Digital / Moving Image and Networked Performance: on Cultural Transformations

Full Programme Digital / Moving Image
What are the images of today, and what do they do? They are operational (Farocki), as they become the computational foundation of military operations in computer vision software. They are navigational, as they emerge as part of the experience of location and movement in specific environments (Pink, Uricchio, Verhoeff). Images are no longer simply images, as the photographic merges into the cartographic, allowing for the development of enactive, navigational and operational images (Hoelzl, Marie) that can no longer be positioned firmly on any point of the continuum between satellite image/digital camera snap/Google StreetView/map/3D model/moving image/cellphone video/news footage/animated gif.

Moreover, computational images and videos are part of apparatuses (Flusser) that include political, social and economic assemblages of various kinds of power. The cognitive capitalist appropriation of user-generated content goes hand in hand with the emancipatory tendencies in the networked use and spread of images in hacktivism and political protests. The Occupy movement manifests online with the production and spread of the ‘pepperspray cop’ meme, while the Anonymous hacker group grew out of an image board that is responsible for the genre of Lolcats. The emergence of subjectivities, individual and collective, takes place through aesthetic work online, where the performance of self finds a suitable, albeit a very novel kind of, theatre. Whether a radical ‘ontological theatre’ (Pickering) or the performative use of network and image machines for normalising purposes, such theatrical arrangements allow for the enactment of new conceptual personae and public events of significant political, social and aesthetic concerns. Curatorship finds itself compelled to deal with this mass creativity, reaching out for new curating concepts and software tools (such as Curatingyoutube, the NoTube Contest, and Network Awesome amongst others), each engaging with questions of value and authenticity, memory and archive, adaptation, copyright, scale and distribution.

What happens to TV when it moves online? As the national and institutional boundaries of television appear to be in a process of rapid erosion, internet-borne moving images become more global and more local at the same time. National and corporate networks develop stringently controlled online platforms for distribution, while DIY art groups develop lofi venues for curating new art through the archaic form of the live TV entertainment show.

The summer school will address, but not be limited to, a few specific threads:

– mass creativity, curatorship and new organizational forms;

– authenticity, authorship, value and image;

– performance on social networking sites as subjective and collective forms of becoming;

– the living forms of new aesthetic genres;

– cognitive capitalist industries and amateur creativity;

– political digital modes of cultural behaviour;

– the algorithmic turn;

– creative coding;

– ‘amateur’, ‘prosumer’ and ‘indie’ production practices (including the ‘DSLR revolution’);

– remixes, mashups and fanvids;

– video game engines and filmmaking

– the ontology of digital video

– online exhibition and digital curating