 Hello! How are we doing? Feeling good after lunch? Perfect. All right, so let's go ahead and get started in the next few moments. Thank you. So I'm sure a few of you have already heard a few times today so I'm sorry that I'm repeating it it's getting annoying at this point but I am Brianna Williams and I'm a lecturer in the Comparative Media Studies and Writing Department here at MIT. This afternoon I will be introducing Dr. Kelly Moore, Associate Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU, and the author of the newly released work Legal Spectatorship, Slavery and the Visual Culture of Domestic Violence which I highly recommend by the way. A bearing witness seeking justice we hope to incorporate creative forms of media namely visual media and our development of new frameworks for social justice. In Dr. Moore's work she furthers our understanding of how the image of domestic violence has altered and can continue to alter legal and extra legal spaces. She does so by examining how witness testimony and witness flesh is translated and transformed once absorbed into legal processes and the political knowledge surrounding domestic violence. She encovers historical and ongoing efforts by state powers to subjugate the presentation of both the crime and the victims without full regard for their autonomy or consent ultimately compromising their agency as they seek justice. It's not difficult to expand our interpretation of the domestic sphere and projected implications beyond the private household. In our national home the United States and beyond its borders state-sanctioned violence occurs daily and it's the images of these abuse, their uses, interpretations, their transmutations that have often maintained the recurrence of a violent history but now offer us the tools with which we can redefine that history. If only we hold fast to our agency as Dr. Moore posits, do mediation, authentication and solidarity. Since earning her PhD at UC San Diego completing her postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley and publishing extensively Dr. Morris found a new home for her vital research. At the Center for the Humanities she continues exploring the potential of a method used in her past work courtroom watching to further expose media history, its use of trauma narratives and the popularization of certain forms of evidence some real and others falsified. No doubt understanding the pre-existing frameworks that define courtroom aesthetics will allow us further agency and forming our own in the pursuit of justice, namely legal justice, which is why I'm so excited today to be introducing Dr. Kelly Moore in her presentation moving images in absentia courtroom looking in the age of hyper mediation. Welcome Kelly. Thank you very much Brianna for that very kind introduction and I want to express my tremendous gratitude to Professor Kenneth Manning for hosting this event and inviting me to it very generous very generous invitation as well as Samantha Fletcher who helped with a number of link logistical issues and everyone else who whose hands and labor touched this conference in any way. Thank you so much. It's been really wonderful to be here and I would like to also think the fellow fellow scholars here who's critical instead of the public who has passed efforts toward the question of visual culture and criminal justice are shifting our ability to understand what so many repressed and silenced communities have already known and experienced of the mediation of criminal justice and its origins in the Anglo-American legal context. So I am a scholar whose work brings together law, media, black studies and I'm interested in how we come to the milios through which we come to the truth, the architectures that we use, the spaces that we inhabit to come to legal decisions. I'm interested in questions of what makes something testimonial and that's what I'll talk about today using some materials from my book and then if there's time and that's actually maybe the better argument, if there's time I'll talk about a project that comes out of my first monograph. This symposium is brought together a number of leading scholars conducting some of our deepest inquiries into the identity and origins of photographic evidence, the effective dimension of photographic evidence, videography and its influence on expressive and narrative legal cultures. The work has expanded the analytical lens of video by emphasizing the sonic elements of videography making ways of hearing the image co-eval with ways of seeing the image. Importantly these timely projects here at the conference do not take for granted the presumption of the availability of the audience as structuring of the history of witnessing and its political importance. The need for evidentiary photography and moving images assumes an audience to view it, post it, like it, tweet it, comment, follow, curate. This is where I'll try to ought to focus a few interventions and provocations. This afternoon my remarks are concerned with the interaction of law and visual culture in the era of ubiquitous social media and I will submit there are our political moment where we depend less and less on formerly trained media professionals i.e traditional journalists for documentation of state oppression in a time of greater awareness of cultures and amnesia where the routines of police work are ever more scrutinized by a techno-savvy public we need to return to those spaces where the live production of recording is forbidden. Absented, erased, confiscated, left unthought, under theorized to comprehend the limits of public witnessing in order to strategize where to push further to access a more thoughtful critique, more transformed justice, more life. I'll put the provocation up first. Is it possible that the democratization and decentralization of the so of social media technology we use to proliferate our witnessing participates in the centralization of state control through courtroom