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Episode 2 of James Bridle’s New Ways of Seeing.

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How is technology changing the way we see? The artist James Bridle reimagines John Berger's Ways of Seeing for the digital age, assessing the reliability and power of images.

How is technology changing the way we see? The artist James Bridle reimagines John Berger's Ways of Seeing for the digital age, assessing the reliability and power of images.

"The camera, by making the work of art transmittable, has multiplied its possible meanings and destroyed its unique original meaning." (John Berger)

In 1972, Berger's seminal TV series and book changed perceptions of art and set out to reveal the language of images.

Of course, that was before the internet, smartphones, and social media took hold.

How do we see the world around us now? And, who are the artists urging us to look more closely?

James Bridle writes about the development of technology on our lives. His work has been exhibited at the V&A, the Barbican, in galleries worldwide, and online. In this series of four programmes, he updates Berger's Ways of Seeing, inviting contemporary artists to explore how the technology we use every day has transformed the ways in which we see and are seen.

In this second episode, Machine Visions, James reveals the true meaning of images today. In an era of face-swap and video generation technologies, fake news and conspiracy theory, how has digitisation altered the nature, reliability and power of images? Artists Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Constant Dullaart and Adam Harvey explore how digital images have become so much more than mere pictures.

Producer: Steve Urquhart
A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 4

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BBC Radio 4 - New Ways of Seeing, Machine Visions

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How is technology changing the way we see? Artist James Bridle considers digital images.

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Hito Steyerl, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013

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HD video projection (color, sound, 14 minutes), architectural environment, dimensions variable.

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BETWEEN ANYWHERE AND NOWHERE #4

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BETWEEN ANYWHERE AND NOWHERE #3

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BETWEEN ANYWHERE AND NOWHERE #2

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BBC Radio 4 - New Ways of Seeing, Invisible Networks

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How is technology changing the way we see? Artist James Bridle looks for hidden networks.

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Tracing the Roots of Photo Sharing exhibition review.

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Tracing the Roots of Photo Sharing exhibition review.

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Tracing the Roots of Photo Sharing, From Mail Art to Instagram (Published 2019)

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A new exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art shows that image sharing is evolutionary, not revolutionary.

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Every year she takes a picture with her son and the picture of the year before 

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Every year she takes a picture with her son and the picture of the year before 

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母親如同藝術家般充滿創造的智慧。母親不但創造了生命，也在親子關係上持續地創造出多樣化的生活體驗。母職是長時期且五味雜陳的過程，非單一品味的甜蜜母子圖或犧牲自我的偉大聖母圖所能表達。而這些大量刻板印象的母親再現，對於處於母職者的我，竟成了一種無以慰藉且難以避免的疲勞轟炸，而這也成為我創作此系列作品的原動力。

從2000年懷孕開始，在不愉悅的孕症與母親無我宿命的恐懼下，我開始嘗試於自身母職中以藝術創作來保有自我的可能性。從一開始紀錄母親的自我如何消失，到在不斷創造的意念下，試圖讓身為母親與藝術家角色的我緊緊結合，以此表露出一種複雜、多樣且具創造性的母職體驗。而這組「母親如同創造者」作品持續進行了20年，它讓我自信地證明，母親除了可以有方法在母職中保有自我，更可以運用創造性來翻轉固有的母職迷思。

從第一張2001年預產期前一天所拍攝的自拍照開始，每隔一段時間，當我們有共同的生命體驗共識時，我會在上一次「我與我的兒子」所拍攝的正式家庭照前拍下我倆的新合照。因此，在時間的推動下，不同年代、不同樣貌的「我與我的兒子」齊一湧現在同一個平面上。由此，不同年代的「我與兒子」及「我們」所共同創作的母子圖，被壓縮在一個奇異空間內不斷地對話，而呈現出複雜、瑣碎且多采多姿的記錄。

這般不斷地創造與自我再現, 如同時光隧道式的視覺再現，不但層層記錄下二十年來的堅持與累積，也讓我們彼此的成長與改變鮮明地展現出來。更重要的是，如此複數多元的女性自我再現概念將計畫持續下去，用生命與時間去挑戰傳統那單一且固定的刻板母親形象。

Like an artist, the Mother is wise in her creation. The Mother not only creates a life, but also a continuous matrix of experiences between Mother and Child. Motherhood is a long-term process full of a myriad of complex feelings. This complexity cannot be expressed solely by saccharine images of Mother and Child, nor by the image of the Mother Incarnate willingly sacrificing herself for the sake of her children. All of these stereotypes of Motherhood are for me a tedious, unavoidable harangue which offers me no consolation. It is from this I derive the original motivation for this series.

Since getting pregnant in 2000, I had been burdened with pregnancy pains and the fear of losing my sense of self, and so I attempted to use art creation to preserve my sense of self during motherhood. From recording how in the beginning the Mother had lost her sense of self, to the notion of constantly creating, I attempted to reconcile my role as both Mother and artist to express a complex, diverse, and creative Motherhood. I am confident that "The Mother as a Creator" series, which took twenty years, not only proves that the Mother can maintain her sense of self, but also that creativity can overturn many of the myths associated with Motherhood.

Starting from the first self-portrait taken in 2001 on the day before I was due to give birth, my son and I would take a new photo together in front of the previous formal family photo every time we had a common life experience. Thus, the different life stages and appearances of my son and me come together to form a single layer. These Mother and Son photos which at different stages of life are overlaid, and from which we created a dialogue compressed into one peculiar space. From within this dimension emerges a complicated, fragmented and diverse recording of Motherhood.

Through this continuous creation and self-reconstruction using time-tunnel artwork, I not only recorded our perseverance and the accumulation of our experiences, I also make it such that we can clearly observe how we grew and developed over twenty years. Most importantly, it is through living and the passing of time that the representations of the many diverse notions of female self-reconstruction can challenge the one-sided and inflexible stereotypes which have traditionally been held towards Motherhood.

