Andrew Neumann | “The Predictability of Unpredictability*…”
December 6
Emilija Škarnulytė is an artist and filmmaker, who reflects on human civilization through the topic of deep time. In the exploration of invisible structures and components of reality beyond human control, she uses the camera as an archaeological tool that pierces through cosmic and geologic, as well as ecological and political strata. Immersive experiences, exercising a move away from the homocentric perspective, dive into the Earth discovering signs of human presence and its interrelation with the beyond-human.
Emilija Škarnulytė is a Lithuanian-born artist and filmmaker. Working between documentary and speculative fiction, her video works take viewers through decommissioned nuclear power plants, deep-sea data storage units, forgotten underwater cities, and uncanny natural phenomena. Škarnulytė is the recipient of the 2023 Ars Fennica Award and the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize. The artist has most recently presented work at the Gwangju Biennale, Helsinki Biennale, Vilnius Biennale, and the Henie Onstad Triennale. Recent solo exhibitions include: Canal Projects, Kunsthaus Göttingen, and Ferme-Asile. Škarnulytė is a co-founder and co-director of the Polar Film Lab, a collective for analogue film practice located in Tromsø, Norway, and is a member of the artist duo New Mineral Collective.
Following the lecture, Škarnulytė will be joined by Professors Kate Brown and Gediminas Urbonas, and ACT student Luca E. Lum (SMACT ’25).
Kate Brown is the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of several prize-winning histories, including Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford 2013).
Gediminas Urbonas is an ACT Professor, artist, educator, and researcher. He is a co-founder of US: Urbonas Studio (together with Nomeda Urbonas), an interdisciplinary research practice that facilitates exchange amongst diverse nodes of knowledge production and artistic practice in pursuit of projects that transform civic spaces and collective imaginaries.
Luca E. Lum (SMACT ’25) is an artist and writer attuned to arrhythmias of time, memory, body, and affect. Working across forms, her ongoing interests include misrecognition, extended and distributed agencies, fraught mediations, and dispositions of feeling and affinity that organise life and meaning. She considers the technological, semiotic and informational as material, relation, and predicament. She traverses fiction, poetry, and analysis in her texts.
Part of the Fall 2024 Lecture Series.
