Brian Goldfarb

Associate Professor

Affiliated faculty: Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies, Education Studies

Education

Ph.D., Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester (1998)

Research

Goldfarb is a digital media artist, curator, and educator. His research and visual media production focuses on media studies and contemporary visual and digital culture. His book, Visual Pedagogy: Media cultures in and beyond the Classroom, (Duke University Press, 2002), considers how media technologies were used in the second half of the 20th century to advance a model of pedagogy across the arts, education, and postcolonial politics in the United States and globally. Goldfarb’s digital art projects have been exhibited nationally, internationally, and on the Web. “Ocular Convergence,” an interactive, fictional, and critical examination of digital prosthetics for enhancing vision, has traveled to museums throughout the US and to Mexico City, Calgary, Paris and Johannesburg. Goldfarb was curator of education at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in NYC from 1994-7 where he organized “alt.youth.media” (Fall 1996), an exhibition of computer art, video, and popular print media (zines) by and for youth.

Goldfarb’s current research project, "Sense Ability: Fragments on Media Pedagogy, Digital Prosthetics and Assistive Technology" explores the roles of visual culture and technology in shaping the concept of disability and in the development of techniques for assessing and supporting disabilities relating to the senses and communication. Photography, the phonograph, video, digital imaging, digital audio and other emerging computer-based media have shaped the understanding and treatment of conditions in which sight, speech, hearing, and touch are impaired. "Sense Ability" considers the role of visual culture, and these technologies in particular, in the emergence of sensory disability as a concept, and in the development of techniques for aiding and augmenting physical and sensory abilities since the late 19th century. The final form of the project will include both book and multimedia components

Publications

“Visual Pedagogy: Media Cultures of Education in and Beyond the Classroom (Duke University Press, 2002)

“Fragments on Prosthetics and the Virtual: Ocular Prosthetics and the Embodiment of Digital Visuality,” co-author Lisa Cartwright, Documentary and the Practice of the Visual, ed. Christina Lammer (Vienna: Verlag Turia & Kant, 2002)

“Local Television and Community Politics in Brazil: São Paulo's TV Anhembi,” Visible Nations: Latin American Cinema and Video, edited by Chon Noriega (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

Temporarily Possessed: The Semi-Permanent Collection, co-edited with Mimi Young (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995)

“A Pedagogical Cinema: Development Theory, Colonialism, and Post-Liberation African Film,” Iris special issue on African cinema (1995), reprinted in Revista Archivos De La Filmoteca, Valencia, Spain (Fall 1998)

“Intimate Interactivity: New Safer Sex Software,” The Independent 16, no. 10 (1993)

“Video Activism and Critical Pedagogy,” Afterimage 20, no. 10 (May 1993). Reprinted in Art Activism and Oppositionality, ed. Grant Kestor and Lynn Love (Duke University Press, 1998)

“Cultural Contagion: On Disney’s Health Education Films for Latin America,” co-author Lisa Cartwright, Disney Discourse, ed. Eric Smoodin (New York and London: Routledge, 1994)

“Radiography, Cinematography, and the Decline of the Lens, 1920-1970,” co-author Lisa Cartwright, Incorporations, Zone Vol. 6, eds. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (Cambridge: MIT, 1992)

Media Projects

Pictures of Waiting Children. (web-based project 20001-present) exploring the culture and economy of international adoption and the Internet subculture that has grown up to support it.

Ocular Convergence (interactive CD-ROM/Web project, 1999) A fictional and critical examination of digital ocular prosthetics.

Curatorial Projects

Curator, alt.youth.media, 1996, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC

Co-curator, Temporarily Possessed: The Semi-Permanent Collection, 1995, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC

Curator, Digital Check-Up, 1993, Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY