International Workshop 2016
Transparency/ Opacity
21-23 March 2016 University Library, Singel 425 Amsterdam
CONTENTS
WELCOME TO THE ASCA WORKSHOP 2016: TRANSPARENCY/OPACITY .................... 3
ABOUT THE AMSTERDAM SCHOOL FOR CULTURAL ANALYSIS ............................... 3
PRACTICAL INFORMATION.......................................................................... 5
TIMETABLE ............................................................................................ 6
PANEL PROGRAM .................................................................................... 7
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS / LECTURES ................................................................ 13
Clare Birchall ...................................................................................... 13
Andrew Hugill ..................................................................................... 15
Akira Mizuta Lippit ............................................................................... 15
PANELIST ABSTRACTS AND BIOS ................................................................. 17
Panel 1: The Transparent Medium ............................................................. 17
Panel 2: Technopolitics of Data ................................................................ 21
Panel 3: The Absent Voice ...................................................................... 24
Panel 4: The Invisible Collection ............................................................... 27
Panel 5: Anonymous Faces ...................................................................... 31
Panel 6: The Opaque Subject ................................................................... 35
Panel 7: Art Languages .......................................................................... 40
Panel 8: Behind the City’s surface ............................................................. 43
Panel 9: Sur-Veil-lance .......................................................................... 46
Panel 10: A-Visuality ............................................................................. 50
Panel 11: Dark Practices......................................................................... 54
Panel 12: Techno-Fetishism ..................................................................... 59
Panel 13: Out/Comings .......................................................................... 62
Panel 14: The Map and the Territory .......................................................... 66
Panel 15: Surfaces/ Modernity ................................................................. 69
Panel 16: Over/Exposures ....................................................................... 73
Panel 17: Tracking Subjects..................................................................... 77
FILM SCREENING AT LIMA ......................................................................... 81
ABOUT THE ORGANISERS .......................................................................... 82
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................... 83
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WELCOME TO THE ASCA WORKSHOP 2016: TRANSPARENCY/OPACITY
Hosted by the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of
Amsterdam, the annual, international ASCA Workshop brings together scholars, artists
and students from around the world to discuss an urgent and common theme. This year’s
theme has inspired people from a wide range of disciplines to reflect on their work
through the chiaroscuro canvas that the cluster transparency/opacity suggests. The
proposals we have received approach these themes through a variety of grey tones
difficult to locate exclusively under the three original categories proposed in the call for
papers. Instead, we have created seventeen distinct panels that capture better the
presenters’ work and hopefully establish a dialogue with each other.
During the three-day workshop, participants discuss central concepts, theories, objects
and analyses with each other. For each session there are between two to four
presenters, who will present for fifteen minutes. They are asked to provide a summary
of the central arguments of their written paper and respond to the papers of their fellow
panelists and the overall theme. The role of the discussants will be, likewise, to
comment on the papers presented offering his/her impressions and questions while also
drawing connections to the other presentations. Through the participation of the
discussants, panelists and everyone attending the panel, we hope to produce feedback
to everyone’s work and share enriching and contentious ideas related to this year’s
topics.
Keynote Speakers
• Clare Birchall
• Andrew Hugill
• Akira Mizuta Lippit
(King’s College, London)
(Bath Spa University)
(University of Southern California)
ABOUT THE AMSTERDAM SCHOOL FOR CULTURAL ANALYSIS
Located at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam, the Amsterdam
School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) is a research institute and doctoral school dedicated
to the interdisciplinary study of culture from a broad humanities perspective. ASCA does
not subscribe to any single theoretical or methodological practice, but, rather, is
defined precisely by its interdisciplinary approach, in which researchers work at the
intersections of core disciplines in the humanities to develop new theoretical
frameworks and research methodologies for analysing culture in all its forms and
expressions. ASCA is the only humanities research institute in the Netherlands to place
interdisciplinarity and theoretical research on culture at the core of its mission, vision,
and program.
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ASCA is home to more than 50 scholars and over 100 PhD candidates active in literature,
philosophy, film and media studies, art and visual culture, musicology, religious studies,
theatre and performance studies, and argumentation theory. Specialists in their own
respective fields, ASCA members share a commitment to working within an
interdisciplinary framework and to maintaining a close connection with contemporary
social and political debates. Within ASCA, they collaborate to provide an innovative,
stimulating, and productive research environment for scholars, professionals, and
graduate students from the Netherlands and abroad.
ASCA has particular strengths in four key areas of research: globalisation and cultural
transformation; creative industries; cultural heritage and identity; and digital
humanities. These strengths, which combine expertise and insights from members across
all constituent departments, make ASCA ideally suited to address the ‘big questions’
facing contemporary society, including issues of multiculturalism; inequality; migration
and urbanisation; new media and communication technologies; and knowledge
production, sharing, and archiving.
Please contact us at [email protected]
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis
Academic Director: Prof. dr. Patricia Pisters
Vice Director: Dr. Esther Peeren
Managing Director: Dr. Eloe Kingma
Office manager: Drs. Jantine van Gogh
Address: Spuistraat 210, 1012 VT Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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PRACTICAL INFORMATION
Locations:
Panels, keynotes and lunch: University Library
Address: Singel 425
The conference proceedings will take place at the University Library, UB of the
University of Amsterdam (UvA).
Lunch for participants will be provided in the same location.
Panel Rooms: panels in sessions will take place in four rooms of the University
Library (UB):
C 1.13
Belle van Zuylenzaal
C 0.07
Doelenzaal
C 0.01
Potgieterzaal
C 1.08
Vondelzaal
If you need to find one of these library rooms, you can follow the internal signposts, ask
at the reception, or consult this ground plan http://cf.uba.uva.nl/nl/rondleiding/
Film event at LiMa (Monday 21st)
+31(0)20 389 20 30
http://www.li-ma.nl
Address: Arie Biemondstraat 111
Dinner party at Kapitein Zeppos (Wednesday 23rd)
Address: Gebed Zonder End 5
Kapitein Zeppos is tucked inside a little alley, just off a street named Grimburgwal. The
after party will take place upstairs, in ‘Claires Ballroom’.
http://www.zeppos.nl/
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PROGRAM
Time Monday 21, March 2016
08.30 – 9.00 Registration
09.00 - 9.30 Introduction by Asca’s Academic Director: Patricia Pisters
09.30-11.00 Keynote lecture: Dr. Clare Birchall
Shareveillance: The Politics of Openness and Opacity
11.00-11.30 Coffee Break
11.30-13.30 Panels (1-2-3)
13.30-14.30 Lunch
14.30-16.30 Panels (4-5-6)
19.30-22.00 LIMA Screening
Address: Arie Biemondstraat 111
Time Tuesday 22, March-2016
10.00-10.30 Coffee
10.30-12.30 Panels (7-8-9)
12.30-13.30 Lunch
13.30-15.30 Panels (10-11-12)
15.30-16.00 Coffee
16.00-17.30 Keynote lecture: Prof. Akira Lippit
Dream of a Transparent Language
Time Wednesday 23, March 2016
10.00-10.30 Coffee
10.30-12.30 Panels (13-14-15)
12.30-13.30 Lunch
13.30-15.30 Panels (16-17)
15.30-16.00 Coffee
16.00-17.30 Keynote lecture: Prof. Andrew Hugill
Transparency, Opacity, Antinomy: ’Pataphysics
19.00 Dinner Party
Kapitein Zeppos
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PANEL PROGRAM
MONDAY MORNING PANEL SESSIONS (11.30-13.30)
C 1.13 Belle van Zuylenzaal
C 1.08 Vondelzaal
C 0.01 Potgieterzaal
Panel 1: The Transparent
Medium
Panel 2: Technopolitics of
Data
Panel 3: The Absent
Voice
1. Asbjørn Grønstad
Toward an Aesthetics of
Opacity
1. Lonneke van der Velden
WikiLeaks: transparency
devices and data publics
1. Thijs Witty
Opacity of the outrelangue: Marc Nichanian on
Translation and Testimony
2. Flavia Larocca
Transparency of the medium
in digital narratives
2. Jonathan Gray
"Dataspeak": Digital
Transparency, Informational
Democracy and the Politics
of Data
2. Viola Lasmana
Shadows in Revolution:
Archival Emanations in
Post-1965 Indonesia
3. Jan Teurlings
The transparency dispositif:
notes on the mediation of
transparency.
3. Frederike Kaltheuner
ALGORITHMS ARE GREAT AND
ALL BUT THEY CAN ALSO
RUIN LIVES - Exploring the
relationship between
transparency and opacity in
algorithmically driven
decision-making
3. Younes Saramifar
Searching in the Oubliette
or Could There Be a Flat
Ontology of Opacity?
4. Ed Graham
Adorno, Transparency and
Contemporary Theory
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MONDAY AFTERNOON PANEL SESSIONS (14.30-16.30)
C 1.13 Belle van Zuylenzaal
C 1.08 Vondelzaal
C 0.01 Potgieterzaal
Panel 4: The Invisible
Collection
Panel 5: Anonymous Faces
Panel 6: The Opaque
Subject
1. Ian Kenny
Shattering the Vanquishing
Lens: Periphery, Obscurity,
and Voicelessness in Emily
Carr's Vanquished
1. Sanem Yazıcıoğlu
Invisible and Unexpected as
Forms of Transparency and
Opacity
1. Florian Göttke
A Protester in Homs, Syria
2. Irem Yildiz
‘Dark’ Side of the
Exhibitions: Process of Vision
at the Ethnographic Human
Showcases and the Case
of Saartje Baartman (17901815)
2. Daniël de Zeeuw
Impersonating the
impersonal: Anonymous’ logo
as a parody of late capitalist
globalization
2. Nelly Pinkrah
(Title to be confirmed)
3. Julie Johnson
Hiding in Plain Sight: How
Display Systems Reveal
Patterns of Knowledge
Production
3. Carlos Bernardo Caycedo
The ‘Who’ behind
Anonymous
3. Halbe Kuipers
Ed Atkins, Warm, Warm,
Warm, Spring Mouths:
Crystalline Self, or
Resistance in Smooth
Space
4. Claire Kueny
“Shadow Sculptures”: from
opacity to transparency and
rewind
4. Patricia de Vries
Dazzles, Decoys, and Deities:
The politics of digital
invisibility
4. Sara Zampieri
On
transparency
and
opacity in documentary
photography
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TUESDAY MORNING PANEL SESSIONS (10.30-12.30)
C 1.13 Belle van Zuylenzaal
C 1.08 Vondelzaal
C 0.01 Potgieterzaal
Panel 7: Art Languages
Panel 8: Behind the City’s
Surface
Panel 9: Sur-VeilLance/Face Value
1. Steyn Bergs
How to lay bare open
secrets?
Communicative capitalism as
a condition for critical
aesthetic practice
1. Neda Genova
From “flat” to “fractal” –
politics of surfaces and
facades
1. Ilya Parkins
Opacity, Translucency and
Racialized Femininities:
Veils in US Vogue, 1915-25
2. Srajana Kaikini
Suddenly This Overview,
Reading the Literal
2. Uzma Ansari
Monochromic Memories
2. Taylor Scanlon
Hidden Faces in Public
Spaces: Covered Faces and
the Logic of Physiognomy
3. Nina Leger
Object obscured by
structure:
On some artistic initiatives
of the 1960s
3. Golnar Abbasi
Homes Housing Resistance:
On the modern project of
housing in Tehran.
3. Lara Mazurski
Intervening in Hegemonic
Imaginins of Veiled
Women in Islam: The
Semiotics of Islam
4. Alina Pertseva
Subject’s Opacity Taken
Literally. Merleau-Ponty
revisiting Sartre’s
transparent consciousness
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TUESDAY AFTERNOON PANEL SESSIONS (13.30-15.30)
C 1.13 Belle van Zuylenzaal
C 1.08 Vondelzaal
C 0.01 Potgieterzaal
Panel 10: A-Visuality
Panel 11: Dark Practices
Panel 12: TechnoFetishism
1. Alice Miceli
Chernobyl Project
1. Michelle Pfeifer
Becoming Flesh: Refugee
Hunger Strike, Coloniality,
and German Politics of
Racialization
1. Giovanni Papini
Handshakes in the Age of
Acoustic Sensing: towards
a humane representation
of thought
2. Caroline Kamya
What else is missing: A visual
investigation into
whitewashing and historical
amnesia
2. Natasha Basu
“Where Are Our Human
Rights?”: The Problematic
Taxonomy of the “Migrant”
2. Julia Velkova
Transparency, power and
digital gifts in the context
of the digital commons
3. Hanna Husberg
On noticing air
3. Nine Eglantine
Yamamoto-Masson
Can the Token Speak?
Towards a Theory of the
Decolonial Trojan Token
4. David Gauthier
Opaque Executions, Black
Boxes and the Politics of
the “Cold Gaze”
4. Lidia Mateo
How does a clandestine
image behave?
4. Mikki Stelder
“Rainbows Are Just
Refracted White Light:”
Troubled Sight/Site and
Israel’s Gay Tourism Industry
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WEDNESDAY MORNING PANEL SESSIONS (10.30-12.30)
C 0.07 Doelenzaal
C 1.08 Vondelzaal
C 0.01 Potgieterzaal
Panel 13: Out/Comings
Panel 14: The Map and the
Territory
Panel 15: Surfaces/
modernity
1. Paris Cameron-Gardos
“I am not gay”: Secrecy,
Authorship, and the Coming
Out Narrative
1. Simon Ferdinand
Artists Astride Shifting
Mapping Paradigms
1. Johan Fornäs
Introduction to Rethinking
Culture: Beyond
Transparency and Opacity
2. Matthieu Foucher
The Heterotopic Closet:
Spectral Presences and
Otherworlds in La Revue
Monstre and Michael James
O’Brien’s Interiors
2. Marco Dell’ Oca
Critique of the Invisible Seer:
A Material Ethnography of
Drone Surveillance
2. Jan Overwijk
Abstract - Modernisation:
Weber and Lyotard on the
opaque
3. Vesna Vravnik
No Way Out – Go West:
Sexual and Religious
Nationalisms, Nonexistence
of Homosexuality and
Cunning Activist Tactics in
the Post-Yugoslav Cinema
3. Ruby Wallis
Coolorta, a place apart –
reframing the landscape
through lens based art
practice.
3 Domietta Torlasco
Screening: House Arrest
(2015)
4. Thomas Mical
4. Rafal Morusiewicz
Opaque Becoming
Transparent: Violent
Contempt in the Polish
Countryside in It Looks
Pretty from a Distance (dir.
Anka Sasnal and Wilhelm
Sasnal, 2011)
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WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON PANEL SESSIONS (13.30 -15.30)
C 0.07 Doelenzaal
C 1.08 Vondelzaal
Panel 16: Over-Exposures
Panel 17: Tracking Subjects
1. Sofia Apostolidou
Fat Women, Thin Modernities: Examining
Cultural Representations of Fat Women at
the Outskirts of Europe
1. Iona Sharp
Finance and Sensory Addition: Feeling
the System and Perceiving the Stock
Market
2. Dan Leberg
‘Look the part’: Strasberg’s Method,
Empathy, and Actors’ Bodies
2. Marjolein Lanzing
The Transparent Self
3. Sara Janssen
From Maximum Visibility to Haptic Erotics
3. Evelyn Wan
Beyond human perception and cognition:
Minority Report, Predictive Policing and
the Ideology of Data
4. Anna Maria Pinaka
Unthinkable dirtiness, non-sovereign
subjectivities, and jumps into the
‘impossible’
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KEYNOTE SPEAKERS / LECTURES
Clare Birchall, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Culture at the
Department of English, King's College London. Birchall is the
author of Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip
(Berg, 2006) and co-editor of New Cultural Studies: Adventures in
Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2007). She has edited special
issues of the journals Theory, Culture and Society (Dec 2011) and
Cultural Studies (Jan 2007).
Her most recent research is concerned with the relationship between secrecy and
transparency in the digital age. Dr Birchall is part of an ESRC-funded series of research
seminars on privacy issues entitled ‘DATA - PSST! (Debating and Assessing Transparency
Arrangements - Privacy, Security, Surveillance, Trust’)
Alongside more traditional scholarship, Birchall is involved with a number of digital
projects. She collaboratively produces a series of online videos entitled Liquid Theory
TV. In addition, she is one of the editors for the online journal Culture Machine; an
editorial board member and series co-editor for the Open Humanities Press; and part of
the team behind the JISC-funded Living Books about Life series. These books, produced
by an international network of humanities and social science scholars, repackage and represent open access science-related research on topics such as air, bioethics,
surveillance and, Dr Birchall’s own contribution, invisibility.
Clare Birchall’s lecture in ASCA Workshop 2016
Shareveillance: The Politics of Openness and Opacity
In recent years, ‘sharing’ has been commandeered by talk of the ‘sharing economy’.
Rather than looking at networked community markets in this talk, I will address the
subjectivity shaped by both open and opaque data initiatives. It is a subjectivity shaped
by a logic of ‘shareveillance’. Opaque government data initiatives, such as those
enacted by the NSA and GCHQ, require us to knowingly or unknowingly ‘share’ our data
with the state in a way that renders us visible. But open government data initiatives also
involve veillance, or watching, because the sharing of data includes a call to act upon
that data – we are envisioned as entrepreneurial and auditing subjects. Shareveillance,
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in different ways, then, constitutes the depoliticized vision the neoliberal state has of
the public: configuring it more as a dataset, a market, or series of individual
entrepreneurs than as a multitude.
In order to re-imagine subjectivity in the face of shareveillance, I turn to Édouard
Glissant’s ‘right to opacity’. While Glissant uses the term to refer to the right not to
comply with the demand to be knowable, understood and transparent within a racialised
relationality, a right to opacity in the context I am concerned with would mean the
demand not to be reduced to, and interact with data in ways delimited by the state: to
resist the terms of engagement set by the two faces of shareveillance. This will involve
an appropriation of ‘sharing’; to imagine a right to opacity that cuts into and apart data
formations through various tactics such as hacking, data obfuscation, decentralization,
encryption, anonymity, and anarchic algorithms.
Such a reassessment of the politics and values associated with openness, secrecy, and
sharing has implications for media scholars too. A right to opacity for those operating
within the university might mean refraining from certain transparency measures
implemented for less than transparent reasons. It might mean thinking more critically
about what kinds of publishing, networks and communications we want to develop. It
might mean not placing too much faith in revelation or exposé alone; intervening in,
rather than accepting, dominant conditions of visibility; pushing beyond ideology
critique, or what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick famously called ‘paranoid reading’, while still
being attuned to the opaque operations and erasures of discursive power. In this reattunement of our scholarship and practice, and the echoes it can have in wider circles,
secrecy is no longer monopolized by the state, and the concept of ‘sharing’ might be
politicised as a Commons. In a conjuncture that places a premium on the knowability
and surveillability of subjects, in which everyone must share their data, come forth and
be understood as, and act upon, data, this appropriation of opacity becomes a political
act.
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Akira Mizuta Lippit is Professor and Chair of Critical Studies in
the School of Cinematic Arts, and Professor in the Departments of
Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Cultures at
the University of Southern California (Dornsife College). Lippit’s
interests are in world cinemas, critical theory, Japanese film and
culture, experimental film and video and visual studies. His publications include the
books Atomic Light (Shadow Optics); Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife; ExCinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video; and the forthcoming Cinema
without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift (2016). Lippit is
General Editor of the journal Discourse, and is active in the independent film community
where he programs events, serves on festival juries, and interviews filmmakers. He
regularly teaches, lectures, and publishes in Japan, where he is a founding editor of the
visual culture journal Ecce.
