Event overview
Mika Elo, Aalto University, Helsinki
Mika Elo is the head of Media Aesthetics Research Group at Aalto University, Helsinki and Associate Professor in Media Aesthetics at University of Lapland, Rovaniemi. His research interests include theory of photographic media, philosophical media theory, and artistic research. He pursues his research in these areas as a curator, visual artist and researcher. In 2009-2011 he worked in the research project (figuresoftouch.com). In 2012-2013 he co-curated the Finnish exhibition Falling Trees at the Biennale Arte 2013 in Venice. He is also a member of the editorial board of JAR.
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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5 Jun 2014 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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