Ithaca College

 In a presentation entitled “Goodbye to Cinema: Jean-Luc Godard’s Adieu au langage as Images at the Edge of History,” Utterson analyzed the ways in which Godard’s 2014 film (distributed in the US as Goodbye to Language) uses contemporary 3D imaging technology to engage the history of cinema, bidding “goodbye” to a certain conception of the medium (the “adieu” of the film’s title) even while it seeks to reinvent its language (or “langage”). 

 Hosted by the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Film & Media and interdisciplinary Berkeley Center for New Media, the “Berkeley Conference on Precarious Aesthetics” took inspiration from Ludwig Wittgenstein, who once asked, “Is it always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often exactly what we need?” The conference sought to explore the relationship between “distinct” and “indistinct” images in contemporary visual culture as part of a larger research project, “The Power of Precarious Aesthetics,” led by the University of Copenhagen.