Event overview
Aesthetic Objectivity: Department of Visual Cultures Public Programme Spring 2014
Pagan photography, visual culture and the decline of representation
Pagan photography is what happens when photography gets into the hands of the nomad who is alien to the logic of representation. Using the real-life story of the fortuitous discovery of exposed and undeveloped photographic film near the remains of Andrée Arctic expedition, this paper will explore a path to photography that allows for a materialist analysis of representation and the image. Drawing on Artaud’s reinvention of theatre as a site of cruelty, paganism and trance inducing rituals this paper conjures different relationship to the image, one that does not hinge on the familiar dualisms of subject-object, figure-matter and presence-absence. This re-evaluation of the image away from idealist aesthetics is required in order to start making sense of the way images that have no material basis (digital born, augmented, synthetic, artificial) still somehow manage to create meaning (ethics, art).
Daniel Rubinstein is a writer and artist whose practice is concerned with photography, philosophy, images and technology. He is one of the editors of the journal “Philosophy of Photography” and the lead investigator on AHRC funded research network into the photographic image online. He is course leader on the MA Photography at Central Saint Martins. He has published extensively on post-representational aesthetics and digital-born photography, his most recent book co-edited with Johnny Golding and Andy Fisher is On the Verge of Photography (ARTicle Press, 2013).
Aesthetic Objectivity
The computational turn, or what might be called the algorithmic paradigm of calculation and modelling, has produced a new ethics that emerges out of bandwidth and code. This database-ethics has changed both the spaces in which action occurs and ways it is acted upon.
Increasingly, our primary access into the spaces of contemporary conflict is through remote sensing technologies and mobile phone uploads. For over four decades now, earth observation satellites have captured and transmitted data-streams allowing us to chart the long-term changes occurring within dynamic planetary systems, demonstrating the ruinous effects of deforestation, environmental pollutants, resource extraction, and climate change. CCTV video surveillance has also turned witnessing by mechanical means into a prevalent and normalised feature of every-day life. The Visual Cultures Public Programme for Spring 2014 aims to shed light on the kinds of spatial, aesthetic, and political transformations being produced by these changes.
The near real-time mediation of all contemporary events needs to be understood and examined not simply as a ‘progressive’ consequence of a technical evolution made possible by enhanced microprocessors, but as inaugurating a radical new form of aesthetic objectivity. How, asks this series, might we modify the aesthetic registers by which such objectivities are produced and activate new means critique and mobilise new modes of resistance?
Chair: Andy Fisher
Free, no booking required ... all welcome
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 30 Jan 2014 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
If you are attending an event and need the College to help with any mobility requirements you may have, please contact the event organiser in advance to ensure we can accommodate your needs.
