Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA)
  • News
  • Education
    • Course Overview
    • NICA-curriculum
    • Core Courses
    • Archive
  • Research
    • Dissertation Defenses
  • Organization
  • Contact
  • Search
  • Menu Menu

Our Mechanical Eyes — On Seeing Machines

July 11, 2019/in Announcements /by Chantal

Call for Papers
Kunstlicht Vol. 40 (2019), No. 4.

Managing Editors: Cleo Foole and Joyce Poot
Deadline for proposals: 12th August 2019

In the exhibition Rothko and I*, *alone without your phone, the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam (Schiedam, NL) invites their visitors for an “intimate experience” with Rothko’s Grey, Orange on Maroon, No 8 (1960); the visitor can observe the painting, but has to leave their phone at the door.[1] The mobile phone is seen as blocking the way when it comes to attaining intimacy with the painting. This presence of smartphones in the exhibition space, not only as communication devices, but also as devices for recording and looking through, has increased dramatically over the last few years. With it came opportunities to share the experience and to prolong one’s visit digitally, yet, as Rothko and I implies, the smartphone also changes how we see. Directed towards sharing, the experience of an artwork becomes a self-reflexive re-creation, wherein the spectator is as much the represented object as the artwork itself.

With the rise of ‘smart technologies’ the meaning of ‘seeing,’ ‘looking,’ and ‘viewing,’ is changing. In Judy Radul’s 2017 installation the king, the door, the thief, the window, the stranger, the camera, the reflexivity of (digital) spectatorship is already incorporated in the artwork. It is not the spectator who records and curates her own experience, but the ‘seeing’ objects Radul places in the exhibition space. The spectator is confronted with video footage of themselves walking through the installation just moments before, causing a distancing between the image of the spectator wandering through the installation and the actual experience of this wandering. But strikingly, the cameras do not follow the spectator, but are programmed to fulfil a pre-set choreography. Therefore, Radul’s cameras are neither surveillance nor spectacle — or are they both? And if so, where should we place the spectator — who not only watches the spectacle, but also sees themselves, and who is not simply observed, but becomes complicit in this surveillance.

Both of these examples show how what it means to be a seeing subject has become vague. In Radul’s installation, there is both the spectator’s human vision and the installation’s machine vision, but in fact, we carry smart technologies with us everywhere we go, yet we are only confronted with this when we are asked to abandon our smartphones. Machine vision is different from human seeing, yet it has come to influence what and how we see; it can look at us, look for us, and regulate what is shown to us. In 1975, Michel Foucault wrote that our society had become “not one of spectacle but of surveillance… We are neither in the amphitheatre nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine.”[2] In the age of intelligent machine vision however, spectacle and surveillance seem to be no longer juxtaposed. The sharer-spectator spectacularizes themselves in an act of (self) observation. They have come to experience the artwork and themselves as an interactive spectacle. Here, we understand the spectacle to interfere with human agency and understanding, as “a social relation between people that is mediated by images,” it is “a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at,” according to Guy Debord.[3] The spectacle becomes interactive when the encounter of the (former) spectator with the spectacle becomes the spectacle itself, rendering the spectator in part object of her own gaze.

This issue of Kunstlicht is an attempt to go beyond an analytical account of perception, and question what it means to be a seer in a world of mechanical eyes. We are interested in how the interactive spectacle influences the field of contemporary art, where the experience of the spectator plays a pivotal role. Radul is only one among many artists who explore the possibilities of digital technology, which appears to create new opportunities for interactivity. Still, the (proposed) interaction can not only emancipate the spectator, it can also limit their agency. And moreover, the museum’s presentation of Rothko’s Grey, Orange on Maroon, No 8 is exemplary of the renewed focus on direct perception, showing a fetishization of the unmediated and thus “intimate experience.” Yet, it is questionable if such a momentary return to another, perhaps already archaic way of seeing is even possible — or desirable.

Instead, we might have to rethink Guy Debord’s spectacle in the age of digital interaction. Does Debord’s critique of the spectacle — to stay with technological terms — need an update? Can we argue that we find ourselves in an interactive spectacle, or could we go to a digital playground? Do mediated screens activate spectators, by making them more involved through appropriating what they look at, functioning as a kind of playbour? How does this online representation reflect back on the physical experience of artworks? And if smart technologies look at and for us, and when they can even regulate what is shown to us, then is there still any direct perception possible? Can the spectator still wander, when their movements are observed, regulated, stored, and then anticipated upon?

