Program
PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE GLITCH
June 14: PUBLIC RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM
June 15-16 WORKSHOP
In collaboration with IASPIS, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee´s International Programme for Visual and Applied Arts, the Hasselblad Foundation and HDK-Valand.
Glitch and Photography III: Metamorphosis and New Ecologies
Welcome to the third symposium of our multi-year research collaboration in digital photographic cultures between the Hasselblad Foundation and HDK-Valand, exploring visual systems around us and the potentiality to disrupt normative logics. Under the umbrella title Photography and the Glitch we explore glitch as form, metaphor, and methodology within photography with a specific focus on digital, networked cultures. Our aim is to define multiple potentials of the glitch as disruption to systems of technology, knowledge, classification, and control. In this symposium we are exploring further what we define as a new turn in 'glitch art' focusing on the ’bug' as insect and its potential for critical, hybrid, non-human, ecological perspectives.
14th June Glitch and Photography III: Metamorphosis and New Ecologies
An open symposium of six lectures
Venue: HDK-Valand, Gothenburg University
Stora Hörsalen, room 338. Kirstinelundsgatan 6-8
No sign up required.
09:00
Coffee
09:30-10:00
Louise Wolthers and Nina Mangalanayagam
Introduction: Metamorphosis as glitch
10:00
Magne Friberg
The Butterfly Lifepuzzle
10:30
Nicky Coutts
Insectile blips: Listening in to power lines
11:00-11:15
Break
11:15
Monica Alcazar-Duarte
Abundance is not excess
12:00-13:00
Lunch
(lunch is not included but the organizers are happy to recommend places in the vicinity).
13:00
Susanne Østby Sæther
Infrastructural interruptions: Possession, Distortion, Translation
13:45
Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert and Alexia Achilleos
The Archive of Unnamed Workers: filling in the gaps of photographic archives and AI’s colonial legacy
14:45
Coffee
15:15
Franziska Kunze
„Is this real life?“ - the Glitch Art movement and its historical predecessors between anaesthesia and sticky emulsion
16:00
End of seminar
15-16th June WORKSHOPS
Venue: HDK-Valand, Gothenburg University
Glashuset, Vasagatan 50 (access through courtyard)
More information about the workshop will be sent out to selected participants. We ask participants to take part in both workshops and engage in preparatory reading and hands-on activities during the workshop. We envisage a small group who wants to engage in the topics and be active participants.
Sign up for the workshop through link: https://forms.gle/U18L95XoprX8LSzaA or by emailing Nanna: nanna.hammer.tiittanen@hasselbladfoundation.org
your name, contact details and short explanation why this workshop is of interest to you.
15th of June
Workshop held by Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert & Alexia Achilleos
09:00- 09:30
Coffee
09.30 - 12.30
Part I: Photography, Archaeology and Archives
13:30-16:00
Part II: Mapping colonial glitches in AI
Description:
The suggested hands-on workshop aims to engage participants with the concepts that surround the work Archive of Unnamed Workers (2022). The workshop is divided into 2 parts as outlined below. The first part explores real photographic archives and identifies colonial “framings” and gaps. It also discusses ways of de-colonizing archaeology related archives. The second part of the workshop builds upon the conversations and findings of the first part, allowing participants to experiment with various AI processes to map and deconstruct glitches within colonial-era photographic archives.
16th of June
Workshop held by Mónica Alcázar-Duarte
09:00- 09:30
Coffee
09:30 – 15:00
Workshop Abundance is not excess
Description:
How can natural patterns be used to inform and design an algorithm as a tool for stewardship in natural resources?
In this workshop, Mónica Alcázar-Duarte introduces the concept of abundance as seen in indigenous cultures, and frames it in terms of data. During the day many different issues will be addressed, all with relation to naming, codifying and classifying nature. How can we develop an emotional language as an alternative for a language of resources towards Nature? Can there be an emotional nature and not a resourceful nature? How would an emotional code work? And is mathematics the language for this?
About the talks and speakers
The butterfly life puzzle
Dr. Magne Friberg, Senior Lecturer, Lund University
Department of Biology
Research group on Speciation, Adaptation and Coevolution
Abstract
Butterflies are important nodes in the web of life, as pollinators, herbivores and pests. Importantly, they are wonderfully diverse, and suitable research subjects for understanding many different aspects of life as an insect. In my talk, I will try to think like a butterfly, and focus on the many important decisions that a butterfly is making during its life. In particular, I will discuss how glitches in this decision-making may play an important role for evolutionary novelty and continued diversification.
Magne Friberg is a Lecturer in Biology at Lund University, studying the diversification of life in general, and in particular the interaction between plants and insects. He is a co-Principal Investigator of the Lund University research group on Speciation, Adaptation and Co-evolution (SPACE).
