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 Anthropocene Issue is a special series of short videos shot during the “Anthropocene Curriculum,” campus held at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, from November 14 to 22, 2014. The program brought together more than a 100 people from various disciplines around a series of workshops, presentations, and talks. It included, among many others, specialists in climatology, geography, law, history of science and technology, architecture, and art to discuss the concept of the Anthropocene. This special series presents the week-long gathering with a set of close-ups, interviews, group discussions, and informal conversations with some of its participants, launched over two ...

These past few years, the fairly ancient concept we call “truth” has been bandied about the place quite a bit. Our social trust barometers, for a long time calibrated with “politician” on one side and “scientist” at the other, have been thrust into stormy weather. People like Donald Trump and Richard Dawkins have buried the needle into extremes of rhetorical squall, political uproar and techno-scientific demand, operationalising belief and fact in excessive ways — destructive of both self and others. The rest of us, muddling through this other ancient concept we call “modern life”, try and poise ourselves somewhere in ...

As an institutional practice, archival practices often tend to serve to colonization, surveillance and discipline society of the Modern world. In the last ten years, with the digital technology and social movement detecting, recording and accumulating images become a civil activity. Thus, archiving videos and other types of visual images brought also non-institutional practices and as well contemporary discussions related to image, open source, collectivity and forensics. Beside interviews with video activists; this book compiles several writers’ articles on their practices and discussions of archives from several angles: forensics, decolonization and commons.

A nuclear facility in Iran before and after an explosion, a village in Pakistan before and after a drone attack, a Cambodian river valley before and after a flood. The before-and-after image has become the tool of choice for analysing events. Satellite photography allows us to scrutinise the impact of war or climate change, from the safe distance of orbit. But one thing is rarely captured: the event itself. All we can read is its effect on a space, and that’s where the architectural expert is required, to fill the gap with a narrative. In this groundbreaking essay, Eyal and Ines ...

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 ...

Camouflage of Large Installations by Charles Stankievech is a rare World War II handbook created by the British Government as a guide for factory owners to implement the then new theories of camouflage in order to protect industrial assets. The handbook is composed of three sections: instructional, advertising by corporations supplying camouflage services and full-page colour swatches. The full-page color swatches are particularly beautiful and when viewed aesthetically are interesting forerunners to the history of monochromes, specifically Yves Klein’s first artwork Peintures (1954): a small portfolio booklet that presents a series of monochromes. Interestingly, Klein had never made these paintings and the ...

Drones – unmanned aerial vehicles – are becoming ubiquitous, yet remain almost invisible. This is a guide to drawing them.

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY BIRDWATCHING Our ancestors could spot natural predators from far by their silhouettes. Are we equally aware of the predators in the present-day? Drones are remote-controlled planes that can be used for anything from surveillance and deadly force, to rescue operations and scientific research. Most drones are used today by military powers for remote-controlled surveillance and attack, and their numbers are growing. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) predicted in 2012 that within 20 years there could be as many as 30.000 drones flying over U.S. soil alone. As robotic birds will become commonplace in the near future, we should be prepared to ...

The catalog “For Ever More Images?” gathers an interdisciplinary group of artists, thinkers, and activists to interrogate the all-seeing eyes and ever-multiplying black boxes that increasingly govern our lives. In the present moment, we use machines to capture almost everything we see; at the same time, we are constantly being photographed by machines without our consent or awareness. Our faces, emotions, habits, beliefs, and data are being collected, stored, and valued in massive and invisible ways, serving warfare, surveillance, global capital, and risk management systems whose aim is to predict the future and produce profit. Our world sometimes feels like ...

The central paradox this book explores is that at the moment of photography’s replacement by the algorithm and data flow, photographic cultures proliferate as never before. The afterlife of photography, residual as it may technically be, maintains a powerful cultural and representational hold on reality, which is important to understand in relationship to the new conditions. Forgetting photography is a strategy to reveal the redundant historicity of the photographic constellation and the cultural immobility of its epicenter. It attempts to liberate the image from these historic shackles, forged by art history and photographic theory. More important, perhaps, forgetting photography also entails ...

Throughout this conversation, we explore the multiple facets of Liam Young’s work for Tomorrow Thoughts Today (originally founded with Darryl Chen) and the Unknown Fields Division (with Kate Davies), his studio at the Architectural Association in London that took him to various expeditions around the world in order to document how our cities, in their infrastructure, extend far beyond their geographical limits and produce geological landscapes. As we discuss, the tentative does not consist in moralizing this production, but rather intervening within it as designers, often through (science) fiction that allows to problematize situations and to expand imaginaries. The last ...