Sarah Kanouse, Associate Professor of Media Arts at Northeastern, will give an original solo performance of her work, My Electric Genealogy. This performance is sponsored by the University of Oregon Center for Environmental Futures and the Department of History of Art and Architecture. Admission is free and open to the public; no reservations are required but seating is limited. 

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My Electric Genealogy

For nearly 40 years, Sarah Kanouse's grandfather designed, planned, and managed the spider-vein network of lines connecting Los Angeles to its distant sources of electric power. From the 1930s until his retirement as general manager of the LA Department of Water and Power in 1972, her grandfather made a second family of the grid and its substations, converters, and intertires, photographing these monuments of the modern everyday with one foot in the aesthetic and another in the techno-scientific sublime. When he died, he left behind images of transmission towers along with snapshots of birthdays and family Christmases, inspiring Sarah to reimagine the electric grid as populated by non-human 'uncles' and 'cousins' whose names she should know and whose legacies she will pass to her child. My Electric Genealogy is an original solo performance that proceeds from Sarah's imaginative rereading of her family tree. It combines live storytelling with still and moving images, choreographed movement, and an original score to make intimate the crumbling, carbon-heavy infrastructures that imperil the planet and to probe the aesthetic, ethical, and practical responses they demand. These systems include not just power plants and transmission lines, but also 'infrastructures of feeling:' closely held beliefs about nature, gender, race, and progress. 

Sarah Kanouse

Sarah is an interdisciplinary artist and critical writer examining the politics of landscape and space. Migrating between video, photography, and performative forms, her research-based creative projects shift the visual dimension of the landscape to allow hidden stories of environmental and social transformation to emerge.