Akira Mizuta Lippit’s lecture in ASCA Workshop 2016
Dream of a Transparent Language
This address looks at the relationship between language, media, and the phantasm of
immediacy, or transparency. Since the advent of language, which is to say since the
advent of human being and history, language has been burdened by the demand of an
eventual self-effacement, by the anticipation of an unmediated language that would
mark the disappearance of language as such. This desire haunts the birth of philosophy
(Socrates) and appears repeatedly in discourses on translation, new media, and the
archive. This presentation considers the specter of language as a medium driven by the
forces of erasure, withdrawal, and dematerialization--by the dream of a language
inseparable from the body, its thought, and a technê no longer recognizable as foreign.
15
Andrew Hugill is the Director of Creative Computing at Bath Spa University and, as a
composer, musicologist, computer scientist, literary
scholar, and ‘Pataphysician, a truly transdisciplinary
academic. His work at Bath Spa University reflects this
mix of disciplines. As a speaker during the ASCA
workshop, and as the Commandeur Requis of the Ordre
de la Grande Gidoulle in the Collège de ‘Pataphysique, he
will tell more about the history of ‘Pataphysics, first written into the world by the
French poet and playwright Alfred Jarry as the “science of imaginary solutions.”
Hugill is the author of ‘Pataphysics: A Useless Guide, published in 2012 by MIT Press. As
he writes in the introduction to this publication: “…we can say that pataphysics is
subjective, privileging the particular above the general, the imaginary above the real,
the exceptional above the ordinary, the contradictory above the axiomatic. Not that
there is any choice in such matters: in pataphysics this is just the way things are.”
Under the growing pressure in and onto the university to account for its relevance and
benefits in transparent and often quantifiable terms, it seems all the more necessary to
protect the unforeseeable, and sometimes inexpressible parts of research; to follow the
"laws of exceptions" and account for the unaccountable.
Andrew Hugill’s lecture in ASCA Workshop 2016
Transparency, Opacity, Antinomy: ’Pataphysics
In the pataphysical antinomy mutually exclusive conditions co-exist beyond metaphysics.
’Pataphysics is the science of laws governing exceptions and contradictions. This
presentation argues for the importance of a pataphysical knowledge that incorporates
the illogical and tacit dimensions. Through a critical analysis of some examples from the
work of Alfred Jarry, it shows how pataphysics can turn the academic eye to its own
blind spots, and protect the unforeseeable, unaccountable, and inexpressible, in
research. It also describes the consolations of pataphysics to the academic researcher.
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PANELIST ABSTRACTS AND BIOS
Panel 1: The Transparent Medium
Asbjørn Grønstad
Towards an Aesthetic of Opacity
Whatever its discrete inclinations might be – analog or digital, aesthetic or sociological,
historical or contemporary – visual culture and its multifarious objects and operations
orbit around a set of tacit presuppositions: that the image is at least theoretically
legible, that in principle anything can be visualized, that our screens will always grow
incrementally brighter, and that vision and light are phenomena that are intrinsically
good. From a technological point of view, the history of the image is the story of ever
more sophisticated machines for the production of sharpness. From mainstream cinema's
historical predilection for unobtrusive staging to porn's axiomatic appropriation of
maximum visibility, the medium of film has, perhaps for obvious reasons, favored what
could be seen as a poetics of transparency. But on the fringes of this paradigm another
mode of audiovisual representation has increasingly come to the fore in contemporary
visual culture. An orientation toward visual opacity, richly present in parts of
experimental cinema for instance, poses severe challenges to the epistemological
efficacy of the filmic image. Historically, visual opacity has tended to be
conceptualized as a formal strategy through which the materiality or mediality of the
work could be foregrounded. While retaining this understanding of non-transparent art,
this paper aims to shift the discussion of opacity away from a concern with staging
materiality and to a heightened awareness of the alternative forms of knowledge and
experience it helps generate. In a consideration of work by artists such as Ernie Gehr,
Bill Morrison and Pat O'Neill, I examine the strange and optically regenerative practices
by which materially impaired images exploit their own opacity to attain a new modality
of existing as a visual artifact.
Bio
Asbjørn Grønstad is professor of visual culture in the Department of Information Science
and Media Studies, University of Bergen, where he is also founding director of the
Nomadikon Center for Visual Culture. The author and editor of numerous books and
articles in cinema studies and visual culture, his new book Film and the Ethical
Imagination is forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan in 2016, as are the anthologies
Seeing Whole: Toward an Ethics and Ecology of Sight (co-edited with Mark Ledbetter,
Cambridge Scholars Press) and Gestures of Seeing in Film, Video and Drawing (co-edited
with Henrik Gustafsson & Øyvind Vågnes, Routledge). His ongoing project is The Muddled
Image: Sites of Opacity in Visual Culture.
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Flavia Larocca
Transparency of the medium in digital narratives
Digital media represent the arrival of a new textual technology, potentially more
flexible and powerful than any other preceding medium. The medium passes from being
transparent, a bare vehicle for the transmission of the message, to be the focus of
attention or even, as McLuhan affirms, the message itself. According to a different view
this shift is only temporary, as the study of the medium will lose importance once it has
reached the maximum achievable level of expressiveness, it will be transparent again,
and the focus will turn on to the message it bears.
Since the Reinassance, transparency seems to have been a goal of artists, as the medium
has always been supposed to function like a window for the viewer to see the content.
On the other hand, there is the striving of the artists for hypermediacy, creating
awareness of the medium and making it visible.
This paper aims to analyze the relationship between medium and textual content in
digital environments, through a theoretical approach supported by case studies selected
among works that see the medium not only as a carrier of content but as a part of the
content it bears. Our main concern will be to understand whether a medium can actually
be transparent, or rather can contribute to turning the content opaque or even obscure.
Digital environments are based on a mechanical character, an algorithmic layer that will
often be inaccessible to the user. This absence of a stable frame of reference, such as
traditional media like the codex used to give, causes a change in the reading dynamics
of digital narratives resulting of texts that are traversed by the reader in the attempt of
sense making through a dynamics of aporias and epiphanies.
Bio
Born in Milan, Italy in 1989 Flavia Larocca holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Foreign
Languages and Literature (English and Russian) at the University of Milan with a thesis in
English Contemporary Literature titled “The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
between New York and Lahore” (supervised by Professor Carlo Pagetti). In July 2015 she
completed her Master’s degree in Multimedia (specialization Culture and Arts) at the
University of Porto, Portugal, with a thesis titled “Literary Dynamics in Nonlinear
Narratives” (supervised by Professor Miguel Carvalhais). Her research interests have
been centred on the fields of digital and computer mediated literature and technology
as a creative and artistic tool with a focus on the changing roles of author, medium and
reader in digital narratives.
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Jan Teurlings
The Transparency Dispositif: Between the mediation of transparency and the
transparency of mediation
With the contemporary interest in transparency we can distinguish between, amongst
others, two types of perspectives on transparency. The first focuses on the mediation of
transparency. This type of work conceives of transparency has a process, that is,
transparency needs to be enacted, and thus has a necessary mediated form - without
this mediating instance transparency would be impossible to obtain. A second type of
work on transparency focuses on the transparency of mediation. Here it is stressed that
each type of mediation, unwittingly or on purpose, makes the mediation and its
conditions of possibility visible, or at least partly so. Thus by watching horror movies we
can learn something about narrative structures, by watching reality TV we can learn
something about television´s production practices, etc… This paper proposes the
concept of transparency dispositif as a theoretical tool that combines both perspectives.
Drawing on the work of Foucault the paper takes a transparency dispositif as a material
arrangement that affords for certain aspects to become to become transparent, while
blocking others. But at the same time as it does its transparency work, the transparency
dispositif displays part of its function, materiality and governmental logic. In order to
illustrate the analytical relevance of the concept the paper finishes with an analysis of 3
transparency devices on warfare: the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, the Medal of
Honor website and especially the Battlescape animated videos produced by the US
military to remember fallen soldiers, and the Russian drone and tank footage in the
Syrian war.
Bio
University of Amsterdam
Department of Media Studies
19
Ed Graham
Transparency and opacity in Adorno, in relation to contemporary critical theory and
cultural studies
Recent theoretical trends inspired by Accelerationism and cybernetics have rendered the
work of Adorno somewhat unfashionable, even outdated, within the domains of critical
theory and cultural studies today. In a world in which day-to-day existence is ever-more
structured by new technologies, the pessimistic postwar Marxist analyses of culture and
society offered by Adorno are increasingly disregarded in favour of theory that is open
and embracing of such technologies, and their potential to move us beyond capitalism.
Adorno, in his hostility towards positivism and enlightenment techno-science, and his
advocating of a critical, negative dialectical method, stands in sharp contrast with
contemporary Nick Land and Deleuze-Guattari-inspired affirmationist tendencies
towards networks, abstraction and techno-fetishism. While it is clearly not the case that
theory indebted to the latter regards contemporary culture and society as transparent,
there is, on the other hand, certainly something about the Adornian “method” that
views its object of examination with a degree of opacity. Drawing mostly from sections
of Minima Moralia and Negative Dialectics, this paper will aim to explicate the way in
which Adorno refuses the faux-transparency of not only the “Culture Industry” and
positive psychology, but also the tendencies towards immediacy found in Nietzsche and
Heidegger. Such rejections are crucial to an understanding of how he construes the
relationship between transparency and opacity, which arguably finds its firmest
appearance in his unique remarks on metaphysics and truth. Truth is not aligned with
transparency in an immediate sense, and yet, arguably, this notion ultimately aims
towards a conception of reality that is less opaque. I will end not by arguing for a
reactionary, technophobic return to Adorno, but instead by suggesting there is
something in his nuanced articulation of truth through a certain opacity that still greatly
benefits, and is as relevant for, cultural analysis, resistance and activism today.
Bio
Originally from the South of England, I am currently studying for an MA in Philosophy at
the University of Amsterdam. I received my BA from the Department of English and
Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick, specialising in critical theory and
continental philosophy. My academic interests span the works of figures such as Kant,
Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno and Deleuze, to broader concerns regarding the
relationship between philosophy and technology, science, art and culture. Of particular
interest to me is the metaphysical dimension of Adorno’s thought, and the way it
informs his remarks about truth, rationality, ethics and the role of philosophy more
generally.
20
Panel 2: Technopolitics of Data
Lonneke van der Velden
WikiLeaks: transparency devices and data publics
This paper reflects upon practices of data-analysis in and around WikiLeaks as a 'radical
transparency' project. Central in the paper is a particular kind of expertise emerging
from WikiLeaks-publications: the study of the surveillance in the context of leaking. The
paper theorises methods for making leaked surveillance data public. I discuss by what
means 'surveillance data' are made transparent, by which kind of (collective) practices,
and for which public. I do so by building on three theoretical pillars: First, the idea that
WikiLeaks establishes a form of radical transparency, as argued by Clare Birchall:
WikiLeaks is disruptive of traditional channels of disclosure; second, transparency
critiques that show how digital devices are performative of so called 'data publics', a
notion coined by Evelyn Ruppert. This is useful because these critiques can be turned
productive for a study into the devices and data practices within the radical
transparency agenda of WikiLeaks; and third, insights into what Geert Lovink and Ned
Rossiter call 'the protocols' of contemporary digital culture. The chapter contains a
description of the methods and devices by which surveillance technologies are rendered
transparent by WikiLeaks-initiatives or researchers inspired by its publications. The
central question in the chapter is, if WikiLeaks can be taken as a form of radical
transparency and digital devices are constitutive of data publics, what are the data
practices surrounding this 'radical transparency agenda'?
Bio
Lonneke van der Velden is a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC funded DATACTIVE
project based at ASCA at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Her work focuses on
surveillance awareness devices and data activism in the context of the politics of big
data. She teaches at the department of Media Studies at the UvA.
[email protected]
21
Jonathan Gray
"Dataspeak": Digital Transparency, Informational Democracy and the Politics of Data
Over the past few years data has come to play an increasingly prominent role on the
world political stage - from the UN's "Data Revolution" to the World Bank's data portal to
hundreds of national and subnational open data initiatives around the world.
How are the vocabularies, rhetorics and practices associated with new data technologies
re-articulating and re-configuring conceptions of transparency and democracy? How are
new forms of "dataspeak" and data infrastructures shaping politics after the digital turn?
What do they foreground and what do they hide?
This paper will draw on a combination of historical and empirical research to survey how
data is implicated in a plethora of different kinds of political projects - from neoliberal
public sector reform to new forms of democratic intervention from activists, journalists
and civil society groups. This will include critically examining the political aesthetics of
new modes of organisation after the data turn - from dashboards and data visualisations
to hackathons and civic software communities.
It will conclude by proposing elements of a theoretical re-engagement with digital
transparency and the politics of public information in the service of a more ambitious
programme towards the recomposition of sociotechnical infrastructures which shape and
organise collective life.
Bio
Jonathan Gray is Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Amsterdam working on the
ERC funded project "DATACTIVE: The Politics of Big Data According to Civil Society". He
is also Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of
Amsterdam, Tow Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia
University and Director of Policy and Research at the global civil society organisation
Open Knowledge. More about him can be found at jonathangray.org and he is on Twitter
at @jwyg.
22
Frederike Kaltheuner
ALGORITHMS ARE GREAT AND ALL BUT THEY CAN ALSO RUIN LIVES Exploring the relationship between transparency and opacity in algorithmically
driven decision-making
2015 has been called “the year of the great algorithm panic”_ (Crawford, 2015). From
academic conferences to popular technology writing, there has been a considerable
increase in studying “algorithms” and their adverse effects on society. To cite a recent
WIRED headline “ALGORITHMS ARE GREAT AND ALL BUT THEY CAN ALSO RUIN LIVES”.
This paper begins with the assumption, that this growing interest can be explained if
algorithms are conceptualised as an opaque form of automated decision-making. From
the curation of social media news-feeds, to the detection of terrorist suspects, opaque
algorithms are increasingly making decisions for us and about us (CIHR, 2015). What
might seem trivial in the case of sell-check algorithms becomes of public relevance
when algorithmically driven decision-making is used to detect terrorism suspects,
engage in financial trading or curate the semi-public spaces of online social networks.
This raises the important question: how can and should algorithms be regulated. In the
words of Taylor Owen (2015): “If algorithms represent a new ungoverned space, a
hidden and potentially ever-evolving unknowable public good, then they are an affront
to our democratic system, one that requires transparency and accountability in order
to function.” This paper explores the argument that transparency is the most cure to
the adverse effects of opaque forms of automated decision-making. It will thereby try
to deconstruct “algorithms” as a coherent analytical category.
Bio
Frederike Kaltheuner is a researcher and writer. Her work explores how citizens resist
massive data collection by corporations and governments. She is a researcher at the
ERC funded DATACTIVE project at the University of Amsterdam, a PhD candidate at
ASCA and a fellow at the Centre for Internet and Human Rights in Berlin. She holds an
MSc from the University of Oxford and an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and
Politics from the University College Maastricht and Bogazici University in Istanbul.
23
Panel 3: The Absent Voice
Thijs Witty
Opacity of the outre-langue: Marc Nichanian on Translation and Testimony
Le sujet de l’histoire: vers une phénoménologie du survivant (Lignes: 2015) is the
culmination of a decades-spanning research project on Armenian survivor testimony by
the eminent philosopher Marc Nichanian (b. 1946). The book is the most radical
formulation of his argument to date, occasioning the need to situate his project in the
ongoing conversation about the sense of history in face of the many catastrophic
turnabouts of the twentieth century. This general assessment will be my proposed
contribution to the workshop.
In the book Nichanian presents a phenomenology of the survivor. If the elimination of
the witness lies at the heart of the disaster, he writes, then it is impossible to testify.
The survivor is neither the real witness nor ever able to speak about the “destruction of
testimony in man.” This destruction is the aim of what Nichanian calls the genocidal
will, a program which seeks not only to destroy a people but also the fact or “factuality”
of its criminal intent. The genocidal will also disintegrate any language that could
convey the experience of the disaster. “Survival is denial”, Nichanian therefore
concludes, and the experience of this survival is of an irreparable loss. Any optimistic
concept of testimony after disaster, he writes, will fall victim to a transcendental
illusion.
What is needed instead is a new language for the survivor, one that is no longer subject
to fact or, in other words, no longer a subject of history. Nichanian discusses three
forms of examination to which the survivor of disaster must instead be subjected:
philology, imagination, and translation. He introduces a number of new concepts in this
threefold examination, of which outre- langue [beyond-language] seems the most
pertinent. The beyond-language is not the beyond of language, but the opaque condition
for all language. It is only in the encounter with the beyond- language that survivor
testimony may approach the aporia at the heart of the catastrophic event and save itself
from the genocidal will. It is the task of translation to approach this beyond-language in
a surviving language as if it were already lost, to “install it there from the position of
those who have already lost it.” The concept of outre-langue is Nichanian’s most
important contribution to understanding translation and testimony in the aporia of the
disaster, and will therefore be at the centre of my presentation.
Bio
Thijs Witty ([email protected]) is a PhD fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural
Analysis,
University of Amsterdam. He is supervised by prof. dr. Mireille Rosello and dr. MarieAude Baronian.
24
Viola Lasmana
Shadows in Revolution: Archival Emanations in Post-1965 Indonesia
In an article on The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer’s film about the 1965-66 anticommunist purge in Indonesia, Intan Paramaditha asserts that “the New Order regime
was built on spectacular violence that existed simultaneously with its invisible double,
spectral violence.” 1 The gap between the controlled spectacle of what the Indonesian
public was permitted to see following the genocide and the different “truths” that were
suppressed by the state remains a grey area that demands attention to the ways that
these histories and silences still haunt the present.
My talk examines the dark spots in Indonesia’s history, as well as forgotten complicities.
The U.S. saw Indonesia as “a gleam of light in Asia” after the 1965 purge, 2 and
considered the military coup in Indonesia a success. If such state-orchestrated and USbacked massacre was a source of beaming victory, my paper brings attention to the
spaces in between transparency and opacity; I aim to shift the light from that shining
façade to the darkness beneath, to make the ghosts—the bayangan, an Indonesian word
that connotes, at once, both the shadow and the imagination—alive again.
Focusing on the ways that digital technologies impact notions of the archive and
Indonesian communities’ relationship to historical trauma, I analyze how current works
(such as the Indonesian Institute of Social History digital archive, and a data
visualization project mapping the 1965 killings based on interviews with survivors) open
up archival silences and illuminate shadows between what is opaque and transparent. As
crucial alternatives to state-sanctioned narratives, they demonstrate what Ann Stoler
describes as emanations from outside the master archive. 3 These are projects that
emerge from in-between spaces—spaces of silence and trauma—and that challenge the
politics of visibility and invisibility in radical ways.
Bio
Viola Lasmana is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of
Southern California and a USC Mellon Digital Humanities Fellow. Her research interests
include American and Indonesian literatures, Southeast Asian American Studies, feminist
media, digital humanities, and digital pedagogies. Her dissertation analyzes post-1965
Indonesian cultural productions that form alternative archives, and emphasizes how
Indonesia’s history and US imperialism across the Pacific are critically intertwined. Viola
has been a long-time HASTAC Scholar, a recent USC Transpacific Studies Graduate
Fellow, and is currently one of Fembot Collective's International Consultants on the
Fembot Advisory Board. Her work can be found in Visual Anthropology, make/shift:
feminisms in motion, Computers and Composition Online, and Interdisciplinary
Humanities
1
Intan Paramaditha, “Tracing Frictions in The Act of Killing,” Film Quarterly 67.2 (2013): 45.
