Event 01 / June 2018
Public lecture: June 28 2018.
The inaugural event featured Shannon Mattern of the New School in New York, followed by a workshop with eight scholars from across the United Kingdom and continental Europe.
Our inaugural event on 28 June 2018 featured a talk from Shannon Mattern of the New School in New York titled Fifty (Thousand) Eyes on a Scene. It was a riveting investigation of the collisions between visualising technologies, surveillance and the immigration policies then being enacted at United States borders.
Shannon's lecture was followed the next day by a collection of inspired scholars from around the United Kingdom and continental Europe working through similar themes and questions. The eight assembled participants compassed a diverse range of digital and visual topics, including the politics of representation and relationships between visibility, representation and recognition.
It was our hope that the substance of the workshop would result in a special edition of sorts. The archive preserves the lecture video and the themes that emerged from the discussion.
Workshop participants
- Joel McKim, Birkbeck, University of London
- Myria Georgiou, London School of Economics
- Sara Perry, University of York
- Giorgia Aiello, University of Leeds
- Scott Rodgers, Birkbeck, University of London
- Asli Duru, University of Oxford
- Gina Neff, University of Oxford
- Clancy Wilmott, University of Manchester
What the workshop opened up
The day was full of rich discussion. Four themes emerged across the various contributions, and they continued to shape the later events in the series.
Representation and recognition
There was a consistent interest in the critical and political dimensions of representation. Several contributors explored the relation between being visible, being represented and being recognised. We discussed the need to move away from accounts of visibility that described being visible as either good, in the sense of recognition, or bad, in the sense of surveillance, and invisibility as either good, in the sense of privacy, or bad, in the sense of secrecy. We wanted a more nuanced account of the political and of visuality. Some expressed a felt need to undertake explicitly normative practice, particularly in the face of resurgent populisms.
Research methods
Research methods were touched on several times. Making impossible things, breaking things, playing and experimenting were all mentioned. So too was the idea of research as a form of creation, and of research images as doing things in and of themselves. We also wondered about thinking of digital visual images and their spatial organisation less through forms of visual or spatial organisation and more as a music score, multilayered and multiple.
Temporalities and spatialities
Temporalities as well as spatialities were discussed across the day. The group considered how digital images organise pasts, presents and futures, and how those organisations are spatial as well as temporal.
Posthumans
A rich cast of posthumans emerged, enacted with their digital companions: celebrities, hardhats, render ghosts, stock images and urban humans.