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母親如同藝術家般充滿創造的智慧。母親不但創造了生命，也在親子關係上持續地創造出多樣化的生活體驗。母職是長時期且五味雜陳的過程，非單一品味的甜蜜母子圖或犧牲自我的偉大聖母圖所能表達。而這些大量刻板印象的母親再現，對於處於母職者的我，竟成了一種無以慰藉且難以避免的疲勞轟炸，而這也成為我創作此系列作品的原動力。 從2000年懷孕開始，在不愉悅的孕症與母親無我宿命的恐懼下，我開始嘗試於自身母職中以藝術創作來保有自我的可能性。從一開始紀錄母親的自我如何消失，到在不斷創造的意念下，試圖讓身為母親與藝術家角色的我緊緊結合，以此表露出一種複雜、多樣且具創造性的母職體驗。而這組「母親如同創造者」作品持續進行了20年，它讓我自信地證明，母親除了可以有方法在母職中保有自我，更可以運用創造性來翻轉固有的母職迷思。 從第一張2001年預產期前一天所拍攝的自拍照開始，每隔一段時間，當我們有共同的生命體驗共識時，我會在上一次「我與我的兒子」所拍攝的正式家庭照前拍下我倆的新合照。因此，在時間的推動下，不同年代、不同樣貌的「我與我的兒子」齊一湧現在同一個平面上。由此，不同年代的「我與兒子」及「我們」所共同創作的母子圖，被壓縮在一個奇異空間內不斷地對話，而呈現出複雜、瑣碎且多采多姿的記錄。 這般不斷地創造與自我再現, 如同時光隧道式的視覺再現，不但層層記錄下二十年來的堅持與累積，也讓我們彼此的成長與改變鮮明地展現出來。更重要的是，如此複數多元的女性自我再現概念將計畫持續下去，用生命與時間去挑戰傳統那單一且固定的刻板母親形象。 Like an artist, the Mother is wise in her creation. The Mother not only creates a life, but also a continuous matrix of experiences between Mother and Child. Motherhood is a long-term process full of a myriad of complex feelings.

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Today’s exercise

Holiwell church

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Today’s exercise

Jowett walk

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Today’s exercise

Holywell cemetery

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Today’s exercise

St Giles church

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Today’s exercise

University parks

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Today’s exercise

Covered Market

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Today’s exercise

Covered Market

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It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.

The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse sobs.
The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool.
The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens,
no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.

It so happens I am sick of my feet and my nails
and my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I am sick of being a man.

Still it would be marvelous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,
or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.
It would be great
to go through the streets with a green knife
letting out yells until I died of the cold.

I don’t want to go on being a root in the dark,
insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
taking in and thinking, eating every day.

I don’t want so much misery.
I don’t want to go on as a root and a tomb,
alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
half frozen, dying of grief.

That’s why Monday, when it sees me coming
with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,
and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,
and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the night.

And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist houses,
into hospitals where the bones fly out the window,
into shoeshops that smell like vinegar,
and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.

There are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines
hanging over the doors of houses that I hate,
and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors
that ought to have wept from shame and terror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical cords.

I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes,
my rage, forgetting everything,
I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops,
and courtyards with washing hanging from the line:
underwear, towels and shirts from which slow
dirty tears are falling.

PABLO NERUDA, 1935.

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In 2007 I made some scrapbooks of photos I took around Abingdon and Oxford. 

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In 2007 I made some scrapbooks of photos I took around Abingdon and Oxford. 

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These are photos of Morris dancers in the Folk Festival...

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I took this photo while I was thinking about closed shop spaces in Oxford 

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I took this photo while I was thinking about closed shop spaces in Oxford 

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This made me think about what would happen next in this space, if anything....

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Artwork in the new Westgate Centre, referencing archaeology, flora and fauna, in relationship to the modern architecture...

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Artwork in the new Westgate Centre, referencing archaeology, flora and fauna, in relationship to the modern architecture...

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Archaeological Display in the Westgate Centre

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Archaeological Display in the Westgate Centre

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This display in the Westgate Centre incorporated tiles found during archaeological excavations before the new Centre was built.

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Looking at art in the Westgate Centre this part of the entrance to the library, I felt this fit with the theme Activating Our Archives 

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Looking at art in the Westgate Centre this part of the entrance to the library, I felt this fit with the theme Activating Our Archives 

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Sculpture in the Westgate Centre, this image includes  a sculpture of some books engaging with the theme Activating Archives

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Sculpture in the Westgate Centre, this image includes  a sculpture of some books engaging with the theme Activating Archives

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Akram Zaatari’s talk at New Art Exchange in Nottingham last year, in conversation with Anthony Downey. See if you spot someone familiar during the Q and A.

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Akram Zaatari in conversation Dr Anthony Downey

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Drinking hot chocolate in the Pegasus cafe

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Drinking hot chocolate in the Pegasus cafe

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I was invited to be the usher for the newest theatre production, Rouse Ye Women!, the story of the 1910 women chain workers strike in Cradley Heath, spearheaded by Mary MacArthur. MacArthur fought for equal wages for women chain workers and exposed the horrors of labours for women workers. The show was held at the Old Fire Station on Tuesday and Wednesday (April 2nd and third).

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Rouse, Ye Women! - A new folk ballad about Mary Macarthur and the women chainmakers - TOWNSEND THEATRE PRODUCTIONS

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The folk opera will be written by Neil Gore and John Kirkpatrick and will tour the UK February - April 19. Below are the 2019 tour dates and detail about this amazing story of the women chainmakers of Cradley Heath striking to achieve a living wage for themselves and their families in 1910.

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Ushering upstairs at the old fire station (April 2nd)

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Ushering upstairs at the old fire station (April 2nd)

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'The Script' (2018) by Akram Zaatari is one of 14 images from the 'Footnote to Hashem al Madani: Studio Practises' (2018) series. Courtesy Akram Zaatari

Sounds, not sights, are the first thing that greet you as you enter the darkened galleries on the first floor of Modern Art Oxford: the plaintive strumming of an oud, the reedy voice of a young boy reciting the lyrics of an Egyptian love song, the voice of an older male singing the signature tune from Ali Edries' 2001 movie, Ashab Wala Business (Friendship or Business).

