeling
Associate Professor, Cinema Studies, University of Southern California

On 鈥淒igitopia鈥�: Blackness, Technology, and the Digital Frame
Abstract: Questions concerning technology have long been part of Black film studies. Indeed, as John Akomfrah points out in 鈥淒igitopia and the Spectres of Diaspora," the extent to which anti-black racism is inherent in the film apparatus itself has been of concern to those film and media scholars and makers who have sought to craft theories, analyses, films and videos capable of transforming existing race relations by revealing another organization of things within the cinematic.鈦� For Akomfrah, the history of debate, analysis, experimentation, and failure within analogue media forms, such as film and video, that raise the possibility that those forms might support anti-racist and/or Black media practices point towards what he calls a 鈥渄igitopic desire鈥� or a 鈥渄igitopic yearning鈥� that haunts the history of analogue media praxis.听 Akomfrah argues that such a 鈥渄igitopia,鈥� perceptible throughout film history, anticipates today鈥檚 digital media technologies and is fulfilled by them. In this talk, I consider Akomfrah鈥檚 proposition concerning the potential of digital media technology. While Akomfrah reads the preoccupation with the technologies of media making within the history of Black film praxis as the presence of a yearning for today鈥檚 digital technologies, I argue that digital media technologies, like the analogue ones to which they are related, raise a series of issues about the ongoing centrality of technology and techn膿 to Black existence. Rather than fulfilling a promise made and broken by celluloid and other analogue media technologies, digital media intensifies elements constitutive of the cinematic by making them more broadly perceptible. As Akomfrah points out, digital media technologies make the mode of production of audio-visual images more accessible to filmmakers whose access to image-making has been structurally limited. New possibilities for creative exploration and imaginative experimentation, including new strategies for improvisation with audio-visual images, open up for those filmmakers because the barriers to production are less formidable than with the more capital intensive technologies. At the same time, the greater accessibility of digital media technologies makes it possible to renew an interrogation of historical relationships between technology and Blackness in ways that, perhaps, reach beyond any digital frame.

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