Monday, April 04, 2022 - 12:40 p.m. to 2 p.m.
Online
The Communication Department Colloquium Series presents:
KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell
In this talk, coauthors Ben Caldwell and Taj Frazier discuss their forthcoming book, KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell (Angel City Press, Fall 2023). The book combines narrative history with multimedia and archival materials to explore the community-engaged media and art practices of filmmaker Ben Caldwell and the L.A.-based media-arts lab he established in 1984, KAOS Network. The authors' presentation will highlight several of the media and artistic works featured in the book, as well as detail aspects of their five-year research on this book, travels together, and collaborations on other projects.
BIOs
Ben Caldwell is a Los Angeles-based arts educator and independent filmmaker. A native of New Mexico, Caldwell studied filmmaking at UCLA. Caldwell’s work has been shown nationally and internationally, most recently at LAMAG and at the Tate Modern. Caldwell founded the KAOS Network community arts centre in Leimert Park, LA, a community art/tech accelerator center dedicated to providing training on digital arts, media arts and multimedia, at the heart of Leimert Park, historic center of the Los Angeles jazz culture, now hosting a diverse multi-ethnic multimedia arts center.
Dr. Robeson Taj Frazier is a writer and professor of communication in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California and director of IDEA (the Institute for Diversity and Empowerment at Annenberg). His research explores Black and Afro-diasporic political and popular cultures in the U.S. and elsewhere, with specific focus on histories and current-day dynamics of race/racism, masculinity, cross-cultural contact and fellowship, and urban media and artistic practices. He is the author of The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination (Duke University Press, 2014) and producer of the documentary film It’s Yours: A Story About Hip Hop and the Internet ( 2019).
Zoom Meeting ID: 873 318 8272
