Visual culture is increasingly comprised of images made by and for nonhuman actors. Surveillance technologies, facial recognition algorithms, satellites, and drones exceed human capacities and grow ever more autonomous. Machines spend vastly more time looking at images than humans do. These conditions introduce new tools and contexts for artists working with digital media. How do nonhuman ways of seeing, thinking, and generating images collide with legacies of painting and photography that centered the human as master of their environment? How has visual culture contributed to ways we define our species, and how can art reframe them? What do new technologies imply for understanding more-than-human agency? This hybrid studio/seminar course examines these questions through discussions of cultural theory and the works of artists, staking them in larger politics of how “the human” has been historically produced and its role in social and ecological issues. Students will learn to critically engage the concepts we explore using digital tools in their own studio work.
- Teacher: Adrienne Reid