Cameron Clark is a joint Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Media Analysis and Practice at Vanderbilt University. He received his Master’s degree in English with a specialization in film, visual culture, and digital media from Michigan State University, where he also served as an editorial and production assistant for The Journal of Popular Culture. His research is broadly invested in how aesthetics and politics mutually inform one another in post-45 global film movements and Anglophone world literatures. Cameron’s work primarily makes interventions in queer theory, women of color feminisms, postcolonial and decolonial theory, ecocriticism, and black studies.
Personal Goals for CMAP 8010 - Creative Media Practice:
- Become proficient in video and sound editing on Adobe Premiere
- Gain practice with DSLR cameras and high-quality sound recording devices
- Work with found footage and create video collage art
- Put theory into the service of aesthetic practice
Inspiration for "The Black Glitch"
- #POWERVHS, an online digital video omnibus project compiled by Rafia Santana as a "9-artist visual mixtape that was born out of a need to see black and brown women and queer femme/non-binary artists as masters of their own image and overseers of their own practice in a hyper-masculine white world that overvalues itself"
- Installation art by E. Jane, Lavendra/Recovery (Iteration, No. 1) and Alive (Not Yet Dead), 2015.
- Breathing metaphors in these artworks and in recent publications for black studies (Christina Sharpe, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Jared Sexton, among others)
Santana, Rafia, Sondra Perry, María José, Elizabeth Mputu, Nandi Loaf, Angelina Fernández, Reagan Holiday, Michelle Marie Charles, and Hattie Ball. #POWERVHS. Vimeo, July 2016, https://vimeo.com/174964173.
E. Jane, Alive (Not Yet Dead), 2015. Interactive NewHive Installation. Installed at UT Austin for Queer Territories, Nov. 2016. "The project began as a response to police brutality, specifically after there was no indictment for the murder of Sandra Bland in January 2015. The project aims to defy the narrative of Black women and femmes as only dead and dying at the hands of the police by focusing on the women who are still here, still alive, still resisting."
The Process & Problems:
To glitch the found footage, I used Photomosh, a free online software program that creates jpgs and gifs of glitched imagery. I overlaid these gifs with other footage from recent documentaries to further create a glitching effect as it pertained to each individual section of the project.
I personally wavered back and forth between creating an academic video essay or my own video art collage. As Professor Rattner explained, the former requires thinking in a theoretical mode, while the latter lies more in thinking in a poetic mode. I believe my final piece actually straddles the line between both dispositions.
Where is the breaking point, the breath, the pause, where the circulation, production, and reception of images of Black suffering and, importantly, the pleasure in them are concerned? (Christina Sharpe, In The Wake, 126).
My Project— The Black Glitch:
In the “Glitch Studies Manifesto,” Rosa Menkman proposes, “Use the glitch as an exoskeleton for progress. Find catharsis in disintegration, ruptures, and cracks; manipulate, bend and break any medium towards the point where it becomes something new; create glitch art.”
Rather than simply champion disintegration and rupture, however, "The Black Glitch" asks what happens when glitch aesthetics are created from an embodied position, condition, or sensation that is already imagined as noise, failure, manipulatable, bent, and breaking? By centering black studies and breathing within the creation of glitch art, I argue that an impending system crash evoked by glitch design offers a means to register state violence against jeopardized bodies. Yet, far from being mired in negativity, glitches also presents strategies for creating and sustaining black life worlds beyond the impediments of racial capitalism and its atmospheric effects.
My argument is that a strategy of black glitch aesthetics is to mimic the suppression, holding, or quickening of breath, the heaving of the body in irregular rhythms, as a solemn record of state and atmospheric violence. Glitchiness registers a process of something going awry, and it brings attention to a non-linear and anti-teleological mobility without a distinct spatial orientation. For contemporary digital and installation artists such as Rafia Santana, Sondra Perry, Elizabeth Mputu, E. Jane, among others, black glitch aesthetics map the precarious, unsustainable infrastructure of the Internet—that is, the potential system failure of “the cloud” and the vulnerability to hacking or theft—onto the conditions of black lives and the collapse of ecosystems. At the same time, however, these artists deploy and subsequently repair glitches to seek a return toward wholeness, a fullness of breath, respite, and communal recovery. Glitch aesthetics are thus not mere general disruptions that validate medium disintegration; rather, through the lens of black studies, glitch art urges us to track the effects of racial capitalism and to also affirm more life beyond the impediments of the present-past.
Future Research:
This Maymester course has impacted my research more broadly in three ways: first, my work in video and sound editing has made me a better close-reader for films; second, this process has given me more appreciation for the craft of editing; and lastly, it has helped me to expand and focalize my interests more in CMAP and its relationship to my home department in English.