Nonhuman Photography

Catalog description

Our culture is increasingly made up of nonhuman actors. Facial recognition algorithms spend more hours "seeing" in a day than humans; drones equipped with visual sensors conduct our warfare; voice chat bots call businesses and make appointments for us. Meanwhile, humans conduct labor that we view as the work of bots: posting disinformation for political gain, or mass-producing children's YouTube videos for ad revenue. As objects begin to see and think, how can we understand the role of human agency and the possibilities (or lack thereof) for artistic expression in this space? What does the future of art look like when more photographs are taken as surveillance than by individuals, or when important cultural producers are nonhuman intelligences? In Nonhuman Photography, we will attempt to interrogate these ideas from an artist's perspective, approaching nonhuman agents and the various components that comprise them both as tools for studio work and as generative entities in their own right. Over the course of the semester we will read and discuss these issues extensively, while engaging in studio projects in a variety of media. While the course bears the title "photography", we will find that many of these tools will be non-photographic or para-photographic, and as a result many of our studio projects will be interdisciplinary. This course takes its name from Joanna Zylinska's Nonhuman Photography, parts of which we will examine over the course of the semester.