Power and Vision: The Camera as Political Technology [2017-2018]

About

This interdisciplinary research group seeks to address the disconnect between popular and academic critique of the way contemporary political crisis is covered in mainstream media. We assert that there is a dearth of pragmatic, accessible discussions about how images work, rather than what they purportedly show. As fake news and multimedia increasingly suffuse the visual landscape, it is imperative to initiate an academic and public discussion about how what we see, and the way it is contextualised, underpins popular claims about how contemporary political power operates. We ask: can academics, artists, and visual practitioners help us all better understand how political issues are imagined and imaged? In order to achieve this aim, the group will organise a series of reading groups, seminars, film screenings, master classes, and practice-based events focused on dissecting the camera as a political technology of power.

THEMES

Easter Term 2018: 'Art' and 'Documentary' as Political Technologies               

We will conclude by questioning how the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics influence our interpretation of imagery. We will interrogate the perceived boundary between ‘art’ and ‘documentary’ imagery in multimedia representations of political crisis, as well as the claim that art can act as a form of ideological protest. The culminating event of this term will be a curated exhibition, hosted in collaboration with either CRASSH or Downing’s Heong Gallery, of topical politicised visual art, with visual practitioners, academics, and members of the public invited to contribute. This will constitute our one-day workshop event.

In addition to this culminating exhibition, one of the major outputs of this group’s work will be a learning resource for academics and industry professionals alike. We will conclude the year with a writing sprint where the core members of the group will collaboratively compile a guide to best practice for thinking critically about contemporary political imagery. The guide will be structured so as to offer insight to a general public and academic audience, including those who may not have been able to attend the series, in order to maximise the impact of the group’s proceedings.

Lent  Term 2018: Technologies of Seeing Others

We will focus on how images are used to make claims about difference, both across cultural divides and across the perceived boundary between the human and non-human. The conceptual lynchpin of this term’s events will be the technological production of alterity, and how images serve to both underscore and cast into doubt what might otherwise be interpreted as clear-cut boundaries of cultural, political, and racial difference.

Michaelmas Term 2017: The Technological History of Visualising Politics

The events of this term will focus on how devices of imaging political crisis have given rise to popular interpretations of conflict. We will explore the technological history of the camera, from the genesis of mainstream photojournalism and film in the 19th century to the contemporary widespread usage of drone imaging. There will also be space to discuss how the aesthetics of data, and visualisation of facts, has historically emerged from assumptions about the objective powers of observational technologies.

 

Administrative assistance: gradfac@crassh.cam.ac.uk