Event overview
Visual Cultures Public Programme – Summer 2014
Imaging Scales of Relation: a roundtable discussion with Joanna Zylinska, Daniel Rubinstein, Susan Schuppli & Andy Fisher.
Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre
Thursday 29th May
5.00-7.00pm
On the basis of a series of short presentations and screenings, participants in this event will explore what meanings and possibilities are opened up when one investigates contemporary imaging cultures in terms of the relations of scale operative within them.
Joanna Zylinska is Professor of New Media and Communications and a cultural theorist writing on new technologies and new media, ethics and art. Her recent books include: Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process (with Sarah Kember; MIT Press, 2012) and Bioethics in the Age of New Media (MIT Press, 2009) and she translated Stanislaw Lem's philosophical treatise, Summa Technologiae (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Together with Clare Birchall, Gary Hall and Open Humanities Press, she runs the JISC-funded project Living Books about Life - consisting of a series of co-edited, electronic open access books about life which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Joanna is one of the Editors of Culture Machine and a curator of its sister project, Photomediations Machine.
Susan Schuppli is Acting Director of the Centre for Research Architecture in the Visual Cultures Department and Senior Research Fellow in/Project Cooridinator of the ERC funded project: Forensic Architecture, out of which came the exhibition Forensis, currently on at the HKW in Berlin. Her scholarly and creative practice focuses on the evidential dimensions of media materials that emerge out of sites of political violence from the Balkans wars of the 1990s to the final days of the civil war in Sri Lanka in 2009.
Daniel Rubinstein is Course Leader of the MA Photography at Central Saint Martins College of Arts & Design. He is a founding editor of the journal Philosophy of Photography and co-editor (with Johnny Golding and Andy Fisher) of the anthology On the Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond Representation. His recently published articles include: ‘A life more photographic; mapping the networked image’ and ‘The grin of Schrödinger's cat; quantum photography and the limits of representation’.
Scales of Relation
Issues of scale have taken on great importance for a wide range of contemporary artistic, scientific, philosophical and political practices. One might take this to signal the emergence of novel problems of scale, which have provoked changes in conceptions of the scalar and in the methodologies one might use to understand that which scales of different kinds might promise to delineate.
In differing ways and at different registers, a concern for scale marks and cuts across the recent resurgence of interest in Marxist thought, the discourses of biopower and biopolitics, the continuing influence of Lefebvre’s notion of Rhythmanalysis and the conceptual frameworks offered by Actor Network Theory. It is also one way of describing a central concern of Object Oriented Ontology and Speculative Realism, namely, their challenges to thinking on the scale of the human subject. Importantly, and perhaps most obviously, the widening gaps between levels of individual agency and globalized geo-political processes - which articulate recent work on ecological and environmental issues as well as attempts to theorize the politics of security and risk - presents difficult questions of a pressing and obviously scaled nature. On these bases, one might ask whether the promises of measure, proportion and resolution held out by the ability to ascertain the scale of things now finds themselves deranged. Whilst thinking about geo-political processes in terms of their scales may be familiar from decades of research on political geography, arguably, de- and re-scaled realities have emerged to put into question the understanding of political territories and social processes that might be offered by such existing methodologies. The exponential growth and speed of exchange that gives shape to the visual cultures of the Internet plays out, for instance, in the spatial and temporal terms of mediatized embodied experiences characterised by their global scope and ability to establish unprecedented and unpredictable scales of social and political relation.
Scales of Relation seeks to foreground and to explore some of these questions and conceptions of scale. The series brings together speakers whose work registers, in some way, the importance of relations of scale. It sets out to ask how the scale of things, their modes of scalability and intensified amenability to being de- or re-scaled – as well as the scales at which one might view or conceive these - have become a theme of contemporary concern.
Chair: Andy Fisher
…all welcome.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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29 May 2014 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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