The effect is not just to transport you from the chilly pavements of Britain's oldest university town to some indeterminate location in the Middle East, but also back in time to a series of specific moments in Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt , Saudi Arabia, Libya, Yemen and the UAE, each of which have been captured in a still or moving image and represented as part of The Script.

Works from the Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari

A travelling exhibition, The Script opened last summer at New Art Exchange in Nottingham, which commissioned the new work that provides the show with its name, but Modern Art Oxford's exhibition is the third, final and largest iteration of it featuring five major installations by renowned Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari.

The first work in the exhibition not only acts as an introduction to Zaatari's ongoing concern with how people imagine themselves through pictures, but also references the original Nottingham show and Zaatari's role as one of the founders of Beirut 's Arab Image Foundation.

Akram Zataari's 'Footnote to Hashem el Madani: Studio Practices' (2018). Courtesy Akram Zaatari

Footnote to Hashem al Madani: Studio Practises (2018) features a series of 14 portraits from the Studio Shehrazade archive, a commercial photographic business that operated in Zaatari's home town, Saida, between 1953 and 2017. Rather than being exhibited in frames, the images were originally transferred onto the walls of New Art Exchange and have subsequently been chipped out of its walls and transferred as fragments to Modern Art Oxford, complete with pieces of the original masonry.

Revealing broader cultural patterns and ideas

Zaatari sees the fragments as remains, almost as pieces of fresco, which are now recessed into a wall at Modern Art Oxford, like a series of fossil-bearing rocks that have been split to reveal the secrets of their innards. "A picture is always a negotiation between the photographer and the subject's desire, and so these are performed images and I wanted to stress them not as part of photography's history, but as the attitudes of the people posing," says the 63-year-old artist, who often refers to his work with the archives created as part of the Arab Image Foundation as a form of archaeology.

"At the end of the show at New Art Exchange we decided we would do all that was possible to preserve those images, but as remains from a show that was performed only once, so they become like traces, a reminder."

Zaatari approaches apparently disparate collections of images in the same way that an archaeologist might approach a spoil heap, not to establish their photographic or art historical credentials, but for their ability to reveal broader cultural patterns and ideas.

'Dance To The End of Love'

The practice informs Dance To The End of Love (2011), Zaatari's 22-minute-long, four channel video projection . Its edited visuals and music transform the upper gallery at Modern Art Oxford into something akin to the dance floor of a nightclub.

"Look at how they celebrate solitude. Look at how they seek self-promotion, which I think they are taught to.

Akram Zaatari

Composed of video footage from across the Arab world that was uploaded on to YouTube on the eve of the Arab uprisings, Zaatari describes the work as "a capture of the social attitudes of a society through what it decided to upload at a very specific time".

A window into the collective imagination of the young Arab men involved and a study in a solitude that is only momentarily assuaged by their impulse to self-promote, the footage was discovered by Zaatari using Arab ic search terms derived from his work on the Studio Shehrazade archive. As well as clips of young men performing bodybuilding displays, the work features boys singing, dancing and engaging highly dangerous tricks on motorcycles and in cars.

In another section, crude special effects have been superimposed on the videos to show the young men harnessing the power of fireballs and lightning. The results are both endearing and pathetic.

Akram Zaatari's 'Dance To The End of Love', 2011. Courtesy Akram Zaatari

"People imagine themselves as heroes when they are not, they imagine themselves as good dancers when maybe they are not; as having beautiful voices or imagining themselves as stars when they are not," Zaatari says.

"Look at how they celebrate solitude. Look at how they seek self-promotion, which I think they are taught to. We live in a society of spectacle, that wants to teach us how to promote ourselves, where it is important to have thousands of 'likes', but why is this important? It's not them, it's the world we live in that's becoming pathetic. They are victims of it and they pay with their solitude."

Inspiration for 'The Script'

It was while searching YouTube using the Arabic phrase "father and son" that Zaatari came across a genre of footage that inspired the newest work in the show, (2018). It is based on uploads of Muslim men who are being disturbed by their young sons while fulfilling their duty of salah, or ritual prayer. The young boys play noisily with toys, use their fathers as climbing frames and even hang from their necks while the fathers prostrate , attempting to distract them.

Akram Zaatari's 'The Script', 2018. Courtesy Akram Zaatari

Rather than using the original rushes, however, Zaatari used them as the inspiration for a filmed re-enactment, made with the highest production values. "I felt like there is something pure in that gesture of praying with your kids around you, trying to use you to climb on, that is iconic enough to become an icon," Zaatari says. "It embodies, indirectly, all of these resistances to a world that is becoming more hostile to the Muslim community."

Discussions about the work began back in 2016 at a time, explains NEA's director of programmes, Melanie Kidd, when anti-Muslim sentiment was becoming markedly more visible in the UK. "That's when we really started to talk about the commission , recent terror attacks and heightened levels of hate crime towards Muslim communities and anyone who was perceived to be Muslim," Kidd says. "We had a lot of conversations about how Muslims are perceived through the media ; how they were perceived nationally [in the UK]."

An attempt to humanise Islam?

Is , then, an attempt to humanise Islam for a British audience, to provide a more domestic and tender face for a faith that for some engenders anger and fear on the far right?

While admitting the context of its commissioning and its likely reception in the wake of recent anti-Muslim attacks in Britain and New Zealand, Zaatari suggests that is only partly the case. "Yes, but one could also make the work in the Christian world as well," Zaatari insists. "It has to do with dance, first and foremost, and it has to do with demystifying the time of prayer."

Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari. Rolf Vennenbernd / dpa / Alamy Live News

For Modern Art Oxford's curator, Stephanie Straine, the value of The Script lies not merely in what it says about attitudes to Islam, but in the way it reveals the broader cultural ideas that lie behind seemingly individualistic acts of self-expression. "The points Zaatari is making about the shift between public and private in our lives offers a really important moment of reflection on what it means to manufacture ones own image and how that can transcend nationality and religion or age," Straine explains.

"To consider that in a very nuanced way like Akram does is very timely."

Akram Zaatari: The Script runs at Modern Art Oxford until May 12

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Artist Akram Zaatari: 'We live in a society of spectacle, but why is this of such importance?'