To explore the ways in which the spectator of contemporary society sees, we open the call to academic articles, image-based contributions, and experimental text contributions from writers and artists who research perception and its subversion in the digital age; those who offer a digital detournement, those who expose the limits of the digital human and those that transgress. We encourage writers to discuss the spectator of the future as well — we encourage predictions, urges, and underbelly feelings. Proposals (200-300 words) with attached résumés can be submitted until August 12th 2019 via redactie@tijdschriftkunstlicht.nl. Selected authors will be invited to write a 2,000–3,000-word paper (excluding notes).

Authors who publish in Kunstlicht will receive three complimentary copies. Unfortunately, Kunstlicht is not able to provide an author’s honorarium. Two articles will be selected to be available online. Two years following publication, papers will be submitted to the freely accessible online archive. The editorial board reserves the right to decline contributions.

For more info: https://tijdschriftkunstlicht.nl/call-for-papers-our-mechanical-eyes-on-seeing-machines-kunstlicht-vol-40-2019-no-4/

[1] Rothko en ik*, *In je eentje zonder telefoon, website Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, 24 June 2018. Online: https://www.stedelijkmuseumschiedam.nl/tentoonstelling/rothko-ik/

[2] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 1975 (1991), 217.

[3] Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 1967 (1984), thesis 2 & 4.



Newsletter

Subscribe to our newsletter to receive updates about our news, lectures, seminars, workshops and more.

Share this page

  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on WhatsApp
  • Share on LinkedIn
  • Share by Mail

Newsletter

Subscribe to our newsletter to receive updates about our news, lectures, seminars, workshops and more.

Research Schools

  • Huizinga: Cultural History (Amsterdam)
  • Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies NOG (Utrecht)
  • OSK: Art History (Utrecht)
  • OSL: Literary Studies (Amsterdam)
  • RMeS: Media Studies (Amsterdam)

Research Masters

  • Art and Visual Culture (Radboud University Nijmegen)
  • Art Studies (University of Amsterdam)
  • Artistic Research (UvA)
  • Arts and Culture (Leiden University)
  • Cultural Analysis (Amsterdam, UvA)
  • Gender and Ethnicity (Utrecht)
  • International Performance Research (University of Amsterdam)
  • Literary and Cultural Studies (Groningen)
  • Literary Studies (Leiden University)
  • Media, Art and Performance Studies (Utrecht University)
  • Religious Studies (Amsterdam, UvA)
  • Visual Arts, Media and Architecture (Amsterdam, VU)

Affiliated Research Institutes

  • Amsterdam Research Center for Gender and Sexuality (ARC-GS)
  • Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA)
  • Centre for Gender and Diversity, Maastricht

NICA archive 2010 – 2020

Read all articles published by Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis 2010 to 2020.

© 2021 - Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA)
Website door Nikolai NL Design Studio
  • Privacy
  • Contact
Scroll to top

We use cookies only for the purposes of measuring effectiveness of our website. Our Privacy Statement.

OK

Cookie and Privacy Settings



How we use cookies

We may request cookies to be set on your device. We use cookies to let us know when you visit our websites, how you interact with us, to enrich your user experience, and to customize your relationship with our website.

Click on the different category headings to find out more. You can also change some of your preferences. Note that blocking some types of cookies may impact your experience on our websites and the services we are able to offer.

Essential Website Cookies

These cookies are strictly necessary to provide you with services available through our website and to use some of its features.

Because these cookies are strictly necessary to deliver the website, refuseing them will have impact how our site functions. You always can block or delete cookies by changing your browser settings and force blocking all cookies on this website. But this will always prompt you to accept/refuse cookies when revisiting our site.

We fully respect if you want to refuse cookies but to avoid asking you again and again kindly allow us to store a cookie for that. You are free to opt out any time or opt in for other cookies to get a better experience. If you refuse cookies we will remove all set cookies in our domain.

We provide you with a list of stored cookies on your computer in our domain so you can check what we stored. Due to security reasons we are not able to show or modify cookies from other domains. You can check these in your browser security settings.

Other external services

We also use different external services like Google Webfonts, Google Maps, and external Video providers. Since these providers may collect personal data like your IP address we allow you to block them here. Please be aware that this might heavily reduce the functionality and appearance of our site. Changes will take effect once you reload the page.

Google Webfont Settings:

Google Map Settings:

Google reCaptcha Settings:

Vimeo and Youtube video embeds:

Privacy Policy

You can read about our cookies and privacy settings in detail on our Privacy Policy Page.

Privacy
Accept settingsHide notification only