“Aesthetics of Machine Vision” Conference

This conference aims to bring together a wide range of scholars, researchers and artists who explore the phenomenon of machine vision and the aesthetics of its modes of perception. Machine vision refers to advanced technologies which have been developed to carry out operations of visual automation in areas of inspection and observation in wider society. In referring to “machine” we include not only the software which underlies contemporary algorithmic systems but also reference the hardware and wider concurrent material relations, which constitute its operations. An increasing reliance on these technologies and its modes of seeing have far reaching cultural and socio-political repercussions. In investigating the aesthetics of this phenomenon, we aim to engage with these repercussions critically, analytically as well as speculatively. Within this context a recurrent question within the sciences and in visual culture theory thus appears again: Can we see, seeing? In examining the aesthetics of machine vision, we aim to reveal a machinic seeing, thus allowing us to scrutinize the ways in which it intervenes in the world through “more-than-human” perspectives.

We are interested in the “aisthesis” of machine vision, in the broadest possible sense of its aesthetic-experiential aspects, its affectivities, bodily entanglements, materiality, and the speculative reflections of such sensoria. We invite scholars, artists, and practitioners to engage with how aesthetics/artworks/sensoria as imaginaries can reflect on the power of machinic sensing within the wider contemporary arenas of cultural, ethical, environmental, and socio-political realms.

Keynotes are Jussi Parikka (Aarhus University) and Luciana Parisi (Duke University), and there will be a special guest artist screening and conversation with experimental filmmaker Johann Lurf (Vienna, Austria).

See more here.