Vertical Integration

Extractive Media, Center for Comparative Media

Backwards integration in the language of capitalism (Reliance in India uses this as a self-description of its journey from textiles to gas exploration, Amazon’s warehouse automation and its own products are examples) is to go backwards from your product, to constituent raw materials and processes, usually as a way of guaranteeing the supply chain. We (CAMP) are proposing this term to think more broadly about extraction, waste, dependency, rear-guarding, mediatic conversions, in- and out-sourcing, and other aspects of such chains of translation and steps of decision and production.

Forward integration is to try to convert such infrastructural capacity into new consumer facing “products”: museums, film production (Reliance again), consumer goods, but also, each of their specific bets on the future. There are many examples of governments, political parties, corporations, families and other smaller assemblages, attempting to “forward integrate” into culture.

We think it is useful to assess such vertical moves for artistic practice today, both as analysis and possibility. Our practice suggests concepts and techniques on this axis: privilege escalations, parasitisms, sensorial extensions and "sacrifices", among types of actions performed at each layer, each moment of dependency or conversion. In this way, art is not only the “content” of someone else’s infrastructure but is testing and modifying the chains of its own existence.

In these stories of vertical integration, we describe downstream and upstream effects and potentials of long-running open-access projects, a reading of media theory in vertical terms, a story about the British Museum in small-town India, another about CCTV cinematography – how a bit of “vertical" thinking and doing may help us all.

Video After Video | The Critical Media of CAMP

Opening soon, CAMP solo in NYC.

The (Reshuffled) Year of the Everlasting Storm

Sunday, 7:00 pm
100 mins
Pandemic shorts by Panahi, Poitras, Apichatpong, Weiwei, and others.

A Terrible Beauty

by Iram Ghufran
50 mins, 2023
7:00 pm

Introduction and post-screening discussion with Iram Ghufran.
A science-fiction fable set in the "miracle city" of Yiwu, in one of the world's largest wholesale markets for small commodities.

Youth (Spring)

by Wang Bing
232 mins | 2023
6:30 pm*

Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat

by Johan Grimonprez
150 mins| 2024|
7:00 pm
A story about the encounter of American Jazz and African decolonisation, via the UN and the CIA, with a lot of world around it.

Around the World Again

Join us for a season of new films at CAMP which explore configurations and revelations of "world", amidst a world in pieces.
We begin the year with
GRAND TOUR
by Miguel Gomes
2024, 120 mins.
7:00 pm.
in memorium, Tejas Pande.

Geographies of Belonging

Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar
Streaming on Union Docs.

Far from Philadelphia

Five narratives developed in the class "Footage Films", that re-assemble archives of campus protest, Penn Museum collections, university weapons development projects, the Schuylkill river, a utopia called Shangri-La, and their intersections across time and place.
*Recalling Far From Vietnam, collectively-made essay film from 1967.

Bombay Tilts Down

Asia Pacific Triennial

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