Insectile blips: Listening in to power lines
Dr Nicky Coutts
Research Lead, The Glasgow School of Art
Abstract
For this artists talk, I plan to trace some metaphorical, structural and visual lines that begin within a photographic practice centering on insects, and lead to a practice of drawing involving beyond human animals. These lines fall in and out of familiarity as they stray closer to the unknown texts of other lives. ‘Insectile’ qualities translated within photographic artworks and installations prove partial and multi sensory prone to slippages and visual elusiveness. More recent drawings involving interactions with primates and sea mammals, that have adapted to use ‘language’ across species, explore further challenges to visual capacities. Glitches are explored in both bodies of work as moments within a practice of making where language tears causing holes and fissures within which there is an opportunity to articulate anew, or otherly. The focus of this talk will be to think through these moments of drop out, to discuss the potential for interspecies language and its limits within an artist’s practice.
Nicky Coutts’ work focuses on the pressures that humans place on species diversity and the environment, and the role of cross-species interactions in finding a way to better interact and live. Through a writing and multi-disciplinary visual practice, she explores how ‘language’ is often used to sustain the status quo and the potential for this to be shifted through working closely with 'oddkin' (Haraway). Queer and feminist methods are deployed in Coutts’s work to disrupt the normative values that have led to some bodies, lives or communities being valued over others. Her research addresses the power structures that have facilitated the ‘othering’ of all ‘others’ experimenting with practices of inclusion in writing and making. Key to Coutts’ work is an interest in mimetic principals and their transformative potential between art and politics. Through her visual work and writing, she addresses how through spending time with and developing strategies of adaptive exchange with other species, it could become possible to ethically share in each other’s qualities and approaches to living and dying.
Coutts works across photography, drawing, the moving image, print, sculpture, academic and experimental writing. She is part of ‘The Fiction Group’ with former colleagues from the Royal College of Art, London, currently taking part in the 5th Research Pavilion, UniARTs, Helsinki (2023). Coutts shows her work internationally, including with The Center for Art, Design and Visual Research (Italy, 2022), Galeria Diferenca, Lisbon (2020), Lokale, Copenhagen (2019), Emscher Newtown Research Residency, (2017 Arts Council Wales, ADDO and Emscherkünst, Germany), Signature Artist, National Trust for Scotland and Creative Scotland in The Year of Natural Scotland (2014) and International Fellow at Kultur Steierrmark (2012). Coutts has also shown in venues such as Youkobo, Tokyo; Reina Sophia Museum, Madrid; Kunsthalle Mainz, Germany and Fotografisk Center Copenhagen. She is represented by Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, London with solo shows in 2018, 2015, 2011 and 2008.
Abundance is not excess
Mónica Alcázar-Duarte
Abstract
Melipona Beecheii, a stingless bee from the Mayan peninsula has been an important part of Mexican indigenous culture for several thousand years. This tiny creature serves as an example of a natural glitch that provokes an alternative view of the notion of abundance. The talk will focus on the ways in which contemporary technological lust for data is threatening global ecological abundance through its relentless demand for “more”. Can we find ways to measure notions of advancement other than through resource accumulation?
Mónica Alcázar-Duarte is a Mexican-British multi-disciplinary visual artist whose work acknowledges her indigenous heritage while exploring current ideals of progress. She embraces themes related to science and technology and their influence over society and the natural world. In her projects she mixes images and new technologies, such as Augmented Reality, to create multi-layered work, producing meaning through seemingly disconnected narratives. Alcázar-Duarte’s work references western society’s obsession with speed, expansion, and resource accumulation as an index of advancement at a time in which ecological disaster looms, and considers other ways of seeing, knowing, and being in the world.
In 2023 she has been nominated for the Prix Pictet, and her work has been acquired by the V&A. She has also been awarded a National Geographic Storytelling Grant to complete a film in early 2024. In 2022 she was awarded, a Wayfinder Award from National Geographic, as well as a residency with Light Work through Autograph Gallery in London. Alcázar-Duarte has been granted fellowships by the MEAD Foundation, Ampersand Foundation, Bar-Tur Foundation, and the British Arts Council.
Her work has been exhibited and collected throughout Europe, Mexico and the United States in places such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Autograph Gallery and the V&A Museum in London, and Wilhelm Hack Museum in Germany.
New visions, new ecologies
Susanne Østby Sæther
Curator Photography and new media, PH.D.
Abstract
Taking the second edition of New Visions. The Henie Onstad Triennial for Photography and New Media as a point of departure, I will in this talk discuss a set of works and artistic strategies that resonate with the notion of new ecologies. New Visions 2023 presents works that explore the boundaries of photography and automated image-making to examine the extraction of natural and human-made resources and expanding infrastructures – and, by extension, the ecological, social, and political consequences of these ventures.