power? Second, how do we put into conversation the fact that the U.S. public that in the U.S. public witnessing is on the increase in the same political moment courtroom trials are on the decline and I'll talk more about that. Legal scholar Jocelyn Simonsen draws our attention to our current post-trial world in which 95 percent of criminal convictions result from plea bargains meaning that juries have fewer roles and responsibilities to represent the public in courtroom trials. Today, bearing witness is mediated by Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok in ways that should make us curious for the whereabouts of juries but also and more importantly wonder about the status of the courtroom and its audience which is to say that bearing witness should also happen in the courtroom more. This talk is about the space and social dynamics of courtrooms where photography and videography are interdicted. As such my talk today focuses on the control over recording visual evidence in the courtroom milieu and by courtroom milieu I mean the historical communication pathways between law enforcement's criminal investigation and the players in the courtroom judges, police, attorneys, court officers, juries and the audience. I suggest that the absence of photography and videography has a binary and closed circuit relation to the proliferation of photography and videography which demand our attention. The proliferation of citizen photography and videography and analysis must be understood as a system of cybernetic control which I'll explain a little bit later. In the spirit of a feminist killjoy, I'll offer some cautionary points and clarifications concerning the social media transformation of public witnessing and its interdisciplinary study. These points and clarifications will draw from examples from my own study of the ascendance of visual evidence in domestic violence in the U.S. courtroom and public culture. I'll then turn to how this study expanded into a founding of a court watch at my university. So I came to this project through looking at coming across images of battered women in a life a few couple of lifetimes ago when I was working in a courthouse as a researcher in New York. And I'm going to show a couple of those images and this is sort of I guess it's my trigger warning which I completely deconstruct with students. The images, a few of them are authentic but the majority of them are art and performance pieces. These are cosmetically simulated domestic violence images. This is an actress whose name I forget and a model. These are images used to advertise public awareness of domestic violence. This one here for the Baltimore Ravens and the Superbowl and the uptick in domestic violence during the Superbowl and this is another just an interview with an actress I believe for People Magazine where they stage her in this way because reasons. These are faked images. Images like these began for me a macabre connoisseurship of some really unsavory digital files and this is the conference for that because I think I've learned all of these colors here have this collection of really unsavory material. And one of the affordances of social media is its flexibility in modifying filtering deconstructing and simulating the truth. While trick photography has been around since the inception of the medium and rituals of cosmetics even longer the ubiquity of social media particularly digital photography has brought ever more opportunities to fake it. Faking it in this case in this case the wounds of domestic abuse using social media has also made its way into law. When I allowed myself to be led by representational motif and genre as is typical in photography studies these images were about violence against women. What Marianne Hirsch studies among other things is the idea of post-memory they were about that. They had also to do with the shadow archive of 19th century domestic portraiture. They have to do with what Karen Shimakawa Karen Shimakawa might call national objection. The sauciness of the images and here I'll show you this image of Donna Ferrado as a photographer who is embedded with a husband and wife named Garth and Lisa in early 1980s. She was working for an issue of Japanese playboy on counter-cultural marriages and so she was embedded living with them with her young child at the time and she's following them around and one night she witnesses this fight and she very famously documents this violence. Ferrado's piece was cut for being obscene and she cut a lot of flak for taking the picture rather than intervening right. I'll show you with this other photograph I'm going to show it quickly it's of the artist Anna Mendieta who while she was getting her MFA at University of Iowa she was by the way known for working with animal blood a lot of the male artists were doing the same. A murder happened while she was in school and what she was moved to engage in a series of performances which she called Tableau of Violence where she read the police material about the described this murder of this young woman on campus and she sort of replicated what the police found and she invited some friends over to her home one evening posed in the way that this young woman's body had been found she didn't say anything to the guest it was a project that involved duration and she is sloped over a table here's the image really quickly and eventually the the folks that she invited to her home started taking photographs and talked about what they saw. Anna Mendieta was herself a victim of domestic violence and her husband the minimalist sculptor Carl Andre was accused of pushing her out of a high-race building many years later and like as I said this was a project that was part of her early juvenile you might you might call it and I got interested in this period of feminist art performance it's a moment in the 1980s where they were calls by critical white feminist artists who were saying what we need to do is stop following the