James Reston, “Washington: A Gleam of Light in Asia,” New York Times (June 19, 1966).
3
Ann Stoler, Along the Archival Grain (New Jersey: Princeton, 2010).
2
25
Younes Saramifar
Searching in the Oubliette or Could There Be a Flat Ontology of Opacity?
Memory is knowable as much as torch of ember which appears alike neither fire nor
coal. Memory does not illuminate the oubliette of everyday life but it does not let us
alone in the maze of oblivion too. Memory becomes the ever present sign in our
oubliette if it hails from the realm of violent past or lurking out from the shadows of
unspoken traumas.
Into that effect, I trace memories of war veterans and PoWs of Iran-Iraq war (1980-1989)
to see the intersections of politics of memory and memories of politics. I ‘read’ (Felman
1977) their published memoir and autobiographies to detect the transparency of the
opaque and obscurity of the clarity within frames of remembrance under the
authoritarian regime. Political climate has changed after more than two decades since
the war and memories are becoming the narratives of resistance against the very regime
which the veterans defended during the war. However, their memories cannot be
published without permission from the board of censorship and they have to hide away
the resistance beneath the layers of intricate syntax and plays of semiosis in order to be
able talk beyond the archive. Thus, language of remembering becomes the realm of
tension between presence and absentia as well as the unsaid within the said to remain a
‘potentiality’ (Agamben, 2000) that eludes the Orwellian newspeak. Transparency
‘becomes’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980) the contingency of opacity in language when it is
the last line of resistance before the exposing peripheries of the body.
I intend to draw an affective cartography of the war-genre to be able show how opacity
is the ‘tactic’ (de Certeau 1984) of turning memory into counter-memory by use of
elocution, metaphor, metonymy and re-signifying diachronic competencies of language
and imposed archive.
Bio
I am a PhD candidate at the department of social and cultural anthropology of Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam. My current project is ‘memory and narrativity in the post-war
Iran’ which is continuation of my long term fascination with the notions of subjectivity.
Previously, I studied subjectivity formation among militants and resistance fighters
which is published in a volume title ‘Living with the AK-47’. I sought after ontological
commitment of memory as well as its epistemological landscape and I try to substantiate
the claims of the theory through ethnography study of commemorative practices in Iran.
26
Panel 4: The Invisible Collection
Ian Kenny
Shattering the Vanquishing Lens: Periphery, Obscurity, and Voicelessness in Emily Carr’s
Vanquished
Vanquished by Emily Carr is an object directly linked to the creation of aboriginal
peoples as peripheral members of Canadian society and sustains this relegation to the
present day. By picturing herself as an ally and lover of the North American Indians,
through her paintings, Carr attempted to catalogue the devastating effects of
colonialism on the Indian tribes of Canada’s Pacific Northwest. Both an act of
commemoration for a culture that is not yet dead, and also an artistic example of the
salvage paradigm narrative put forward by ethnographic studies, Vanquished presents
viewers with a unique object of analysis that supports the exact opposite of Carr’s
political and artistic intentions: namely, the objectification and fetishization of the
North American Indian and their sacred and artistic objects. This leads to and upholds
their peripheral location in Canadian society as the ‘other’.
Some scholars (mostly of Western/European origin) view Vanquished in the context and
intention of the artist, while still others (mostly of Aboriginal descent) claim that Carr
merely depicts a Western, romanticized version of the North American Indian and their
culture—essentially, the depiction of something that never existed. I plan to further
problematize the relationship between these dialogues as they are both presented in
Vanquished to show the status (or lack thereof) of the North American Indian in the
image and construction of Canadian society, though not in the intent of Carr.
I believe that this object ties in uniquely with contemporary questions regarding the
subject of the colonial, here being transferred from people to objects and then to
landscape: in short, I posit that Vanquished dehumanizes and makes difficult the
struggle of a societally marginalized group to attempt to regain their cultural identity
precisely because the painted landscape is devoid human occupants and the objects
which come to signify them. By removing the people and objects from her painting, Carr
draws attention to the lack of both, and turns the subject of the artwork away from the
very people (the living culture) she is attempting to catalogue, and relegates them to
obsolescence.
Bio
I am an rMA candidate at the University of Amsterdam in Cultural Analysis. I am
originally from Ottawa, Canada, and attended the University of King’s College and
Dalhousie University for my Bachelor’s degree in Early Modern Studies and Classical
History (BAh 2014). I am a thankful and fortunate recipient of this year’s Amsterdam
Merit Scholarship awarded by the UvA. In the past, I have organized an academic
conference on the subject of early modern studies, an interdisciplinary programme of
study, and presented a paper on Islamic gardens as earthly reflections of Paradise and
origins of agronomic science and literature. In partial completion of the requirements
for my Honours degree, I wrote a thesis titled “Situating Sturm und Drang Theatre in
Romantic Opera”, for which I was awarded the University of King’s College thesis award,
for the top thesis of my graduating class.
27
Irem Yildiz
The ‘Dark’ Side of the Exhibitions: Process of Vision at the Ethnographic Human
Showcases and the Case of Saartje Baartman (1790-1815)
Exhibitions are made of shiny, transparent and glass showcases. In these showcases,
objects are put in order to be watched, gazed and looked at. However, in the
nineteenth century, things were different. People were displayed as objects in
ethnographic exhibitions. There was a desire to observe, collect and display the various
‘races’ where each man would be dressed according to the traditions of their country
and they were placed in a ‘reconstructed’ space. Pascal Blanchard asks how did the
West invent “the savage”? For Blanchard, it was through gazing, spectacles,
performers, shows, exhibitions, museums and also narratives. Adapting Blanchard’s
statement, this paper will look at the structure of human exhibitions that reflects
significant issues about how the image of “other” was portrayed and transformed into an
object for the gaze of Western spectator.
The critical point of these exhibitions is that the non-Western subject now becomes a
‘displayed’ object, who is not only being gazed, but can also see the other side or other
Western side. Now, the eye is in contact with the spectator’s gaze. I am taking the story
of Saartje Baartman (later called Hottentot Venus by European entertainment sector),
who is a key figure in the birth of the practice of human exhibitions, as a case study. In
this respect, the main aim of this paper is to analyze the process of vision in the
ethnographic exhibitions by pointing out how the control of ‘Western gaze’ is challenged
by being gazed back and how the spectator’s ‘eye’ lost its visionary power through being
gazed back by the displayed ones.
Bio
I have graduated from Bilkent University, Archaeology and History of Art Department in
2006. Then I continued in the field of Business Administration and finished it with a MBA
project titled ‘Compatibilities of Museums with Marketing Strategies in a Competitive
World’. Currently, I am a graduate student in the Department of Cultural Studies at the
Istanbul Bilgi University. I am working on my MA thesis regarding the history of human
exhibitions during the late nineteenth century and their connections with the issue of
‘race’. Since 2009, I presented papers both in national and international conferences.
Now, I am still working on museum anthropology, postcolonial theory and memory
studies. In my further academic life, I am planning to do a Phd. in the field of cultural
anthropology.
28
Julie M. Johnson
Hiding in Plain Sight: How Display Systems Reveal Patterns of Knowledge Production
This paper considers the invisibility of Maria van Oosterwyck’s 1668 Vanitas Still Life, a
painting that has been present in the Habsburg collections since it left the artist’s
studio. Its story shows that even when museums preserve and display objects, those very
same objects can disappear from official, or discursive, memory. Such was the case for
Van Oosterwyck, who was remarkably successful during her lifetime but subsequently
effaced from general histories of art, or the “museum of the mind” of the discipline.
Themes of presence and absence, memory and oblivion have become part of the
painting’s history as an object. In its long life, and it is, appropriately, a vanitas
covering themes of memory, life, death, regeneration, degeneration, macrocosm and
microcosm, it has joined several display types, from the early modern Baroque gallery of
Karl VI, to a remarkable inclusion in the gold cabinet of the Ambras collection. It also
made appearances in two key feminist exhibitions of the twentieth century. Despite this
accessibility and Van Oosterwyck’s rich themes of authorship, time, memory, and
scientific knowledge, the painting and its author have gone relatively unexamined in the
literature of art history.
This study utilizes a painted itinerary, photographs and visual resources to reconsider
issues raised by Judith Butler in her reading of the Rodney King trials (Butler
demonstrated how philosophical constructs overpower visual evidence, rendering
empirical facts invisible). I examine how specific framing systems could not only reflect
but also prefigure the subsequent discursive presentation of art history. The changing
fate of the painting as it made its way through various display systems raises questions
about how they worked as mediators of knowledge and is suggestive of a relationship
between framing (in both literal and metaphorical senses) and gender, understood as
connected to authorship, genre, and theories of autonomy.
Bio
Julie M. Johnson is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Texas at San
Antonio, where she teaches courses on modern and contemporary art, as well as
museum and display history, women artists and gender issues. She completed her PhD at
the University of Chicago in the history of art with a minor in film theory. She has held
research residencies in Vienna, Austria through Fulbright and the IFK. Her book The
Memory Factory: The Forgotten Women Artists in Vienna 1900 (Purdue University Press,
2012) recovers the pasts of women who were once famous and active as public artists
but who lost their lives and works in the Holocaust, rendering invisible their
contributions to the creativity of Vienna 1900.
29
Claire Kueny
Shadows sculptures”: From opacity to transparency and rewind “
The shadow is a very paradoxical material. First considered (since Plato) as a
simulacrum, an opaque stuff, untrue and far from Reality, it is inherent to reality, the
sign of every presence. Like a picture of the body, it only offers its deformation:
elongated or stocky, the shadow represents an imperfect knowledge of the body it
refers to.
Since the 1980s, the artists Christian Boltanski, Mac Adams, Alain Fleischer and Bernard
Moninot explored the potentialities of the photographic media in space, by the use of
cast shadows. The first “shadows sculptures” were created in 1984. 1984 sounds, due to
Georges Orwell, with a very transparency period – the transparency is synonym here of
danger and totalitarianism – and marks the beginnings of the research on shadows in
sculpture.
What we define as “shadows sculptures” are artworks for which artists use cast shadow
as a material. All of them are realized at least with a basic projection process,
composed by a light source, a screen and an object. The shadows-pictures (still or
moving) appear with the encounter of light and object. All the “shadows sculptures”
refer to the historical process of the cinema and reveal its archaeology. The
phantasmagoria is one of them.
Unlike the magic lantern that showed the projective machine, the phantasmagoriaʼs
machine (called fantascope) was hidden behind an opaque screen, completely
dissimulated to the public eyes. (We will study the sense of this dissimulation in a
cinematographic and in a political way).
If the “shadows sculptures”, like phantasmagorical pictures, look like ghostsʼ shows and
illusions, they place the spectator on the other side of the screen. They show the
process of the picturesʼ manipulation and the objects at the origin of the picture. The
spectator can cast a crossing and transparent glance on the image, on the shadows,
with the risk of eliminating their enchantress power?
Bio
Claire Kueny is an art historian and an art critic. After having studied Art History at the
University of Strasbourg, she is currently doing a PhD in Art Sciences at The University
of Paris 8 – Vincennes-Saint-Denis, under Professor Paul-Louis Rinuyʼs direction. Her PhD
is about the use of cast shadows in contemporary sculpture (from the eighties to
nowadays). Since 2012, she teaches Art History at the University (Université Populaire,
Paris 1, Paris 8) and in the School of Art (École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de
Strasbourg). She publishes since 2011 in art magazines (Mouvement, Novo, Strabic,
Specimen, Hybrid) and for exhibition catalogues (Pièces Montrées – Frac Alsace,
catalogue des collections du Frac Basse-Normandie). From 2013 to 2015, she has
assisted the artist Yves Chaudouët in his cinematographic, theatrical and exhibitionʼs
projects.
30
Panel 5: Anonymous Faces
Sanem Yazıcıoğlu
Invisible and Unexpected as Forms of Transparency and Opacity
Contemporary philosophy presents itself mostly as a challenge to the dichotomies of
classical metaphysics. This challenge can easily be observed in the theories of concrete
selves and their conditions to act and to perceive. Arendt's analyses of political action
offer a particular perspective on what makes selves (in)visible and on the opacity
intrinsic to political action as such. In light of her views, opacity can be interpreted in
terms of the unexpectedness of political action since political action never provides any
certainty in its results. Moreover the resistance against any forms of determination neither at the beginning nor at the end, makes politics the realm of spontaneity and
freedom. According to Arendt selves who live among others can only become visible by
actualizing their capacity of action and speech.
However how to position the relation between transparency and invisibility needs
particular attention on this level: today, transparency belongs to the political discourse
that promises openness, trustworthiness, whereas it gets closer to a critical view in
Arendt’s analyses, namely the invisibility of the self that indicates of being nobody and
being under the rule of nobody as transparent beings. This paper aims to investigate the
tensions between, first, changing forms of classical dichotomies and the in-between
fields of those dichotomies, second, the instrumental usages of terms such as visibility
and transparency, and lastly it aims to provide analyses on how opacity can be
interpreted as a productive capacity for vision.
Bio
I am Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Istanbul University, Turkey.
My research interests fall mainly in the areas of phenomenology, political philosophy and
aesthetics. I am particularly working on theoretical problems related to time, memory
and perception and their applications on contemporary political philosophy and
philosophy of art. I have recently accomplished Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Experienced Researcher Grant for 18 months at Freiburg University, Husserl Archive,
Germany. I edited bilingual books on contemporary philosophy including Heidegger and
Arendt; Metaphysics and Politics (2002), Hannah Arendt on Her Birth Centenary (2009),
In-Between (2013). I have published articles intrinsically related to the described
program of Opacity/Transparency such as “The In-Between of No Longer and Not Yet”
(in Thinking Plurality, Brill 2014), “The Mist of Seeing” (in The Yearbook of
Hermeneutics” Issue: 13, Mohr Siebeck 2014).
31
Daniël de Zeeuw
Impersonating the impersonal: Anonymous’ logo as a parody of late capitalist
globalization
Among the traditional symbolic representations of power are flags, coats of arms,
depictions of heads of state, great architectural monuments, etc. But what are the
symbols of hybrid and networked forms of power today? ‘Even though the monuments of
power still stand [...] power no longer permanently resides in these monuments, and
command and control now move about as desired’, Critical Art Ensemble already
declared back in 1994. Has this dis-anchoring of power from its symbolic representation
made it more opaque? Or were these symbols perhaps always already masks of a power
located ‘elsewhere’? In other words, what is the relation between the
opacity/transparency of power, its ability to be represented, and its actual efficacy?
Needless to say the notion of representation here acquires an additional, more political
sense, as a necessary condition of democratic control, for example.
In order to address these more general questions I will take a closer look at the
hacktivist pseudo-collective Anonymous. The latter formed an integral part of the 2011
global wave of protests targeting these new nomadic, neoliberal forms of networked
power. In this context it developed and deployed various symbolic artefacts as tactics:
signatures, logos, banners, manifestoes, YouTube messages, etc. The three most
recurring Anonymous symbols are: the collective pseudonym “Anonymous” itself, the
Guy Fawkes mask, and the headless suit logo. In this paper I will focus on the three main
elements that make up this logo: the olive-branch wreath and globe, the headless suit,
and the question mark hovering in place of the head.
In this paper I argue that Anonymous use of the headless suit invokes a sense of mirage,
a playful doubling of contemporary corporate and bureaucratic landscapes that are
home to equally anonymous actors and institutional agencies. As such It establishes a
self-reflexive mockery of the vacuous symbolisms employed by contemporary global
institutions such as the UN and the IMF (fig. 2). In theatricalizing anonymity by
identifying with the impersonal, chaotic and monstrous nature of informatic
globalization, Anonymous interrogates the increasingly vacated and therefore
superfluous sphere of political representation as it is replaced by a combination of asignifying and “spectacular/specular” media assemblages.
Bio
Daniël de Zeeuw studied New Media and Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, as
well as Interaction Design & Unstable Media at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and is a coeditor of Krisis, Journal for Contemporary Philosophy. He is currently a PhD candidate at
ASCA, researching the politics and aesthetics of anonymity in contemporary media
culture, art and activism.
32
Carlos Bernardo Caycedo
The “Who” Behind Anonymous
The rise of the Internet has opened up new ways of sharing information, interacting
with others and acting in concert. Researchers in both the social sciences and media
studies work to conceptualize politically motivated online actions under the umbrella
term “hacktivism”. While these descriptions provide us with insight into the empirical
reality of cyber actions, there remains a lack of philosophical inquiry into how these
actions compel us to rethink essential categories such as political action, agency and
publicity.
In this paper I address the complex relationship between politically motivated online
actions and its agents from a philosophical perspective. By discussing cases of
anonymous hacktivism and anonymous whistleblowing, I argue that these events entail a
new kind of relation between actions, agents and publics. I claim that online anonymity
questions Hannah Arendt’s understanding of the disclosing potential of action and
speech. According to Arendt, individuals actively reveal their unique personal identities
(a “who”) and appear in the human world by acting and speaking. Furthermore, she
holds that this revelatory quality of speech and action depends on “sheer human
togetherness”. On the one hand, the increasing digitalization of social and political
interactions is changing the meaning of human togetherness; on the other hand, political
agents such as Anonymous or the anonymous source of the recently leaked “Drone
Papers" do not appear as identified individuals. This shows that online actions have the
potential of revealing agency while concealing the agents. Against this background, the
paper explores how this digital chiaroscuro transforms our understanding of the “who”
behind political action, and whether there is still a “who” there.
Bio
PhD Researcher at the University of Amsterdam, Department of Philosophy. Currently
working under the supervision of Dr. Robin Celikates and Prof. Dr. Beate Roessler on the
Digitalization of Civil Disobedience. This research is part of the NWO-VIDI project
Transformations of Civil Disobedience: Democratization, Globalization, Digitalization.
Member of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), the Dutch Research
School of Philosophy (OZSW) and the Amsterdam Center for Globalization Studies
(ACGS).
33
Patricia de Vries
Dazzles, Decoys, and Deities: The politics of digital invisibility: Contesting Capture
Technology with Anti-Facial Recognition Masks
This paper analyzes a developing counter-discourse on “capture” technology (Chow
2012), software that enables automatic collection of data and identification of objects.
Over the past years a growing number of scholars, artists, activists, journalists and
programmers has formulated much critique over the intensification and dissemination of
these data surveillance and biometric and face recognition technologies. There seems to
be a representation politics at work that engages with a series of metaphors and
theories to make sense of the perceived implications capture technology. These
representations give shape to how capture technology and the algorithmic and
measurement-processes and techniques on which it runs are understood and how they
are countered. The perceived threats and implications of capture technology are often
described by critics by way of comparisons with visual metaphors and ways of seeing
(panopticon, Big Brother).
In turn, the undermining of capture technology is sought in invisibility by way of antirecognition face-masks (Blas 2014; Cox 2014; Goh 2006), by way of encrypted
communications (Appelbaum 2014; Rieger 2015; Gonggrijp 2005; Sunde 2015). Or, and
on the contrary, in transparency (Heller 2011; Seemann 2015; Wei Wei 2010), and in
visualizations of the material infrastructures of capture technology (Paglen 2015; De
Maat 2013; Denny 2015),
What are the ontological, epistemological, political and historical underpinnings of the
ways in which critics imagine and counter capture technology? What logic are they trying
to break away from by becoming (in)visible?
Bio
Patricia de Vries is researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Network Cultures and a
Ph.D. candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She has an academic formation in
Film Studies (BA), Cultural Analysis (MA) and Liberal Studies (MA).
