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 ...

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 ...

Air Raid Precautions, Handbook No.11 1939/2014   The majority of errors in the field of aesthetics spring from the eighteenth century’s false premise in the field of ethics. – Charles Baudelaire Camouflage of Large Installations 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 colour swatches are particularly beautiful and when viewed aesthetically are interesting forerunners to the history of monochromes, specifically Yves Klein’s ...

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 ...

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 ...

Photomediations: A Reader offers a radically different way of understanding photography. The concept of photomediations that unites the twenty scholarly and curatorial essays collected here cuts across the traditional classification of photography as suspended between art and social practice in order to capture the dynamism of the photographic medium today. It also explores photography’s kinship with other media – and with us, humans, as media. The term ‘photomediations’ brings together the hybrid ontology of ‘photomedia’ and the fluid dynamism of ‘mediation’. The framework of photomediations adopts a process- and time-based approach to images by tracing the technological, biological, cultural, social and political ...

Realeyes is a commercial platform that performs real-time measurement of emotional responses to video stimuli through facial recognition AI modeling. Using (with consent, for now) the intake of webcam feeds, the platform records and analyzes the shape of facial responses while a subject watches a video, telling advertisers and marketers how to more effectively reach a consumer’s core sense of decision-making. Founded at Oxford University in 2007, Realeyes shares some traits with the now-famous Cambridge Analytica company, deriving actionable and expensive) data from the aggregated emotional reactions of thousands of users. This stunningly benign-seeming white paper lays out the psychological ...

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Chekhov’s Gun at 062 Gallery. An industrial revolution is a product test that everyone participates in. One’s participation is induced by the diffusion of new technologies, the depth of their adoption and their aggregate influence.1 In a promotional video, the World Economic Forum heralds the fourth industrial revolution as “blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.”2 A visit to Davos truly is not complete without an experience of these new forms of time compression. Try out the seventy-five minute refugee simulation sponsored by Facebook.3 Tell us about your experience having your ...