Film & Media Studies Keyssar Lecture: "Laugh Out Loud: Race and the Manufacture of Digital Emotions"

The Film and Media Studies Program at Amherst College presents the Helene Keyssar Distinguished Lecture Series, featuring Tung-Hui Hu. Hu will present a talk entitled "Laugh Out Loud: Race and the Manufacture of Digital Emotions." Please join us March 8 from 4 to 6 p.m. in the Center for Humanistic Inquiry (Frost Library, second floor). The talk is free and open to the public.

In his talk, Hu explores how persons of color are asked to perform the role of being emotional online. Taking as a starting point artist Yoshua Okón’s installation Canned Laughter (2009), which depicts a fictitious factory in Juárez that cans every type of laughter for export, Hu suggests that a dystopian era when low-wage workers across the U.S.-Mexico border laugh, cry or otherwise emote for white audiences is not as far away as we might think.

Tung-Hui Hu writes on media art and the politics of digital culture. He is the author of A Prehistory of the Cloud (MIT Press, 2015) and three collections of poetry, most recently Greenhouses, Lighthouses (Copper Canyon Press, 2013). Hu has received fellowships from the NEA, Yaddo, MacDowell Colony and the San Francisco Foundation, and is an assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan.

(Note: This lecture was formerly titled "How to Comply with an Algorithm: Lethargy and the Affects of Big Data.")