34
Panel 6: The Opaque Subject
Florian Göttke
A Protester in Homs
A Protester in Homs, Syria addresses the tensions between distance and proximity a
Western news consumer experiences to the often catastrophic events in far away
places.The work revolves around a photograph of a protester engaging in the Syrian
uprising, printed on the front-page of the International Herald Tribune from October 3,
2011.
The essay and the voiceover in the video narrate three movements of approximation, of
which none is ultimately resolved. The first line of the narrative describes the
transformation the image undergoes on its travel from a performed self-image in the
demonstration in Syria through the mechanism of the news media to the front page of
the newspaper on the breakfast table. The second line discusses the relationship that is
established between the reader of the newspaper and the protester depicted in it,
arguing with Ariella Azoulay the necessity to recognize the agency of the depicted and to
acknowledge a responsibility of the spectator. The third line of thought concerns the
social and political spaces that are created through the image and its mediation in
various platforms as well as the power relations revolving around notions of visibility and
transparency.
The video image parallels these movements. It consists out just one very slow,
mesmerizing zoom from the complete front page of the newspaper to a detail in the face
of the protester in the photograph, which eventually becomes unreadable and dissolves
into the ink-blobs of the newspaper print.
Bio
Florian Göttke is a visual artist based in Amsterdam. Since 2006 he is teaching at the
Dutch Art Institute (DAI), Arnhem, about topics related to art and public issues. In his
recent works he investigates the functioning of public images, and their relationship to
social memory and politics. His lecture and book Toppled (Post Edition, Rotterdam,
2010), about the fallen statues of Saddam Hussein, is a critical study of image practices
of appropriation and manipulation in our contemporary media society. Toppled was
nominated for the Dutch Doc Award for documentary photography in 2011. Currently he
is working on his PhD in Artistic Research “Burning Images – Genealogy of a Hybrid and
Global Cultural and Political Practice” at the University of Amsterdam and the Dutch Art
Institute, about the practice of hanging and burning effigies in political protests
35
Nelly Pinkrah
In my paper I will explore the productivity of Édouard Glissants “Right to Opacity”as a
strategy of epistemological disobedience as well as political resistance. On the basis of
the question of how to establish, reinforce and empower solidarities in contemporary
times, the productivity of this approach lies exactly in the cuts and spaces where those
two areas, politics and epistemology, meet and intersect. With the methods of
“Decolonization” in mind (cf. Walter D. Mignolo, Ramón Grosfoguel and others), I will
briefly reflect upon the mantra of transparency and its ideological
implications, which has become a principle of organizing political, social, cultural and
technical spaces in digital cultures.
The “Right to Opacity”, which was first formulated and claimed by Glissant in 1969, and
opacity as a principle within Glissants theoretical construct (cf. “Poétiques de la
Relation”, 1990) are not only relevant in todays mostly Western digital cultures. But
their necessity, as I will argue, is even more emphasized in those same digital cultures
that paradoxically gravitate towards cultural encounter in times where nationalism and
identity politics are on the rise again. Opacity is opposed to the
reducing and violent effects of the Eurocentric understanding and implementation of
transparency, Glissants writes. ”In order to accept you, I have to measure your solidity
with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps,
judgments. I have to reduce.“ (Glissant 2010: 190) In cybernetic societies this
reductionist idea is carried forward in new and different ways by the logics of computer
technology, by the assumption that knowledge is gained simply through information, and
by the monopolization and privatization of infrastructures and digital spaces. Therefore
they allow the preservation of power structures, the discrimination and the violence
against certain bodies.
By looking at the German initiative #schauhin that seeks to visualize the experiences of
everyday racism and create safe spaces for those affected by it, I want to ask how new
collectivities can be achieved for political struggles. Thinking of and acting upon
“Opacity” then becomes a unifier and an engine for these different collectivities and the
principle of solidarity they are determined by.
Bio
Nelly Y. Pinkrah gained her M.A. in the program “Culture Arts and Media” at Leuphana
University in Lueneburg, Germany with a thesis on “Seeing the Impenetrable – Édouard
Glissants ‘Opacity’ in Light of Digital Cultures”. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in
Ethnology, African Studies and Sociology from Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz,
Germany. From March 2013 until October 2014 she co-organized the annual conference
of the German Society for Media Studies at Leuphana University Lueneburg. Since
November 2013 she is the personal assistant of Prof. Claus Pias, for whom she does a
wide range of editorial (articles, papers, books) and administrative work. Since the
beginning of her studies she was employed as a student assistant in different areas and
combined her academic and political interests which have merged in various projects
such as the conceptualization of an exhibition on the anniversary celebrations of
36
independence of 17 African nations in 2010 at the University in Mainz, Germany. She is
actively engaged in different political projects, among them the German anti-racism
initiative #schauhin.
Forthcoming Publication: Pinkrah, Nelly Y./Warnsholdt, Clara Lotte (2016): “Erinnern
Vergessen”, in: ZUfo ’14: Speicher. Friedrichshafen: Zeppelin University Press.
Areas of interest: Digital media, technology, political thoughts and practices, black
feminist thought,
decoloniality, intellectual and cultural history.
37
Halbe Kuipers
Ed Atkins, Warm, Warm, Warm, Spring Mouths: Crystalline Self, or Resistance in Smooth
Space
This paper explores the digital environments of artist Ed Atkins in his works Ribbons
(2014) and Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths (2013) as sites of potential resistance. I
advance that the work of Atkins, by surveying the limits of the medium through a
constellation of its specificities — its diaphanous color, modular mise en scène,
stuttering language and above all the direct incorporation of the Self through Atkins’
avatar, invoking a process of self-exhaustion — construes a smooth space that allows for
the emergence of a new subjectivity. Considering the problematization of precisely that
smooth space in our current neoliberal environment, wherein the flows of capital
enforce such modulation and thus operate at precisely a logic where there has been a
sort of “convergence between the dynamic of capitalist power and the dynamic of
resistance” (Massumi, “Navigating Moments”) and where a “transparent Self” (ByungChul Han, Die Transparenzgesellschaft) arguably loses its agency, it becomes necessary
to refigure subjectivity. In that light, I argue that it is precisely by exposing the limits of
the medium and incorporating and exhausting the Self in his work that Atkins takes a
“splash into the counter power of the modulating forces of capitalism.” (Massumi, The
Power at the End of the Economy) Here, it becomes a matter of not just a new
subjectivity, but subjectivity anew: its form modular, its shape manifold, its quality
diaphanous, in sum, a crystalline self and internal resistance.
Bio
Halbe Kuipers is a media scholar working at the intersection of film, aesthetics and
philosophy. Currently he is pursuing a PhD at ASCA Amsterdam and Concordia Montréal,
which concerns itself with the convergence of the dynamic of resistance in our current
neoliberal setting. The project revolves around intrinsic self-exploitation and its
concomitant modes of exhaustion in relation to artistic practices that engage with
precisely that logic in order to counter the dominant logic. His interests lie in: modernity
and excess, visual culture, philosophy of difference, aesthetic-politico practices and the
idea or concept of the Self.
38
Sara Zampieri
The (Un)reliable Mirror: On Transparency and Opacity in Documentary Photography The concept of transparency in the philosophical debate on photography has been linked
to the mechanical nature of the camera, intrinsically able to guarantee the objectivity
of the image that it captures because of the physical nature of the process, that
bypasses the photographer’s beliefs. On the opposite range of the spectrum, other forms
of images (e.g. paintings) are considered opaque because their production involves —
and is based on — the creator’s beliefs. With the transition to digital means of
production and the widespread diffusion of post production techniques that allowed
photographers to easily manipulate their images, the distinction between transparency
and opacity in photography has become more and more blurred, with consequences on
the role of documentary photography as a reliable source of information about the facts
it portrays. In this paper I will briefly introduce the different philosophical positions
regarding the notion of transparency in photography and I will discuss the ways in which
the digital process of production and the digital manipulation of images influence and
change the concept of photography as a transparent medium. Moreover, to better
illustrate how this passage from analogue to digital has affected the field of
documentary photography, I will examine the case of the World Press Photo contest and
the debate about its own rules on digital manipulation, to understand in which direction
and using which tools the photography community is trying to adapt to this evolution
and to discipline itself in order to preserve the images’ degree of transparency, which is
considered a direct expression of their trustworthiness.
Bio
2000: MA in philosophy at Università Ca’ Foscari - Venice. Subject of the dissertation:
“Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Mathematics”. 2000 - present: worked in different
positions in the fields of photography and visual communication.
2014: Doctoral candidate at ASCA - University of Amsterdam. Provisional title of the
research: “A Study on the Relationship between Photography and Knowledge”,
supervised by professors Francesco Berto and Josef Früchtl
39
Panel 7: Art Languages
Steyn Bergs
How to lay bare open secrets? Communicative capitalism as a condition for critical
aesthetic practice
Not the illuminated modernist glass facade, but the one-way mirror of the interrogation
room is the visual metaphor for the kind of transparency that prevails in our networked
societies of globalized capital today. While the Internet is purported to have brought
about a more democratic and horizontal distribution of information (to have instigated
transparency, in other words) it is clear that our present-day situation is far removed
from the cyberutopian fantasies of freely distributed information, unrestricted
rhizomatics, and “access for all”. First of all, the vectors of information are obviously
highly in favour of capital, as McKenzie Wark famously argued in A Hacker Manifesto.
But secondly, in a dialectic transformation from quantitative to qualitative change, the
information overload itself – this hypertrophy of transparency – has also brought about a
new opacity entirely of its own, as people as diverse as political theorist Jodi Dean and
the design collective Metahaven have noted.
Despite Latour-like claims that critique has run out of steam, then, the critical gesture
of demystification and of unveiling covered truths or apparatuses is in fact more
relevant than ever. But what critical gestures are effective in the face of the specific
kind of opacity that we see today? How to lay bare open secrets?
In my conference paper, I will argue that art can be crucial in this regard: as a site for
critical thinking grounded in and mediated through sensuous experience, what art can
do is aestheticize these open secrets; artists can render zones of opacity into sensible,
perceivable, and hopefully even mobilizing forms. Drawing from Alexander Galloway’s
terminology in The Interface Effect, one could say that artistic practice is therefore in a
privileged position for transforming data into information. I will turn to the work of
artist Susan Schuppli, who is associated with the Forensic Architecture research project,
as a critical practice that is exemplary in this regard.
Bio
Steyn Bergs is an art critic and a researcher. He recently graduated cum laude from the
Research MA programme Visual Arts, Media and Architecture: Critical Studies in Art and
Culture at VU University, Amsterdam, with a thesis on the commodity form, value, and
reproduction of the digital art object. Platforms he has published on include Open!, De
Witte Raaf, Stedelijk Museum’s Global Collaborations publication, and the journal
Kunstlicht, for which he is also an editor. Furthermore, he works for Casco – Office for
Art, Design and Theory, and is preparing PhD research.
40
Srajana Kaikini
Suddenly This Overview, reading the literal
What does it mean when one speaks in an opaque language? The construction of
‘experience’ in art has been closely explored through the concepts of ‘rasa’,
‘sensation’, ‘affect’ etc. in philosophical enquiry across the globe which have given rise
to the question that informs my current research - the role of the ‘literal’ object and
the objectified ‘letter’ in contemporary art practices. The ‘literal’ somehow finds itself
at this strange crossroads of explicit and implicit communication. The Dhvani theory
(dhvani can be loosely translated as ‘resonance’) or the theory of Suggestion, one of the
several linguistic theories in Indian aesthetic philosophy, emphasizes on reading and
receiving language through multiple levels of interpretation. At the same time it puts
emphasis on expressing emotions through material symbolism i.e referring to concrete
objects in the world to convey an abstract expression. The landscape poetry in Tamil
Sangam Literature is an example of highly charged symbolism where the landscape
becomes the expression of the state of mind. Swiss Concrete poet Eugene Gomringer
(Constellations, 1953) and artist groups like the Noigandres group of poets in Brazil –
Haroldo de Campos, Décio Pignatari and Augusto de Campos invested entirely in the
word, trying to shed its semantic weight and construct new ways of reading materially.
Words turn into materials to make visual/sensorial experiences out of them - an
inversion of linguistic role-play and a tendency towards a more universal poetry where
form and content collapse into each other. What happens when one is confronted by an
opaque material? How is meaning constructed out of a literal work. The paper will
explore the conditions of the ‘literal object’ and the ‘object letter’ in contemporary art
practices and engage with the two contrapuntal impulses of clarity and obscurity which
frame a contemporary condition where-in art vocabulary takes recourse to the
‘material’ language once again.
(This paper is a theoretical reflection based on curatorial research. The curatorial
research was made possible by the FICA Research Fellowship 2013 in collaboration with
Goldsmiths University, Iniva and Delfina Foundation. The exhibition “Suddenly this
Overview, Reading the literal” took place at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi , India in
July-August 2014)
Bio
Srajana Kaikini is a writer, curator and researcher presently a Research Fellow, PhD at
the Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities, Manipal University, India. She was
part of de Appel Art Centre’s Curatorial Programme 2012/13 in Amsterdam, Netherlands
and has a Master’s degree in Arts and Aesthetics from Jawaharlal Nehru University in
New Delhi, and a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture. She is the recipient of the 2013 FICA
Research Fellowship and was curator of the 2014 Arts programme at the MOD Institute in
Bangalore, which focused on artistic engagements with the city and its spaces. Her
independent curatorial work has a research-oriented, process-based focus. Her doctoral
research will philosophically engage with the study of contemporary art curatorial
practices. Her reflections and writings have appeared in many places both digitally and
in print.
41
Nina Leger
Object obscured by structure: On some artistic initiatives of the 1960s
At the end of the sixties, Conceptual art made its entrance on the art scene of the
United States. Seemingly putting an end to Modernism, it broke with the traditionally
visual work of art, and chose language as its privileged medium. In this talk, we want to
point out that this apparent rupture hides a fundamental continuity: Modernism (as
defined by critic Clement Greenberg) as well as Conceptualism (as defined by artist
Joseph Kosuth) both considered the artwork as a transparent proposition on the true
nature of art. The artwork then had to have the clarity of a definition, and art was a
matter of affirmations. Here, we would like to argue that many artists of the sixties
disrupted the continuity that runs from Modernism to Conceptualism by developing an
art based on opacity. Producing equally visual or linguistic works, they turned away from
object and investigated the structures that allow its perception or its conception. At the
root of their enterprise lied the conviction that no language (whether verbal or visual) is
ever transparent. Vision was used to obscure the clarity of the visual, signs were
employed to ban the access to any signified. Demonstrating the essential opacity of
these inescapable structures and investigating the gaps existing between each system of
representation and the reality it is referring to, artists – among which Mel Bochner and
Robert Smithson – dismantled the conviction that the artwork could ever grant access to
any stable truth. This led the development of a conception that considered
contradiction and irresolution – instead of tautology and truth – as the true regime of the
artwork.
Bio
Nina Leger is a lecturer at the Université Paris 8 – Vincennes Saint-Denis and at the
CELSA – Paris Sorbonne. Trained at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (2009-2013)
ant at Columbia University (2011-2012), she is now completing a doctorate in Esthetics
about the uses and misuses of linear perspective in the works of the American artists Mel
Bochner and Robert Smithson (“Systems of disbelief: perspective in the work and
thought of Robert Smithson and Mel Bochner”, Université Paris 8). She is also the head
of the art journal Specimen and art critic for the online journal Délibéré (delibere.fr).
She has published papers in LIGEIA, Hippocampe, and is to publish a paper in the
upcoming issue of the academic journal Marges (“Misunderstandings and Illusory Babels:
Thinking with Mel Bochner and Robert Smithson”, Marges n°22, march 2016).
42
Panel 8: Behind the City’s surface
Neda Genova
From “flat” to “fractal” - politics of surfaces and facades
In my paper, I will depart from an examination of a particular case study in which the
visual transformation of residential facades in the city of Tirana has been publicly
framed and marketised as a desirable act in favour of a certain conception of a
community. By examining the rhetorics surrounding Edi Rama's renowned project of the
colourful repainting of many facades in Tirana in the early 2000s, I will ask questions
about the shifting notions of community and conviviality implied in the material
transformations of such “inhabited” surfaces.
I will then theoretically engage with the notion of the material “surface” and will offer
an account of the various ways in which it has been negotiated throughout different
fields. I will examine different ways in which “surface” and “superficiality” have been
set in relationship to “equality”, “communality” or “equivalence” (see Ranciere 2009;
Bruno 2014) and will attempt to offer some alternative readings or points of departure
for potential politics of surfaces. Rather than taking the flatness of surfaces for granted,
I will instead ask about the ways in which flatness itself is constituted and will engage in
a discussion of the possibilities that might be engendered by what with Félix Guattari we
might call “fractal surfaces”.
Bio
Neda Genova is a Mphil/PhD candidate at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths
College in London and a scholarship holder from the German Academic Exchange Service
(DAAD). She graduated from the MA programme Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths
in 2014 and from the MA Medienkulturanalyse (HHU Düsseldorf) in 2013. Her research is
focused on an examination of shifting conceptions of communism in present-day
Bulgaria, in particular through the material-semiotic transformation of surfaces. She is a
co-founder and editor of the online magazine dВЕРСИЯ and is involved in various antiracist and feminist collectives in Sofia.
43
Uzma Ansari
City Streets in Grey: Monochromic Memories of Pamuk’s Istanbul
In this paper I will examine those of Pamuk’s works that feature the colour ‘grey’ in
relation to the city of the modern Republic of Turkey. In order to do so I will define
what it means for a state to be ‘modern’ since this term will be used frequently in
relation to ‘nationhood’ and the city. The premise for my argument will be built on an
historical as well as a decolonial understanding of the ‘modern’ nation state and
‘civilisation’, because it is the primary theme of those of Pamuk’s works that have any
political underpinnings.
I will look into the dominant mood of Pamuk’s descriptive texts, which, if it could be
depicted in colour, would be grey and/or charcoal, grey the colour of ‘huzn’ and
charcoal the colour of the packs of stray dogs that roam around the streets of his city
Istanbul. Grey is the colour of ash under which the city seems to be buried and these
ashes are that of a ‘ruined empire’. It is a discolouration that is aestheticized by Pamuk
in contemplation over the city ruins that resulted from the coercive modernisation of
Turkish society and loss of cultural identity. In addition, colour, or rather discolouration,
is an aspect of the city that presupposes a gaze, an on looker who is viewing the city,
and thus becomes an essential part of experiencing the city. There are two types of gaze
that I will discuss and examine in this paper, one that is feared and the other which
fears, i.e. the gaze of the Western onlooker which is an exoticising gaze, and that of the
local city dweller of Istanbul who looks back self-consciously at the Western eyes on his
city.
Bio
Uzma Abid Ansari is a Ph.D. candidate at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis
(ASCA) and part of the Cities Project. She graduated from the International Islamic
University Islamabad in Pakistan with a major in Comparative Literature. Her research
project, Pamuk’s City and the Republic: Orhan Pamuk’s Engagement with the Nation
State, is an examination of the Turkish author’s work as a case study for the exploration
of the notion of the ‘nation state’ in the early 20th century and its dismantling and
reconstruction of local identities.
Coming from a postcolonial academic background herself, her principle field of interest
is decolonial and postcolonial narratives in literature and film. She was also a member of
the organising committee of the previous ASCA Workshop 2013, “Brains, Maps, and
Rhythms: Knowledge and Experience in Biopolitical Orders”.
