CSNI

Workers’ education in the age of intelligent machines

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Workshop 22 July, 12pm start
with Nicolas Malevé and Adam Brown: Rethinking workshop / Rethinking work

@The Photographers’ Gallery in London [part of geekender and Experimental Photo School]
16 – 18 Ramillies St, London W1F 7LW

What kind of work is photography, and how can a photographic worker be taught, in the face of increasing automation, precarious working and a saturated market? Thinking back to the beginnings of workers’ education in the nineteenth century, a historical emphasis on self-empowerment through creativity persists in contemporary creative education, but how does one empower an algorithm, and does the camera or digital network now play the role of ‘middle management?’ [Read more…]

Spectacle, Speculation and Spam

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Spectacle, Speculation and Spam by Alan Warburton

This video essay was created by Alan Warburton for the Edge of Frame Weekend seminar at The Whitechapel gallery in East London in December 2016. Artists, curators and academics were asked to explore where experimental animation practice sits in relation to independent animation, visual art, histories and institutions. Rather than presenting papers, participants were challenged to cite up to three works that illustrated their case.

CSNI PhD Symposium and Research Event, 29 June

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PhD Symposium
29 Jun, 10.15 – 17.00 @ Mayday Rooms, 88 Fleet Street, London

The Centre was established formally in November 2015 and is pleased to convene its first annual review of its PhD research programme with invited external respondents. Lunch will be provided and time to celebrate the achievements of the year with a drink afterwards.

The programme for the day will involve a closed morning session with presentations from five research projects together with invited comments. The afternoon session will open with a reading session led by Daniel Rubinstein followed by a keynote presentation from Olga Goriunova.

The provocation for wider discussion is that the networked image suggests a rejection of meaning to be found in the singular image, icon or even artist’s work in favour of looking for new process of value in modes of production and reproduction in the allegiances between humans and machinic agents. This complex of agents can be termed the networked image. As such networked image can be considered as a way of seeing, a way of (re)producing and possibly a way of comprehending relations involved in its making.

The research project presentations have a range of subjects, through which a common set of theoretical and methodological themes can be detected. We hope that through comment and discussion we can identify more clearly the underlying problems and their proposed solutions.

[Read more…]

Ways of Machine Seeing, Cambridge, 26-28 June

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Panel: Unthinking Photography: cultural value and the networked image
@ Ways of Machine Seeing organised by Cambridge Digital Humanities Network, and CoDE (Cultures of the Digital Economy Research Institute) and Cambridge Big Data

with Nicolas Malevé, Gaia Tedone, Katrina Sluis, Annet Dekker, Magda Tyżlik-Carver, Andrew Dewdney

“If the new language of images were used differently, it would, through its use, confer a new kind of power.” John Berger. (1972) Ways of Seeing,P33

John Berger’s BBC broadcast experiment ‘Ways of Seeing’ argued that vision and seeing are essentially meaning making activities. Revisiting this understanding of the reproductive and cultural modes of seeing now in computational culture is timely, not least because Berger was concerned with a politics of culture that required new ways of thinking and acting.

Indexical and archival representation of a unique point of origin is no longer a sustainable definition for the image and yet its reproduction in culture persists, cloaking the reality of image production as an unspoken set of allegiances between human and machinic agents. This complex of agents can be termed the networked image and considered as a way of seeing. Working out epistemological and ontological accounts of the entanglements between computational and cultural languages is needed in order to identify and translate the politics and power of the networked image.

[Read more…]

TRAFFICKING OF CULTURAL GOODS: 3D modelling and digital colonialism

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9 Jun 2017, 18.30
@ The Photographers’ Gallery

with Özge Ersoy, Nour A. Munawar, Sarah Nankivell, Christina Varvia
curated by Annet Dekker

 

Trafficking of cultural heritage is nothing new. It ranges from the looting of archaeological sites, theft from cultural heritage institutions and private collections, and the displacement of artefacts due to war. Recently a new phenomenon can be added to this list: the filming of destructions of “fake” ancient relics, while the originals are quickly and illicitly traded.

