Events
Special Events

Image as Location Conference

Special Events
22 Oct, 2014

Image as Location Conference

Updates

Read the Revisited post of this event.

Watch the videos of this event.

Original Post

When man-made images constitute the evidence of our environment and even our existence, how is our perception of the world manipulated and shaped?

Our planet is wrapped in images. From stratospheric satellite stills to disembodied medical x-rays, we use pictures to describe our environment with unprecedented frequency. Images have become the common language that allows us to not only understand our present landscape, but also access the inaccessible.

Yet, as Emmanuel Alloa wrote, images are “re-articulations of a past that has never been [truly] present.” We must ask ourselves then: what dangers and what possibilities arise from defining our location through image?

State mandated degradation of pixelation on surveillance footage ensures that we are unable to perceive the evidence of drone strikes, altering our perception of foreign policy. Meanwhile, sublime hubble telescope imagery invokes the American West and our manifest destiny, furthering space exploration. As ubiquitous street view technology allows us to encounter the fringes of a city — its dumps and mortuaries and scrap yards — forcing us to reckon with our urban landscape, mapping interiors peels back the shadow of the real to reveal the traces of present time within the grand scale of oblivion.

At Image as Location, a Bay Area festival that explores the relationship between people, pictures, and places, an international group of experts discuss and visualize how images define locations. Through exhibitions, conferences and workshops, artists, theorists, and technologists from Europe and the Americas will question how we are shaped by the images of our world.

Conference Schedule

Brought to you by Books in Browsers, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, the Goethe-Institut San Francisco, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, swissnex San Francisco, and the UC Berkeley Center for New Media; media sponsorship provided by KQED and NewHive.com.

Previous Next