[ecrea] Liquid Blackness: Announcing a New Research Initiative on Blackness and Aesthetics

liquid blackness April Symposium (April 11-12, 2014)

liquid blackness, a Research Project on Blackness and Aesthetics of the 
Department of Communication at Georgia State University, is pleased to 
announce a Symposium on blackness and aesthetics to be hosted by the 
Department of Communication on April 11-12, 2014, with the participation 
of Hamza Walker (Associate Curator, The Renaissance Society at the 
University of Chicago), Derek Conrad Murray (Assistant Professor of 
History of Art and Visual Culture at UC Santa Cruz), and a panel of 
multimedia artists.

The purpose of the Symposium, which will bring together scholars, 
artists and curators, is to begin a conversation about liquidity as a 
primary aesthetic form in which blackness is encountered in our 
contemporary visual and sonic landscape. This event is free and open to 
the public.



The schedule for the Symposium is as follows:



Friday, April 11:  Department of Communication, Georgia State University

6:00pm— Lecture by Hamza Walker, Associate Curator, The Renaissance 
Society at the University of Chicago

*7:30pm—Gathering Wild Dance Company Performance/Wine Reception at 
Mammal Gallery (this event will take place off-campus)



Saturday, April 12:  Department of Communication, Georgia State University

                        3:00pm—Keynote by Derek Conrad Murray 
“Afro-Kitsch and the Queering of Blackness”

                        4:30pm—Artists Panel:  Nettrice Gaskins; Nikita 
Gale; Carla Aaron Lopez; Yanique Norman; Fahamu Pecou

*7:00pm—Release Party at The Sound Table with DJ Kemit (this event will 
take place off-campus)



Additionally, throughout the month of April several artists will be 
showing their work at the Window Project, the new media installation 
space curated by GSU’s Digital Arts Entertainment Lab.

Please feel free to circulate this announcement widely and to direct all 
questions to (liquidblackness /at/ gsu.edu) or to our Coordinator, Dr. 
Alessandra Raengo, at (araengo /at/ gsu.edu).



If you would like to subscribe to our mailing list to receive updates on 
this and future events, please reply to this email with “subscribe” in 
the subject line. Additional information on the liquid blackness 
initiative is below, including links to our website and social media.


www.liquidblackness.com

(liquidblackness /at/ gsu.edu)

www.facebook.come/liquidblackness

@liquidblackness



What is liquid blackness?

The idea of the liquidity of blackness emerges both from an observation 
of salient contemporary aesthetic forms as well as a sort of thought 
experiment. If, as Harry Elam has argued, blackness does indeed ‘travel 
on its own,’ then what aesthetic arrangements have become possible as a 
result of that?

What happens if we leverage, rather than condemn, this type of mobility? 
What happens when blackness is deliberately held in suspension, by the 
critical act one might perform in attempting to understand its contours? 
What if we could think of it, not as an attribute, but rather in its own 
terms, like a thing, like a substance, a shadow that “escapes from the 
body like an animal we had been sheltering”[i]? What if we held 
blackness in balance, so to speak, not necessarily to sever it from its 
lived experience, but in order to confront and come to terms with the 
many other ways in which it exists?



If blackness is placed firmly in the middle, held at the center of our 
conversations, affective investments, aesthetic concerns, if it is 
therefore made accessible, discussable, touchable, usable, 
re-purposable, then the focus might shift to new considerations: not 
what it represents, but what it does and can do, to its affective 
charge, and its sensorial reach; to the relations it facilitates, the 
fantasies it coagulates, and the sensible and sensorial configurations 
it orchestrates. One would therefore not be seeking a black aesthetic 
but rather to understand blackness as aesthetics.



Thus, as a research group, liquid blackness privileges the aesthetic 
mode of liquidity because it offers a provocative and generative 
characterization of one of the most mercurial, yet vigorous modes of 
interfacing blackness in contemporary visual and sonic culture, as well 
as the affects and intensities that this mode of engagement produces and 
circulates.



Liquidity is also meant to describe the fluid relationship between 
creative, critical and curatorial practices, as well as a bleeding 
between artistic community and academic community this research project 
is committed to pursue.



Finally, liquidity intends to convey the desired adaptability of liquid 
blackness as a research group and platform for scholarly and artistic 
work, which will hopefully grow in pursuit of its research questions, 
spilling into those spaces where critical and creative thinking grapples 
with ideas of what indeed lies between us all, with the conviction that, 
given its enormous role in filling this in-between, there is no question 
about blackness that is not worth asking.



Below, we have listed some conceptual clusters that the idea of 
liquidity of blackness is intended to render. They are meant to perform 
evocatively in the hope that they will trigger both the critical and 
artistic imagination of the Symposium’s participants as well as the 
larger Atlanta artistic community.

·         Sensuousness – liquid blackness is sensorially rich and 
erotically charged

·         Affectivity – liquid blackness exists and moves in between bodies

·         Formlessness – liquid blackness fills all available space and 
fluidly transforms with the shape of its container.

·         Penetration – in its shape-shifting qualities, liquid 
blackness is capable of infiltrating anywhere.

·         Fluctuation – liquid blackness moves through ripples and 
waves, like electronic signals

·         Modulation – liquid blackness oscillates and vibrates within a 
spectrum of possibilities

·         Absorption and assimilation – liquid blackness manifests 
fantasies of racial amalgamation

·         Intensity - liquid blackness channels “intensive affective 
flows”[ii]

·         Viscosity - liquid blackness produces fantasies of tactility 
and experiences of stickiness

·         Density - liquid blackness is tangibly material and thick

·         Slipperiness: liquid blackness can be seemingly touched, but 
not held, or held in place

·         Elasticity - liquid blackness can stretch, bleed, and slightly 
give in

·         Allure - liquid blackness beckons and yet withdraws

·         Vibration - liquid blackness is animated by the vitality of 
black matter

·         Unboundedness - liquid blackness is unstoppable and pervasive

·         Virality - liquid blackness proliferates and procreates, 
gaining incremental vitality with each reproduction.

·         Channeling - liquid blackness is a channel, a vehicle, a 
medium – it carries, funnels, and puts in contact

·         Plasticity - liquid blackness mutates within constantly 
mutating conditions

·         Organicity - liquid blackness wades fluidly through processes 
of appropriation, sampling, grafting, injecting, rejecting, implanting, 
and transplanting.

·         Glide - liquid blackness slides transversally across and 
between surfaces



We hope that you will be able to join us for the Symposium!



[i] Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation  (Minneapolis: 
University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 20.

[ii] Steven Shaviro, "Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding 
Gate and Southland Tales.," Film-Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2010).



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