tradition the male tradition of representing our bodies and take our bodies out of circulation stop appearing nude in our art stop making our art be about our naked form and what made me interested in these images given what I had shown you about the faked domestic violence public public awareness campaigns was the fact that these women were not doing that these artists and photo journalists were were straying from that and what I found really compelling was that though these are forms of art performance they were actually mimicking a new form of police photography of domestic violence of battered women and I would be remiss if I didn't tell you that it's precisely this these kinds of images that got the police to take domestic violence seriously right previously for decades the police would ask Carl the husband to take a walk around the block right and nothing really was done about about what was happening domestically here is another of the famous photographer Nan Golden this is a an authentic image the image she calls the image Nan one month after being beaten and she it's an image of her with a black eye that she received from an ex-boyfriend and she's also put rouge put makeup on her face sorry okay this is an image that she would show regularly in an art performance piece that that she did in the 1980s very famous photograph of her and what was compelling about this image is the makeup and the bruise together in all of these cosmetically simulated images what i find compelling is the fact that makeup is being used in a in a radical makeup is being radicalized right makeup is being used in this activist way makeup being sort of one of the one of the essences of feminine masquerade like one of the ways that you highlight femininity one of the ways that you highlight womanhood and so i was quite interested in the ways that makeup could be used by these female these women activists in this way in this particular image that i just showed you kind of has those two things going on at the same time okay so how did we get to this place of advertising law by circulating faked images of the very real evidence needed during domestic violence trials rather than exclusively following the configuration of women's bodies in these images right where have i seen this configuration of bodies before right rather than ask that question the motifs of genre that i've that have organized film and these are the motifs and genres that have organized film and photography free studies i was led instead by the dominant terms we use to refer to these images images of battered women pictures of intimate partner violence domestic violence images of dv the images are used to advertise the medical legal term is sorry these images are used to advertise the medical legal terms for a particular kind of victim of a particular violent crime these images were also used to bring awareness to policy changes brought about by the bipartisan efforts of the violence against women act of 1994 which we'll talk more about shortly what i wanted to do however was not merely tell the story of these images in terms of their the more prominent content but rather to see what forms of law were represented through the image and so i was really thinking about domestic violence that term and if you are in any way connected to the court system or the social service world you know that dv is a shorthand a shorthand that's commonly used to describe these kinds of crimes so i realized that i had seen dv elsewhere and it's in the united states constitution in article four section for the guarantee clause which says the united states shall guarantee to every state of the union a republican form of government and shall protect each one of them against invasion on the application of the legislature or the executive when the legislature cannot be convened against domestic violence so it's quite interested in how this little d big v can become and this is the argument of the book that little d big v can become big d big v and what i mean by big d big v is the way that those two letters appear in court documents to signify a domestic violence case it's a way of quickly identifying through the docket number might be 2004 dv and then a series of other numbers that's a quick way for you to identify through court documents that this is a domestic violence trial and that that sign opens up those particular cases for particular forms of analysis and monitoring that are quite different than other criminal cases or other other forms of charges so this book is really about this transformation which i argue is a transformation that has to do with the archive of slavery it has to do with the evidence the archival history of new world slavery even when that evidence appears to not be present right so even when the voices or lives of slaves appear to be absent from art from the archive that absence is actually a presence since i wanted to bring the archive of slavery to bear upon this change a change that begins to code legal files are you with me does that make some sense okay so the interesting thing about this moment in the constitution this guarantee clause is that the united states is becoming a republic it cannot be a monarchy it cannot be a dictatorship though maybe it can be but it has to be a republic and in the moment of the constitution when this is being debated this clause by the southern and northern states the southern states interpret domestic violence the little d big v they interpret that as the utter cultural and economic catastrophe that will ensue should slaves become free so domestic violence is not what you think it is right it is actually about a debate of black folks gaining freedom and so the image of domestic violence and i i use some abolitionist photography the image of domestic violence early on might be lithographs or engravings of the civil union army attacking southern plantations that's domestic violence so how do we get from an image like that to