Скачать или смотреть 2017 CAST Symposium BEING MATERIAL: Lisa Parks and Trevor Paglen, INVISIBLE

Lisa Parks, Ph.D. is a media theorist who writes on television, satellites, drones, and infrastructures of surveillance. Parks, a Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, previously worked at UC Santa Barbara (1998-2016) where she chaired the Department of Film and Media Sudies (2008-2011) and served as Director of the Center for Information Technology and Society (2012-2015). Parks is an interdisciplinary researcher and has collaborated with international artists. Her current research is focused in three related areas: satellite technologies and global media cultures; critical studies of media infrastructures; and media, militarization and surveillance.

Trevor Paglen is an artist and geographer who explores and documents invisible infrastructures, ranging from secret corporate and government sites to networks known through technologies of non-human, machine vision. Paglen’s work spans through image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering and numerous other disciplines. Among his chief concerns are learning how to see the historical moment we live in and developing the means to imagine alternative futures.

BEING MATERIAL:
In 1995, MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte predicted that “being digital” would have us entering a realm increasingly unconstrained by the materiality of the world. Two decades later, our everyday lives are indeed ever more suffused by computation and calculation. But unwieldy materiality persists and even reasserts itself. Programmable matter, self-assembling structures, 3D/4D printing, wearable technologies and bio-inspired design today capture the attention of engineers, scientists and artists. “BEING MATERIAL” showcased recent developments in materials systems and design, placing this work in dialogue with kindred and contrasting philosophy, art practice and critique. Panels on the PROGRAMMABLE, WEARABLE, LIVABLE and INVISIBLE—along with a concert, AUDIBLE—explored new and unexpected meetings of the digital and material worlds.

INVISIBLE:
Material things bear the traces of their conditions of production and circulation. Sometimes these traces are visible — as carbon footprints or carbon offsets, as contaminated or reclaimed geographies, as toxic waste or as renewable energy. Other times, such signs are invisible, out of everyday view or otherwise occluded. This panel considers today’s shifting lines between the visible and the invisible. Panelists will discuss cloaking, “operational” machine seeing, clandestine or surveillance media, and other technologies that change what it means to see and be material.