Works-in-Progress (WIP) Workshop Series presents
Documenting Capital: Intersections of Free Trade Zone Architecture and Digital Filmmaking
Patrick Brodie and Patrick Brian Smith
November 9th, 5pm
GEM Lab, FB 630.15
The first iteration of the Fall 2017 WIP workshop series will feature a multimedia video project by Patrick Brodie and Patrick Brian Smith on the Shannon Free Zone in the Republic of Ireland. Established in 1959 to attract foreign and regional investment, the Shannon Free Zone is claimed to be the world’s first free trade zone. Driven by a motivation to document and visualize financialized spaces like the Shannon Free Zone, Brodie and Smith embarked on a multimedia project aiming to “cognitively" or "deep" map the abstract flows of capital through the Shannon area. By visualizing the spatial machinations of finance capital, they hope to confront its invisible circulations by focusing on its material infrastructures and conditions of labour. The presentation will introduce the theory and practice behind the project, and will screen uncut footage from the research trip conducted in the summer of 2017, partially funded by the GEM Lab.
Biographies:
Patrick Brodie is a PhD student in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, in affiliation with the School of Irish Studies. He received an MA in Film Studies from Columbia University. His dissertation project investigates Irish media infrastructure in relation to transnational policy, financialization, and spatial development. His research interests extend to and tie together film and media circulation, piracy, media industries, logistics, free trade zones, environmental media, theories of modernity, and alternative spaces and modes of moving image exhibition.
Patrick Brian Smith is a Film and Moving Image Studies PhD student in the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University, Montreal. His research interests include experimental nonfiction cinema, the politics of space, Marxist geography, precarious labour, and the essay film. He is currently working on a thesis project titled "The Politics of Spatiality in Experimental Non-Fiction Cinema" which maps out the presence of a spatio-political tendency within a diverse corpus of contemporary experimental nonfiction films.