Symposium Abstracts - Cartographies of the Image in the 21st Century

The Future of Future Images
Jean-Luc Nancy

In a series of writings on the image, the world-renowned French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has described the unsettling forces unleashed by the images that confront us, the limits that bind us to them, the death that stares back at us from their frozen traits and distant intimacies, and the violence and ambivalence so often at their heart. In a world increasingly saturated with images, can we any longer say that we know what an image is? Can we imagine the future of images, and even the future of future images?

“Hale County, This Morning, This Evening”
Directed by RaMell Ross
Conversation with RaMell Ross and Liana Theodoratou

RaMell Ross’s stunning directorial debut, “Hale County This Morning, This Evening”, has garnered critical acclaim and a host of accolades, including an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature. An impressionistic and avant-garde film set in Hale County, Alabama, it examines the quotidian and intimate moments of its African American protagonists and the community in which they live. A lyrical documentary in which dramas are embedded, elicited, extrapolated, and in which tone and mood—and the visual and sonic moments and associations that they conjure—are inseparable from the observation and evocation of character and personal experience, the film presents an emotive impression of the historic South. Interweaving images that replace narrative arc with visual movements, Ross crafts an inspired tapestry made up of time, history, environmental wonder, sociology, and cosmic phenomena, producing a new aesthetic framework that offers a new way of seeing and experiencing the lives of p​eople in the Black Belt region of the U.S. as well far beyond. The film asks whether we can live a life sustained by the benefits of technology without sacrificing the knowledge, experience, and heritage of a life lived in relation to particular histories.

Forensic Architecture and “The Pavlos Fyssas Case”
Eyal Weizman and Christina Varvia

Conflicts around the globe have increasingly become complex data and media environments and it is therefore necessary to develop analytic techniques and strategies that can match this complexity. Director of the Forensic Architecture Agency, Eyal Weizman, will discuss the ways in which image fields—produced by digital recording equipment, satellite communications, remote sensing technologies, and social media platforms—can be used to analyze violations of human rights and international humanitarian law. He will explain how the creation of animations and interactive cartographies not only helps us model events as they unfold in space and time but also helps us invent new techniques of media research and new ways of presenting investigations of violence in urban and architectural environments. Deputy Director of Forensic Architecture, Christina Varvia, will discuss the agency’s efforts to reconstruct the events leading to the murder of Pavlos Fyssas from audio and video material. The resulting video investigation and the accompanying report, presented in court September 2018, joins CCTV footage, recordings of communications between police and emergency services, and witness testimony, and points to the role images can play within forensic and criminal investigations.

The Climates of Images
Tom Cohen and Yates McKee

This panel will explore the relations among the technical media (especially cinema, photography, painting, and artificial intelligence) and questions about climate change and what has been called the “Anthropocene.” Focusing on materials ranging from films by Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Hitchcock, to photographs by Robert Capa and Sebastio Salgado, to paintings by Andy Warhol, it will trace the figures of disaster, death, and extinction that circulate in relation to both the world of images and the crises of our biosphere. If we are witnessing the twin accelerations passed so-called “tipping points” in the public imaginary, beyond reversibility—climate chaos and A.I.—we can also register the identifications between cinema and extinction, between images and the “Anthropocene,” between security measures and the displacement of populations. Can we think about the relation between what Hal Foster has called the “distressed image” and a world whose climates and atmospheres are increasingly distressed and even devastated?

The Sounds of Images
Raviv Ganchrow and Fred Moten

Can we speak about the sonic frequencies of images, about their phonographic content? Is looking always accompanied by listening, and does seeing always redouble itself as sound? Within the complex music of the image, improvisation is activated in a sound that holds information in the implicit graphics of its rhythm, in a spatial representation that is sound, a space whose aurality exceeds but does not oppose visual-spatial determination. Indeed, attempts to materialize sound vibrations, whether by conferring on them object–like qualities or transposing them into visual manifestations, have played an important role in the historic epistemology of sound. From Chladni’s figures to the “phonoautograph,” the visibility of acoustics has continually underlined the dimensional characteristics of sound. Raviv Ganchrow and Fred Moten will explore the aural energies of images, their “vibrant terrain” and their sonic topographies, by considering their circulation within the history of vibration-sensing technologies and in texts such as M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, in which the history of the middle passage is sounded, and space is (phono)graphed.