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Sounds, not sights, are the first thing that greet you as you enter the darkened galleries on the first floor of Modern Art ­Oxford: the plaintive strumming of an oud, the reedy voice of a young boy reciting the lyrics of an Egyptian love song, the voice of an older male singing the signature tune from Ali Edries' 2001 movie, Ashab Wala Business (Friendship or Business).

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I plan to eat here one day.

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An interview with Felicia Honkasalo for ASX by Sunil Shah. This artists work deals with her grandfather's archive.

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An interview with Felicia Honkasalo for ASX by Sunil Shah. This artists work deals with her grandfather's archive.

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Do objects have a relationship to each other outside of human relations? Object orientated philosophers contend that they do, critiquing the Kantian philosophical tradition of anthropocentrism that places objects as subordinate to humans and their cognition. I wonder about this thinking of the latent reality of the objects and documents in Felicia Honsksalo's book, Grey Cobalt, based on her grandfather's work archive. As a geologist, he collected and recorded his work meticulously, revealing a life of research, experiments, specimens, samples and equipment. None of this meant anything to Felicia, only that it was compelling enough to become part of an enquiry into the materials she sifted through to learn something of her grandfather, whom she hardly knew in person. Grey Cobalt is published by Loose Joints and the following conversation took place over email in February and March 2019.

SS: Can you tell us about how this project came about and how this relates to your wider practice and interests in photography?

FH: My story began with objects. When my grandfather died, I lived in London, and was not present when his belongings were divided amongst relatives. I had very few washed out and faded memories of him from my childhood, but even then, he had seemed to be an elusive character, very different from my grandmother, with whom I had a close relationship to as a child. In my family home, in which my parents still live, unfamiliar objects started to appear, and on one visit from London I opened the attic doors to find boxes and boxes of books and papers. Slowly I started rummaging through them, in search of an idea of the person that had passed away. That perhaps these papers or things could explain to me what had happened, who he had been. In my mind, these pictures of minerals, medals, open cast mines, furnaces, factories, miners, steel sheets and rolls were marking a path to a world in which I could find the person that had disappeared. I started to read about metallurgy and enrolled on a course on geology. I visited museums, looked at core samples, went to factories, studied the intricate drawings of furnaces, trying to form an image in my mind as to what this was all about.

If I had no grounded memories of the person who had passed away, did he really exist? Could I find the memories somewhere else? Could I create them? I started looking at the objects in a different way, organizing them into groups based first on intuition and then on a system I created. They became, for me, souvenirs from the past, souvenirs that had outlived their owners. I started to see a pattern emerge, in which specific artefacts seemed to hold inside them a hidden narrative, as if they were silent about the story I wanted to discover. I catalogued all the objects by taking photographs of them, after which I regrouped them according to how they appeared to me. Through a language I felt was hidden inside the objects, I wanted to see if these objects could reveal something through my images.

Having never known him, remembering for me is an act of reconstructing through imagination not only a person, but a world that once existed. Being a man dedicated to his work, the inherited artefacts were not perhaps the usual heirlooms. In the process of creating metals, that are vital to our materialistic existence, rock matter is poured into a furnace turning it into molten matter. There is something captivating about this act, as it is precisely in this state that the earth once was, and how the core of the earth still is. Whereas geologists use rock layers to read the timeline of the earth, in a furnace, we fast track through all that history, back to the start of our time. I like to think of the work as a capsule of space and time like that of a cabinet of curiosities, where the disparate collected objects help one form a tactile experience of a lost world. And like all collections, they evoke an ever-present absence.

What started out as an act of mourning, turned over the years into a complex set of questions through which I tried to understand and investigate the possibilities of making a portrait of someone lost to the sea of time. How could I make sense of, primarily a person's death, but also, and maybe more importantly, that they had once existed, lived a life, but had now disappeared. In an interview with Christian Scholz, W.G. Sebald verbalises my main concerns in a very precise manner:

"You cannot imagine what it is, this slow dissolution of life over many decades. And that is something absolutely monstrous (Ungeheures) to me: having to witness this and having to take into account the possibility that this real person who is now, in the year 1999, let's say eighty-five years old, back then supposedly was only twenty-two years old. Is something like that possible? Can we get that into our heads? What do we do with this information?"

By exploring these ideas through photography, the work is also a commentary on photography itself. Through very minimal visual information, I try to unfold and make use of this impulse we have to grab hold of that which is evanescent by making a permanent record of it, and the failure of making that record. What is held onto through a photograph, is no longer the disappearing object itself but something that appears or becomes visible in the moment of its vanishing: as it were, the last glance that it casts at us, or the last glimpse of it that we can catch.

SS: There is an interesting relationship here between the transience of human life and the permanence of matter and the hope that something of your grandfather can be recouped from within the objects and documents of his life. I am interested in the process of activating this archive which for me greatly includes the act of sifting through his belongings, making sense of them, research, learning and photography, the creation of a new archival order, for you, one day to be passed down to your relatives. For me this act of activation of this material goes beyond its photography. It is a relationship to absence and to loss, the belief that in the material we can find access to the spiritual. I love this belief in the power of objects, aesthetics aside, it is cosmological at the atomic level; harking back to the fact that all matter was created in the origins of the universe. We are all made up of the same matter and it is our spirit that resides within matter, so looking at objects to find a person doesn't seem at all absurd, does it?

