The Center for Humanities & the Arts (CHA) at CU Boulder is holding the second installment of the Cox Family Process Speaker Series on Wednesday, March 30, 2022 at 12:30pm MT via Zoom Webinar. This event will feature renowned filmmaker and video essayist Kevin B. Lee and his work “Transformers: the Premake.”

The Cox Family Process Speaker Series annual programming seeks to bring renowned artists and scholars to CU Boulder each spring to speak about work that made them well-known in their fields of study and research.

About Kevin B. Lee

Kevin B. Lee directs Crossmedia Publishing at Merz Akademie, Stuttgart. He is a filmmaker, film critic, and producer of over 350 video essays that explore connections between film and media. He is also the Founding Editor and Chief Video Essayist at Fandor Keyframe and founding partner of dGenerate Films (a distribution company for independent Chinese cinema). He often collaborates with filmmaker and media artist Chloé Galibert-Laîné. Their work has been shown at IFFR, True/False Film Festival, Open City Documentary Film Festival, Camden International Film Festival and London Essay Film Festival, as well as art venues such as the Ars Electronica Festival and the WRO Media Art Biennale. Most recntly, he has been appointed the Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts at USI Università della Svizzera italiana. 

 WEBSITE: https://www.alsolikelife.com/

About "Transformers: The Premake"

Transformers: Age of Extinction, the fourth installment of the Transformers movie franchise directed by Michael Bay, was released June 27, 2014. But for months ahead of the release, on YouTube one could already access an immense trove of production footage recorded by amateurs in locations where the film was shot, such as Utah, Texas, Detroit, Chicago, Hong Kong and mainland China. Transformers: the Premake turns 355 YouTube videos into a critical investigation of the global big budget film industry, amateur video making, and the political economy of images.

The Premake utilizes a “desktop documentary” technique that acknowledges the internet's role not only as a boundless repository of information but as a primary experience of reality. It creatively depicts the process in which we explore a deep web of images and data to reach moments of discovery and decisive action. In a blockbuster cinema culture rife with insipid remakes of franchise properties, The Premake presents a critical counter-image in which personalized digital media asks what Hollywood is really doing in the world.