Exhibition | Claude Gillot: Satire in the Age of Reason
Claude Gillot, Scene of the Two Carriages / Les Deux carrosses, ca. 1710–12, oil on canvas, 127 × 160 cm
(Paris: Musée du Louvre, RF2405)
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Now on view at The Morgan:
Claude Gillot: Satire in the Age of Reason
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, 24 February — 28 May 2023
Curated by Jennifer Tonkovich
Around 1700, as an increasingly pious Louis XIV withdrew to Versailles, Paris flourished. The dynamic artistic scene included specialists such as Claude Gillot (1673–1722) who forged a career largely outside of the Royal Academy, designing everything from opera costumes to tapestries.
Known primarily as a draftsman, Gillot specialized in scenes of satire. He found his subjects among the irreverent commedia dell’arte performances at fairground theaters, in the writings of satirists who waged the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, and in the antics of vice-ridden satyrs whose bacchanals exposed human folly. Gillot’s amusing critiques and rational perspective heralded the advent of the Age of Reason while his innovative approach attracted the most talented artists of the next generation, Antoine Watteau and Nicolas Lancret, to his studio.
With over seventy drawings, prints, and paintings, including an exceptional contingent from the Louvre, Claude Gillot: Satire in the Age of Reason explores the artist’s inventive and highly original draftsmanship and places his work in the context of the artistic and intellectual activity in Paris at the dawn of a new century.
The catalogue accompanying the exhibition, published by Paul Holberton, will provide the first comprehensive account of Gillot’s career.
Jennifer Tonkovich, Claude Gillot: Satire in the Age of Reason (London: Paul Holberton, 2023), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-1913645373, $60.
Exhibition | Sublime Ideas: Drawings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Fantasy of a Magnificent Forum, ca. 1765, pen and brown ink and wash, 33 × 49 cm
(New York: Morgan Library & Museum, 1974.27)
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From the press release for the exhibition:
Sublime Ideas: Drawings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, 10 March — 4 June 2023
Curated by John Marciari
In a letter written near the end of his life, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) explained to his sister that he had lived away from his native Venice because he could find no patrons there willing to support “the sublimity of my ideas.” He resided instead in Rome, where he became internationally famous working as a printmaker, designer, architect, archaeologist, theorist, dealer, and polemicist. While Piranesi’s lasting fame is based above all on his etchings, he was also an intense, accomplished, and versatile draftsman, and much of his work was first developed in vigorous drawings.
The Morgan holds the largest and most important collection of Piranesi’s drawings, well over 100 works that encompass his early architectural capricci, studies for prints, measured design drawings, sketches for a range of decorative objects, a variety of figural drawings, and views of Rome and Pompeii. These form the core of the exhibition, which will also include seldom-exhibited loans from a number of private collections. Accompanied by a publication offering a complete survey of Piranesi’s work as a draftsman, the exhibition will be the most comprehensive look at Piranesi’s drawings in more than a generation.
This exhibition begins with Piranesi’s interest in theoretical architecture, showing works that combine an imaginative and fantastic approach to architectural study with a bookish understanding of ancient buildings and a Romantic appreciation of ruins. This blend of fantasy and theory would eventually give birth to the Invenzioni caprici di carceri (Capricious Inventions of Prisons), his most famous work. The drawings in the Morgan’s collection show how Piranesi’s work developed from precise architectural drawings to imaginative fantasies. Later sections of the exhibition document Piranesi’s study of the inventive work of Tiepolo in a series of trips to his native Venice, his turn from architectural theory and fantasy to archaeology, and his work as a practicing architect and as a designer and dealer of classicizing interior decoration.
The exhibition also highlights the role of paper in Piranesi’s working practice, showing his use and reuse of earlier drawings in later works. Close study of his surviving sheets makes clear that Piranesi preserved drawings in the workshop to serve as inspiration for future projects, and many sheets have reworking that can be dated years after the original drawing, a testament to the continual reuse of his archive.