these image that i just that i began the talk with that's just really what the book is about and what i try to do is to take attention away from the intimate romantic couple and the visual evidence used to adjudicate it and throw attention more on to the neighbor the intimacies of the police interacting with with with citizens okay i'm gonna fast forward a lot in black studies particularly black feminist theorists this memoir slave memoir is extremely important it is the incidence of a life of a slave girl by Harriet Jacobs who very famously hid in a garret for seven years on her captor's property and had a people in the garret that she was hiding in and through that garret could see her children playing and her children didn't know that she was hidden away in this space for this amount of time and in the book i make a connection between that garret space with the people and the camera obscura which is a really important and foundational pedagogical tool for those folks who study visual culture and photography and film and i won't explain how the camera obscura works but it's a very similar form that i could that you can imagine in the photography what that you can imagine in the the slave memoir but also that gets made here by a white artist named ellen driscoll who renders Harriet Jacobs loophole of retreat as she called it i also think about this social media crazy dilemma about the dress and the different ways you could see the color the signification of the color blue and how the salvation army would hack that campaign and say why is it so hard to see black and blue right what you should be gathering here and much of the evidence that i've shown you are that these are images of white women's bodies the white women's body this is a really old art history and visual culture argument that's nothing really new there um but what what i what it allows me to say is that if we go back to this um guarantee clause and we know that domestic violence had been something else having to do with black freedom but it makes us ask about this that what's being that something is being ghosted here and it's the freedom struggles of black folk okay i won't go through this one but you should take a look at it later um as another pedagogical tool i look at the power and control wheel this is the sort of cybernetic aspect of things this feedback loop that is used as a pedagogical tool in court cases um and the reason i call this a cybernetic thing is that um cybernetics is a is a is a language it's a way of describing the division of labor of machines how do you program a robot to be able to do labor and this kind of circular wheel cycle function is a similar way of describing a feedback loop of the the exchange of the power dynamic between the couple and these are tools that attorneys and experts will use in court domestic violence court cases to help explain to the jury why women stay in these cases and why they sometimes um for very good complicated reasons sabotage their own cases why they they be overwhelming majority of women do not want to participate in this okay so quickly this leads me to another project which i'm calling critical marginalia um this is yeah this text appears somewhat small but as i said at the beginning um you cannot bring any recording materials into a courtroom you have to be low tech it is an extremely low tech environment and the first and sixth amendment of the constitution are both a right they are interlocking amendments meaning that we have the right to assemble and we have the right to a trial of one's peers we have the right to be seen being accused and those two um those two amendments interact interlock again i'm using the work of jocelyn sidenson um so we have the right duty and obligation as audience members not juries but audience members to be in a court so i bring my students in this class i've created this court watch clinic and we go and we have i give them a notebook i insist that the notebook be anonymized and they go and deal with the overwhelming boredom utter boredom and confusion of the courtroom they have no idea what's going on these are folks um my campus is really international they've they revealed to me that they've never been to a courthouse in their own country they've never been to one in this country it's incredible for them it gets them moving um and it gets them telling a different set of stories and i was very intrigued um a by elissa richardson's book which i adore um but also her talk yesterday and she really um digs into the photographs and to what the photographs and what holding a camera in a student holding a camera can the power of that and i actually want to make a somewhat different argument there's something about the courtroom space where the phone is not a tool is not available to young people that forces you to go low tech and low fi and it forces you to draw and it forces you to write and what i find interesting is when i um have students they they engage in drawing activities such as this they engage they have to write in language that accounts for themselves in the courthouse they have to deal with the the grindiness the smelliness of the american court system the courts are often in disrepair there's a reason for that um i have a student who um you know they get up they get tied into how out of date and old and grimy things are rather than taking a photograph and saying we got the picture we're woke we understand we have the critique what my study is suggesting because it's located in the courtroom you is these folks do not are not ideologically the same they do not carry the same ideas about what it means to document evidence precisely because they are meant to deal with the utter boredom and confusion of legal language it slows everything down in a way that your ability to use a smartphone does not do and so i i highly recommend this as a pedagogical and storytelling potential um another um this is a woman who's from korea who was got really