flynn033

At the inaugural meeting of the Chicago Film Seminar for the 2016-2017 academic year, Aymar Jean Christian of Northwestern University presented on his current research project, Open TV Beta, a production and distribution platform for independent web series and pilots by queer, trans and cis-women and artists of color. Mobilizing the concept of scale to analyze the development of work by Open TV artists, Christian argued that “production value” has different meanings at different production scales. For small scale productions, like the work produced through and for Open TV, Christian argued that production value no longer depends upon a logic of scarcity (in which resources are rare and competition for resources is key) and that instead production value resides in a logic of capacity (in which resources are seen as something to be mined from what is available in community). In his talk, Christian focused on how space, time, and culture were utilized in Open TV productions from the 2016 ...