FH: This is really interesting, because on the one hand I agree, that yes, at times it seems as if the spirit of someone resides within matter, but then when I was working on this project, I came to look at it from another angle, that rather we place that spirit within the object, we project ourselves onto them and anthropomorphize these independent things. The object itself is something else, has its own hidden trajectory, and agency, which we know nothing about. People have throughout history had a need to place objects near the final resting places of the dead, from the paraphernalia placed inside tombs of Pharaohs in Ancient Egypt to the votive offerings laid along graves in Catholic countries. What fascinates me, is that these objects have had the occupation of keeping the dead close to the living, but they have also been placed there in order to gain favor with supernatural forces. Grave goods are still placed into caskets for example in Finnish secular society, and they are seen to serve the purpose of aiding the journey of the deceased on its migration to the unknown. But then at the same time these objects really only serve us, the living, in helping us deal with the death of someone close to us. An archaeologist from the University of Helsinki told me once how funeral homes in Helsinki have had problems with mourners placing mobile phones into caskets, as the batteries explode in the furnace of the crematorium, causing irreparable damages. The problem has been solved by advising mourners to take out the battery before dropping the phone in with the deceased. I see this mobile phone as being something that eases the pain of the mourner, rather than easing the afterlife of the one who has parted, but who knows maybe I'm wrong. I do still wonder, what is it that objects hold, that has made them the laborers of memory and mourning? Of course, one aspect is the tactile function, objects are something we can hold and caress, or kick, something we are in active relation to, rather than the more complex feelings related to mourning, death and facing our own dissolution.

SS: What do you feel you learned about your grandfather and his world in this project?

FH: My grandfather's story is of course the one that many will attach themselves to, but I would find it important that people also try and see the context as something involving a much larger narrative, like you mentioned in your reply. During my process I was interested in how these independent, witness bearing entities communicated, to me, aspects of this complex relationship between my own, fleeting, disloyal memories and these almost eternal, solid forms that had seen so much, yet withheld all that information. I would touch their material surface and by investigating the circumstances in which they were born, questioning the landscape they were from, I came to recognize that they have capacities to interfere and disrupt historical moments. That was a really important turning point for me. It is not a purely human history that I want to convey in the book, rather a much larger narrative that humans usually overlook. For me that was really essential, to see these inanimate objects as having agency, and having them telling their story, if you can say that.

These encounters with the landscape and the objects driven out from the depths of the earth made me question the usefulness of depicting a human history, and rather I started to be more and more interested in the hidden history within these objects and places. Take for example Nickel, there is a town in Russia named after the hard and ductile metal. It's very valuable in modern industry, but it is also an essential nutrient for quite a few living things, and furthermore occurs in meteorites that fall from the sky. Some believe life came to earth on these falling rocks containing nickel. The biggest reserves are believed to be inside the earth, at the centre, that is a like a massive tangible chewing gum. It's a headache for the mining industry, as it's a vast money pot that we have no access to. It is also believed that Nickel played a part in the Great Dying, the end-Permian extinction, causing 90% of the world's species to die some 252 million years ago. It created much of human history, if you can put it like that, through its human use in armaments production, and battles were fought to keep or overtake nickel reserves. This metal is a perfect example of how everything is interconnected, in intra-action with each and everything, and in this way, you can say metals like Nickel, have capacities to interfere and disrupt historical moments, and human lives. Everything is intertwined. To borrow Karen Barad: "We" are not outside observers of the world. Nor are we simply located at particular places in the world; rather, we are part of the world in its ongoing intra-activity [...] I don't want the human to be in Nature, as if Nature is a container. Identity is inherently unstable, differentiated, dispersed, and yet strangely coherent."

I love how she goes on to say that knowing can never be fully claimed as being a fully human practice because we use nonhuman elements when we discover and build on our knowledge, and how do we know in what ways these elements interfere and disrupt, distort this knowledge that we claim to be scientific evidence, for example.

I was looking through some of my grandfather's books, and I came across this really beautiful quote by Pliny the Elder that was included in The History of Metals, published by MacDonald & Evans. It was originally written for his magnum opus, the Natural History encyclopaedia. In the quote he foresees human greed relating to metals, and he wrote it sometime in AD 79. I felt it was like an omen. The beginning of this quote is included in the book. So, to cut a long story short, perhaps I didn't really learn anything about my grandfather, but through what he left behind, I discovered a completely unknown world, that had been present all along.

SS: There is a strong metaphor in this work for what constitutes technological progress from ancient times through to the present manifest in the extraction of useful metals for humankind's advancement. I wanted to ask about how your findings were reconciled in your visual approach and decision making around text and contributions for the book. Are you able to describe how your feelings for these objects and documents become artistic and aesthetic choices?

FH: I'm using the history and the mining of metals as my starting point, as my grandfather was said to be a man dedicated to his work and his profession was metallurgy. In a sort of Marxist way, I thought that if I were to look for who he might have been, I was to look at the work that he did, to really understand it, infiltrate the scene so to speak. The work that he did, influenced his life, but also the life of his children, and I think it also trickled down to us, his grandchildren.

However, as I worked longer on the project, I came to realise that I wanted textual elements to merge with the visual, so that each would support the other by opening portals to different ways of understanding the work. I built the texts as a kind of map or a set of clues, (I have been really impressed and inspired by George Perec's Life a User's Manual) that in case the viewer wanted, they could look for different meanings in the images, that went deeper than just the visual. The texts were of course also necessary as the historical context was so specific, that part of Finnish history is riddled with uncomfortable truths that people are maybe only now starting to talk about, as the past generation starts to disappear. I think artists have a responsibility to respond to incidents in their own culture.

In an aesthetic and textual sense, I also wanted to recreate the levels of different times I was working with, and to see them in a way as sort of happening at the same time, that there is no past, no present, or future, just this one, stretching and contracting idea of time. Things can happen simultaneously, or in the wrong order, the past can collapse into the future. I guess I'm interested in the impossibility of trying to build a bridge between the living and the dead, reality and art, history and memory, or memory and oblivion.

And then naturally, I felt it really important to add the factual elements in the writing, to point in a very concrete way to the politics and polemics of mining. Otherwise the book would aestheticize something horrendous, and I was aware that that was a really big issue. I was intrigued by the idea that this beautiful, almost otherworldly rock material containing vital elements, had, in human hands turned into something abhorrent that was necessary for our industrial and material trajectory. However, in saying this, I think it's also really important to stress the fact that I do not see myself as outside of this process. Here I am, writing this off a MacBook, reaping the benefits of these technological advancements that have made all these products and ways of life possible, for some.

SS: I am very interested in how cultural inflections and histories emerge and coexist in a book presented in English. While I recognise the necessity of a common language and the reach that provides in terms of audience, I like that you've stated there is a strong articulation of Finnish culture and history that is re-worked in the present by you as someone who in this case, is positioned across cultural boundaries - Finnish and English. The "visual" which can be thought of as general or universal is diverted towards aspects of the culturally specific with the text. It is an important site of articulating your Finnishness. Is this positioning of culture within work made in Finland a strong current amongst artists, or something you are particularly attune to? In speaking between cultures, is this a comfortable place for you or a problematic one?

FH: Yes, I completely agree with you that translating aspects of another culture into a different language is always difficult, and sometimes seems to me, impossible. I would love to read all books in the original language they were written in, it feels one is always missing out when reading a translation, however good it is. It's still an ongoing project for me, to learn at least Russian, so that I could read Russian literature in the original form.

During my childhood I spent long periods of time living in various places, and with time, Finland did start to feel, in a peculiar way, foreign to me. Maybe it also has to do with the fact that I didn't attend a Finnish speaking school until I was 16, so my grasp of the language is, in a way, limited. I used to write a lot when I was younger, but always struggled to find my own language when I wrote, a way to truly express my ideas, so I think photography for me opened up a way to tell the same stories and investigate the same themes through mute images rather than words. Writing still plays an important part in my work, and I think the biggest influences come from the novels I read.

I think this moving around also influenced the way in which I see the world, how I create meaning in it. It is also the reason why archives play such an important part in my work, that those few items and things salvaged when moving, in a way, are an archive of the past that you are about to leave behind. Why are some things saved, others lost? The sense of history we gain from visiting archives, is one which derives from a loaded space. Yet it is a fundamental need that we seem to have, to collect and then preserve, in a strict order, as if there only existed a thin sheet between our very existence and our disappearance, and by preserving artefacts and documents, we somehow hope that we are able continue to exist eternally. To have your narrative immortalized in a story is a way of marking your lived existence as a unique being. In our personal archives, we keep a very carefully curated version of our past, which mirrors all the other archives, in its play of inclusion and exclusion.

A bit on a side street here, so going back to your original question, I do think translating distorts, always. However, with this work, I think the aspects of Finnish culture I speak of are historical and point to a specific time that the whole of Europe shares. This act of silencing a darker area of history is shared across cultures, and I think the form it takes is quite similar, which in a way is interesting. Therefore, I did not find it a problem to be using English. To use a language that only 5 million people speak would feel to me like another act of silencing, when the histories and timeframes I talk about are shared by so many.

I don't think you can ever separate the personal from the historical, and I was interested in how bigger historical events influenced personal decisions and also vice versa. For example, my grandparents met during the war in Petsamo, in Northern Finland. They were working at the Nickel factory there. Just before the war, the nickel deposits had been deemed to be the richest in Europe. Germany depended on nickel for their war effort, and the allies tried to stop them from obtaining it. There were political and armed conflicts relating to the access of these ore deposits, and it therefore affected many of the major political decisions of that time. This is an overlooked area in history, that many are not aware of, but I found it intriguing to follow how ore was moving armies across Europe. The area now belongs to Russia.

I tried to visit the place, Petsamo, or Pechengsky District as it's now known, when I was working on this body of work, but it's all a military zone. It's close to the Arctic so no one is really allowed in. The reason they are turning those areas into military zones, is because everyone is waiting for the ice to melt so that they can start drilling the oil reserves, but also the ore deposits, under the ice. That landscape was affecting the whole of Europe during WW2, and some believe during the End-Permian Extinction. The same is happening now, without people really realising it, or maybe caring about it. Some thought we were bringing the world to an end with WW2, and now we are again at a point where the world most likely will end, due to climate change caused by us.

But I also have to point out that this reference to Finnish culture is only one slice of time that the book deals with. In the book you can follow the personal or historical traces, or you can choose a larger timescale by investigating the geological traces, and their timeline. Maybe the last option of three is what I wish people would eventually think about when they have seen the work. Our story, or the story of one culture is only a drop in the sea, whereas I feel we should be talking about the history of those unseen and forgotten histories that have dominated our past and is dominating also our future.
Grey Cobalt
Loose Joints

(All Rights Reserved. Text @ Sunil Shah & Felicia Honkasalo. Images @ Felicia Honkasalo.)

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Felicia Honkasalo: Objects and Ontologies

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"What is held onto through a photograph, is no longer the disappearing object itself but something that appears or becomes visible in the moment of its vanishing: as it were, the last glance that it casts at us, or the last glimpse of it that we can catch."

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Pegasus is a community youth centre on the Magdalen road. It focuses on theatre production and encourages young people to take part and organised their own plays or take part in current productions. The Pegasus wants to cultivate the aspirations and imagination of youth and help build their confidence.

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Hugh Mangum: the rover who united America

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Though segregation was the law in the south, this photographer went from town to town, bringing black, white and Native Americans of all ages together in studios set up in shops and even tents

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April 24, 1832. Le voyage de Eugène Delacroix au Maroc. 

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April 24, 1832. Le voyage de Eugène Delacroix au Maroc. 

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Eugène Delacroix. Moroccan Interior (1832). The Frick Collection,

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Eugène Delacroix. Moroccan Interior (1832). The Frick Collection,

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City wall of Meknes (Morocco from the sketchbook) (1832)

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City wall of Meknes (Morocco from the sketchbook) (1832)

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Delacroix

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Arab Horseman Attacked by a Lion by Delacroix

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Arab Horseman Attacked by a Lion by Delacroix

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Moroccan Jewish bride watercolor painted by Delacroix, 1832 

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Moroccan Jewish bride watercolor painted by Delacroix, 1832 

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Fez, Irving Penn photographing his wife for Vogue

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Fez, Irving Penn photographing his wife for Vogue

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Fez, online archives

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The (Networked) Image in Conflict - Panel Modern Art Oxford on Thurs 4th April 6pm - FREE for Activating our Archives participants

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The (Networked) Image in Conflict - Panel Modern Art Oxford on Thurs 4th April 6pm - FREE for Activating our Archives participants

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Hi all, we have been invited to attend this panel discussion which is relevant to our work. How social media has become a site for artistic and political activism.

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Nanna Bonde Thylstrup

Nanna Bonde Thylstrup is the author of The Politics of Mass Digitization (MIT Press, 2019). ​She was recently appointed Associate Professor in the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School (CBS). Bonde Thylstrup is affiliated with several large-scale collaborative research projects exploring the role of archives, infrastructures, and cultural memory institutions in the age of digitization and big data. Recently she has been working on issues related to data, waste and environmental memory.

Donatella Della Ratta

Donatella Della Ratta is the author of Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria (Pluto Press, 2018) and Assistant Professor of Communications and Media Studies at John Cabot University, Rome. From 2007 until 2011 she lived in Damascus and carried out extensive media ethnography of Syrian TV series, which became the topic of her Ph.D. research, obtained from the University of Copenhagen in 2013. She is a former Post-Doctoral Fellow at University of Copenhagen and at the Annenberg School for Communication, Pennsylvania University and an Affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. To date, she has authored three monographs on Arab media, and contributed chapters on Syrian media and politics in several edited books. She is a contributor to Italian and international media outlets such as Al Jazeera English, Hyperallergic, Internazionale, and Il Manifesto. She has professional experience as a journalist, TV author and producer, and managed the Arabic-speaking community of the international NGO Creative Commons [ www.creativecommons.org] for five years (2008-2013). She has curated several art exhibitions and film programs on Syria, and she is a co-founder and board member of the web aggregator on creative resistance SyriaUntold [ www.syriauntold.com].

Anthony Downey

Anthony Downey is Professor of Visual Culture in the Middle East and North Africa within the Faculty of Arts, Design and Media at Birmingham City University. He sits on the Editorial Board of Third Text (www.thirdtext.org) and is an Associate Researcher for the Institute of Human Activities. Recent and upcoming publications include Unbearable States: Digital Media and Human Rights after the Arab Spring (forthcoming, 2020), Displacement Activities: Contemporary Art, the Refugee Condition, and the Alibi of Engagement (forthcoming, Sternberg Press, 2019); 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 in the Middle East (Sternberg Press, 2016); Dissonant Archives: Contemporary Visual Culture and Contested Narratives in the Middle East (I.B. Tauris, 2015); and Art and Politics Now (Thames and Hudson, 2014). In 2019, he will launch Research/Practice (Sternberg Press, 2019), which will examine the role and uses of research in artistic practices today.

Nat Muller

Nat Muller is an independent curator and writer. She is an AHRC Midlands3Cities-funded PhD candidate at Birmingham City University researching science fiction in contemporary visual art from the Middle East. She is a regular contributor to art publications and has edited a variety of monographs including Sadik Kwaish Alfraji (Schilt Publishing, 2015) and Nancy Atakan's Passing On (Kehrer Verlag, 2016). She has curated video and film screenings for amongst others Rotterdam's International Film Festival (NL), Norwegian Short Film Festival (NO), International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (DE), and Video D.U.M.B.O (USA). Recent exhibition projects include Spectral Imprints for the Abraaj Group Art Prize in Dubai (2012); This is the Time. This is the Record of the Time at Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam & American University of Beirut Gallery (2014/15); Stirring the Pot of Story for Delfina Foundation's Politics of Food Program in London (2015); the A.M. Qattan 2016 Young Artist of the Year Award at Qalandiya International in Ramallah. She has been appointed curator of the Danish Pavilion for the 58 th Venice Biennale.

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The (Networked) Image in Conflict: Cultural Activism and Visual Culture

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Nanna Bonde Thylstrup Nanna Bonde Thylstrup is the author of The Politics of Mass Digitization (MIT Press, 2019). ​She was recently appointed Associate Professor in the Department of Management, Society and Communication at Copenhagen Business School (CBS).

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Entrance into the MAO cafe/bar

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Insightful read on how politics and the future are being defined by the digital.

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"You taught me language and my profit on it is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language." [1]

Mapping darkness
What is this flurry of data and figures and smiling faces? The interminable, irrepressible expansion of chaos: this is the subject of Hito Steyerl's book, Duty Free Art. The book can be read as a cartography of the looming darkness, the outcome of the boundless intensification of light, and of the unchained proliferation of visual-nervous stimulus.

"What if human evolution responded to the change of light sources around us? For millions of years, the only light on earth came from the stars and the sun, maybe some fire or candles. Now there are a lot of electric lights and tons of screens."

The metaphor of light and darkness has been important in the mythology of modern culture since the Enlightenment, and even before. But now, in the dawn of the new millennium, the old metaphor of light and darkness comes back with new meaning: light has blinded our vision, and darkness expands. As James Bridle states:

"The old idea that more visibility and more democratic access may be useful for stopping violence or exploitation is now groundless...we find ourselves connected to vast repositories of knowledge, and yet we have not learned to think. In fact the opposite is true: that which was intended to enlighten the world in practice darkens it." [2]

The old age of Darkness, referred to as the 'Middle Ages' by Europeans, was connection and interaction-poor. Contemporary darkness, on the contrary, is hyper-connected and highly inter-dependent. Despite this darkness, the global machine only becomes faster.

How is this possible? How can we go on running on empty?

The answer is here, in the following words:

"Bureaucracy is based on utopian thinking because it assumes people to be perfect from its own point of view."

The utopian thinking of functionality keeps the wheels turning, but human life does not conform to perfection. Nevertheless, perfection has taken the upper hand in the business of everyday life, and it is enforcing human bodies in a logico-mathematical confine that we are unable to escape.

The convergence of Massive Data Extraction and devices of Artificial Intelligence is the all-encompassing trend of the present phase of Evolution: it is the ultimate case of the logico-mathematical trap.

This convergence paves the way to the creation of the cognitive automaton, based on the inscription of the future in the computational present.

The problem is that the cognitive automaton has to confront itself with the force of chaos. The Automaton is the final avatar of Modern rationality, but it is emerging in the middle of the chaotic sphere of mental maelstrom.

Prescription and prophecy
Language is the dimension in which the future is shaped. The future is inscribed in the present as a possibility among many: language acts as a catalyst.

