X-TRA and MEMORY present a screening of All Light, Everywhere (2021), followed by a conversation between the film’s director, Theo Anthony, and X-TRA Executive Director Nora N. Khan.
EVENT DETAILS
Thursday, August 4th, 2022
7:00pm Doors
7:30pm Introduction + Screening
9:30pm-10:30pm Theo Anthony + Nora N. Khan live in conversation
2220 Arts + Archive
2220 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90057
All Light, Everywhere examines the construction of objectivity, evidence, and testimony, through the use of the camera as a weapon, put in service of systems of capture and policing. Anthony expands on his deep interest (explored in Subject to Review) in the politics of surveillance technologies, from drones to police body cameras. Probing crime classification and algorithmic forms of phrenology (a concept coined by scholar Mimi Onuoha), All Light, Everywhere tests the limits of the reliability of human perception, the assumptions brought to seeing and watching, and the ways the threat of being surveilled changes human behavior and interrelation. To see is to also see what one looks for.
The film is winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award in the category of Nonfiction Experimentation and a special mention for the CPH:DOX F:ACT Award. It has been an official selection at Sheffield DocFest 2021 and True/False Film Fest.
The screening will be followed by a conversation between director Theo Anthony and X-TRA Executive Director Nora N. Khan, with a focus on the film’s heavily researched, interactive web companion, All Light, Expanded. The site captures the wide-ranging themes of archive politics, the history of cameras and evidence, and the forms of mechanical (and human) witness that underpin the film. Anthony and Khan will consider the site’s structure, methodology, and rich references in context of current anti-surveillance discourse and growing public scholarship about technologies of capture.
This event is programmed in tandem with the release of X-TRA Volume 24, Issue 1, which features a review of All Light, Everywhere, written by Max Levin.
To learn more about 2220 Arts + Archives, a volunteer-run community arts center, visit https://www.2220arts.org/
Theo Anthony is a filmmaker based in Baltimore and Upstate New York. His first feature documentary, RAT FILM, premiered to critical acclaim, with a successful festival and theatrical run followed by a broadcast premiere on PBS Independent Lens in early 2018. Theo is the recipient of the 2018 Sundance Art of Non-Fiction Fellowship and the 2019 Sundance and Simons Foundation Science Sandbox Fellowship. In 2015, he was named to Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. His most recent film, SUBJECT TO REVIEW, for ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, premiered at the 57th New York Film Festival. ALL LIGHT, EVERYWHERE is Theo’s second feature film and first film to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.
Nora N. Khan is a curator, editor, and writer of criticism on digital visual culture, the politics of software, and philosophy of emerging technology. She is the Executive Director of Project X for Art and Criticism, publishing X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal in Los Angeles. She is also the next Curator for the next Biennale de L’Image en Mouvement in 2023, with Andrea Bellini, hosted by Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. In 2020, she curated Manual Override at The Shed, featuring Sondra Perry, Morehshin Allahyari, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Simon Fujiwara, and Martine Syms. Khan’s short books are Seeing, Naming, Knowing (Brooklyn Rail) on the logic of machine vision, and Fear Indexing the X-Files (Primary Information), co-written with Steven Warwick. Forthcoming are No Context: AI Art, Machine Learning, and the Stakes for Art Criticism (Lund Humphries), The Artificial and the Real (Art Metropole), and a hybrid memoir about criticism from Strange Attractor Press. Her writing has been honored by a Critical Writing Grant given through the Visual Arts Foundation and the Crossed Purposes Foundation and a Thoma Foundation Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, and supported by residencies at La Becque and Eyebeam. She has served as editor of Topical Cream, HOLO, and was a longtime editor at Rhizome. From 2018-2021, she was a professor at Rhode Island School of Design, in Digital + Media, teaching artists’ writing, technological criticism, and critical theory and artistic research.