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The Future of the Networked Image: Digital Archives and Cultural Practices in a “Post Truth” Age

A lecture by Professor Anthony Downey

Info about event

Time

Tuesday 10 December 2019,  at 10:00 - 12:00

Location

Building 1584, Room 212 (School of Communication and Culture)

Organizer

School of Communication and Culture

The extent to which the visual arts reflected upon and promoted social and political change during and after the Arab Spring increasingly gives rise to decisive questions regarding the future relationship between digital images, cultural activism and networked images. Taking into consideration recent revelations concerning the role of social media in surveillance technologies, political repression, and the proliferation of targeted disinformation, alongside the anxieties being expressed about the opaque power of algorithms, this talk will explore critical frameworks for understanding the relationship between digitized images, cultural activism and social media. The broader issue here concerns a perennial, indeed global, issue: how do cultural practices — through digital means — realign how we engage with the politics of historical events and images of conflict? 

Anthony Downey is Professor of Visual Culture in the Middle East and North Africa (Birmingham City University). He sits on the Editorial Boards of Third Text (thirdtext.org) and Digital War (digitalwar.org). Recent and upcoming publications include Unbearable States and Applied Futures Cultural Practices, Political Activism, and Human Rights in a Post-Digital Age (forthcoming, 2021); Displacement Activities: Contemporary Art, the Refugee Condition, and the Alibi of Engagement (forthcoming, Sternberg Press 2020); Don’t Shrink Me to the Size of a Bullet: The Works of Hiwa K (Walther König Books, 2017); Future Imperfect: Contemporary Art Practices and Cultural Institutions inthe Middle East (Sternberg Press, 2016); and Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and ContestedNarratives in the Middle East (I.B. Tauris, 2015). In 2019, he will launch a new series of books, Research/Practice(Sternberg Press, 2019).