Following the release of such videos by ISIS, many Western nation states reacted with outrage and responded by attempts to digitally preserve or rebuild of some of the remains. While adopting conventional methods of appropriation, and ignoring their own role in these (fake) destructions, a new player entered the marketplace: commercial companies specializing in 3D modelling and printing. 

The possibility of generating detailed copies of an artefact without the need to access it brings undeniable benefits in terms of its accessibility and preservation. It allows people access to lost ‘treasures’; a digital model can capture the appearance and shape of an object in a way that a 2-dimensional representation could never do. Rather than being committed to the preservation of cultural heritage it could be argued these companies are profiting from the reselling of copyrighted files. Drawing attention to the importance of a freely shared memory and using the power of technology, artist Morehshin Allahyari devised her own method to counter what she considers to be a new ‘digital colonialism’. Based on found footage from exhibition catalogues, tourists’ snapshots and using her imagination, she created 3D visualization models from scratch in her project “Material Speculation: ISIS”. Realised as 3D printed sculptures, these cultural objects have the documentation of their creation embedded on a flash drive inside the model, which has also been shared by Allahyari online for others to use. 

Reflecting on Allahyari’s use of technology as a political medium, the panelists will present their views on what could be a decolonialist practice. They will show how re-use and re-interpretation allow for a new set of values to emerge in which destroyed objects, and their users, regain agency through digitisation. [Read more…]

Transformations at Borough road Gallery

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Exhibition: Transformations @ Borough Road Gallery,
103 Borough Road, London SE1 0AA
The School of Arts and Creative Industries

Vernissage: 23rd June 6-8pm
Exhibition Open: 26 – 30 June 2017, 11am – 7pm

The School of Arts and Creative Industries invites you to a solo exhibition of networked artworks by artist Garrett Lynch (IRL), titled Transformations.

Transformations presents nine networked artworks conceived over a four-year period that explore a practice involving networks. Each artwork provides an example of transformation by a network. This includes the transformation of what is arranged as part of the conception of the artwork and as a consequence the transformation of what can be considered as an artwork.

Garrett Lynch is an artist, lecturer, curator and theorist. He has exhibited internationally at 319 Scholes in New York, the V&A in London, Filmwinter Festival for Expanded Media and Edith Russ Site for Media Art in Germany, FILE festival in Brasil and Videoformes International festival of video art and multimedia in France. Recently most active in networked performance Garrett’s practice explores the spaces between artist, artworks and audience as a means, site and context for artistic initiation, creation and discourse.

Please register your attendance for the vernissage on the 23rd of June via Facebook.

Experimental Photo School: Geekender

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5-7 May 2017
TPG Geekender: Experimental Photo School
with Morehshin Allahyari, Gretchen Andrew, Adam Brown, Rich Cochraine, Claire Davis, Gene Kogan, Nicolas Malevé, Andrew McGettigan, David West,
organised by Katrina Sluis, Ioana Zouli with support from Nicolas Malevé

The collision of photography with planetary scale computing is transforming the medium, disrupting traditional conceptions of visual literacy, raising new questions concerning the agency and cultural value of images and creating new job opportunities even as it destroys others.

Today, computer scientists develop algorithms to read, organize and valorize the billions of images which circulate online without familiarity or reference to the history of aesthetics or photography theory. Animals, weather cameras and Twitter bots create images for large online audiences. The product photography which plasters our magazines and screens now originates in CGI software rather than the photography studio.

The camera itself is becoming an increasingly intelligent agent, remade by those in the field of computational photography who proclaim that “software is the new optics”. Photographers are now advised to create their portfolios not for the aesthetic sensibility of the human eye, but for the seduction of search engines using SEO and carefully coded templates. The mirage of analogue culture becomes fetishized as the hyper-analogue both at the consumer level (with platforms like Instagram) and the art world (with the return of the unique photographic print).