tied into the clothing that they wear these are also folks that you can see have a manga practice who very quickly are able to engage in storyboarding and that's how that's how cognitively they're able to process the confusion and and boredom of the courtroom i like the circle that she's making this feedback loop that she comes to make um people question the architecture of the court they end up questioning what women are wearing what what defendants are wearing right you really have to ask yourselves i mean i where i asked myself what is it that i have here in these reflections and these images that they're drawing i don't think i have anything but i think that there is something here precisely when you put it into context when you read it against the smartphone and what it can do and the speed with which people can very quickly capture an image um and with the the kind of ideological unity or commonality that we assume is in place in the moment of bearing witness here's another um that really sort of documents very nicely the slow creep of the smartphone in the courtroom when court watchers when sorry when court officers bodies are at rest they get bored and they bust out the phone and they're not allowed to but they do it anyway so the phone is slowly making its way into into the court system and that find i find that fascinating um let's see these are moments also where rather than meeting the police in the streets you're meeting them on their turf you're meeting them or we're meeting my students i are meeting them in their home and it makes them very nervous and they start being excessively nice but sometimes they let something slip they say things under their breath and these are really interesting moments for us to capture without the use of without the use of a phone this is a student i'm compelled by this image because of the way that she shows the shackled hands and the back um i might you know i would put this into conversation with the history of reading the back um in in images the archive of slavery but also images of criminality the sagging back what that means effectively one of the things that i tried to do in the book is take the attention away from um all of the affect of reading the face but located in reading other aspects of the body flesh the way that your head hangs etc so conclusions here i'm just restating the um the the provocation about the the closed circuit relationship between evidence and the state the state controls it all they control the authentic images but they also control the fake ones and we need to be cognizant of that i want to also suggest that their um that the courtroom audience their lives and the way that they move through the audience is an absolute labor history we need to understand it that way and that um what they produce in terms of the drawings um and and and and reflections with reflected diverse set of ideologies they do not agree they are not all left-wing they are and they have some very conservative ideas um and they those ideas are present in the moment of the court system rather than what we might assume or prefer they believe and following toran monahan um the interaction between law and counter archival or surveillance practices which are these forms of critical marginalia that i'm talking about they may serve to blunt their radical potential because as he says as people are entrained to participate in systems of data production they become compliant surveillance subjects whose labor generates value for others often unbeknownst to them end quote such that quote the very mechanisms that allow for and encourage participation by users in data creation also afford opportunities for artistic and for interventions that illustrate the insidious logic of supposedly rational systems i could answer questions about any of those things um or i'll be happy to clear up any other things okay thank you the question i'm curious kali how did violence against the state legally become violence against the flesh and then eventually violence against feminine white flesh in the book um i talk about i try to orient the question fundamentally to the violence of new world slavery and what that means in terms of restricting the freedom of black bodies i use the work of hortense spillers to try and answer that question where she makes this very famous distinction between the flesh and body and lots of scholars have dug into that moment in her text where she makes that distinction the flesh is something as i read her that can be used to um you can control the body but there's something also there's something um different or extra about the ability to control the flesh and i think that that meaning in her in her text changes and i try to show that through the way that the look the ideal look of the domestic violence evidence begins to appear as a white woman whose body is used as a blank canvas to show us what domestic violence should look like and when you put that in conversation with the cosmetically simulated images what you get is a sort of nice way to train people on how to see these photos in court right the at my fundamental argument or one of my arguments is that the court controls them both and it opens up by by my saying that it opens up questions around what kind of um art practices do certain groups engage in if you were to look at an art history of black women art performances you don't begin to see bare breasts of of black women artists artists until late in the game that's not the case with the way that white women um are engaging in radical art practices the way that they use their bodies and you could and i wouldn't i mean this is a very American centric project i realized but i really would like to see myself in conversation with um the way that other folks are theorizing our our practices i hope that makes sense it does thank you all right so i'm going to start at the right right side of the room with questions and then we'll move over to the left i'm