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.

Her monograph, Working Title: Media Packaging and the Margins of Art, is forthcoming with University of California Press. This book is about all the supposedly mundane things involved in creative work that you’re not supposed to talk about, and the rhetoric of the talk itself: the prerequisites, formalities, long waits, copyright battles, packaging dilemmas, and project pitches (like the one you’re reading now). Media processes typically understood as merely peripheral to a discrete and more valuable “work of art” in the making. But why might we be hesitant to openly acknowledge the range of legitimating operations, better alternatives, microdecisions, and false starts that affect the conditions of possibility for “actual” creative artistic work? This book helps visualize the messiness and indiscreetness of the creative process by attending to such crucial, if often overlooked media processes and their influence on canonization and institutionalization. It delves into European and transatlantic audiovisual media from the 1960s and 1970s, including performances, visual art, installations, and films, which might seem well-known to us as avant-garde artworks from “the past.” But in this book, they don’t remain there. Exploring the less visible media among these works – from video games, photography, television, and YouTube videos to legal texts, containers, rubbish, and paperwork – Working Title unsettles the familiar motivating mythologies of art of this era and makes space for the heavy lifting these media do, carving out what and how they mean for us today and revisiting their forgotten futures.

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).