Kalani Michell

Kalani Michell is Assistant Professor in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. Prior to this, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the research collective (Graduiertenkolleg) “Configurations of Film” and as an Assistant Professor (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) in Media Studies at the Goethe University Frankfurt. She has taught and written about a wide range of media, including photography, comics, installation and performance art, print culture, film and media theory, sound studies, and media historiography.

Currently, she is preparing her monograph, Media Among Themselves: Unboxing Audiovisual Media from the 1960s and 1970s, which thematizes a range of media processes typically understood as merely additive or preparatory for a discrete “work of art” in the making. Boring prerequisites for something more valuable yet to come. But why might we be hesitant to openly acknowledge the range of formalities, legitimating operations, better alternatives, micro-decisions, and false starts – the long waits, copyright battles, endless drafts and delivery delays, packaging problems, and paperwork – that affect the conditions of possibility for “actual” creative artistic work? Once we begin to look at the work these media processes do among themselves, meaning not only in relation to highbrow, legitimated artistic media forms, these tedious tasks suddenly become more complex and quite intriguing to look at. This book helps visualize the messiness and indiscreetness of the creative process by attending to such crucial, if overlooked media processes and their influence on the canonization and institutionalization of audiovisual media such as performance and installation art, visual art, and film.

In addition to working on this project, she has published on a variety of art and media topics, such as the circulation of the Mona Lisa in the set design of pornographic productions (in CineAction), the emergence of academic podcasts in film and media studies (in Format Matters), and conformist expectations of captions for photographs and film stills in scholarly texts (in New Perspectives on Academic Writing). Her research on German cinema has examined concepts of surveillance, memory, and home movies in Thomas Heise’s Barluschke (in East, West and Centre), invisibility techniques in a sci-fi film from the Third Reich (in Continuity and Crisis), and the comics storyboard and sketch aesthetic in Christian Petzold’s filmic shot composition (in Storyboarding). Her latest research projects focus on the backside of paintings, disciplinary yearbooks, and video conferencing interfaces: the Antiguan studio photographs on the versos of Frank Walter’s miniature European landscape paintings (in liquid blackness), ways of reassembling a collective image of disciplinary belonging by emphasizing questions of reception in German-speaking contexts (in New German Critique), and the epistemic values inscribed into new media environments of remote learning (in Video Conferencing).