Highlights of the exhibition include Design for a Ceremonial Gondola (1745–47), a large and fanciful design for a craft that was surely never set afloat; Piranesi nonetheless reused much of the decorative language in subsequent works. Piranesi’s Fantasy of a Magnificent Forum (ca. 1765) is one of his most accomplished fantasies, showing a play on ancient Roman architecture in a dramatic sketch that was likely dashed off as a command performance of his skill as a draftsman. The Proposed Alteration of San Giovanni in Laterano, with Columnar Ambulatory (ca. 1763–64) is Piranesi’s largest architectural drawing, a rendering almost five feet wide with an ambitious plan for the expansion of one of the largest churches in Rome. In addition, this exhibition includes a number of preparatory designs for his etchings, including very rare proof impressions of his printed views of Rome and Tivoli with drawn corrections by the artist. The exhibition ends with a group of large drawings of Pompeii, made in the bold style that Piranesi adopted in the last few years of his life.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi and workshop, Proposal for the Alteration of San Giovanni in Laterano, with Columnar Ambulatory, ca. 1763-64, pen and brown ink and wash, and gray wash, over graphite, on paper, 21 × 58 inches (New York: Morgan Library & Museum, 1966.11:55).
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The Morgan’s Director, Colin B. Bailey, said, “Given the depth of our collection of drawings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the Morgan has long been a leading institution in the study of his works. This new exhibition, the most complete showing of our Piranesis since 1989, reflects long study as well as new discoveries, and will bring Piranesi alive to a new generation of visitors.”
This exhibition is curated by John Marciari, Charles W. Engelhard Curator, Head of the Department of Drawings and Prints, and Curatorial Chair. Marciari is also the author of the accompanying publication, which reaches beyond the Morgan’s collections to offer a complete survey of Piranesi’s work as a draftsman. Marciari explains, “Very few of Piranesi’s drawings were carefully finished works made for sale or exhibition, but in looking closely at the hundreds of working drawings that survive, we not only see the artist devising new ideas and working through problems, but also understand how the archive of drawings served his workshop as a constant source of inspiration.”
John Marciari, Sublime Ideas: Drawings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2023), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1913645380, £40 / $60.
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Note (added 6 March 2023) — The exhibition was originally planned for 2020 (May–September) to mark the 300th anniversary of Piranesi’s birth; like so many other things, it had to be rescheduled for obvious reasons.
Exhibition | Cabinet of Dutch Drawings: The 18th Century
Isaac de Moucheron, Italian Landscape with Trees and a Port / Paysage italien avec arbres et un port, 1738
(Brussels: Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique; photo by J. Geleyns)
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Now on view at the Fondation Custodia / Collection Frits Lugt:
Cabinet of Dutch Drawings: The 18th Century, from the Collection of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium / Cabinet de dessins néerlandais: Le XVIIIe siècle
Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, 1 February — 23 May 2019
Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede, 2020
Fondation Custodia / Collection Frits Lugt, Paris, 25 February — 14 May 2023
Curated by Stefaan Hautekeete, Robert-Jan te Rijdt, and Charles Dumas
The Fondation Custodia presents a selection of eighty eighteenth-century drawings, assembled by three generations in the city of Breda, in the province of North Brabant. The entire collection was bequeathed to the Belgian state in 1911, and the works were deposited in the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique.
Bernard Picart, Nu féminin assis, sanguine, 30 × 36 cm (Brussels: Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique).
Many eighteenth-century drawings are preparatory studies for paintings. But drawings were also made for a different purpose, created to be sold as works of art in their own right, albeit on paper. This presupposes a large number of collectors who kept drawings in folders and albums, and who viewed and enjoyed them with fellow enthusiasts or in a family context. The phenomenon became widespread throughout the century and artists capitalised on this market. More than ever, they produced highly finished drawings which were appreciated by collectors of sophisticated taste.
The works in the exhibition provide a better understanding and appreciation of the art of drawing at a time when commerce, science, and culture were experiencing unprecedented development in the Netherlands. At the beginning of the century, historical and mythological scenes were in fashion, but public taste changed and tended to favour representations of an ‘ideal world’, before moving towards greater realism with a production that focused more on landscapes, city views, and interior scenes. Draughtsmen also did not hesitate to take inspiration from the old masters of the 17th century.
The exhibition is a collaboration with the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, where it was presented in 2019. It was then shown at the Rijksmuseum Twenthe, in Enschede, in 2020. The exhibition is accompanied by a thoroughly documented catalogue published in French and in Dutch. It is vividly written by a group of specialists led by Stefaan Hautekeete, Curator of Drawings at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, who, together with experts Robert-Jan te Rijdt and Charles Dumas, was responsible for the selection of works.
Cabinet des plus merveilleux dessins: Dessins néerlandais du XVIIIe siècle issus des collections des Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique (