THE EVENT WILL BE HELD ONLINE
please RSVP at admin@cca.rutgers.edu for a Zoom invitation
The symposium will consider one of the most prevalent but unseen uses of the medium: the recording and documentation of civilian life around the world. From the time of photography’s origins, scholars and scientists celebrated the utopian potential of the camera’s all-seeing eye. Nearly 200 years later, these applications of lens-based technology—to document, surveil, record, and collect—shape the visual landscapes of public and private life. At each critical juncture in the medium’s technological development, photography has found pervasive, and at times, pernicious applications: as 19th-century detectives used mugshots to create archives of criminality, Facebook now applies facial recognition algorithms to build marketable consumer profiles. Meanwhile, the same satellite imagery that can document climate change and global conflict is also increasingly used to monitor civilian activity. Our symposium will present a range of interdisciplinary perspectives on this topic, bringing photo historians into conversation with academics in other fields and a visual artist. Each presentation will be approximately 20 minutes in length and the day will conclude with a panel discussion.
Sponsors
Center for Cultural Analysis
Art History Department, Rutgers University
Mark Tribe, San Juan, UV print on shaped aluminum composite panels, 72x96 in. (c) Mark Tribe
Schedule (in Eastern Standard Time - US)
1:00 Introduction
1:15 Zeynep Devrim Gürsel
1:35 Jennifer Tucker
1:55: Drew Thompson
2:15: Break (10 minutes)
2:25: Ahmed Elgammal
2:45: Mark Tribe
3:05-4:00: Discussion
4:00: End
Talks
Computer Vision and Surveillance: From Analysis to Synthesis - Ahmed Elgammal
Ahmed Elgammal
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
ABSTRACT
In this talk I will track the journey of computer vision involvement in surveillance over the past 25 years from analyzing images and videos to synthesizingfake imagery. I will explain this journey from the perspective of my own research.
BIO
Dr. Ahmed Elgammal is a professor at the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University. He is the founder and director of the Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Rutgers, which focuses on data science in the domain of digital humanities. He is also an Executive Council Faculty at the Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. Prof. Elgammal published over 180 peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and books in the fields of computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. His research on knowledge discovery in art history and AI art generation, received wide international media attention, including reports on the Washington Post, New York Times, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, CBS, NBC News, Science News, New Scientist, and many others. Dr Elgammal received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2006. Dr. Elgammal received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2000 and 2002, respectively.
So that They May Never Return: Photography, the Ottoman State and the making of Armenian Emigrants - Zeynep Devrim Gürsel
Zeynep Devrim Gürsel
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
ABSTRACT
How has photography policed borders and differences? How do photography and statecraft intersect in the making and unmaking of citizens? Portraits of Unbelonging is a double-sided history of migration, examining one of the first uses of photographs to police borders. It studies the history of Ottoman Armenian emigration from the Ottoman east to the United States from the politically fraught and often violent 1890s to the end of Abdülhamid II's reign in 1909.
Like each individual terk-i tabiiyet photograph, the official document used in the renunciation of Ottoman nationality for emigration, the project faces two directions; it links an Ottoman past to an American future. Portraits of Unbelonging traces the stories of emigrant families over a century – from the bureaucratic files that unmade Ottoman subjects, to the ship manifests that tracked their migration routes, to the census and naturalization records that documented their new lives as immigrants then citizens in the United States, to the family albums of their descendants living today. This talk focuses on why Ottoman Armenian subjects's potential return to the empire needed to be policed and prevented through photography.
BIO
Zeynep Devrim Gürsel is a media anthropologist whose scholarship involves both the analysis and production of images. She is the author of Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation (University of California Press, 2016), an ethnography of the international photojournalism industry during its digitalization at the beginning of the 21st century, based on fieldwork conducted in the United States, France and Turkey. She is also the director of Coffee Futures, an award-winning ethnographic film that explores contemporary Turkish politics through the prism of the everyday practice of coffee fortune-telling. (www.coffeefuturesfilm.com) Recently she has been researching photography as a tool of governmentality in the late Ottoman period. Specifically she is investigating photography during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid (1876-1909) from medical imagery to prison portraiture to understand emerging forms of the state and the changing contours of Ottoman subjects. During 2018-2019 she is a NOMIS Fellow at eikones Center for the Theory and History of the Image in Basel, Switzerland. While there she will be working on Portraits of Unbelonging, the first in-depth exploration of the official role of photography in the history of Armenian emigration to the United States.
Coloring Black Surveillance - Drew Thompson
Drew Thompson
Bard College
ABSTRACT
In this paper, I would like to draw attention to the Polaroid camera and film, and to draw connections between seemingly disparate phenomena: namely, the development of color photography, anti-apartheid protest, and the use of Polaroid cameras and films in US prison. This work departs from existing writing on Polaroids and the black experience in the United States in order to argue that how black populations used Polaroids in Africa and the Diaspora, including the US, contributed to the development of color photography. I make this argument through the contemporary art practices of the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement, multimedia artists Steve McQueen, Kay Hassa, and Lorna Simpson, and photographer Jack Leuders-Booth. Their respective works offer insight into how Polaroids influenced how black populations in Africa and the United States viewed themselves and envisioned notions of blackness across time and space.
BIO
Drew Thompson is a writer and visual historian who works as Assistant Professor in Africana and Historical Studies and Director of Africana Studies at Bard College. He recently authored Filtering Histories: The Photographic Bureaucracy in Mozambique, 1960 to Recent Times(Forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press). His writings on contemporary art have appeared in leading popular art journals, including contemporaryand, photograph, Foam, Mail and Guardian, and the blog Africa Is A Country.
Plein Air - Mark Tribe
Mark Tribe
School of the Visual Arts, Founder of Rhizome.org
ABSTRACT
The first and most literal form of surveillance is the aerial view. First made from balloons in the mid-19th century, the practice of aerial photography developed significantly during the First World War, when it was used for reconnaissance, as a way of looking down at the enemy from above. Since then, military applications of aerial imaging technology have expanded exponentially, from spy planes to satellites and, most recently, drones. Mark Tribe will talk about Plein Air, a series of aerial photographs of virtual landscapes. Plein Air seeks to interrogate and reframe the ways in which aerial images are used to expand territories and defend geopolitical interests.
BIO
Tribe is an artist, educator and the founder of Rhizome, an organization that supports the creation, presentation, preservation and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology. He has been on the faculty of the MFA Art Practice Department at SVA since 2011 and served as a thesis advisor in the MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Department in 2001 and 2003. Tribe has also taught at Brown University, Columbia University School of the Arts and Williams College. His new appointment at SVA begins July 1.
Tribe’s art explores the aesthetics of political performances such as protest speeches, street protests and militia training exercises. His photographs, installations, videos and performances are exhibited widely.
New faces of privacy: Trans-Atlantic historical and legal perspectives on the circulation of facial images in media, 1890-1940 - Jennifer Tucker
Jennifer Tucker
Wesleyan University
ABSTRACT
The topic of facial recognition is timely and significant. A vehement international debate has arisen over how to protect individual data and privacy in the face of the expansion of large-scale data collection systems. Schools are adopting facial recognition technology in the name of public safety. In January Facebook agreed to pay $550 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over its use of facial recognition technology in Illinois. London is using live FRT technology to police the city. Today, questions about facial recognition and the state are being raised in myriad contexts, from debates over government collection of facial recognition data to the use of new digital visual technologies in courtrooms. From Edward Snowden to Google Street View, today’s news reporting often leads with the latest advances in digital technology and surveillance systems. The entwined issues of privacy, identification and security go to the heart of the meaning of democratic citizenship and individual rights.
Just as H.G. Wells and other creative intellectuals registered the hopes and fears of modern society’s technology one hundred years ago, thinkers, writers and entertainers today are marking the public curiosity and anxiety about the impact of digital technology on society and on human nature itself.
Contemporary debates around facial recognition technologies have their roots in 19th century practices, debates and scientific visual culture. It is a story of landmark events and unfilled promise, of technological successes and failures, of legal regulations and their critics. It is not a story of linear progress in technological capacity: there was also popular resistance in the form of photographic evasion and social protest.
Questions include when a photograph could be admitted as evidence; where it was possible to take a picture; who owned the photographic object; and when the taking of a photograph became an invasion of privacy. Is photographing one’s face a tool of empowerment, or of social control, and how have people in previous generations debated that question? What role do visual technologies play in fixing the identity of consumers and citizens in colonial and post-colonial, industrial and post-industrial societies?
BIO
As an historian of 19th- and early 20th-century British society, Tucker’s research interests have ranged from the role of photography in scientific discovery and exploration to photos as tools of law for evidence (mugshots, crime scenes and surveillance) and how cameras in the courtroom have transformed the system. Recently, her work has included a project — “Science Against Industry: Photographic Technologies and the Visual Politics of Pollution Reform” — that traces the historical roots of the use of visual evidence in environmental science and pollution reform, and explores the visual representation in chemical climatology and the presentation of visual exhibits in Victorian courtroom debates over air and river pollution. She is also working on a new book-length study about the history of facial recognition photography, “Caught on Camera."