Mercredi 21 avril 2021, 18h, en visioconférence (Zoom)
Fabienne Liptay (Université de Zurich) : The Statistical Complex: Film as a Dispositif of Testing
Testing is a common practice deployed in a broad field of social engineering and governance. It relies on venturous experimentation as well as calculation and estimation in the service of risk management, controlling processes and even predicting their probable outcomes based on statistical reasoning. Testing thus operates on social life by creating scenarios in which social order is maintained, disrupted, or restored according to prescriptive and regulatory measures. In my lecture, I will explore the idea that film not only participates in social life, but is also placed in the service of its testing. The works discussed are Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests (1964-66), William Greaves’s Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (1968), and Hito Steyerl’s SocialSim (2020), all of which use technologies of testing to explore the social complexities and tensions at play in the process of their making. Albeit diverse, these works critically engage with theoretical models and practices from the social sciences (Alphonse Bertillon in Warhol, Arthur F. Bentley in Greaves, and Joshua Epstein in Steyerl) to reveal the technological and ideological parameters used to regulate and control society. Departing from Tony Bennett’s concept of the “exhibitionary complex” and its indebtedness to Foucault, I wish to draw attention to another web of relations, one in which power is exercised not through modes of visibility, but through statistical measures operating in and through images as part of the “transactional realities” of civil society.
Enregistrement vidéo de la conférence :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqOoDKMzE4I
Mercredi 12 mai 2021, 18h, en visioconférence (Zoom)
Markus Krajewski (Université de Bâle) : Constructing the Conscience. About German Post-War Architecture and its Media
This talk will be about Architecture and Media, more precisely, about a specific form of town houses’ exteriors and how these specific elements served as a medium of silence: tiles. My case study will discuss tiled facades as a certain dispositive of hiding and hygiene which was used in the 1950ies in predominantly Western German house building, as an architectural shape as well as a reflex to Germany’s recent past.
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Mercredi 26 mai 2021, 18h, en visioconférence (Zoom)
Estelle Doudet (Université de Lausanne) : Archéologies médiévales du télévisuel : penser les dispositifs avant l’ère des machines
Penser aujourd’hui les dispositifs de vision et d’audition signifie souvent se pencher sur les relations médiatiques caractéristiques de l’ère des machines (XIXe-XXIe s.) : enregistrements, projections, algorithmes, etc. L’archéologie des media, une approche encore émergente dans les pays francophones, invite toutefois à explorer plus profondément les époques éloignées de notre âge technologique. Ainsi, en Europe, du XIIIe au XVIe siècle, se sont déployées des théories et des pratiques du télévisuel – la capacité de voir ce qui est situé loin du regard humain grâce à divers supports – au croisement de la science optique, de la pensée religieuse et des innovations artistiques. Est-il pertinent d’approcher cette ancienne culture par la notion a priori anachronique de « dispositif » ? Quels nouveaux éclairages sur nos usages contemporains pourrait nous apporter l’étude d’un temps où le visible était considéré comme une traversée vers l’invisible et où l’image oscillait entre surface de projection et performance d’une présence ?
Enregistrement vidéo de la conférence :