a doctoral student at brown university in modern culture and media and my work is actually on the trial as a narrative form so this talk and your book have been really really inspirational for me and i was wondering because you mentioned at the beginning of uh your talk that public like we're at the highest point of public witnessing in the united states while the actual courtroom trial is decreasing yeah and i think uh first i think it's interesting that some of like the most high profile like media mediated trials have been civil trials recently with the amber heard johnny deb case and then i've personally been watching the live stream of alice jones's defamation trials um and i was wondering how this kind of decrease how do you think this decrease in like the actual trial like actual case is going to trial squares with maybe the popularity of true crime media but also kind of in like sleuthing and the act of kind of investigating especially on social media in general it feels very interesting that in reality like there's not that many cases but it seems like yeah yeah um i think the the camera obscura i think can help us think about your question which is i think a very good one thank you um that this was a scientific object the camera obscura it reveals natural phenomena and it's used for scientific purposes but as you see oh you don't see it uh thank you um as you see uh these other quadrants this is used by the bourgeoisie as a as a as a leisure as a form of entertainment right so particularly you know in the west there is a long cultural tradition of inhabiting machines and even the lives of others for entertainment purposes and i think that's part or a lot of what's going on and people's appreciation of true crime um lifetime television for women there are even uh i was at a legal studies conference this summer and heard a wonderful talk about um conferences that happen in in las vegas that are about uh women staging themselves in you know these horrific you know violence against women acts um as a form of of leisure activity right as something that's interesting to watch that's that's fun um the same ways that we like or similar ways that we enjoy horror other sorts of genres that seem distasteful they are very very pleasurable and i'm quite interested in and describing what kind of aesthetic category do we need to describe that feeling or that the participation in those kinds of activities um yeah i hope that answers it hello excuse me excuse me charise leprey associate professor at new house how are you i i have two kind of very divergent points but um one of which i can't and going through your talk i can't help thinking about todd atkin achin and his comment i think he passed away a few years ago about legitimate rape right and legitimate rape women have a whole women's bodies have a whole way of shutting that thing down um and you know this idea of what is legitimate violence and what is illegitimate violence and when we talk about violence against say black and brown bodies and we've had those conversations um that it's technically legitimized right because it's part of the rules of state and so on and so forth but at the same time the emphasis on visual evidence keeps us from understanding say emotional violence so i think i don't really have a question but i feel like there's this real intersecting positionality of what we can bear witness to what we can see versus what we can't see and what we choose not to see yeah um with respect to the racialized understanding of what is legitimate violence against which bodies yeah thank you um i your talk makes me think again about these instruments these power and control wheels and all the things that are not represented the archive of slavery is not in this in these instruments um and the assumptions that we bring to these instruments are that the and and this is borne out in in the in the cases is that we are always thinking that these are cases of female victims and male perpetrators and that is what you see overwhelmingly it's what i saw overwhelmingly um in the ethnographic work i did watching these trials but the dynamic here describes the trans couple it describes the queer couple um it describes all couples it describes female perpetrators as well and so i think your your comment really makes me um think about that and and really try to i would like to think that the book can open that question up too that that we're in this moment where we're you know finally celebrating queer lives and people loving who they like but there is uh there's a whole bunch of work that's going to need to come out about violence and control in those relationships as well and how that goes down just as it does for street folks and very briefly the other note that i wanted was um and that work is already ongoing sorry is uh and not to make it about myself today is my fifth year anniversary and so i'm here and my husband is not um but we got married in the courthouse right and so you know thinking through that experience of there was only two couples getting married that day and all of our families were there to literally bear witness to this courtroom process but there were also people who were there for courtroom processes and i think the woman that i remember most clearly was the woman who was bearing witness to our wedding unintentionally because she had something else coming up after we did this whole marriage thing for these happy couples and i really am excited about the idea of what it means to bear witness in a courtroom when there is no videography or that you can participate in that videography is taken out of the hands of the people and i don't know it now i'm just i really wonder who that woman was and i kind of want to go back and find out who bear witness to our wedding our marriage uh for very very different reasons very very different reasons thank you there were two very different contracts being put into play your marriage contract and her