Join CAMS on March 5th at 5:30 in Gilman 479 for Mckenzie Wark’s talk and screening: “Trans Writing and Critical Auto-Theory.”

McKenzie Wark is an Australian-born writer and scholar, known for her writings on media theory, critical theory, new media, and the Situationist International. She is the author of “Reverse Cowgirl,” “Raving” and “Love and Money, Sex and Death.” She is Professor of Media and Culture at Eugene Lang College, The New School. After the talk and screening, transgender historian, Jules Gill-Peterson (History), will be in conversation with McKenzie Wark.

More about the film, Life Story, dir. Jessica Dunn Rovinelli:

In this short film, an original text by philosopher McKenzie Wark is combined with the exploration of her naked body. The story of her life intertwines with that of the Left, both haunted by death.

“Rovinelli’s Life Story is a monologue to camera, sort of. Over the course of the film’s ten minutes, Rovinelli focuses it on Wark’s body. The audio begins and ends with Ne/Re/A’s “In the Dark”, a club track that matches the moves of Rovinelli’s photography: immediately inquisitive, tenderly exposing. Life Story contains a gradual color gradation, a kind of slow siren between a “realistic” image and a super-orange hue. The film has a heartbeat, a heat. It’s a little voyeuristic, but any eroticism is closer to the body as observed-observer, a beat away from Wark’s 2023 book about the NYC techno scene, Raving. There’s pleasure being taken, in photographing a friend, in showing a trans body as a thing with a past and future, in asserting the older female body as a glorious image.” (Frank Falisi, Filmmaker Magazine)

More images can be seen here: https://krieger.jhu.edu/cams/2025/02/17/march-5th-2025-talk-and-screening-with-mckenzie-wark/

*Co-sponsored by the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute