Visual Culture Program Event

Visual culture has always played a significant role in social movements, but protest practices today arguably depend on visual media, employing tactics that are acutely sensitive to the affordances of technology and global systems of exchange. These emerging forms of "visual activism," a term popularized by South African photographer Zanele Muholi, face challenges as well as opportunities. Responding to the growing interdisciplinary interest in new ways of doing politics in highly mediatized times, this one-day symposium unites scholars, artists, and activists in a series of talks and roundtable conversations to consider the multimodal futures of visual cultures of dissent. How are popular technologies, digital platforms, and artificial intelligence shaping insurrectionary imaginations? What new ways of seeing and being seen demand attention? Are the boundaries of the political (or the visible) in flux? Together, participants tackle these and related questions to explore how "the interaction of pixels and actions" makes change in a rapidly transforming mediascape (Mirzoeff 2016).

Participants include Carla LynDale Bishop, Arizona State; Harris Kornstein, University of Arizona; Ace Lehner, University of Vermont; Erin McElroy, University of Washington; Nicholas Mirzoeff, New York University; and Kade L. Twist, Otis College; Rosten Woo, artist and designer.