44
Golnar Abbasi
Homes Housing Resistance: On the modern project of housing in Teheran
This presentation is based on a project called Potential Soviets, one of the six projects
produced as part of “Housing Contemporary Forms of Life: A Project for Tehran”, a
studio project conducted at The Berlage (2014). This research focuses on the condition
of visibility in Tehran (Iran), and its spatial consequences for practices of resistance in
relation to domestic space.
The state’s constant observation over public space in Tehran, brings the condition of
visibility to a complex tension. This has created a parallel sphere for resistance
activities and practices of a diverse range, whose common criteria is longing for
concealment, a form of chosen self-exclusion.
As a liberating strategy, these activities take refuge in the private sphere of the ‘house’.
The modern house, once emerged as an instrument to strengthen the unified image of
the Iranian modern nation, now becomes a space housing resistance. The modern ideas
of public and private ownership, once used as a tool for management of the masses, now
becomes the tool for resistant activities to regain power.
Among these activities are, specifically, domestic art galleries (as opposed to
government-funded ones), who instrumentalize the concept of private ownership to
define a ‘safe’ territory; they also shape a community, a network, and a set of rituals
among themselves, and basically create an art sphere alternative to the dominant
government-supported one. This safe zone continues emerging, developing, and
transforming under the ‘legal’, valid face of the ‘home’. By inhabiting the unused spaces
of the privately-owned houses (garages, rooftops, one whole floor, etc) they conceal
from the strong observation of the state, and gain their valid position as in constant
suspension between being a legal and an illegal mode.
Bio
Golnar Abbasi (1987) born in Iran, is currently based in the Netherlands. She has studied
her bachelors in Architecture at the University of Tehran, and holds a masters from The
Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design. Currently, she is
a participant at Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht.
Apart from having worked in several architectural offices since 2010, she has been
involved in series of projects including directing and holding workshops, seminars,
reading group sessions, etc; Namely the project Framing the Common (a project on
shared spaces of the apartment) which is a collaborative work with teams in Rotterdam,
Tehran, Bogota, Mumbai, and Kuala Lumpur. Her works has been shown in several
exhibitions such as the Rotterdam Biennale (IABR) and Post--Office (Rotterdam); and she
is a co-founder and editor of Sarmad Magazine (A magazine on experimental imagemaking) and 2 X 1, Two Times One, a two-volume publication at Jan van Eyck Academie.
website: http://golnarabbasi.tumblr.com
45
Panel 9: Sur-Veil-lance
Ilya Parkins
Opacity, Translucency and Racialized Femininities: Veils in US Vogue, 1915-25
In the years of the veil’s declining popularity as a fashion accessory, the New York
edition of Vogue devoted sustained attention to this garment. A series of textual
meditations on its significance amounted to a minor philosophical discourse on
concealment, revelation and femininity itself. This preliminary investigation of these
treatments of veiling considers its positioning vis-à-vis both the white women who were
the normative subjects and imagined readers of the magazine, and orientalised women
who were only spectrally present in the pages of Vogue. The paper compares the ways
that veiled unknowability was figured for white women and orientalised women in the
pages of the magazine, and considers the veil-as-fashion-accessory (distinct from but
obliquely related to the imagined ‘veil-as-cultural-signifier’) as a material technology of
opacity that was seen to enable a strategic positioning of white femininity in relation to
power. Veiling presents a significant instance of power-saturated relational encounter,
highlighting asymmetrical points of contact between two feminine imaginaries, which
hinged on questions of opacity as a conceptual analogue to feminine mystery. This
reading shows that invocations of the veil frequently defaulted to translucency, while
remaining steeped in the language of opacity, and thus obliquely established
translucency as a privileged category that allowed white bourgeois women some
conceptual mobility while trying orientalised women to pure opacity.
Bio
Ilya Parkins holds a PhD in Social and Political Thought and is Associate Professor of
Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus,
where she has taught since 2007. A specialist in feminist theory, fashion, and early
twentieth-century cultural formations, she is the author of Poiret, Dior, and
Schiaparelli: Fashion, Femininity and Modernity (Berg, 2012) and the co-editor of
Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion (2011). Her work has also been published in an
interdisciplinary range of journals that includes Time and Society, Feminist Review,
Biography, and Australian Feminist Studies, among others. Her current research project,
‘A Cultural Politics of Feminine Unknowability, 1910-39,’ is funded by an Insight grant
from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2013-17).
46
Taylor Scanlon
Hidden Faces in Public Spaces: Covered Faces and the Logic of Physiognomy
During the ideological skirmishes preceding the 2015 Canadian federal election, the
question of whether or not women ought to wear niquab or burka face coverings during
citizenship ceremonies became one of seemingly central importance, intersecting
notions of governance, openness, and coherence of the nation-state. What the anxieties
around these face coverings reveal is a long-standing preoccupation with figuring faces
as transparent and legible objects—this is a preoccupation that is, in part, a legacy of
physiognomy, which held that it was possible to render faces into easily understandable
composites for the sake of public and urban safety. The paper I propose considers
contemporary conflicts between this physiognomic legacy and forms of face covering. I
suggest that far from being a pseudoscientific relic of industrialization and early
criminality studies, physiognomy retains a potency that informs aggressive responses to
covered faces. These responses include the criminalization of masking, the attempted
forbiddance of face coverings at citizenship ceremonies and during legal proceedings,
and the intensification of forms of surveillance which target faces. I am interested in
thinking about how physiognomy circulates as an attempted solution to forms of
unsanctioned opacity (that of the covered face), and how these tactics of face-reading
assume the face to be a legible and open object that must stay legible and open for the
sake of public and national securities. This paper will thus engage primarily with
physiognomy as a mode of reading, analyzing its practices and presumptions, and relate
these notions to select case studies as a way of understanding how the logic of facereading functions to encourage bodily transparency in the present moment.
Bio
Taylor Scanlon is a PhD Candidate at the University of Alberta. Her research broadly
considers the legacy of physiognomy in American culture, with an emphasis on the
intersection of masking and surveillance. Her research is funded in part by a fellowship
from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
47
Lara Mazurski
Intervening in Hegemonic Imaginins of Veiled Women in Islam: The Semiotics of Islam
A number of contemporary thinkers such as Eve Sedgwick and Jose Esteban Munoz
suggest that the concept of disidentification is a productive way of subverting
hegemonic claims of identity through performance illustrating its construction. As a
tactic, disidentificiation not only invites us to both embrace and also reject hegemonic
imaginings of identity, offering a middle ground in which an individual can take on an
identity and reveal its delicate construction. In her video performance, Semiotics of
Islam: A Primer for Kuffar (2014), Fouzia Najar demonstrates the very power of
disidentification: she both embraces and rejects the fictional figure of the Muslim
woman that haunts the Western imaginary and illustrates the power of performance as a
tactic of social transformation. In the West, when we think of veiled Muslim women we
often think about a series of complex imaginings that emerge as a result of mediatized
texts and images that are about Islam. In these representations we are offered
particular views of how we are to think of Muslim women, to represent them, and as a
result we are often limited by a particular vision of them – that is Orientalistic.
Najar’s video performance makes visible the crisis that surrounds the representation of
Muslims in America, particularly veiled Muslim women intervening within essentialist and
static tropes. In a contemporary retelling of Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen
(1975) viewers are offered a performative response to dominant imaginings of Muslim
identity in the mainstream Western mass media but also through her performance
viewers are offered an opportunity to reconsider them. How can performance help
viewers to negotiate dominant and minority constructions of ethnic identity and offer
other possibilities for transformation?
Bio
Lara Mazurski, Dr
University Affiliation: AUC & ASCA
Email: [email protected]
48
Alina Pertseva
Subject’s Opacity Taken Literally. Merleau-Ponty revisiting Sartre’s transparent
consciousness
Modern Subject is often described in terms of transparency that is supposed to
be characteristic of its reflexivity. In contrast, the Subject of the XXth century is
basically considered to be opaque to itself largely due to a series of theoretical
displacements that introduce its incorporation, the hypothesis of unconsciousness, and
illusory character of its freedom. Nevertheless, the terms of transparency/opacity in
connection with the Subject are used primarily as metaphors. What if we refer to
the literal sense of the terms and actually fasten our eyes on the Subject? On the face
of it, it seems that the Modern Subject’s transparency predetermine its invisibility. But
as a matter of fact, the opaque contemporary Subject is not visible either: visibility
and image both refer to identity and not to the Subject whose structure is symbolic.
It appears that both Modern and contemporary Subjects resist the vision: though
they are often defined as the source of vision, as soon as we try to make the Subject
visible, we objectify it.
Perhaps the only philosopher who comes to terms with the visibility of the
Subject is the late Merleau‐Ponty who placed a special emphasis on its opacity. In
Le visible et l’invisible, he brings into being the thesis of reversibility of vision by
analogy with reversibility of touch. However the notion of the “flesh of the world”
that aliments this thesis makes problematic the very concept of the Subject (though
doesn’t obliterate it, as we are still dealing with a phenomenological account). The
question is: can the Subject be thought of as opaque in the ordinary sense of the
world, that is to say ultimately visible, without lapsing into the indiscernibility with
the object?
Bio
Alina Pertseva is a PhD student at Paris--‐8 University (PhD School “Practices and
Theories of Meaning”) and National Research University Higher School of Economics
(Moscow). At first interested in the relationship between face and subjectivity, in her
Master’s Thesis that she prepared and defended at Paris--‐8, she reflected on the issues
of “ la défiguration” (the deformation of faces) in art. Her current research project
emerged due to the shift of attention from the face to the visibility in general.
More specifically, she examines the efforts of the several contemporary French
philosophers (foremost Maurice Merleau--‐Ponty, Jean--‐Luc Nancy, and Jacques
Rancière) to conceive of the Subject in the terms that engrain it particularly but not
exclusively in the visible
49
Panel 10: A-Visuality
Alice Miceli
Chernobyl Project
In my work in Chernobyl, the nature of the visual and its borders were explored to show
how radiation escapes visibility and yet defines that environment. If a place does not
reveal itself in the visual, the question then becomes how to look. By what means? The
project was rooted in this question, therefore developing a means by which to see it.
The poetic as well as the physical operation of the work needed to reside in the
capturing of the image, in the impression of a physical impact created by the means of
radiation itself, which revealed a pervasive but hidden reality. Instead of creating
traditional documentary imagery, I built customized pinhole cameras made of lead that
blocked the light penetration but let in radiation. The experiments were placed in the
most contaminated locations within the Exclusion Zone, and filled with radiographic film
to be exposed directly to the site’s radiation over time. The marks captured on film are
the direct result of this radioactive exposure. The resulting series comprises 30 largeformat radiographic negatives. If details of pictorial place are unclear, what is unveiled
is the sense of physical impact, revealing the invisible stain of a physical and societal
collapse. The project was developed in collaboration with the Radio-Protection
Institute, in Rio de Janeiro, the Medical Faculty of the University of Munich and the Otto
Hug Strahleninstitut, in Munich, and the Sakharov University, in Minsk.
Continuing the theme of impenetrable, inaccessible spaces, different kinds of landscape
ask different questions, and issues of contamination and impenetrability are specific to
each site. The research in which I am working at the moment looks into the space of
landmine fields. What intrigues me in this situation is that the impenetrability is no
longer visual, as it was the case with Chernobyl. Instead it lays in the actual depth of
space to be walked through, and represented in the image.
Bio
Alice Miceli utilizes formal experimentation, investigative travel, and archival research
to chart the visual, physical, and cultural manifestations of trauma inflicted on social
and natural landscapes. In photographs, videos, and installations, her projects explore
not only their depicted subjects, but the history of their representation in different
media formats. Recent projects include the Chernobyl Project, which documents the
exclusion zone around the site of Chernobyl’s nuclear disaster using specially developed
photographic processes. Her current research focuses on photographic representations of
landscape, in particular those relating to land-mine fields.
[email protected]
50
Caroline Kamya
What Else Is Missing? A visual investigation into whitewashing and historical amnesia
Taking “The Moor” from Othello as the starting point of my interest as an African
teenager and as part of my further exploration into historical amnesia I have compiled a
photomontage of selected images I have researched over six months. The purpose is to
continue to provoke thoughts in the observer and myself into “his story” and the
dialogue that results in viewing images with a different lens. I am using images and not
text to express my purpose as an investigation into the subject.
My understanding is that the more one digs under the surface of what was taught in the
limited and agenda driven school system of my past the more I have unearthed a new
point of view that I find exciting and reinvigorating. I am ever more curious as to what
has been whitewashed, omitted and buried below the surface.
The photomontage has
no reference of website or bibliography and this is intentional. Contrary to the expected
form of reference for academia, I have left this open in a similar form as the video
montage that I submitted in advance. It is not about where the information was found
and by whom but what the images and in some instances the text attached provokes. All
the images are not included the video montage.
Some images are stand-alone and some
juxtaposed intentionally moving back and fourth through time. Historical amnesia and
the lack of historical empathy go hand in hand. By placing images of different eras side
by side my aim is to recognize this. I invite the observer to be triggered into an
emotional state by these images and my question remains, “What else is missing?” These
images among others open up my discussion.
Bio
Caroline Kamya is a visual artist and award-winning filmmaker. Her first degrees were in
Architecture and Urban design but her true passion since the age of sixteen when she
began making films was always cinema and she went on to gain an MA in TV
Documentary from Goldsmiths College (University of London). During her studies and
after graduation she gained valuable experience working in TV and working at the BBC.
In 2004 she travelled to Uganda and set up a company office in Kampala, Uganda with
the intention to make her first feature film IMANI after a few years.
Caroline attended various film labs including the Berlinale Talent Campus, DOX Lab,
Durban Talent Campus and most recently Binger. Caroline also set up a not for profit
training arm of iVAD to provide TV training to young people.
Caroline currently works as a director of fiction films and “cross genre” films
collaborating with the international co producers. Some of these films include “Chips
and Liver Girls” shot in Uganda and “Fire Fly” shot in China commissioned by The Danish
Film Institute and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. She currently has a T.V
drama series, two fiction features and one feature documentary in the development
stages.
51
Hanna Husberg
On noticing air
My proposition for the ASCA Workshop Transparency/Opacity is to look at some of the
material exchanges taking place through air and atmosphere, and at how they become
perceptible in phenomena such as clouds. The presentation will draw on the research
phase and the materialisation of an artwork I am currently developing for the Hybrid
Matters exhibition.
Human influence has significantly changed our environment. Through extensive land use
a variety of new materials are manufactured, metals and minerals which previously
weren’t in contact with the biosphere, are now absorbed by plant, animal and human
cells. This explosion of hybrid materials dissipating into the biosphere and the
atmosphere at large scales has made the material atmosphere troubled, and
compositionally unfamiliar in a time span humans can perceive.
We see through translucent air, but air is also a medium that contains information, light,
vibrations and diffused substances. Air is a mixture of gases, a suspension of solid
particulates and liquid aerosols in a gaseous medium. These substances in suspension
produce diffused sunlight and give us the colours of the sky. They also create a
thickened aerial space through clouds, fog and mist intensifying the immersive qualities
of air, making it discernible, just as a ball gives presence to relationality. This passage
from transparency to opacity, that takes place as water vapour condenses on a
suspended particle, creates a temporal manifestation of the potential aerial space holds
in terms of a space of shared belonging and coexistence of disparate actors. It
intensifies the relationship between the body, vision and place.
Clouds are highly material, still they exist by disappearing, distributing water, dust and
microbial species around the globe. From the darkened skies and spectacular sunsets
produced by the Krakatoa eruption to poison gas or radioactive clouds during the world
wars to data clouds today, aerosols are also significant historical markers and a symptom
of anthropogenic climate change. Clouds bear significance but without any code to
clarify what they mean. They introduce uncertainty and disorientation but are also
essential for understanding the often paradoxical spatial relations of air.
Bio
Hanna Husberg (b. Finland) is a Stockholm-based artist. She graduated from ENSB-A,
Paris in 2007, and is currently a Phd in Practice candidate at the Vienna art academy.
Through a focus on the troubled atmosphere her practice investigates how we perceive,
and relate to anthropogenic climate change. Recent projects include Human
Meteorology (Galleri Mejan, Stockholm, Chateau de Chamarande, France), Being with
(Systemique, CEEAC, Strasbourg), The world indoors (St. John's Cathedral, Gdansk), The
Free Sea (HIAP, Helsinki) and the curatorial project Contingent Movements Archive and
Symposium conceived together with Laura McLean for the inaugural Maldives Pavilion at
the 55th Venice Biennale, and further developed for the UNESCO-COAL exhibition
Adapting in the Anthropocene, UNESCO, Paris.
52
Lidia Mateo
How does a clandestine image behave?
I focus my research on the clandestine cinema made during the late Francoism
dictatorship and the Transition to democracy in Spain. From the beginning, I decided to
call this practice clandestine instead of militant (which has been the most common way
to describe it) because I found that what increased the quality and the intensity of this
footage was its hidden condition, that is, the furtive gaze that was required to register
those images and the risk the filmmakers had to assume as a dangerous practice. I found
this characteristic the most powerful among others, because it needed to remain in the
darkness to be done, it needed to be invisible to make something visible. Since I took
that decision, I have often asked myself about what clandestinity means in terms of
visibility. For example, the images were not always in the darkness. In fact, they had to
be shown to accomplish their target: to resist the Francoist regime (of visibility).
Besides, I observed that, after the Transition, in democracy, these images remained in
an invisibility regime, as if they were still clandestine. This made me think of their
temporality and how they behave depending on the political order they live in. In this
sense, clandestine images allow us to think about the regime of invisibility of any
political order and, inversely, the scope of its visibility. All these facts led me to
propose the term clandestine in my dissertation not just as an adjective that describes
film practice, but also as an aesthetical concept that determines the image. This
concept could be used to think about other images beyond my study cases. I am
currently defining what clandestine images are, how they behave, under which
conditions they change their “status”, to what extent they are (in)visible, what their
temporality is... Etymology tells us that the word clandestine has two opposed
meanings: something that is in the darkness, as a secret, but it also contains the latin
word clam: “what needs to be said”. A dialectic characteristic which I would love to
explore with you all.
Bio
Lidia Mateo Leivas is a PhD student in Art, Literature and Cultural Studies at the
Autonomous University of Madrid and a predoctoral researcher at CCHS-CSIC (Madrid),
where she is doing her dissertation about the afterlife of the clandestine cinema footage
in Spain. Her interests are concerned with the uses of the past(images) in relation with
both the politics of the visible and memory, as well as the radical imagination, archival
theory, images temporality and their role in historical epistemology. She has been
visiting scholar at the University of Buenos Aires (2014) and at New York University
within the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Literatures (2015). She will be doing a
research stay at ASCA by the time the workshop is going on.
53
Panel 11: Dark Practices
Michelle Pfeifer
Becoming Flesh: Refugee Hunger Strike, Colonialism and German Politics of
Racialization
Securitization and militarization of the EU’s external borders and increasingly repressive
asylum policies are an indication that racial practices informed by colonialism are still in
place in Europe and Germany. My paper will ask what the possibilities of decolonizing
German society are given the state’s refusal to confront colonial and racist continuities.
