With Jeff Scheible (Kings College London)
//October 26th, 2022
//5:00-7:00 PM
//GEM Lab
//1250 Guy, FB 630.15
About the event: Every day, since August 2020—for over two years and counting—world-renowned filmmaker David Lynch uploads a video to his YouTube channel in which he announces the date and swirls his hand in a jar filled with numbered ping pong balls, before choosing one and sharing it in a series of instalments called “Today’s Number Is…”
This talk makes a case for critically attending to these Dadaesque, pandemic-era uploads as much as any of Lynch’s widely scrutinised films. It considers how to make sense of them along different but intersecting axes: in relation to calendrical rhythms and the “daily” as a category of media production and consumption; through a digital media ecology in which the videos resurrect televisual form but disrupt the capitalist logics and aspirations of the American lottery-drawing broadcast; and in terms of the semiotics of the ping-pong ball itself, as a signifier of what Carlin Wing describes as “planned chance.”
Jeff Scheible is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London. His edited book with Karen Redrobe, Deep Mediations: Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures (Minnesota, 2021), received SCMS’s Best Edited Collection Award, and his monograph Digital Shift: The Cultural Logic of Punctuation (Minnesota, 2015) received the Media Ecology Association’s Susanne K. Langer Award. He previously taught at SUNY Purchase and was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University.