digital | visual | cultural
Oxford, 2018 to 2019
School of Geography and the Environment
Digital | Visual | Cultural was a two year programme of lectures, workshops and public events at the University of Oxford. It brought media theorists, geographers, artists and designers together to examine how digital images are made, circulated and used.
Fig. 01
01The question
The series began from a proposition: that digital visualising technologies do not simply show the world, they help to constitute it.
The term visual culture first appeared in Svetlana Alpers's study of visualising technologies in sixteenth century Amsterdam. It named how a certain way of seeing emerged in that city across a wide range of image types and depended on innovations in surveying, navigation and the camera obscura.
Nick Srnicek argues that platform capitalism relies on digital infrastructures and software. It also appears to generate visualising technologies that are less representational and more operative, to use Harun Farocki's term.
John Berger and Gillian Rose ask who is seeing what, where and with what effects. Those questions sit at the heart of any critical visual methodology, and they framed every event in the series.
Reference image. Immersive visual technologies place the viewer inside the image, raising questions about embodiment, orientation and control.
What sorts of viewers are constituted together with these complex reformations of social relations and digital visualising technologies?Digital | Visual | Cultural, project statement
02Field notes
Digital visual culture uses digital technology to create, manipulate and distribute visual content. These are the forms the field most often takes.
Computer software is used to draw, paint, sculpt and build 3D models. Digital art can produce intricate, lifelike images that are difficult to create with traditional materials.
Digital cameras and editing software allow photographers to work with high dynamic range images, panoramas and long exposures, and to adjust and enhance a photograph after it is taken.
A short animation built from a series of still images. GIFs circulate easily on websites and social media, where they are used to make an idea more engaging or more compact.
Computer generated images produce three dimensional scenes for games, films, architecture and medicine. As the technology advances, the line between a render and a photograph becomes harder to see.
Digital cameras and editing software create moving visuals for films, music videos, tutorials and streaming platforms. Video has become one of the dominant ways of publishing visual culture.
Computer generated images and sound create an immersive three dimensional environment. VR is used in gaming, medicine, heritage and research, and it changes how a viewer is placed inside an image.
03Series index
Each event paired a public lecture with a workshop or panel, drawing together scholars, practitioners and campaigners from across the visual arts and digital humanities.
A keynote from Clancy Wilmott and a day of talks on laser scanning, LiDAR, building information modelling and the materiality of digital objects. The event asked what it means to visualise in three dimensions, and where the political possibilities of that act might lie.
Two days on the ways digital visualising technologies convene different kinds of publics in cities and heritage organisations, with keynotes from Ayona Datta and Monica Degen.
The inaugural lecture examined collisions between visualising technologies, surveillance and the immigration policies being enacted at United States borders, followed by a workshop with eight scholars.
04Archive
Event recaps, programme notes, lecture videos and the Twitter record of the series remain available. The archive is a resource for anyone working on digital visual culture.
05Reading room
The project statement is supported by a working bibliography on visual culture, digital mediation and the politics of looking. It remains one of the most useful parts of the archive.
The list includes Svetlana Alpers on Dutch art and visualising technologies, John Berger on ways of seeing, Gillian Rose on visual methodologies, Nick Srnicek on platform capitalism and Simone Browne on the surveillance of blackness.
A resource for scholars, artists and activists
The website was designed as a supplement to the event series: a place to collect references, programme notes and recordings for people interested in the questions the series raised.
06Contact
The events have ended, but the archive remains open. Use the contact page to join the mailing list, send a message or find the series on social media.
The conversation continues
Digital | Visual | Cultural is curated by Gillian Rose, Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford, with Sterling Mackinnon. The series was supported by the School of Geography and the Environment and St John's College, Oxford.
Mailing list
The original site invited readers to join a mailing list for event announcements. The contact page preserves that invitation and the archived social feed from June 2019.