To approach this question, I will analyse a series of hunger strikes that were staged by
refugees from 2012 until the present in Germany. I understand hunger strike as a politics
of refusal, which reveals the entanglements between Germany’s colonial history and
contemporary conditions of asylum. By asking which possibilities lie in staging the
hunger strike I will argue that Germany’s necropolitical conditions of detention, asylum,
and deportation mark the racialized refugee population as disposable. Refugees are
relegated to spaces of obscurity and darkness under conditions of bare life. Drawing on
black feminist and queer theory as an important analytic I look at bodies that have been
marked for abandonment and are already considered unreproductive within the logics of
citizenship and national belonging. I will propose that hunger strike is a form of
becoming flesh, which makes visible how racialized violence is enacted on the refugees’
bodies. Becoming flesh opens an arena for reclamation of the flesh in which the hunger
strikers can articulate a politics of refusal that subvert the logics of recognition,
empathy and suffering liberal rights discourses rely on and, instead, performs an
embrace of the refugees’ abjection. I will argue that understanding the relations
between colonialism and contemporary asylum practices demands an articulation of a
genealogy of racialization in Germany. The hunger strike, thus, is a form of political
refusal that reveals coloniality as the dark side of modernity by bringing into visible sight
the matter of racialized and disposable bodies.
Bio
Michelle Pfeifer is a Masters candidate at the department of Social and Cultural Analysis
at New York University. She holds a Bachelors degree from the Amsterdam University
College in Liberal Arts and Sciences and is fellow of scholarship of the German National
Academic Foundation. Her research interests include feminist and queer theory and
practice, affect studies, embodiment, and cultural studies. Lately, she has worked on
analyses of politics and aesthetics of refusal in queer, black feminist and postcolonial
literatures. Her scholarship intersects with activist work on queer politics, justice in
Palestine and refugee solidarity.
54
Natasha Basu
“Where are our Human Rights?”: The Problematic Taxonomy of the “Migrant”
The “migrant crisis” in Europe is highly visible due to ongoing media coverage. We see
pictures of migrants in Calais holding up signs that read, “Where are our Human Rights?”
and “Stop Police Violence.” While these messages are visible expressions of protest
against the injustice of the international system, we tend not to read these signs, or the
actions of “illegal” migrants as political. Instead, the perception of the migrant is
contained within the taxonomy of “illegal”, “economic migrant”, “asylum seeker”,
“criminal”, and “victim.” This taxonomy hides crucial features of the migrant as a
political agent of change and resistance because it is embedded within the logic of what
James Tully refers to as “informal imperialism.” Using both Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s
and Iris Marion Young’s developments of the concept, I argue that epistemic violence is
a key feature of “informal imperialism,” and that it applies today to those who are
considered “illegal” migrants.
Taking this perspective, I explore how the migrant as political agent discloses the
obscure nature of a global system of informal imperialism. In particular I focus on two
ways epistemic violence manifests itself. First, I will examine the imperial nature of the
idea of universal human rights. While human rights are considered universal, they often
fail to protect those who are most in need. Secondly, I examine the colonial subjectivity
of the migrant as “Other.” While migrants visibly articulate political messages regarding
their right to human rights, these messages are obscured by a perception of the migrant
that is based on a colonial logic.
Bio
PhD Researcher at the University of Amsterdam, Department of Philosophy. Currently
working under the supervision of Dr. Robin Celikates and Prof. Dr. Beate Roessler on the
Globalization of Civil Disobedience. This research is part of the NWO-VIDI project
Transformations of Civil Disobedience: Democratization, Globalization, Digitalization.
Member of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), the Dutch Research
School of Philosophy (OZSW) and the Amsterdam Center for Globalization Studies
(ACGS).
55
Nine Eglantine Yamamoto-Masson
Can the Token Speak? Towards a Theory of the Decolonial Trojan Token
People who are not white and cis have had to remind the world that they matter too,
and fight against the erasure even of this claim. Their mattering must matter not only in
language and representation, but also as voices actively participating in the structuring
of the present and future of our society, and in challenging and diversifying “official”
tellings of history and culture. A first step towards breaking up hegemony is a critique of
a notion of “universality” and of the discourse of “objectivity”. Recognising the
imbalances, noticing the absences, silences, blind spots; identifying the dynamics and
ideologies that govern access to the forum, across various contexts. Another key step is
awareness of false ally-ship and of the many forms of active silencing and erasure
through a controlled and hermetic discursive frame. Subject formation can be
perpetually stalled if caught in a dynamics of tokenism, when a dominant group close to
the centre of power may invite one member of a marginalised group in as a token, yet
expects compliance. Elevating someone as a token while simultaneously framing this
gesture as generosity often also silences the other Others. Calculated tokenism
obfuscates power dynamics and is used to continue to justify, stabilize and fossilise
centered and exclusionary configurations of power, conditions of access and authority.
The question is: Can the Token speak? Does the token speak? How can the token speak,
if she does? A prospective token may decide to expose this by refusing to participate.
Refusal can be very effective; but is often occulted and at the individual's detriment.
The trojan token chooses a different course of action: after careful assessment of the
situation of risk / success ratios, after precise analysis of energy expenditure and
projected effectiveness; often using the tools of neo-venture- capitalist thinking,
subverting institutional power by inhabiting the cracks in its logic and using these sites
as strategic locales to act from. In this paper I propose to first sketch out a theory of
the token and then delineate a practical strategy of resistance against tokenism,
echoing writings about (and practices of) culture-jamming and hacking, and developing a
model of “trojan token” that can be put to use as an emancipatory strategy towards
becoming and staying a speaking active participating subject within the centres of
power.
Bio
French-Japanese artist, practicing theorist, curator and PhD candidate at ASCA
(Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis). Previously she studied cultural studies,
literature, history of art, film and philosophy at the universities of Paris Sorbonne, Berlin
Humboldt, NYU, London Goldsmiths and Tokyo Waseda. In academic research and
artistic practice, her work examines historical memory, ideology, resistance and
counter-narratives at the site of their encounter with socially engaged art as a critical
forum. Particular focus is placed on postwar and contemporary Japan, its stateenforced historical taboos and amnesia, and how these affect the contemporary in its
various constellations, relations with its neighbours (some of which are former colonies)
56
in the Asia- Pacific region. She has thus been engaged in research, curatorial, activist
and artistic projects in and with Tokyo, Gwangju (South Korea), San Francisco, Manila,
Taipei, Berlin, Delhi, working with local communities, artists, academics, curators and
activists. In Berlin she works with anti-racist organisations that provide support for
refugees and with organisations that work against gender-based-discrimination. Her
work is invested in the potential of art to offer alternative avenues through which to
articulate socio- historical concerns, such as the use of fiction as a testing ground for
reality and a strategy towards a differentiated understanding of the contemporary.
She
is the founder of the intersectional networks and knowledge exchange platforms
Messengers United, The Panther Moderns, and founder of the Refugee Phrasebook and
Berlin
Refugee
Help
community.
http://nineyamamotomasson.tumblr.com
[email protected]
57
Mikki Stelder
“Rainbows are nothing but refracted white light:” Troubled Sight and Israel’s Gay
Tourism Industry
This paper departs from the poem “Rainbows are nothing but refracted white light” by
the trans south asian performance art duo DarkMatter, and from there, moves deep into
the folds of Israel’s Gay Tourism Industry. In DarkMatter’s poem, the rainbow - as a
symbol for LGBTQ communities world-wide - becomes but refracted white light. White
light acts as a visual metaphor for the way in which mainstream LGBTQ organizations
present the political agenda of a predominantly white, male, and affluent community of
gay people as the only agenda for sexual politics, while at the same time attempting to
speak for all LGBTQs. Hidden behind the clouds that form the conditions of possibility for
the rainbow to emerge, hides a dark matter set on exposing what was meant to remain
obscured in the first place. The rain that falls from these clouds forms the rainbow’s
constitutive outside. It is the rain that gives space and give shape to the projection of
the colors of the rainbow, and it is the rain that we turn our backs to when the rainbow
appears in the sky.
Since 2005, the Jewish-Israeli gay community and the Israeli government have staked a
claim in the promotion of Israel as a rainbow nation; one in which gay people are
welcome, safe, and respected. It presents itself as “the only gay friendly country in the
Middle East,” always already in opposition to “the rest of the Middle East.” This selfimage departs from the negation of Israel as a settler colonial space.
By reading the DarkMatter poem and Israel’s Gay Tourism Industry together, I hope to
rain on this gay pride parade. This paper will show how the negation, and at the same
time production, of Israel as a settler colonial space is the main product of the Gay
Tourism Industry. The invisibility of Palestine and Palestinians hinges on the blinding
effects of the rainbow exposed by DarkMatter. After its brightness recedes, what
remains is a troubled vision of Israel as a gay tourist hotspot. The Israeli Gay Tourism
Industry renders Israel’s violence invisible. It is not that we cannot see it, because we
“already look through,” rather the gay rainbow produces a powerful and willful
blindspot that is reluctant to see what lies behind its horizon. This paper will look closely
at the workings of this troubled sight.
Cited: DarkMatter, “Rainbows are Nothing but Refracted White Light”
Bio
Mikki Stelder is a PhD Candidate at ASCA. Her interested are in the fields of Critical
Feminist, Race, Queer and Postcolonial Studies. She teaches at the School for New Dance
Development.
58
Panel 12: Techno-Fetishism
Giovanni Papini
Handshakes in the Age of Acoustic Sensing: towards a humane representation of thought
Together with Alex Rothera we recently led a series of workshops called: Humans,
objects and the future of touch. In the 2 days workshop we developed and
experimented with Active Acoustic Sensing (AAS), a technology developed (amongst
others) by Alex Rothera, Makoto Ono, Buntarou Shizuki and Jiro Tanaka. It’s very easy to understand the application of such a technology: using the minimum,
low cost, diy hardware it is possible to turn every object into a smart device. However
for us AAS also disclose more interesting discussions, which are embedded in that first
obvious one.
First of all the disappearance of the interface. With AAS we don’t need to press a button
to send informations anymore: the observer and the thing observed start being
connected by a continuos stream of communication, leaving no space to a metainterpreter of the action to be accomplished. This interpreter used to be the interface: a
translator able to mediate between our language and the machine’s. With the evolution
of computational devices the gap between the two codes became so deep that is now
almost impossible, for an average user, to understand what is going on when a specific
button/switch/knob is activated. Especially since the interface moved from the analog
to the digital, and the translation started happening in mimetic backgrounds.
It seems to us that merging the borders between the interface and the system controlled
is the natural evolutionary step to accomplish for a better communication.
In second place, we would like to speculate on this scenario where every object starts,
literally and metaphorically, having a microphone; crawling out of its cage of darkness
and silence; hearing its own sound and the sound of the environment: is our privacy
ultimately compromised? If every object surrounding us will start listening and talking
(probably to an unknown or unwanted audience) will we be free to speak? Perhaps
people, instead of being silent will start building white noise generators or similar
devices to interfere with the inner vibrations of objects. Once camouflaging meant
sending as less data as possible, but, in this hyper connected scenario, will sending an
overflow of informations be the new way to achieve invisibility?
Bio
Giovanni Papini’s work envisions future evolutionary paradigms and new topographies.
His cross-disciplinary approach drifts between ideas of disembodiment, mind uploading,
consciousness, and ethics as applied to mammals, machines and the interaction between
the members of these two clades. He is a member of the decentralised, camouflaged,
and explorative group gvn908.
He was an artist in residence at Fabrica in 2014 and at Jan Van Eyck Academie in 2015.
He recently worked on a series of performative lectures at Universidade de belas artes
de Lisboa, BAD Rotterdam, Interference Amsterdam and at the Museum of the Future in
Dubai. www.gvn1ppn908.space
59
Julia Velkova
Transparency, power and digital gifts in the context of the digital commons
This paper explores transparency in the context of the exponential proliferation of
digital commons online, with particular focus on the ways in which it configures media
production practices, inwardly and outwardly.
The production of digital commons has for long been embedded in the rhetorics of
“openness” and positive communication that enable the constitution of a democratic and
pluralist mediascape based on the values of transparency, free speech and creative
autonomy, enacted through making culture public by sharing artifacts as digital gifts.
However, as Baudrillard (1981:65) argues, the gift is an ambivalent medium that
simultaneously embeds relation and distance, love and aggression, positive
communication and agonistic confrontation, an aspect that has been undertheorized in
relation to the production of digital commons. Similar ambivalence exists in relation to
transparency which simultaneously produces and reconfigures power relations through
politics of visibility that are ambiguous and regularizing (Flyverbom, 2015). The paper
discusses these ambivalences in relation to the production of digital commons, through a
concrete case, that of making a “free and open source” animation film, Cosmos
Laundromat by the Amsterdam based organisation Blender Institute for “open 3D
projects”. The production process of this film has been made public and shared as
commons, alongside with the technology and the digital media assets that comprised it.
The paper contextualises this practice as a specific articulation of the modernist ideal of
transparency and outlines two main tensions that arise when transparency and gifting
are combined; one of them being related to the ways in which the outward commitment
to public culture configures inwardly labor relationships, in particular, the efficiency of
labor. The other tension is related to power, and the duality between fostering public
digital creativity through sharing, and establishing relationships with other cultural
producers through the public performance of skill, technical wealth and a broader
commitment to openness
Bio
Julia Velkova is a PhD candidate in Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn
University in Stockholm, Sweden. Her interests are on computer cultures, the politics of
infrastructure and internet governance. In her dissertation project she explores forms of
autonomy, value creation and power enacted within techno-artistic practices that are
centred on building independent media production infrastructures and content in the
domain of digital media commons. She examines them through the phenomenon of
“open films” developed by the Dutch organisation Blender Institute in Amsterdam, and
adopted on a minor scale by others among whom the Russian project “Morevna” in
Siberia. Previously Velkova studied the relevance of alternative journalism to internet
governance that resulted in her master thesis on “WikiLeaks CableGate and the
Multistakeholder model of Internet Governance” (2011) at the department of Arts,
Culture and Communication (K3), at Malmö University, Sweden.
Email:
[email protected]
60
David Gauthier
Opaque Executions, Black Boxes and the Politics of the “Cold Gaze”
Why does technical media require that our age-old notion of theory be revised? If theory
is to be understood from its etymological roots as theoría, which means at once
contemplation and speculation, then one can consider the contemplative and speculative
gaze of the technical media machine itself – its “cold gaze” – as yielding theory proper.
Some have argued that this “cold gaze,” promoted by certain media scholars, creates a
type of distancing from the messy world of politics. In this essay, I argue that, on the
contrary, “cold gazing” harbours new types of “posthuman” politics since different
notions of what machines are and what they do promulgate contrasting regimes of
visibility/invisibility, transparency and opacity, or, to put it bluntly, perpetuate quite
diverging worldviews. In proposing two concepts of computing –structure versus machine
– and in considering the problematics of execution as (under) theorised in the field of
media and software studies, I expose how these two notions produce contrasting
postulates of what execution is and/or does. My aim is to problematise the illusory
division between soft- and hardware by arguing it leads to the establishment of
misleading conceptions of machinic super- and infrastructures. Rather, I posit there is
only “infrastructure” all the way down, and show that in privileging the symbolic order
of code (software) certain theorists are incapable of addressing execution in and for
itself, as the symbolic regime they promote effaces the fuzzy material, temporal and
logistical conditions of execution as such. In turn, I propose that theories addressing the
problematics of execution ought to move from questions of programmatic structures and
symbolic orders to ones of catalytic event conditioning where the temporal and material
conjugates partaking in the micro operations of execution can expose what they
contemplate and speculate
Bio
David Gauthier is a PhD Fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Cultural Analysis (NICA)
based at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. His
research explores what the advent of technological errors can reveal about the various
processes of machinic subjectivisation sustained by contemporary digital media.
Gauthier is actively involved in producing (gauthiier.info) and curating
(sciencefriction.dk) media arts and is interested in projects addressing the various
regimes of visibility/ invisibility of modern techno-scientific configurations and
equipment.
61
Panel 13: Out/Comings
Paris Cameron-Gardos
“I am not gay”: Secrecy, Authorship, and the Coming Out Narrative
The concept of secrecy is at the heart of the coming out narrative. For critics such as
Richard Dyer (2002) and Esther Saxey (2007) coming out must result in the production of
a specific kind of gay protagonist. The registers that don’t fit with their conception of a
narrative of progress, propelled by well meaning scripts, are excluded and new
analytical blind spots emerge.
In order to explore the dynamic relationship between intelligibility, secrecy, narrative,
and coming out, I draw on the work of Ross Chambers (1981) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
(1990, 2008). Chambers argues that the biggest secret about secrecy is that everyone
knows both the existence of the secret and, in many cases, the contents of the secret.
Most importantly, I return to Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet. Her notion that
silence is central to the speech acts associated with coming out guides my inquiry.
I demonstrate that agency and authorship are central to the coming out secret in Marco
Kreuzpaintner’s 2004 film Summer Storm. Specifically, I question who has agency with
the coming out secret. Through a focus on moments of transparency and invisibility in
the narrative, I highlight how the coming out secret creates shifts in agency that turn
individual and confessional acts of coming out into collective ones.
Bio
Paris Cameron-Gardos moved to the Netherlands in 2014 to pursue doctoral studies
within the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of
Amsterdam. Paris received his B.A. from the University of Toronto (2002) and his M.A.
from the Université de Montréal in 2004. His dissertation, Out/Comes: An Evaluation of
Agency, Performativity, and Violence in Gay Coming Out Narratives will demonstrate the
links between performativity, agency, and violence in the gay male coming out
narrative. In particular, he intends to examine the links between violence and narrative
in stories of sexual self-recognition. This research will also question how the audience is
created and what values they are asked to accept or reject when confronted by stories
of self-identification.
62
Matthieu Foucher
The Heterotopic Closet: Spectral Presences and Otherworlds in La Revue Monstre and
Michael James O’Brien’s Interiors
Relying on spectrality as main theoretical and metaphorical device, this essay offers an
analysis of the Interiors series of photographs by artist Michael James O’Brien, featured
in the first issue of the French queer magazine La Revue Monstre entitled ‘Back to the
closet.’ O’Brien’s interiors are various Parisian backrooms empty of all human bodily
presence, yet full of reminders of the activities taking place there. This ‘presence of an
absence’ produces a haunting effect, and forces us to reconsider these spaces that we
might tend to overlook, and thus to wonder: are they truly governed by shame, filled
with guilty ghosts and deviant pleasures, as one might sometimes be tempted to think?
Are they embarrassing remnants of the past, contrasting with increasing gay
respectability, visibility and conformity? Or are they, as the editors of Monstre suggest in
a short text, a space of ‘extraordinary liberty’? Can the closet be reconsidered as a
heterotopia, a place where, ‘together with others’ in the dark, one might be able to
invent new forms of sociality away from the sight of society? Can obscurity encourage a
form of collective resistance, making this nostalgic look at backrooms not only turned
towards the past but rather towards the future?
In addition to relying on Derridean spectrality, this essay is strongly inspired by the works
of queer theorists Guy Hocquenghem and Didier Eribon, by Esther Peeren and María Del
Pilar Blanco’s research on spectrality, by Terry Castle’s Apparitional Lesbian, and by
José Esteban Muñoz’ notion of ‘queer world-making.’ Focusing on Monstre’s invitation to
go ‘back to the closet,’ it plays with two directions often taken by the spectral
metaphor: one linked to the visible / invisible dichotomy and the second, inspired by
Spectres de Marx, which blurs the lines between past, present and future.
Bio
Matthieu Foucher holds a M.Sc. degree from the Iéseg School of Management, where he
wrote his thesis about new business models in the media and entertainment industry
under supervision of Xavier Lecocq. After two years of working experience, he pursued
the Research M.A. in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam, where he relied on
Queer Theory and Spectrality to analyse the French magazine La Revue Monstre under
supervision of Esther Peeren. He has held several positions in the media industry,
working as a market & media analyst, a production assistant, a programme development
officer, and as a cultural journalist and writer specialised in queer cultures and politics.
