PARTICIPANTS
Connie Samaras

An artist and writer based in Los Angeles, Connie Samaras, has exhibited and lectured on her work extensively at various institutions including New Langton Arts, San Francisco; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; the ICA, London; Wexner Center for the Arts; Banff Centre for the Arts; Kunst House, South Korea; and Medcad, Spain.

She has presented and published numerous papers on a variety of subjects including: feminist critiques of censorship of the arts, considerations of new Pacific Rim economies and the transcultural flow of ideas (Australian Monthly), and an analysis of UFO culture as it relates to US cultural anxieties in the late 20th century (Is it Tomorrow or Just the End of Time? in Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life, eds: Jennifer Terry and M. Calvert). She has also co-authored, with Victoria Vesna, the book and online project Terminals which deals with technology and the cultural production of death. Currently she's working on two projects. The first is "Angelic States," a photographic series which maps dislocation in the everyday and the "seepage" of digital immersive environments on to the real world urban landscapes of LA and Las Vegas. The second, currently in a nascent sleepwalking phase, deals with dreams and the unconscious in the age of digital, medical and teletechnologies.

Samaras is a Professor in the Department of Studio Art and Affiliated Faculty in Women's Studies, UC Irvine. She's also an enthusiastic sometimes troupe member of Desktop Theater.

    Symposium Abstract: Photographing Sights Unseen: Techno Landscaping the U.S. Homeland and the "I" in Eye Witness

One summer evening in1997, while washing dishes and watching the sunset from the kitchen window of my L.A. apartment, I suddenly heard the screams of my neighbors ? below me and to the side of me ? as well as the yells of strangers who had stopped their cars on the street, all of them calling to those of us inside to come out and look up at the sky. There to the west, filling the expanse of the heavens and dwarfing the entire city of Los Angeles, was a smoky swirl of colorful celestial markings. Later, we "the people," learned that what weıd witnessed had been the unannounced experimental explosion of a disarmed Minuteman Missile. Launched and detonated from military installations hundreds of miles away, this was the first of a series of tests undertaken by the Clinton administration to assess the feasibility of Reaganıs Star Wars Defense Initiative. The photograph I took of that event began a series of work in which I started to photographically search for geographical, psychic and social dislocation in the everyday landscapes of Los Angeles, Las Vegas and later, NY . I intentionally began taking these images to look as though they were digitized even though they are "in truth" straight photographs for many reasons. One was that I became fascinated with how the subjects/spectacles I was photographing (e.g. a downtown LA lit red, white and blue for the 2000 Democratic National Convention in an Albert Speer-like display for the gaze of media helicopters) appeared as though the "look" associated with cyberspace had begun to leak past its electronic borders on to the real world quotidian. As I continued to make these photographs, what became both obvious and at the same time alarming was the sort of visual (and material) intersection between entertainment, surveillance, and military technologies on a scale previously unseen. In my talk, I will be discussing these images in relation to spectacle and memory, historical amnesia and trauma, seduction and blindness, resistance and the body politic, resurrected tropes of U.S. nationalism in the age of digital technologies, and the failure of sight in my "eye witness" experience of having watched the World Trade Center towers explode, burn and fall from less than a kilometer away.