Cultural Politics of the Computational Image
Computer vision and computational photography are proliferating rapidly worldwide, transforming the cultural understanding of image making in the process. While facial recognition technologies have been subject to considerable debate in the English-language press, their uneven global spread and reception is often glossed over and poorly understood. Beyond the face, the increasing role of automated image processing in areas like entertainment, social media, transportation, and surveillance is only just beginning to be grappled with from a visual culture perspective. This workshop from the MIT Global Mediations Lab brings together scholars coming at these questions from humanities and critical media studies approaches, and focusing on cultural contexts beyond the United States.
Please RSVP here by April 21 if you plan to attend and would like us to provide a lunch for you.
Schedule
(click title for abstract + presenter bio)
9:45 Welcome
10:00-11:45 Panel 1. Biometric Images
Moderator: Paloma Duong (Global Mediations Lab, CMS/W)
- Mariel García-Montes (MIT), “Privacy by [Electoral Circumstance]: Safeguards against Computer Vision in Mexico’s National Voter Registry”
- Rin Huang (University of Washington, Seattle), “The Pervasive Images: Airport Security, Imaging Infrastructure, and Biometric Privacy in China”
- David Humphrey (Michigan State), “Seeing Attention: Line-of-sight Tracking and Marketing Analytics”
11:45-12:45 Lunch at venue*
12:45-2:30 Panel 2. Generative Images
Moderator: Ian Condry (Global Mediations Lab, CMS/W)
- Mihaela Mihailova (San Francisco State University), “Deepfakes in/as Critical Computational Art Practice”
- Hamidreza Nassiri (Independent Scholar), “Automated Orientalism or Intercultural Dialogue? Rethinking Computational Imaging and Generative AI Systems”
- Fabian Offert (UC Santa Barbara) and Thao Phan (Australian National University), “Are Some Things (Still) Unrepresentable?”
3:00-4:45 Panel 3. Infrastructural Images
Moderator: Paul Roquet (Global Mediations Lab, CMS/W)
- Owen Leonard (UC Santa Barbara), “The Global Perception Stack”
- Ardalan SadeghiKivi (MIT) and Tobias Putrih (MIT), “Computational Analysis of Color Semantics in Google Image Search: Exploring Socio-Political Dimensions of Mass Consumption through Regional Imaging Data”
- Minji Chun (Oxford), “Algorithmic Oblivion: Computational Erasure and Historical Memory in Jungwoo Lee’s Artwork”
* provided for participants + attendees who RSVP’d
Inquiries: contact workshop organizer and Global Mediations Lab lead Paul Roquet.