63
Vesna Vravnik
No Way Out – Go West: Sexual and Religious Nationalisms, Nonexistence of
Homosexuality and Cunning Activist Tactics in the Post-Yugoslav Cinema
By drawing the correlation between politics and art, I study the extent to which postYugoslav queer cinema has a potential for a political critique. Film with queer topics or
queer characters can be identified as either activist art or artistic activism even though
the intentions of production houses and film directors may not be directly connected to
queer activism. The region that I focus on in my research is neither less advanced than
the Western, nor the same as the Eastern Europe; however, it is still seen as a blurry
hole in between. Thus the aim of my project is twofold: a) to de-centralize the Western
perspective and localize the post-Yugoslav space concerning heteronormativity and
homonegativity; b) to use post-Yugoslav cinema as a critique of homonegativity from the
region where queer discourse is not settled yet and queer community is still struggling
from invisibility and gross homonegativity. To that purpose I analyse Ahmed Imamović’s
film Go West (Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2005). The film offers a solution in the use of
masquerading queer identities to conform to heteronormativity or destroy them by
killing them or migrating to the West. In order to understand the issues I take into
account the political backgrounds of the connection between sexual and religious
nationalism on one side and homonegativity and xenophobia on another. This helps me
answer why are homosexuals such easy targets for nationalists and how are xenophobia
and homonegativity interrelated in the post-Yugoslav context. However, I aim not to
analyze the dominant discourse only but its counter discourse as a form of resistance as
well. I plan to make a detour from the homonegativity expressed in the film and focus on
activist tactics of the rhetoric of detournement, while focusing on hidden positive
images of solidarity and alliances between patriarchy and homosexuality.
Bio
Vesna Vravnik has finished her master thesis on de-construction of lesbian desire in
European film at Ljubljana Graduate School of Humanities (ISH) in Slovenia. While taking
part in numerous activist initiatives in Slovenia and other post-Yugoslav countries she cofounded two activist guerrilla groups (Alter Šalter and Vstaja Lezbosov) and mobilized
many street actions addressing the exclusionary politics of precarious workers, migrants,
erased community of Slovenia, LGBT and queer communities. Now she focuses on the
possibility of combining the academic and activist-centered knowledge. Currently she is
an ASCA’s PhD candidate, working on post-communist transformations of queer activism
and cinema in the in the post-Yugoslav space. She is especially interested in negotiating
heteronormative discourses through the post-Yugoslav cinema and their activist potential
of reflecting current fights against homonegativity in the region.
64
Rafal Morusiewicz
Opaque Becoming Transparent: Violent Contempt in the Polish Countryside in It Looks
Pretty from a Distance (dir. Anka Sasnal and Wilhelm Sasnal, 2011
As of late October 2015, the socio-political landscape in Poland may no longer be
fittingly summarized with the words of the film title It Looks Pretty from a Distance (dir.
Anka Sasnal and Wilhelm Sasnal, 2011). It does no longer look pretty, even from a
distance. In the recently concluded 2015 parliamentary elections, the biggest Polish
right-wing party, “PiS” ("Law and Justice") gained power after a campaign built upon the
xenophobic, gender-phobic, and pro-Catholic-church postulates. Joined by a few other,
even more radical, right-wing parties in the Parliament, “PiS” expresses Poland's heterowhite-normative national self-identification, which, as Kulpa (2012) claims, relies on its
self-recognition as both the “other” and “othered” state, fluctuating in terms of the
national- or gender-bound referents against which it consistently positions itself as
“other”, yet stable in persisting its symbolic field. It Looks Pretty from a Distance
depicts the contemporary realities of the Polish countryside, the national trademark of
the Polish national identification, unveiling what Leder (2014, pg. 98) identifies as
“Polish-ness”. This amalgam of the national pride, expressing itself in the pleasure in
contempting and humiliating “the other” is a continuum of the hierarchical structures of
domination, historically present already in the exploitative relations between tenured
land workers and gentry, originating in the 12th century and continuing till the mid1850s. The film, along with Sekret (dir. Przemysław Wojcieszek, 2012), presents the
continuum of the pathological relation, counterpointing the internationally popularized
vision of Poland's "success", as evidenced by the GDP-measured economic growth, with
the visual and textual study of the impoverished backward Polish suburbia, heavily
indebted to the idea of retaliation for the injustice done by the phantasmatic “other”.
Both films illustrate the Polish film's penchant towards producing the mimicry of the
imagined society, operating along different shades of the heteronormative national
whiteness. This presentation is part of my PhD project on modes of assimilation and
resistance in Polish “queer film”, the opaque identification in/of film, a term that
embraces moments in/of film that break out of the hegemonic heteronormative
spectrum and venture towards the less homogenous, the less normative
Bio
I am a second-year PhD candidate in the “PhD in Practice” program at Akademie der Bildenden
Künste Wien, at the same time working on another PhD project at the University of Warsaw’s
Institute of Applied Social Sciences, both of which study the (non-)visibility and (non-)existence
of the Polish queer film. My research interests concern the different modes of resistance and
assimilation in the history of the Polish LGBT activism as visible in film, intermediality in the
context of “queer theory,” and the opacity/transparence of non-heteronormative elements
within the Polish cinema, video art, and experimental film. Since 2005, I have taught courses on
film, TV, performative arts, and video art, as well as research-based writing, at the University of
Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw and at the Webster Vienna Private University.
65
Panel 14: The Map and the Territory
Simon Ferdinand
Artists Astride Shifting Mapping Paradigms
Following a remarkable diffusion and diversification of cartographic activity beyond
professional domains in recent years, contemporary mapping is practiced in an expanded
variety of social contexts. If Michel de Certeau once distinguished between street-level
quotidian practices and the elevated cartographic perspective of city legislators, today
non-specialists perform mapmaking on digital devices in the streets. Recent scholarship
invokes theories of cartography’s performative agency to suggest that ordinary citizencartographers continuously revisualise contemporary cities as they move through them.
My paper aims to parse issues surrounding this performativity by engaging experiments in
walking and mapping by artist Jeremy Wood (b.1976). Tracking his movements by GPS
technology, Wood’s walking body becomes what he calls a “geodetic pencil” that
inscribes the urban landscapes it traverses. I will show how some performances map
everyday travels through London over decades, tracing a life in spectral street systems.
And how others consciously augment and recreate existing patternings of the city mapping new streets into being and walking messages into space before the proverbial
cartographic “eye in the sky”.
The city is both object and product of Wood’s imaginative mapping performances, which
merge synoptic cartography with everyday mobility. In preparing my presentation, I
want to query the agency of such quotidian mappings. How, and under what conditions,
might they shape the urban realities they navigate? Spaces produced by official
cartographies are maintained by state power and rhetorics of objective transparency.
Lay and artistic maps, by contrast, are openly partial and creative, often remaining
private or supplementary aesthetic constructions. My suspicion is that though practices
like Wood’s articulate urban space differently and richly, substantial interventions in
how streets are imagined and performed would require greater social assent than is
often evident in such alternative mappings.
Bio
I am a dedicated researcher working as a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam.
My current project explores the use of cartography as the formal and thematic
substance of artistic production under the title of “Sharp Fantasies: Maps and Modernity
in the Visual Arts”. Previously I wrote a research-based masters dissertation on the
legacy of romanticism in certain modernist theatre theorists at the University of
Warwick, where I also taught an undergraduate course on contemporary art. Several of
my book reviews are published (https://uva.academia.edu/SimonFerdinand/BookReviews) and I have articles in process.
66
Marco Dell’Oca
Critique of the Invisible Seer: A Material Ethnography of Drone Surveillance
This paper suggests an ethnographic description of the kind of imagination of politics
that drone surveillance-and-strike operations reveal. How to return to conceivability
practices that because of their technical complexity as well as the veil of secrecy
covering them seem to somehow escape our experience?
To address this question, the text is organized in two main sections. The first opens with
a “material ethnography” of Predator drones: where did they come from? How do they
see, reason, interact with reality? What kind of materialities are they? In this
perspective, the paper reconstructs a brief history of unmanned aerial vehicles, and it
investigates the functions of the several electro-optical intelligence devices that
compose the dronic assemblage of Predators, putting particular emphasis on the kind of
visibles they produce. From this perspective, the figure of the “invisible seer” emerges
as a techno-political reality. The second section begins with a discussion of Norberto
Bobbio’s definition of democracy as “the public government of public power”. What are
the implications of a technological arrangement that forces a redefinition of virtuality
that radically excludes a structure of power from visibility, and in fact makes of secrecy,
invisibility, and the possibility of total surveillance the “aggregating center” of the
political?
Bio
I graduated (cum laude, 3.8 GPA) with a Bachelor in Liberal Arts and Sciences
(anthropology, history, cultural studies) from Amsterdam University College, before
advancing to Goldsmiths, University of London, where I have just completed an MA in
Anthropology and Cultural Politics, working within the Centre for Research Architecture.
This paper is a revised version that draws on my final thesis. An extended version is
currently under review with the Journal of Material Culture.
67
Ruby Wallis
Coolorta, a place apart – reframing the landscape through lens based art practice
This research takes the form of a series of experimental and philosophically guided
attempts to represent place through the practices of photography and film. Throughout
this process my photographic approaches alternated between transparency and opacity.
Informed by the phenomenological approaches and theory of the image produced by
Judith Butler, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Laura U. Marks and Vivian Sobchack, the research
draws upon the history of experimental approaches to cinema and photography. In this
thesis I essay I argue for an approach that privileges the role of the senses in a lensbased engagement with the landscape, focusing, in particular, on the sort of ‘haptic’
experience of a portrayed environment that film can provide. I have chosen Coolorta, a
small alternative community in the West of Ireland, for the location of my research. This
is where I lived as child. I ask whether or not it is possible to represent a place such as
Coolorta without this representation becoming a ‘fixed’ view insensitive to the complex
interaction of artist and community. The three lens- based practice sub-projects
produced as elements of this research, respectively titled Autowalks, Moving Stills and
Turlough Swim, explore the boundary between empirical and phenomenal forms of
research, in their investigation of such formal elements of lens-based practice such as
'walking photography' ‘slow filmmaking’, ‘the close up’ and the ‘point of view shot’. The
cinematic approach which I adopted evolved over the course of the project, from one
employing what could be called an ‘ocularcentric’ perspective (which privileges sight
above other senses) to one which engages with haptic and phenomenological filmmaking
sensibilities and which seeks to explore the intersubjective experience involved in the
relationship between the spectator, subject and filmmaker – often induced by
performance and mimicry.
Bio
Ruby Wallis recently completed her PhD in Fine Art Media at the National College of Art
& Design, Dublin. She also holds an MA in Documentary Photography from the University
of South Wales. She was recently nominated for the Prix Pictet Award and won first
prize at Claremorris Open Exhibition in 2013. She is currently on residency at The Irish
Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.
Recent exhibitions include solo shows at the Burren College of Art (Co. Clare), Pallas
Projects (Dublin), and The Dock (Carrick-on-Shannon). Group shows include: The Gallery
of Photography (Dublin), 126- Artists run gallery (Galway), Galerie du Faouëdic (France),
The Lab (Dublin), Centro de Artes Visuais, Coimbra, (Portugal), Vondelbunker
(Amsterdam), and Ffotogallery (Cardiff).
Publications include the Journal for Artistic Research (Switzerland), Super Massive
Blackhole Magazine (Dublin) and the British Journal of Photography (UK).
68
Panel 15: Surfaces/ Modernity
Johan Fornäs
Introduction to Rethinking Culture: Beyond Transparency and Opacity
This paper is an introducing presentation of a new project aiming at rethinking the
concept of culture. The hermeneutic concept of culture as signifying practice has since
half a century been vital for cultural research, recognizing the centrality of
communication, mediation, meaning and interpretation. It has simultaneously been
questioned by proponents of discourse analysis, media archaeology and new materialism
(Foucault, Kittler, Barad among others). These anti-hermeneutic challenges should be
taken seriously. Can they be accommodated within a revised interpretive framework for
cultural theory? With that purpose, the dynamic dialectic between meaning and
materiality needs to be worked through in greater detail.
After a brief conceptual history of culture, the paper will suggest a number of problems
to be solved, in response to current anti-hermeneutical challenges. Some are already
answered by the regrettably neglected critical text-hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur, who –
against romanticist forerunners and answering to contestations by structuralism and
ideology critique – showed that interpretation theory can do without the strict divide
between understanding and explanation, the psychologising search for authorial intentions and the belief in one fixed inner meaning in any text. Other problems still demand
further attention, for instance the neglect of non-verbal texts and of emotive aspects of
interpretation, or the need to consider the limits of meaning and interpretation. I invite
further suggestions on urgent challenges of this kind.This theme has several links to the
workshop topics. For instance, the hermeneutical concept of culture opens up a crucial
third field of intersubjectivity beyond dichotomies such as objective–subjective or
external–internal (Bernstein 1983). Meaning-making demands interpretive detours that
make the human-social world neither transparent, nor opaque, but rather semi-opaque,
like a half-open door (Bachelard 1958). Hence, critical hermeneutics must go beyond
rigid dualisms such as those between transparent immediacy and opaque hypermediacy
(Bolter & Grusin 1999).
Bio
Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University in Stockholm.
With a background in musicology and cultural studies, he is in spring 2016 visiting scholar
at the University of Amsterdam, working on a new book on Rethinking Culture. Previous
books include Cultural Theory and Late Modernity (Sage 1995); Digital Borderlands
(Peter Lang 2002); Consuming Media: Communication, Shopping and Everyday Life (Berg
2007); Capitalism: A Companion to Marx’s Economy Critique (Routledge 2013);
Signifying Europe (Intellect 2012); and Europe Faces Europe: Narratives from its Eastern
Half (Intellect 2016, in press). He is Member of Academia Europaea and has been vice
chair of the international Association for Cultural Studies (ACS), founding director of the
Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden (ACSIS) and chief editor of Culture
Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research. He currently edits a theme issue on
“Time and Media” for the International Journal of Communication (in press 2016)
69
Jan Overwijk
Abstract - Modernisation: Weber and Lyotard on the opaque
Transparency has always been one of the organising principles of the modern. With
Enlightenment thought, modernity described itself as illuminating the opaque, as
rendering the world visible by driving out magic and myth under the aegis of reason.
Discursive reason allows the scientist to retrace the steps of scientific argument and
thus to recover its truth through transparent procedures. Likewise, in the political
sphere, the transparency of governmental institutions and procedures warrants its
rationality and thus its justice. Transparency and rationality thus belong to the core of
modernity and appear to be perpendicular to opacity.
In this essay, I want to investigate this figure of opposition between the transparent and
the opaque in the process of modernisation. I will do this by exploring two tensions
within the works of Jean-François Lyotard. In the first part, I will introduce Max Weber’s
thesis of modernisation as rationalisation. We will see that his description of modernity
fits the general framework of the transparency of reason exorcising the opaque. In the
second part, I want to position Lyotard vis-a-vis Weber by noting their affinities and
differences. Primarily, we will see that according to Lyotard, modernity does not merely
drive out the opaque but also thrives on it. I think this sentiment is emblematic for
much social theory today. At the same time, however, Lyotard remains attached to the
fundamental Leitmotif of the Weberian thematic. I will show this duality or tension
within Lyotard’s work by posing two questions regarding Lyotard’s notion of
‘performativity’, which must be understood as the technical criterion of efficiency and
which bears a resemblance to Weber’s purposive rationality. These two questions are: Is
it always transparent what counts as performative? And can the opaque be performative?
Bio
Jan Overwijk is a PhD-candidate in political philosophy and cultural analysis at the UvA.
He is concerned with modernisation theory and critical theory, departing from the
theoretical intuition of Weber and Lyotard that modernisation represents a form of
socio-cultural closure. Right now, he is working on his ‘pilot study’ regarding the nature
of ‘performativity’ or efficiency in Lyotard’s oeuvre.
70
Domietta Torlasco
Screening: House Arrest
House Arrest (US., 8 min., 2015) is a split-screen video essay documenting a visit to the
Stasi Museum, Berlin, in the summer of 2013, a few weeks after the leak of classified
NSA documents. The piece juxtaposes shots of the museum’s homelike curtained
windows and mundane office furnishings with glimpses of the American West, a world,
for all its wild expanse, that likewise emerges as world of vigils and vigilantes, policed
borders, trafficking, equivocal domiciles. In the one domain as in the other, surveillance
regrets nothing. It aims at organizing life down to the last detail. It casts its net on the
big and the small, the nearby and the faraway, the living room and the desert.
In this piece, the Museum’s lace curtains return from shot to shot as markers of the
unstable threshold between private and public life, opacity and transparency, secrecy
and intelligence. They remind us of the constraints placed on vision by a variety of
institutions (from the family to the state), pointing to the fact that even looking through
something as ordinary as homelike curtains is all but devoid of political implications.
That the boundary between the inside and the outside, the familiar and the foreign is
often consolidated by policing perception and promoting the illusion of total visibility
(exposure) as a matter of national security. At the same time, the Museum’s curtains
become the occasion for a small act of resistance—the free play of associations that they
engender in this video and that is inimical to the very order of surveillance.
Please find a copy of the video on vimeo:
https://vimeo.com/116778507
password: amarcord14
Bio
Torlasco is Associate Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Northwestern
University. She works at the intersection of film theory and practice, with a specific
interest in critical theory and time-based visual arts. She is the author of two books: The
Time of the Crime: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian Film (Stanford University
Press, 2008) and The Heretical Archive: Digital Memory at the End of Film (Minnesota
University Press, 2013). She is currently at work on a new book manuscript, Time
Unframed: A Counter-History of War in Film and Installation Art, which investigates
how experimental films and installations after 9/11 have responded to mainstream
representations of war. She has recently completed the video essays House Arrest (U.S.,
8 min., 2015) and, together with Cesare Casarino (University of Minnesota), Philosophy
in the Kitchen (U.S., 21 min., 2014). Both pieces have screened at national and
international venues (www.campagne-premiere.com/artists/screening/event).
71
Thomas Mical
The interface of urban flown to the demarcated interior / exterior spaces establish a
sophisticated processural spatial mechanics in our hypermodern times. This research
rethinks the rise of forms of translucent, as an ordinary para-tectonic in the surface
theories of contemporary architectural and spatial design. The surfaces of modernity are
the skins of desires, increasingly the translucent surfaces of sense. In the case of
architecture, where the modifications of the skin are both conceptually flexible and
high-performance determined, it is commonplace for the prior modernist optic of
transparency to be replaced today with more filtered and inflected surfaces of
translucency. Indeed, the movement from transparency to translucency (here
considered as a special case of opacity) where translucency is a primitive optic, the
optical residue of the modernist myth of transparency. The surfaces of modernity, often
ignored or repressed, are the object of analysis, and they originate as the siblings of
psychoanalysis in 19thC Vienna - as an ontology of fashionable dressing (bekleidung), of
surface-effects of presence and absence, only to later have this ontology reify and
default into a compulsive spatial regime of translucent skins. As there is no pure
negation, so to there is no pure transparency.
This dissolution of pure transparency is also a marker of a cultural shift legible in the
traces of ultrathin surfaces and see-through media techniques. The surfaces of hypermodern architecture are the receptive recall of the open figure of the blank screen, the
empty signifier, now technologically achieved at urban scale. To this end, the trope of
translucence invites an analysis of sense and difference, which here will include
references to the “formless-ness” of Bataille / Bois and Krauss, targeted towards the
reciprocating mechanisms of sense in urban flows configured under a theory where
translucency marks the zero of whatVictor Burgin has described as a "psychic Realism"
now permeating the architectural skin of the world.
