Border Cantos: Resonance, Art, and the Politics of Migration

The lecture by Lutz Koepnick takes the works by ,post-mexican’ sound artist Guillermo Galindo as impetus to reflect on politics of resonant objects and relations. During the last years Galindo often utilized found objects from precarious border regions to create unique musical instruments which sounds should put contemporary border demarcations and power structures acoustically into question.

In his lecture, Koepnick discusses Galindo’s works and performances as part of an aesthetic strategy to conceptualize resonant objects against the demarcation of political space in the 21^st Century. At the same time, he also puts his reflections in a theoretical framework within a bigger book project on questions of Resonance and Sound Art of the present time.

Lutz Koepnick is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of German, Cinema and Media Arts at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he also chairs the Department of German, Russian and East European Studies and serves as the director of the joint-Ph.D. program in Comparative Media Analysis and Practice (CMAP). He received a Joint-Ph.D. in 1994 in German Studies and Humanities from Stanford University.

Koepnick has published widely on film, media theory, visual culture, new media aesthetic, and intellectual history from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. He is the author of Michael Bay: World Cinema in the Age of Populism (2018); The Long Take: Art Cinema and the Wondrous (2017); On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary (2014); Framing Attention: Windows on Modern German Culture (2007); The Dark Mirror: German Cinema between Hitler and Hollywood (2002); Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power (1999); and of Nothungs Modernität: Wagners Ring und die Poesie der Politik im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (1994). Koepnick is the co-author of Windows | Interface (2007), [Grid ‹ › Matrix]  (2006), and the co-editor of various anthologies on ambiguity in contemporary art and theory, the culture of neoliberalism, German cinema, sound. culture, new media aesthetics, aesthetic theory, and questions of exile. His current book projects include a monograph on Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo and a book on the role of resonance in contemporary sound art.