Thomas Torres Cordova "Everybody Loves the Sunshine: I wish you could color correct my films for the rest of my life"
CUNY Graduate Center
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Thomas Torres Cordova, who has worked for the past fifteen years as a gate manager for Continental Airlines (and whose brother runs an air-conditioning repair business), understands the anatomy and dynamics, as well as the social interactions, particular to a workplace. In his aesthetic conceptualizing, air conditioning and air conditioners play a critical role, yet one that is continually reconfigured. Torres Cordova treats air conditioning as others have treated the advent of digital communication—as a culturally, technologically specific filter or agent which, once introduced, thoroughly conditions not just the immediate atmosphere but all that transpires within it: everything from entertainment, to shopping, to domestic life, to the work that gets done in a climate-controlled environment. His real subject, I think, is the particular mix of socializing and attention to task that the work arena invites. This shows up most conspicuously in his videos, which he likes to describe as a type of collage, short takes of workers familiar to him. The people he records are never analyzed or heroicized or reduced to type; they’re defined by what they’re doing, not by “what they do,” and by their communication, verbal and nonverbal, with their peers.
Media
Schedule
from January 17, 2009 to January 31, 2009