Bio
Thomas Mical completed his professional M.Arch. at Harvard GSD with a thesis on “Blade
Runner Urbanism for Cyber-City Tokyo”, and his first doctorate (in architectural theory)
at Georgia Tech and Emory, which examined the influence of Nietzsche‘s Eternal
Recurrence in Georgio de Chirico‘s ‘Metaphysical’ Urbanism. His second doctorate, in
media-philosophy through the European Graduate School, is entitled “A HegelianSurrealism Account of the Genesis and Inversion of Impossible Worlds.” He has worked in
the design firms of SOM Chicago and Murphy/Jahn, and is the author of Surrealism and
Architecture (Routledge, 2004).
72
Panel 16: Over/Exposures
Sofia Apostolidou
Fat Women, Thin Modernities: Examining Cultural Representations of Fat Women in the
Outskirts of Europe
In The Fat Female Body Samantha Murray analyses a sexuality and lack of objectification
as a common motif within representations of female fatness. By analysing cultural
objects that depict female fat characters in a specifically oversexualised light, I argue
that in a country like Greece, where Europeanness and modernity are not internalised
identities but aspiring initiatives, a new field of interaction is uncovered. Thus, these
cultural objects, where fatness is represented as both desired/sexualised and
abhorred/de sexualised, serve as what Rodanthi Tzanelli in “Not My Flag!” calls an
“oscillation between subordination to European demands and resistance to them” that is
“often typical of anti imperial nationalism”. In this manner, the fat body is
simultaneously hyper and invisible, with fatness serving as a simultaneously transparent
and opaque actor, operating on the female body. Using Ian Chambers’ concept of the
mediterranean and that of porous modernity, I examine the ways in which transparent
and opaque fatness in the Greek paradigm demonstrate a certain failure of current fat
scholarship to effectively theorise the (fat) body, outside the perceived center of
modernity. On one hand, I explore how Greece as part of the mediterranean
demonstrates “the continuities and discontinuities that emerge from the clumsy
movement of the modern nation as it pushes its way through the unjust and uneven
complexities of modernity” (Chambers, 7). On the other, through porous modernity, a
modernity that absorbs whatever it encounters, I focus on the ways in which the
contradictory representations of fatness in Greece, can help in order to “articulate a
sense of the past that disavows the homogeneous continuum of historical time
(Chambers 26), and disrupt the
“usual chronologies of ‘progress’ in their linear accumulation of sense” (136).
Bio
Sofia Apostolidou is a PhD candidate with ASCA. Her research interests include fatness,
posthumanism, disability studies and modernisation processes of European peripheries.
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Dan Leberg
‘Look The Part’: Transparency, Self-Mutilation, and Celebrity in Method Acting
This paper will examine Strasbergian Method Acting’s sometimes-extreme demands of an
actor’s psyche and physical body to become her character through self-alteration and
creative mimicry, making the actor transparent by transforming the actor into the
character.
Although screen actors’ performances solicit empathetic relationships with the audience,
most of the empathetic and creative labor behind realist screen acting occurs prior to
filming. Many screen actors spend a great deal of creative energy developing their role
by experimenting with creative character choices, based in a logic that equates
verisimilitude with truth and fidelity. The actor thereby comes to embody her character
in a way that seems real to the actor herself, her fellow actors-as-characters, and to her
audience.
Although one could argue that this invisible creative labour is visible as the means to a
performative end, what the actor actually thinks and feels during her performance – of
what governs her creative choices – is not adequately assessable through a quantifiable
analysis of gestures, postures, or vocal intonations. If acting is, as William Brown argues,
as much a form of mimicry as a mode of becoming (2012), how does an actor’s creative
imaginary work navigate the distance between the actor’s quotidian self and the
character’s fictitious self? How is the actor visible through the camouflage of the
character; or, in some cases, how is the character visible through the masking persona of
the star actor?
Some styles of acting have tried to solve this problem of transparency by making the
actor and the character as similar as possible. Lee Strasberg’s highly influential version
of the American Method Acting movement encourages actors to draw primarily from
personal experiences, lest the performance seem false or uninformed. This pressure to
become the character through memories and recalled emotions, rather than through
imagination per se, prompts some actors to undergo complex rituals of research and
physical transformation to deeply understand their role. The tactics and ramifications of
this immersive work, undertaken by celebrated actors like Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino,
and Daniel Day Lewis, exemplify the dangerous creativity of becoming transparent.
Bio
Dan Leberg is a PhD student in Film Studies at the University of Amsterdam. After 25
years of work as a professional stage and screen actor, Dan’s current dissertation project
is a neurophenomenological theorization of screen acting. He has published on Stanley
Kubrick, science fiction and fandom; racial performance in music videos; and
Shakespeare on film. Dan is also the Programming Coordinator for Cinema Politica, a
year-round activist documentary festival based in Montreal, Canada.
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Sara Janssen
From Maximum Visibility to Haptic Erotics
“We all know what sex looks like. Many movies have tried to capture the magic, but
most can only bring home the tricks”. This blurb from the feminist porn film
Skin.Like.Sun (2010), illustrates a much-heard critique on the representation of sex in
mainstream pornography, namely that porn focuses primarily on exposing the mechanics
of the sexual act. However, over the last few years, a corpus of alternative pornography
has been released, which instead emphasizes the tactile and visceral experience of the
sexual encounter. Highly diverse in both style and content, these pornographies share a
desire to explore different ways of visualizing sexuality, problematizing the demand for
“maximum visibility” (Williams, 1989) that defines mainstream commercial pornography,
and blurring the boundaries between pornography and activism, pornography and
erotica, and pornography and art. This paper addresses how these pornographies make
use of a playful and creative oscillation between visibility and invisibility, transparency
and opacity, and proximity and distance, disturbing the habitual “ocularcentrism” (Jay
1988) of film in favour of a more embodied account of cinema experimenting with the
affective qualities of film, and creating a “haptic erotics” (Marks, 2002). Rather, these
films appropriate opacity as a particular feminist strategy to trouble the connection
between pornography, visibility, and the production of truth and allow for an alternative
pleasure of looking; one that does not rely on a voyeuristic and controlling gaze, but
rather establishes an intersubjective relationship between the image and the spectator.
Bio
Sara Janssen is a doctoral candidate in Film Studies at the University of Kent. She
received her MA in Cultural Studies at the Radboud University Nijmegen, specializing in
gender and sexuality studies. Before coming to the University of Kent, Sara was a part of
Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies when she followed a one-year PhD
training programme at the University of Utrecht. Her research interests include visual
culture, feminist and queer theory, sexuality studies, film philosophy, aesthetics, and
critical theories of embodiment. Her current PhD research investigates contemporary
alternative pornography as a form of cultural activism, focusing specifically on the
cinematic aesthetics.
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Anna Maria Pinaka
Unthinkable dirtiness, non-sovereign subjectivities, and jumps into the ‘impossible’
Through this paper I address the usage of ‘dirty’ sexual subjectivities in art and image
making and as in contrast to and in dialogue with the ‘clarity’ of comprehension,
articulation, understanding, perceiving and theorizing.
I argue that artists such as Leigh Ledare, Joanna Rytel, Prefix-poly and myself use
positions of ‘negativity’ and employ rhetorics and visual vocabularies of confessionality
and autobiography to self-objectify into roles as both artists (e.g. assuming positions
such as the white male pornographer-exploiter) and as sexual subjects (e.g. ‘perverted’
or hyper-sexual and narcissistic objects of desire). Thus, they submit themselves in
sexually and politically ‘dirty’ subjectivities in order to expose how these are already a
matter of discourse. I consider the agency of negativity as that which destabilizes
subjectivity/identity and manifests as ‘nonsovereignity’, the state of subjectivity where
one is not able to explain one’s self to one’s self. In these terms, my research-paper,
where I employ they very art methodologies that I examine, is an investigation into the
unknowable/unthinkable – meaning both that which cannot be thought and that which is
unthinkable as too ‘dirty’, ‘wrong’ or ‘improper.’ I use the notion of affect so as to
submit myself as a writer to nonsovereignity: I resist relating and using it through clarity
and comprehension. I instead use it by considering it as a notion-object that cannot be
tamed through thinking, as something too ‘wild’, broad, mysterious and messy (whilst it
has in itself to do with wildness, broadness, mystery and messiness). Idealizing it as such
I underline my own ‘lack’ regarding comprehension and use my ‘lacking’ position as a
starting point. I argue that using theory that I don’t engage with through coherence, i.e.
that I don’t fully understand, is a manner of claiming ‘dirtiness’: starting from the
seemingly hopeless position of non-understanding but defiantly doing so. Thus the
process of writing this document reflects the strategy used in the artworks I discuss:
jumping into the ‘impossible’, ‘unknowable’, ‘unthinkable’, ‘wrong’ and ‘dirty’ and so
negotiating those as such.
Bio
AnnaMaria Pinaka is a visual artist - her work is in lens-based media (photography and
video) and performance, informed by the intimacies of private life, the domestic real,
traditions of diarism and low-techness. She is pursuing her practice-as-research PhD
studies in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Roehampton University. A
particular focus of her work, as an artist and a researcher, is sexualised imagery –
including reappropriations of pornographic representation – to explore ways in which
close human relationships are lived and experienced, in the ordinariness of social and
familial connection, or the ecstasies of the everyday. Her current projects involve
collaborations on explorations of female masculinity and drag and the association
between images, sex and romance through the documentation of a relationships
grounded in art-making and the application of a process which she calls ‘pornographing.’
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Panel 17: Tracking Subjects
Iona Sharp
Finance and Sensory Addition: Feeling the System and Perceiving the Stock Market
Visualizing the capitalist economic system has been a problematic question many artists
and writers have been concerned with in the recent decade. It is as if the inability of
recognizing the body and borders of the capitalist structure we are ingrained in had led
to a naturalization of this invisible and inarticulate system. What would happen,
however, if we were to move away from trying to see the economy, and were given the
tools to sense and feel the fluctuations of the economic system?
Neuroscientist David Eagleman has created an object named “Sensory Substitution
Vest”, a piece of clothing that allows the hearing impaired to feel words instead of
hearing them. This project has also experimented with sensory addition, creating a new
sensorial experience based on the fluctuations of the stock market. By feeding the vest
real-time stock data, and challenging the subject to take decisions connected with the
impulses received (thus unconsciously trading with these stocks), David Eagleman
believes the subject wearing the vest could learn to have a sensorial experience built on
the economic movements of the market. To explore this object further and illustrate
some of the effects it might have on our patterns of embodiment, I propose analysing it
from the perspective of (critical) disability studies. In doing so I recognize how
Eagleman’s Vest not only becomes a perfect product of its ‘Silicon Valley’ setting, but
also how it blurs and shifts classic perceptions of what constitutes able and disabled
bodies. I end by questioning the differences between usual, visual trading, and this new
form of embodied trading; interpreting how the body can experience the invisible realm
of the economy, and hopefully stimulating further discussion points and questions that
can be explored in the future.
Bio
I am Iona Sharp, a current second year student of the research MA in Cultural Analysis at
the UvA. My research interests mainly involve different ways of visualizing and
understanding the capitalist economic system. I am currently starting to give shape to
my MA thesis, which will probably focus on exploring the possibilities of visualizing the
system as a monster (an inorganic, alien-like, inhuman thing) through popular culture
(specifically, in Mary Harron’s movie “American Psycho”). My background is in English
language and culture, with particular interests in English literature and cultural studies.
As for the clusters of discussion in this year’s ASCA workshop, I would like to be placed
under the “transparency / (in) visibility” one.
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Marjolein Lanzing
The Transparent Self
Self-tracking is often referred to in terms of ‘quantification of the self’: a means to
grasp insights about your self based on data, generated by quantifying aspects of your
self with the assistance of various (wearable) digital devices and applications that
measure your everyday practices and activities. The data is consequently recorded,
stored, monitored, shared and interpreted by the user. Self-tracking -by making the self
transparent through numbers- is promoted and used as a means to self-knowledge, selfimprovement and self-control.
This paper sets out to raise various philosophical questions with regard to new
technological developments in the field of self-tracking. It does so by examining the
practice of self-tracking from a normative perspective. In particular, it focuses on the
conceptual tension between the assumption underlying the practice of self-tracking that
disclosing personal information increases one’s autonomy on the one hand, and the
conviction that one needs informational privacy in order to live an autonomous life. I
will argue that while self-tracking may sometimes prove an adequate method to shed
light on particular aspects of oneself and consequently to provide information that can
be used to strengthen one’s autonomy, self-tracking technologies often cancel out these
benefits by exposing too much about oneself to an unspecified audience, destroying the
informational privacy boundaries that are necessary for living an autonomous life.
First, I will describe the cultural phenomenon of self-tracking, including its practices and
promises. Secondly, I will describe how the culture of self-tracking fosters
decontextualization of information flows: how data produced by self-tracking
transgresses the boundaries of its usual contexts. By discussing the design of selftracking devices and the discourse employed by enterprises manufacturing self-tracking
devices and the self-tracking community, I will argue that the culture of self-tracking
encourages disclosure of personal data to unspecified audiences. Subsequently, I will
argue why this is problematic from the perspective of privacy. I will explain how
informational privacy boundaries enable us to live autonomous lives. Finally, I will
present a normative stance towards the practice of self-tracking by evaluating its
presupposed value for empowerment.
Bio
Marjolein Lanzing is a PhD candidate at the 3TU Centre for Ethics and Technology and
works at the department of Philosophy and Ethics at the multidisciplinary faculty of
Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences at Eindhoven University of Technology.
Her supervisors are prof. A. Meijers, Dr. P. Nickel (TU/e) and prof. B. Roessler (UvA).
Her interdisciplinary project ‘The Transparent Self: Identity and Relationships in a
Digital Age’ will contain a normative interpretation of the changing norms of privacy
under the perspective of the changing meaning of the Self in a digital age. Her research
entails an analysis of changing privacy norms ensuing from new ICTs and what this
entails for the meaningfulness of self-relations and social relationships.
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Marjolein completed a BA in Philosophy, a master in Conflict Resolution and Governance
and a research master in Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam.
Her RMa thesis Changing Norms of Friendship evaluated Facebook-friendships in light
of classic and contemporary notions of friendship and changing norms of privacy in the
online realm.
Marjolein is editorial assistant of Philosophical Explorations, a peer reviewed philosophy
journal, specializing in the philosophy of mind and action and chair of the OZSW PhDcouncil.
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Evelyn Wan
Beyond human perception and cognition: Minority Report, Predictive Policing and the
Ideology of Data
In the age of the Internet of Things, digital objects are able to communicate with each
other through network infrastructure, share data, carry out functions, and bypass human
consciousness and decision-making. This places the centrality of human agency in
question, as they leave humans out of their operational loop. Learning abilities
programmed into algorithms also turn them gradually into opaque entities, making it
harder for humans to maintain control over what the algorithm churns out as a decision
based on the huge data-sets they analyse, pattern, and adopt. Mark Hansen’s recent
monograph Feed Forward (2015) makes use of Alfred North Whitehead’s process
philosophy to discuss the limitations of human perception and cognition in the digital
age. Machine-to-machine relations are part of the ‘speculative’ domain where humans
have no access to, and human consciousness is no match for the vastness and fastness of
the bits and bytes happening with such algorithms.
This paper looks in particular into the case of predictive policing where US
law enforcement attempts to prevent crime by using historical crime data. What
Minority Report (2002) has imagined before is now in full-fledged development—datamining takes the place of ‘precogs’ and psychics to forecast when and where crimes are
likely to emerge, and advise officers to increase patrols in the area. In essence, these
data-sets and algorithms strongly influence police operation. The crime rate data itself
may also already carry embedded biases and certain ideologies such as targeting
coloured individuals and those who are ‘Other’ in the communities. With this in mind, I
explore the methodological questions raised by the operations of such data-driven
programmes as human agency is undermined, and analyse the implications of adopting
such technologies.
Bio
Evelyn Wan is a PhD Candidate at Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON) at Utrecht
University under the full support of the R. C. Lee Centenary Scholarship from her
hometown, Hong Kong. She holds a research MA in Media & Performance Studies and an
MA in Comparative Women's Studies in Culture and Politics from Utrecht University. Her
research focuses on philosophies of experience, new materialism, and affect theory.
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FILM SCREENING AT LIMA
The interplay between the transparent and the opaque areas on a film strip made
possible the eerie magic touch of early cinema: as light traveled through the celluloid
and onto the screen, a train started moving in time, penetrating the invisible space
between the image and its viewer. With the ongoing development and rise of new
technologies, transparency loses its material dimension and becomes more an issue of
the increasingly invisible medium as such, creating new and distinct forms of potential
deception. The surface of the so-called ‘silver’ screen can still be a mirror – but, then,
what kind of reflections can we see? This program brings together a selection of short
videos and/ video documentation from the LIMA collection, in which the ‘transparent’
medium itself or the human subject ‘behind’ its operation explicitly opts for selfreflection, thus becoming apparent in the dark.
Organized by Moosje M. Goosen & Geli Mademli in collaboration with LIMA. Special
thanks to Sanneke Huisman and Gaby Wijers, who made this screening possible.
About LIMA
Founded by experts from the former NIMk (Dutch Institute for Media Art), LIMA is the
international platform for sustainable access to media art. With knowledge and passion
for both art and technology, LIMA insures that video, digital and performance artworks
can and will be presented now and in the future. Through (online) distribution of our
own collection, we keep abreast of technical issues and advances. With our storage and
digitisation services we are additionally able to provide support to museums, galleries
and individual artists. In collaboration with artists, museums and universities LIMA
carries out research in preservation and accessibility of this segment of our cultural
heritage.
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ABOUT THE ORGANISERS
The organizers of this year’s workshop are PhD candidates at the ASCA. Their project
titles are below.
Alejandra Espinosa
PhD candidate at ASCA Amsterdam. Her research project “Ürban Planning and Cultural
Identity in Ecuador” describes political and cultural struggles behind governmental
constructions and its influence in Ecuadorian cultural identity formation.
[email protected]. More information about her project and bio:
http://www.cities.humanities.uva.nl/projects/planning-public/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alejaespinosa
Moosje M. Goosen
Moosje M. Goosen is a PhD candidate at ASCA Amsterdam. Her project is titled ‘Missing
Limbs’ and analyzes virtual images and representations of phantom limbs as described in
fiction and (medical) literature. Moosje is also a writer and critic and has written for
various art periodicals, such as Frieze and Metropolis M. She also contributed essays to
exhibitions and exhibition catalogues. [email protected]
Geli Mademli is a Ph.D. candidate at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis at the
University of Amsterdam, as a scholar of the Greek State Scholarships Foundation,
working in the intersection of media studies, archival studies and film museology. For
the last few years, she has been working for the Thessaloniki Int’l Film Festival as a
program assistant, catalogue coordinator and editor of its annual publications, and she is
as a freelance journalist, specializing in film and media. She is a member of the editorial
board of the Journal of Greek Film Studies FilmIcon.
Irene Villaescusa Illán
Hispano Filipino Literature in a Global Context: (Post)Colonialism, Modernity
and Spectrality
Summary here: http://jeroendekloet.nl/teaching/phd/
[email protected]
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The organizing committee, Alejandra Espinosa, Moosje Goosen, Geli Mademli and Irene
Villaescusa Illán
We would like to thank Eloe Kingma and Jantine van Gogh for administrative support,
encouragements, organizational guidance and assistance.
Additional thanks to all the panel discussants for their time and effort.
We thank Kristiaan der Nederlanden for the design of the conference logo and Sanneke
Huisman and Gaby Wijers for accepting our proposal to work together in their space,
LiMa.
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