There are many ways the future is implied through language: code, data, prescription, injunction, paradoxical injunction and prophecy are different modes through which this happens.

The interplay between big data and Artificial Intelligence aims to place automatisms in the social language, so that an appalling (or reassuring?) perspective emerges: the future is no longer a range of possibilities, but a logically necessary sequence of the states of the world.

I will outline how the cognitive automaton is constructed by reflecting on the prescriptive inscription that is implemented through the automatisms in action. I call automatism the penetration of a logical device in the flesh of a linguistic agent. The infiltration of automatisms in the field of social action (in the economy, in language, in affection) shapes the global cognitive automaton.

In the (self)construction of the automaton, the prescriptive inscription replaces prophecy and replaces law. It absorbs code, nullifying the unpredictability of the future. In other words, it nullifies the (relative) autonomy of the future from the present.

I want to look at this question from the point of view of prophecy. Prophecy is not, as we tend to think, a precognition of the future. Rather, it is a perception of the imminent, i.e. understanding what is written in the present. Not as a secret, but as an enigma.

Imminent is the immanent tendency, inscribed in the present composition of matter: physical and psychological matter. Sensing the imminent, interpreting the immanence as tendency; this is the task of those people who once upon a time were called prophets.

The science of politics is not useful in understanding the contemporary crisis and prefiguring the imminent evolution. Nothing is more empty, inconsistent and superficial than the pseudo-science called 'politology'. What we need is an interpretation of our maladies as symptoms of this tendency. I would call psycho-manteia the interpreting of maladies.

Duty Free Art, in my view, is a psychomantic book.

Sadness, depression, panic, attention disorders, the dementia epidemic: these are the symptoms that we need to interpret in order to act prophetically, to interpret the enigma of 'future'. We will not discover some secret, necessary truth, only the symptoms of possibility.

The (infinite) activity of interpreting the enigma (of malady as enigma) is the action of generating future, of creating events that are never exhaustive, never true, never final, but always unstable as the interpretation of an enigma.

This is why great politics is similar to poetry, the intuition of the possibile. The low politics we are witnessing today is limited to our management of the probable, the way we pit the probable against the possible (Statistikon is the name Warren Neidich gives to this reduction of the possible to the probable, which is is turned into necessity by the prescriptive machine).

Unpredictability in question
The harbingers of cynicism that prevail in the contemporary cultural environment bend their head in front of the inevitable, while forgetting that in human history the inevitable never succeeds. What always succeeds is the unpredictable.

But a question breaks out: do we still dwell in the sphere of human history? Or, on the contrary, have we transitioned into the sphere of the cognitive automaton, where history does not exist, where unpredictability is erased, and the infinite complexity of reality has been reduced to the combination of computable units, thanks to the connection of machines for data extraction (probability) and by devices endowed with artificial intelligence?

This is why I wonder if the unpredictable still exists, and if great politics are still thinkable. Obviously, I do not have an answer. I don't know, I cannot know, as my meditation is about unpredictability, and I cannot know if the unpredictable will emerge from the ripetitive series of probability that the intelligent machine aims to turn into necessity.

While the construction of the cognitive automaton is proceeding full steam, are we still able to distinguish the possible from the probable? Are we still capable of free action, or is the only effective action the one that follows the rules shaped by the dates extracted from social existence, and interfaced with intelligent machines?

The Neidich's Statistikon is the extraction of data linked with the insertion of prescriptive devices. The Automaton emerges from the concatenation of data extraction and artificial intelligence. Computational prophecy.

Automatic prescription
As I said before, there are many semiotic techniques for inscribing the future in the present: code, injunction, paradoxical injunction and prophecy. Nevertheless, the cognitive automaton is based on a new mode, which I call automatic prescription.

Let me explain. When the Government emits a law that imposes or forbids, it is inscribing the future in the present act of language. But citizens can violate that law, sometimes at their own risk.

Code is different. Code is a linguistic tool that generates real objects according to a homogenous format. Code generates enunciations and events that can only be deployed if they follow the format and the logical implication of the code itself.

Prophecy concerns the relation between an act of language and an event that will or will not actualise the content of the prophetic enunciation. A particular kind is the so called self-fulfilling prophecy: an act of language that creates pragmatic conditions in which the content of the prophecy is established as truth. If one enters a crowded space shouting that a catastrophe is going to happen, it's quite likely that the prophecy will be fulfilled. If a well known rating agency predicts that the financial value of a company will dramatically collapse tomorrow, the collapse will probably happen.

The interfacing of data with logical devices finalised and self-evolving turns social language in automated self-fulfilling prophecy.

Prescription is the insertion of automatic semiotic codes into the social organism.

In the last decades, political action has repeatedly shown to be impotent in the face of financial rule. The financial rule is the generative code that pre-scribes social language: the machine that turns prophecy into prescription.

Is the impotence of politics to be seen as a temporary inability?

Or, on the contrary, have we entered a sphere that is impervious to political action, impervious to freedom, as the data extracted from the present are linked automatically with intelligent semiotic machines?

"Google researchers call the act of creating a pattern or an image from nothing but noise "inceptionism" or "deep dreaming." But these entities are far from mere hallucinations. If they are dreams, those dreams can be interpreted as condensations or displacements of the current technological disposition. They reveal the networked operations of computational image creation, certain presets of machinic vision, its hardwired ideologies and preferences."

The political art of the future (that I call psychomanteia) is based on the same principle: we must interpret the noise that comes from the chaos of the social brain as a meaningful cartography: mapping darkness indeed.

Final (essential) caveat
What I have outlined is a hypothetical scenario, drawn from the pages of Steyerl's book. Can we really believe that the cognitive automaton will prevail upon chaos? Will the human mind shift into connective-computational mode, or will the brutality of the insertion provoke a demential reaction of the collective brain? The answer may be found in the dimension of psycho-manteia.

But this is another story.

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"You taught me language and my profit on it is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language." [1] Mapping darkness What is this flurry of data and figures and smiling faces? The interminable, irrepressible expansion of chaos: this is the subject of Hito Steyerl's book, Duty Free Art .