On Tuesday, June 16, 2026, I presented research in Unfinishedness: Moving Through Incompletion and Imagining The Unresolved, a PhD symposium at the University of Cambridge in the Lucia Windsor Room of Newnham College. Coordinated by Matt Parry, Jessica Moore, and Walden Wu of the University of Cambridge Film and Screen Department, this year’s symposium invited us to stay with what is unresolved: in cinema, audiovisual media, and our own research.
My presentation, entitled “Seeing the Unseen: Reconciling the Registries of Understanding in Art Made Politically,”—a section within my essay, Co-opting the Master’s Tools: a Black Techno Intervention in Mediated Performance—engaged the study, an epistemic tool of understanding utilized in artistic research to think with and think through pressing concerns as they relate to the broader field of contemporary art. I examined working studies of my doctoral thesis (Ah New Riddim 2023 and Light Years Apart 2021 -2025), my artistic impulse, intentions, materials, and approach, drawing profound connections between art made politically, labor, and conceptual comprehension.
Vital to this discussion was the role of play, a Janus production across both form and matter, and, correspondingly, form and content. Through failure, discovery, and feedback, play advances the material and conceptual drivers of the study. But, can this logic, integral to the optimization of the aesthetic object, be applied to the phenomenology of the creative exchange, and how might the role of play suture ‘whole’ the aesthetic and conceptual faculties of understanding within the encounter of art made politically?
It was great sharing my research and current developments with fellow scholars. The feedback and discussions held in between were most useful. I will reflect deeply upon them as I continue development on my thesis. Cambridge was a warm experience. I enjoyed the city and the conversations had. Thank you for having me!
