A. S. Aurora Hoel, “On Imaging Technologies and the Operational Realities They Give Rise to”
Wednesday, July 19, 2023, 6:15 – 8:00 PM CEST / 9:15 – 11:00 AM PST
Hybrid lecture, to view online: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85659345839?pwd=UmFZYU0xN1NxMGJ1MjlQM054NXgvZz09. Meeting-ID: 856 5934 5839 | Password: 148258
This presentation investigates the notions of scale and scalability from an eco-operational perspective. My point of departure is that the human way of being-in-the-world is always infused with technicity. This implies two things: First, that the human scale is not fixed but changeable, and second, that living bodies and technical machines are best understood in their entanglement. I discuss the limits of scalability by focusing on how imaging technologies displace the human-world relationship by instituting new operational realities that are neither human nor nonhuman but irreducibly both.
A. S. Aurora Hoel is a professor of media studies and visual culture at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her research focuses on operational uses of technologies and media, including marine remote sensing, machine images, brain images, image-guided surgery, and scientific uses of photography. In parallel with this, she seeks to develop a theoretical framework to better understand operational images and media, seeking to establish an operational aesthetics and epistemology. Hoel has published widely in the overlapping fields of media theory, science studies, and the philosophy of technology.
The presentation is part of the on-site workshop “Scalability and its Limits in Photography and (Digital) Sculpture” given at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, München, July 19-21, 2023. The workshop aims to focus on scaling as a cultural technique, and as an imaging practice fundamentally based on procedures of measuring, scanning, transforming, and projecting objects in time and space. Investigating the manifold intersections between two- and three-dimensionality, the workshop will examine these relations from an art history, image science, and media studies perspective.