More specifically, I will emphasize how artists presently harness photography to scrutinize ecological impacts of resource extraction, as well as the environmental and ecological dimension of media themselves. For example, some artists in New Visions employ outdoor LED-screens and CGI imagery reconstructed from satellite images to examine electricity infrastructures and light pollution. Others experiment with the very materiality of photography to convey precarious environmental states by staining their prints with acid or adding pigments from toxic sea algae. In conclusion I trace how the acutely pertinent “new ecologies” envisioned through these practices also have longer genealogies that harks back to the work of photographer and educator László Moholy-Nagy, whose 1932 manifesto “A New Instrument of Vision” greatly impacted twentieth-century experimental photography – and lends the triennial its title.
Susanne Østby Sæther, PhD, is Curator of Photography and New Media at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Norway. Her curatorial and research interest is the intersection of art, media, and technology, with a particular focus on 21st century camera-based art and photography in its computational and algorithmic manifestation. Sæther has been a Research Fellow at Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM), Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, and a Postdoctor at Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo. She is currently a partner in the research projects PHOTOFAKE – Visual Disinformation, the Digital Economy and the Epistemology of the Camera Image and Deep-Sea Sensing, both financed by the Norwegian Research Council, and a core member and convener of the Media Seas of the High North Collaboratory, financed by the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities. Among her recent publications are Screen Space Reconfigured, edited with Synne T. Bull (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), Why Photography?, co-edited with Behzad Farazollahi, Christian Tunge and Bjarne Bare (Skira Editore, 2020), and New Visions, ed. (Mousse Publishing, 2023).
The Archive of Unnamed Workers: filling in the gaps of photographic archives and AI’s colonial legacy
Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert & Alexia Achilleos
Cyprus University of Technology/ CYENS Centre of Excellence
Abstract
This presentation explores how art practice that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) attempts to fill in representational gaps and function as a form of archival activism. The first section of the presentation provides the context of our investigation by looking into photographic archives in museums with an emphasis on archaeological-related photographic archives during the colonial period in Cyprus (1878-1960). When taken together, these archives present a fragmented and incomplete history of Cypriot archaeology, especially when appearing online. The second section investigates how AI-generated images are using existing datasets to produce new visual representations; databases which by nature reproduce power imbalances inherited from colonial-era photography. The third section presents and discusses an artwork titled “The Archive of Unnamed Workers” (2022) as an example of how artistic practices may use AI to reveal the inherent power imbalances found in historic archives, fill in visual gaps, and point towards an urgency to decolonize Cypriot archaeology.
Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert is an artist/researcher. She is interested in the ontology and workings of everyday photography and archives, as well as the intersections of new technologies and photography. Theopisti is a member of the advising committee of the peer-reviewed journal “photographies”, the vice-chair of the “International Association of Photography and Theory”, a curator of the IAPT Photobook show (2016, 2018, 2021) and has received several international fellowships and awards. She has exhibited her work in a number of art exhibitions in Cyprus and abroad and she is passionate about photobooks. She is currently Associate Professor at the School of Fine and Applied Arts at the Cyprus University of Technology, and the group leader of Museum Lab at CYENS Centre of Excellence.
Alexia Achilleos is an artist, with a background in fine art, archaeology and cultural studies. She is currently a PhD Fellow at CYENS - Centre of Excellence, undertaking artistic research on colonialism and AI, as well as a Research Associate at the Media Art & Design Research Lab (MADLab) at Cyprus University of Technology. Alexia is interested in the social, cultural, and political issues that impact narrative and power dynamics. By investigating data and utilising machine learning processes, often in a historical context, she aims to re-examine such issues found within history and society, but also within AI technology itself, particularly challenging the idea of technology as universal and objective.
„Is this real life?“ - the Glitch Art movement and its historical predecessors between anaesthesia and sticky emulsion
Dr. Franziska Kunze
Chief Curator of Photography and Time-based Media
Pinakothek der Moderne | Sammlung Moderne Kunst
Abstract
Cracked smartphone displays, distorted images, colourful pixel structures. Only when there is a malfunction is our attention directed to the nature of the technical media that surround us every day, without them, however, being shifted to the forefront. As one of the youngest and most unpredictable art forms, Glitch Art specifically draws attention to the aesthetics of the flawed. However, its roots can be traced back to the early days of the history of photography, take its course form there as an artistic counter-movement to recognised forms of expression via avant-garde film, video and sound art to digital image media and net art, where glitches are intentionally provoked or deliberately programmed.
The lecture provides insights into the upcoming exhibition “Glitch. The Art of Interference” at Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich by focusing on the connections of the Glitch Art movement and its historical predecessors – showing the manifold possibilities and motivations for making the invisible visible.
Dr Franziska Kunze is chief curator of photography and time-based media at the Bavarian State Painting Collections | Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. Before, she was vicariously responsible for the Contemporary Art Department at the LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur in Münster and was from 2017 to 2019 a fellow in the programme "Museum Curators for Photography" of the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation. Franziska takes on teaching assignments at irregular intervals, writes texts and is involved in various professional juries on photography.