Transtechnology Research,
Room B312 Portland Square,
University of Plymouth,
Drake Circus,
Plymouth,
PL4 8AA

amanda.egbe@plymouth.ac.uk

Still from Deptford|Tributes, dir. Amanda Egbe & Rastko Novakovic (2009)

Profile
Amanda Egbe is an artist, filmmaker and PhD-candidate at Transtechnology Research. Her work often uses archive materials, and fuses documentary and fiction to create experimental film, video and art works. Amanda is a graduate of the University of Westminster where she completed a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Media Practice. She holds a Masters in Digital Media: Technology and Cultural Form from Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has worked on collaborative film projects like deptford.tv, and archiving the work of the Tesla Research Interest group at the Computer Science Department at University College London. Her research interests are concerned with the history of the moving image, archives, issues of representation, the technology of the media, art, science and technology collaborations, and the potential of the moving image outside of the realm of arts and entertainment.

Current Research
Notions on a radical moving image archive practice as a problematic

The context of this research is situated within the shift towards the digitisation of moving image works. Increasingly individual artists as well as large institutional organisations are archiving their works in this circumstances. Within this shift towards the digital; archival practice through notions of accessibility and sustainability privileges approaches that rely on the interoperability of the technology.  This desire leads to frameworks such as metadata schemas, which attempt to standardise what is held within, discarding that which is redundant.   This research critically investigates the underlying assumptions of what is considered surplus to the archive.

This research is concerned with the problem for example of archiving Structural Materialist moving image art works, which have as their aim to challenge dominant institutions, frameworks and representational ideologies. Such works produced by the London Filmmakers Co-op in the 60s and 70s now find themselves in the archive; the archive, which by its nature reconstitutes the problematic, which such filmmakers were trying to subvert.

The concern of this research is on how moving image practice can be informed by considerations of its making and reception and how this is configured within the archive. A key concept within the research is the translation that occurs from image to text to image; in the production, reading and archiving of film. Strategies of deconstruction and distancing attempt to highlight this process.

Research Seminar 19 March 2014, Ontologies of the Moving Image: From Paper Prints to Flipbooks
The seminar will present an assemblage of film artefacts: paper prints, posters, books, slides, filmstrips, flipbooks, in order to ask what can we understand about the moving image when viewed outside of the cinematic apparatus of screen and auditorium?

Research Seminar 13 February 2013, Mediating the Infinite Object – Rita Cachao with Amanda Egbe
The seminar will unfold from the assumption that there are research ‘objects’ that cannot be altogether understood, that they are unknowable, infinite, but that at the same time these ‘objects’ can be more fully accessed by means other then causal/linear explanation, even utterance.Mediating the infinite object thus becomes the centre of the seminar.

Research Seminar 11 May 2011, Structural/Materialist and Brechtian Film Practice
Using film clips for illustration, this presentation will explore Structural/Materialist film, a non-illusionist cinema that attempts to demystify the film process as defined by Peter Gidal.  It will also explore ‘Brechtian aspects of radical cinema’ as characterised by Martin Walsh, a term coined to encompass a range of filmmakers from Godard to Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet, whose anti Illusionistic cinema, a cinema of disjunction can be linked to Brecht?s writings.

The presentation will open up a discussion around key terms concerning avant-garde film practice, and the strategies deployed to counter dominant cinema.

Selected recent academic presentations and publications
Egbe, A. (2014) (Review) Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Post War Art by Andrew V. Uroskie, University of Chicago Press, 2014 Leonardo Reviews

Egbe A. (2014) Experiencing Reality through the Optical Printer – International Lisbon Conference on Philosophy and Film, Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon, (5-10 June, 2014)

Egbe A. (2014) “Technology, Exchange and Flow: Artistic Media Practices and Commercial Application” – Advertising and the Dynamics of Cultural Exchange Managing Popular Culture – Emergence, Strategy and the Development of Popular Phenomena, Karlshochschule International University, Karlsruhe (30 January – 1 February 2014)

Amanda Egbe’s CV (Click to download PDF)

Still from Life in Peckham, dir Amanda Egbe (2008)