perhaps way of using visual evidence to contract her way into the violence against women act which is the this act that takes the pressure off of the victim to charge the batterer right it's not women it's not the victim who brings those cases it's the state right that discretion is that agency is taken off of the victim's hands for all sorts of reasons i'm quite interested in how the law ends up having to do that given the the nature of the kind of power control dynamic that's being described here which i which has just haunted me for for the longest time thank you for that yeah my name is jakes aslo and i was really fascinated by your discussion of boredom and i think attention and coming from a music background there's a lot of ambient music studies about how in a space where there is little that's actually going on the attention tends to really hone in on very different topics than you would in a much busier context which i think you discussed greatly with your students at reservations so i was wondering for you personally though what do you tend to notice in those places of boredom what really begins to draw your eyes in those courtrooms um i'm really a theory person so i i'm really interested in what the boredom might suggest and the ways that boredom has to be an overcome and i use a theorist theorists by the name of cn nye to talk about that she's i think one of the most offered some of the most intelligent thinking about aesthetic categories and she has this idea of she sort of looks at the history of affect an emotion and how we study it in in liberal cultures and the emphasis when we're in studies of emotions the human affect system let's say and feelings the emphasis is always on what she calls the grand affects shame joy anger really big topics really big grand affects but her she wants to place emphasis on something that she calls the minor affects confusion concern disorientation boredom those things don't seem very serious but she makes this really interesting political argument that it's precisely those minor affects of which awkwardness is included that we really need to turn to to address problems in a liberal democracy it's precisely the when awkwardness has the power to stall a conversation that confusion actually produces all sorts of legitimate misunderstandings amongst groups and people and individuals that that where cross talk ends up happening and so you don't end up really connecting with a person and really listening or really understanding and boredom in the courtroom is one of those spaces where you really the students and and i we really have to deal with our bodies and our feelings in that moment to come to understanding i think it'll i think i think you know using you know nice theory it i guess it helps me understand the conditions of having your consciousness unfold you know in a way that i think is different when you're taking a picture and and it makes you more attuned to why you don't understand something why you don't understand the the genre how you how it is that you have to deal with drawing a picture and accounting for yourself while also listening to other people account for themselves communication is very difficult when it's a miracle that it happens it's a miracle that it works so i hope that somewhere in there that's a there's a response to it thank you any other questions i'm trying to see you because the the light sorry this is more of a statement rather than a question um why if the person what is a question well what if the person is not viable to listening and like the only way of listening is seeing pictures to like tell their story or to get other people to hear their story rather than them listening because you're talking about in the courthouse where they're not listening um there's a thing called double consciousness and people know that you're not listening people know the stereotypes that people have for you so like what would you have to say about that um different forms of communication get enacted in that moment right when you're not heard all sorts of you know calamities can ensue you know through physical uh violence um that can happen other people engage they run through a litany of ways of communicating when listening breaks down um in the in the courtroom cases in the around the issue of domestic violence um one thing that happens that i could tell you about is there are some photographers who work with battered women i talk about this in the book there are photographers who work with battered women um who engage in a kind of therapeutic practice with them by having giving them a makeover and then photographing them and showing them the beautiful pictures that resulted and a lot of those women those victims of of dv they are really engaged by that kind of therapy and it really they cry they're very moved they're very happy to see themselves as they should be seen rather than the ways that they have regarded themselves in mirrors for example with bruises on their bodies etc so this is a way that has nothing to do with anything being said it's a kind of therapeutic practice that's led by photographers to just put makeup on in the same way that um survivors of cancer your friend you know friends might shave their heads you know during chemotherapy or um refuse to wear a wig or wear a wig or do some sort of other um makeover kind of cosmetic activity right this doesn't have anything to do with being um heard in terms of you know spoken language right it's other ways of of um of engaging with people communicatively that seems to be very helpful yeah I hope that can answer your question a little bit we have time for one or two questions um so I have a question I struck by your research and some of the parallels with some work that I'm doing right now as well regarding the way the visual press can and cannot cover executions in the united states and how cameras are kept outside of the building while the state is able to kill another human being and