The Fury of Images
Joan Fontcuberta

Catalonian visual artist Joan Fontcuberta has recently explored what he calls “the fury of images,” the wild proliferation and circulation of images in all sorts of media and in nearly every dimension of our daily life. At the same time, his writings and his practice as a photographer suggest that this saturation of images obliges us to think about images that remain missing, images that have never existed, that have existed but have remained unavailable, that have been lost to our collective memory or been prohibited or censored. This is why, often taking his departure from already existing archives, he so often invents new ones with different kinds of computer software and algorithms. In this way, he encourages us to think about the new status of the photographic image in an age in which its mad itinerancy prevails over its content.

The Rights of Images
Tom Keenan and Sharon Sliwinski

It is difficult to imagine making claims for human rights without using images. For better or worse, images of protest, evidence and assertion are the lingua franca of struggles for justice today. And they seem to come in a flood, more and more, day and night. But through what channels does the torrent pass? This panel will examine the pathways through which these images and ideas circulate routes that do not merely enable, but actually shape human rights claims and their conceptual background. What are the technologies and languages that structure the global distribution of humanism and universalism, and how do they leave their mark on these ideas themselves? How have technologies of the image and the channels of communication transformed the very terms of human rights? If human rights discourse and activism increasingly rely on mediatic presentations of evidence, can we also think of the rights that images not only seek to produce but that they also have themselves? What gives images the right to exist, and how might this right be linked to human and nonhuman rights?

The Geography of Images
Zahid Chaudhary and Rosalind Morris

As elements of ever-expanding archives, images resist being fixed in a single location. While they travel around the globe and across different geographies, they are constantly transformed and further displaced whenever they are re-contextualized and reread. This is why we must learn how to trace the movement of images across all sorts of borders and how to regard them as simultaneously material artifacts, mediums of communication, and disembodied and itinerant networks of relations. Indeed, as cameras document, enable, or control human movement across geographical, cultural, and political divides, images themselves migrate with their makers, subjects, and viewers. Exploring image-making practices in India, Israel, Thailand, South Africa, and other countries around the world, Zahid Chaudhary and Rosalind Morris explore diasporic photographic practices that raise questions about the extent to which images bear the traces of specific geographical and historical contexts or the degree to which they are instead associated with a network of different locations. Can we talk about the geography of images or must we speak of an image’s several geographies? Do images remain linked to a specific location or is a certain decontextualization and abstraction always at work within them?

The Migration of Images
Bouchra Khalili and Susan Meiselas

Much of the work of Bouchra Khalili and Susan Meiselas has been devoted to issues of conflict, migration, displacement, and the movement of both p​eople and images. Because photographs and cinematic images speak and move across historical periods, national borders, and different media, it is perhaps not an accident that photography and film are among the privileged modes for representing the crises of migration and refugees, and this because every image is itself a kind of refugee. Every image turns what it presents into a kind of refugee—tearing it from its context and displacing it to another place and moment—and every image circulates in the world away from its “original” context. What makes an image an image is perhaps its capacity to wander, often far from the moment and place in which it was produced. This is why the mass circulation of images that characterizes our present moment requires that we develop a visual and linguistic lexicon for understanding their migratory character and the agency they might or might not have in relation to their movement and displacement. Taking its point of departure from Khalili and Meiselas’ work, this session will think about the ways in which the itinerancy of images helps us think about the migration and displacement of peoples, even as it can also hinder such thinking.