Shannon Mattern: the inaugural event.

The inaugural event of the digital | visual | cultural series was a lecture by Shannon Mattern, Professor of Media Studies at the New School in New York. The lecture, Fifty (Thousand) Eyes on a Scene, examined the collisions between visualising technologies, surveillance and the immigration policies being enacted at United States borders.

Watch the lecture

The full lecture is available on YouTube. It remains the best introduction to the questions that framed the series: who is looking, at whom, with what technology and with what consequences.

Watch Shannon Mattern's lecture

The workshop

The following day there was a workshop at St John's College with eight participants discussing their various projects on aspects of digital visual culture. The day was full of rich discussion, with four themes emerging across the various contributions.

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, which was also a theme of Professor Mattern's lecture. We discussed the need to move away from discussions 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 more complicated understandings 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. Can research images be operative in Farocki's sense of the word? 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. The workshop 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.