my question to you is is whether we're talking about domestic violence cases within the court or something like an execution what what ought we what would we like the public to be able to see because clearly there's certain things that we we don't want them to see but normatively what would we like them to be able to understand visually about what is happening before us regarding the state and violence and the state's power here yeah that's a really beautiful question um and I I don't quite have an answer except to say that for example my book was not written to try and get some policy changes about how to improve images for when women are or victim other victims are dark skinned it's a problem it's a problem of the technology and how your skin behaves on camera and the light and all that but I didn't write this book to try and get the images to improve that's not quite the question that I was interested in and I don't know that that would work especially given the ways that we know I mean that the Rodney King trial has come up many times in the sessions here and all of the you know the evidence in a number of other cases that we've been through them the last you know 20 30 years etc it's not about improving the image or the angle at which you are shooting the material or shooting shooting the events and I think perhaps in the case of of state executions I'd almost wish the public would have to do on the one hand I would wish that the public would have to see it all and hear it all the loss that the relatives are going to experience on both sides right and then on the other hand shoot I'm losing my train of thought oh and then on the other hand if you look at the history of people going to court houses it was a bunch of racist sexist paternalistic people who went to courthouses really dotafully and was really happy to watch executions very happy to watch you know horrible decisions that ended up getting people lynched thrown in jail etc so even the history it's I don't want to suggest that that court watching is you know any kind of cure all right or the disclosing information in that way is any kind of cure all because the history of the watching is not a nice one so I I think your question really opens up an impasse and I appreciate it I don't know the answer to that actually but thank you that's a yeah that's a good question can I add one other piece of evidence to that thought process is where the flag draped coffins post-arock war that we were not allowed to see or there was you know legal efforts to prevent the publication of those images through because of state-sponsored violence legitimate violence right so I just wanted to put that one out there to add into the formula yeah yeah yeah no it's good there is a really beautiful talk I went to yesterday by an indigenous of Maori scholar named Latoya I don't have the last name she offered a beautiful memorial in many ways of a relative who was killed using a spit hood and her family kind of replicated that killing through the use of the spit hood but they used they represented it artistically and similarly to the faked the cosmetically simulated images that I talk about what happened it is a way of memorializing her family that was killed was they they called upon the very forms of the state they got allies to dress up in uniforms that looked like prison guards they got a car that looked like you know a police car prison vehicle and they fed it back to the system so to speak and I think that kind of work that kind of project Cherise you're helping me maybe triangulate between this question that I just got before you about finding ways for the state to see what has been done to us but then again we have this art practice of really enjoying inhabiting the lives and pain of others in in our leisure activities right we enjoy watching that stuff and participating that stuff so this actually helps bring us back to this cybernetics question and the loop this feedback that we just don't seem to be able to to break out of and and I think perhaps I think that I feel that that's where I where I've ended the project in a way and I'm really beginning to think about that feedback loop and how to live and work outside of it yeah so to theorize that space in a different way I have a final question related to that feedback loop because throughout your talk I was wondering in understanding that your project is very much scrutinizing our scrutinization of the visual imagery why is the courtroom the best space to analyze these visual images or this evidence knowing that it does strip a lot of the context away from the victims as opposed to say some kind of entertainment the one that comes to mind might be the color purple that traces the connections between slavery and domestic violence quite clearly yes I don't claim that the court is the best space it's the space that I was brought to in this first project one of the things that the project opened up for me through thinking about the court space and thinking about art and law and authentic things and fake things is this concept of theatricality which is not the same as performativity and I there's something about the forms of the theater the law of the theater how the theater works such that we know we're in a theater such that we know when something is official versus not official and I and it's a difficult concept to define in performance studies there's some discussion about it so i'm thinking about that at the moment so it's I don't claim that the court is the best space because and if I did come claim that I wouldn't be able to really engage people who genuinely like true crime or watching theater and that you know there really is good television and good theater out there that produces change I mean it that does happen I if I were to say that the court is the best space I couldn't speak to those folks very well right so that's kind of the next step yeah awesome yeah we're out of time thank you so much thank you