We are slowly starting to reveal a bit more information about the events planned for this spring by us and our collaborating partners. Not necessarily in a chronological order, but why not challenge the linearity of time?

Thus, we would like to warmly welcome you all to join us for “Machinic landscapes: Art practices at the intersection of machinic logic and natural forms“, a hybrid seminar with Dr Lila Lee-Morrison (Lund University). The event is hosted by Tema Culture and Society (IKOS) in collaboration with The Eco- and Bioart Lab and The DATA LAB, Linköping University.

The seminar takes place on 15th April 2024 at 13:15-15:00 CEST in the room Tvärsnittet, Kopparhammaren, Campus Norrköping and on Zoom.

The Zoom room link is: https://liu-se.zoom.us/j/69856604991

The event is included in The Eco- and Bioart Lab spring series LITHIC ECOLOGIES.

“Machinic landscapes: Art practices at the intersection of machinic logic and natural forms“

Abstract:

This talk sketches an aesthetics of the Anthropocene by analyzing artistic engagements with advanced tools of visual calculation used in the context of the environment. It explores what I term, machinic landscapes which are landscape works made by contemporary artists that involve a confrontation between two mediums, that of the logic and the representational mechanisms of machine vision technology and that of the infinite representational forms and processes found in nature and the environment and the multiple layers of representation that emerge and further generate through it. The merging of two theoretical directions of  the “machinic” and  “landscape” are operationalized in this analysis to counter binaries between nature and technology and foregrounds ways in which environmental forms are integrated into the functioning of a technical, aesthetic gesture by machine. I focus on the work of contemporary artists Mishka Henner, Daniel Lefcourt, and Davide Quayola, each of whom works with various digital visualizing programs often utilized in the fields of landscape architecture and in the geosciences such as heightmapping, LiDAR, 3D scanning, and satellite imaging systems and recontextualize their aesthetic output. These artists experiment with the parameters of these technologies and address some of the aesthetic challenges of the Anthropocene—specifically, issues of latency, entanglement, and scale. Drawing on landscape theory and philosophy of technology to frame this study, this talk revisits the art historical genre of landscape as a vehicle to explore contemporary aesthetic and political dimensions of our relationship to and within the environment.

Bio

Dr Lila Lee-Morrison is a writer, scholar and art historian. Her research interests focus on the visual culture of machine vision, intersections of art and technology and socio-political agencies of the image. She has written about the visual politics of drone warfare systems, representations of the body through biometric technologies, media representations of the immigration crisis, ethics of the image and on contemporary art practices as sources of theoretical engagement. She graduated a PhD from Lund University in Sweden in Art History and Visual Culture studies with a published dissertation titled, Portraits of Automated Facial Recognition: On Machinic Ways of Seeing the Face (Transcript Verlag, 2019) that was recognized as providing a novel perspective at the intersection of visual culture studies, philosophy, computer sciences and art history. She has been invited to give public talks internationally on subjects ranging from the intersection of art and AI and the instrumentality of contemporary art production in relation to technology. She has written for Artforum, Theory, Culture and Society and been published by MIT Press, Liverpool University Press and Brill Publishing. She recently co-edited two special theme issues with Media+Environment (2023) and the Journal of Media Art Study and Theory (2022). She presently holds a position as a postdoctoral fellow at Lund University in the Dept of Sociology under the ERC funded project, “Show and Tell: Scientific representation, algorithmically generated visualizations, and evidence across epistemic cultures.”

Image included in the poster: Mishka Henner, Levelland Oil Field, Hockley County, Texas, 2013. Archival pigment print, 270x400cm. Courtesy of the artist.