Episode Two explores the benefits and disadvantages of going unseen by surveillance technologies. We examine notions of visibility and invisibility in the context of AI imaging systems with author and professor Simone Browne, artist Sondra Perry, and artist and academic Mimi Onuoha.

As the physical world degrades and so corrodes the credibility of institutions that enable consumption, the status quo in the global north goes virtual. Within a short time, we’ve witnessed a rapidly increasing capacity to design, simulate and conjure a virtual perception of reality with exactitude and definition. Our ability to simulate reality has come to match our ability to record it. We’re able to simulate and produce a photographic image of an object without any need for the object itself. The same goes for retouched images and the act of retouching. As a result, images no longer need to ...

A unique blend of travelogue, photographs and poetry, A Stranger’s Pose draws the reader into a world of encounters haunted by the absence of home, estrangement from a lover and family tragedies. The author’s recollections and reflections of fragments of his journeys to African cities, from Dakar to Douala, Bamako to Benin, and Khartoum to Casablanca, offer a compelling and very personal meditation on the meaning of home and the generosity of strangers to a lone traveler. Inspired by the author’s own travels with photographers between 2011 and 2015, the Iduma’s own accounts are expanded to include other narratives about ...

Glitches are hot. It is clear from what we can see on MTV, Flickr, in the club or the bookstore. While the “Glitch: designing imperfection” coffee table book introduces the glitch design aesthetic to the world of latte drinking designers, and Kanye West uses glitches to sing about his imperfect love life, the awkward, shy and physically ugly celebrate under the header “Glitched: Nerdcore for life”. Glitch has become hot. A brightly colored bubblegum wrapper that doesn’t ask for much involvement, or offers any stimulus. Inside I find gum that I keep chewing – hoping for some new explosion of ...

In The Age of Total Images, art historian Ana Peraica focuses on the belief that the shape of the planet is two-dimensional which has been reawakened in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and the ways in which these ‘flat Earth’ conspiracy theories are symptomatic of post-digital image culture. Such theories, proven to be false both in Antiquity and Modernity, but once held to be true in the Medieval Period, have influenced a return to a kind of ‘New Medievalism’. By tracing visual representations of the planet across Western history and culture, Peraica provides support for a media-based explanation behind ...

“The tension implicit in any photograph is the tension between an inert, black-and-white, two-dimensional object, and an event that actually existed in the phenomenal world. A successful photograph mediates, though never completely resolves that tension.” In 1972, as his career was beginning to take off, Lewis Baltz conducted a revealing interview, his first considered statement about photography. Never published, the interview has recently resurfaced, and is printed here for the first time. In an increasingly sardonic exchange Baltz describes the character of his practice, articulates his position within and against the world of photography, and comments on his intellectual heritage and ...

Roberto Boettger reframes what is being conserved at Tijuca National Park and denaturalizes the project of conservation behind UNESCO’s first “urban cultural landscape”; Ella Comberg seeks views of the street beyond what Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture, and Google, ask us to see; Alexyss McClellan-Ufugusuku extends the recent COVID-19 outbreak at Marine Corps Air Station Futenma to legacies of dual colonization and militarization in Okinawa; Karamia Müller revisits her architectural education alongside the imperial conception of land that came with it; and Malcom Rio and Aaron Tobey examine the design of injustice in the case of the courthouse.

Lori A. Brown parses legalese to uncover how the state wields spatial barriers to abortion access in Garza v. Hargan; Elisavet Hasa traces the “archive of resistance” assembled by solidarity heath care initiatives in Athens; David Hurtado unpeels Okinawa’s imperial layers through the photographs of Mao Ishikawa; and Isabelle A. Tan reflects on various encounters with the Belt and Road Initiative in Jakarta’s past, present, and future.

This conversation with Caren Kaplan introduces the work she has been conducting for her forthcoming book dedicated to a genealogy of aerial photography (and painting) and its militarization leading to the ‘age of the drone’ we currently experience. We begin with the development of the balloon, the progressive learning necessary to understand this new point of view on the world and the simultaneous success of panorama paintings. We then evoke the creation of the British Board of Ordinance and its survey of Scotland as part of the counter-insurrectionist effort to control the terrain against the Jacobites. We conclude the discussion in ...

The older paradigm for photojournalists was to simply record events, with the hope—and frequently the expectation—that people and their governments would be moved to respond to the injustices pictured, as witnessed by the impact of certain images during the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War. Given evolving media and political climates, however, including the billions of images now available online from all kinds of sources, the purpose and effectiveness of media, in particular of visual journalism, has been called into question. Bending the Frame, by author and critic Fred Ritchin, addresses the new and emerging potentials for visual media ...

New technological media such as film, photography and computers have altered the way we perceive possible relations between stillness and motion in the visual arts. Traditionally, cinema theory saw cinema and especially the ‘illusion of motion’ as part of the ideological swindle of the basic cinematic apparatus. This collection of essays by acclaimed international scholars including Tom Gunning, Thomas Elsaesser, Mark B.N. Hansen, George Baker, Ina Blom and Christa Blümlinger, starts out from a different premise to analyse stillness and motion as part of a larger ecology of images and media. They argue that the strategic uses of stillness and ...