Visions: A forum on the contemporary art, science and politics of seeing
15–17 August 2024
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
“Visions” proposes a new way of looking at looking. Over the course of three days, this public forum will bring together a group of experts to share their thoughts on the art, science and politics of vision. How do scientists and engineers understand vision today? What is its history? And what utopian or dystopian visual futures lie ahead?
This forum is co-presented by the Power Institute, Foundation for Art and Visual Culture at the University of Sydney, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.
TICKETS
Day tickets are now sold out. However, some $10 tickets will be available to individual sessions each day on the door.
Speakers
DAY 1
THURSDAY, 15 AUGUST 2024
10:20am–10:30am
WELCOME TO COUNTRY
Michael West (Traditional Custodian, Metropolitan Land Council)
10:30am–11:00am
INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS VISION?
Mark Ledbury (Director, Power Institute) and Suzanne Cotter (Director, MCA Australia)
11:00am–12:30pm
SESSION 1: ART, SCIENCE AND VISION
Anina Rich, Trevor Paglen, Mark Ledbury (moderator)
This panel will explore the ways vision works, using insights from scientists active in exploring issues such as perception, attention and colour – and how insights from science and art intersect. The panel will hear from experts on colour and perception, but also from artistic engagements with surveillance and the conditions of seeing.
2:00pm–3:30pm
SESSION 2: SEEING RHETORICS AND VISUALISING IDEAS
Ben Grosser, Kylie Boltin, Nick Evershed, Marni Williams (moderator)
What does it mean to ‘see’ a virus spreading? What would social media look like without metrics? This panel stares back at our screens and explores the new ways artistic practices, interface design and multimodal forms of communication are helping different publics to understand complex ideas.
4:30pm–6:00pm
VISION STATEMENT: HUEY COPELAND
"ALL THE THINGS ART HISTORY COULD BE BY NOW IF BLACKNESS WERE ITS MOTHER: REFLECTIONS ON VISION AND VALUE"
In this lecture drawn from his new book project, African-American art historian Huey Copeland considers how disciplinary structures differently value and tend towards the racialized historicity of the aesthetic, above all to those blackened beings whose everywhere present yet suppressed exertions continue to provide the preconditions for the emergence of the visual, the modern world, and the work of artists on the engendering of both.
DAY 2
FRIDAY, 16 AUGUST 2024
10:30am–12:00pm
SESSION 3: VISUAL SUBJECTS
Erin Vink, Huey Copeland, J. Joon Lee, Katerina Teaiwa, Stephen Gilchrist, Nick Croggon (moderator)
This panel considers vision as a mode of power. How does vision shape subjectivity and the social world today? What alternative or disruptive visual practices are possible?
2:00pm–3:30pm
SESSION 4: SEEING THROUGH OCEANS: NAVIGATING A NETWORK OF TORRES STRAIT ISLANDER IDENTITIES
Aaliyah-Jade Bradbury, Christopher Bassi, Peggy Kasabad Lane, Rebecca Ray (moderator)
What are the ways of seeing particular to the Indigenous people of the Torres Strait Islands? It is a way of seeing that is conditioned by the islands, sky, winds and sea, and a way of knowing that has performed important interventions in Australia’s political histories – such as the landmark 1992 Mabo decision. It is also a diasporic way of seeing: a network of relations that stretches across the Australian mainland continent, connecting Torres Strait Islander people both to each other and to home and, in turn, forms a unique sense of belonging and cultural identity.
4:30pm–6:00pm
VISION STATEMENT: TREVOR PAGLEN
“YOU’VE JUST BEEN F****D BY PSYOPS: HOW MIND CONTROL, UFOS, MAGIC, AND ELECTRONIC WARFARE EXPLAIN THE FUTURE OF AI AND MEDIA”
With AI-generated content, social media influence operations, micro-targeted advertising, and ubiquitous surveillance becoming the norm, we have entered an era of PSYOP capitalism. This era is characterized by fabricated hallucinations and manipulations intended to influence our senses, perceptions, and beliefs. This talk delves into the history of secret military, intelligence, and technology programs that have paved the way for our increasingly strange present.
DAY 3
SATURDAY, 17 AUGUST 2024
10:30am–12:00pm
SESSION 5: PICTURING WORLD FUTURES
Dennis del Favero, Jennifer Deger, Katrina Sluis, Terry Smith (moderator)
World picturing is the universal practice of creating imaginative, insightful, accurate, and useable understandings of past, present, and future worlds, initiated in ancient times and ongoing to this day. World pictures condense complex phenomena into comprehensible configurations, usually through concepts, textual description or visual images, but also through projective planning, managed environments, computational processes, artworks and soundscapes. From the Feral Atlas to an Atlas of AI, this panel will explore the affordances of world picturing for addressing the challenges facing our near and further futures.
1:30–3:00pm
VISION STATEMENT: KATE CRAWFORD
"MATERIAL VISIONS"
Generative AI systems are proliferating and shifting practices of image-making. But they are also fundamentally reshaping the Earth. AI is one of the largest planetary architectures ever built by our species, requiring vast amounts of energy, minerals, water, data, and labor. This talk will contend with generative AI as a fundamentally metabolic technology - burning energy and consuming water at an exponential rate to keep the ingestion, digestion, and production of data going. By placing this moment in a deeper historical context, we can see how this shift echoes previous eras when empires harnessed technologies to centralize power.
3:30pm–4:30pm
FINAL WORDS
Visions speakers, Mark Ledbury (moderator)
A discussion will all Visions speakers on the ideas, risks and possibilities raised by the Forum, and some speculations about futures of vision.
More Information
TICKETS
Day tickets are now sold out. However, some $10 tickets will be available to individual sessions each day on the door. We will not be live-streaming.
QUESTIONS
If you have any questions about the forum, please email powerinstitute.events@sydney.edu.au
VENUE
The forum will take place at the MCA Australia. All events will take place in the MCA's Lecture Theatre.
More information about how to get to the MCA can be found here and more information about accessibility can be found here.