Over the first weekend in May, The Photographers’ Gallery digital programme will be transforming the Gallery into an Experimental Photo School, with a series of workshops, talks, reading groups, drop-in sessions and a new Media Wall commission by Morehshin Allahyari.

For the full list of events and how to book see Experimental Photo School at The Photographers’ Gallery

Posthuman Curating: curating authenticity or the question of content online

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CSNI Panel Discussion with Anne-Marie Schleiner (via video link), Michaël Borras A.K.A Systaime, Gaia Tedone curated and moderated by Magda Tyżlik-Carver.

@ The Photographers’ Gallery

Thursday 6 Apr, 18.30.

The claim that curating is posthuman recognises the changing modes of curating in the world of mass participation in and mass creation of popular culture. It is no longer just about meaning making by art professionals who commission, archive and interpret objects in museums’ collections but it defines a popular activity performed daily by agents of different orders. Not just curators but users of social media, not just people but algorithms and software are actively involved in managing, organising and evaluating content. Curating has become a practice that supports creation of narratives and online personas, generation of data and content that is displayed and managed across different social media platforms. While using digital objects and networked images to represent identities and conceptualise ideas about the world, the self and others, curating is firmly situated as an element of computational cultures distributing, constructing and performing ever new subjects, content, data, objects, and concepts.

This event will explore what and how is curated online. Showcasing three different practices of curating and making art online the focus is on what stories we tell, what objects are displayed and how they are performed through curatorial and artistic practices and strategies online.

[Read more…]

Expressions with sound and image. Technic-praxis-theory

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05 April 2017
10h – 16.30h
Anfiteatro ISMAI
Instituto Universitário da Maia, Porto, Portugal

With Tiago Cruz, Irene Luszting, Magda Tyżlik-Carver, Francisca Gonçalves AKA DJ Sininho, Ricardo Salazar

Expressions with sound and image. Technic-praxis-theory is a series of open classes, promoted by the curricular unit of scenic arts of the arts and multimedia course at the Instituto Universitário da Maia in Porto, Portugal, presenting artistic work, and national and international investigations in the various areas of sound and image.

[Read more…]

Executing Practices – book launch at transmediale festival in Berlin [05/02/17]

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transmediale festival, HKW Berlin
Sun, 05.02.2017
15:00 – 17:30
Cafe Stage

Executing Practices is a public book launch and alternative presentation of content from Data Browser 6: Executing Practices, to be published by Autonomedia in early 2017. The book brings together artists, curators, programmers, and theorists whose practices make critical intervention into executions (of code, orders, laws etc.), drawing attention to their assembled structures and biopolitical strategies. The contributing authors engage with execution from diverse vantage points, defining the actors and forces guiding execution practices, and for whom or what they are performed. Queering the typical book launch, the event features different execution practices from the book, expanding related dialogue beyond the written texts.

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Sliding into a face: aesthetics and politics of image recognition

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CSNI and The Photographers’ Gallery
Panel Discussion
Thu 24 Nov, 2016, 18.30

Curated by artist and educator Nicolas Malevé with Federica Biotti and Zach Blas

What happened to the face? The list is long of what computers do with faces. Applying filters, they improve facial aesthetics. Computers also detect faces in pictures – they identify people, they reconstruct faces based on data, they correlate faces and other data, they predict the evolution of a face.

The face is not a given, it is always under construction. It only exists as a face as long as we have the right apparatus to perceive it and the
right configuration. The face can escape and elude perception (as in the case of prosopagnosia). A long process of reconstruction and archeology may be necessary to make it re-emerge from traces (as in forensics practices). At the same time, the face is under a permanent scrutiny that produces discrimination and stigmatisation.

How to detect a face, to construct one and to evade from one are not necessarily oppositional questions. The face becomes a space where different strategies and forces are active. Panel participants will articulate different responses where the networked image is solicited in various ways. And redefined in the process.

[Read more…]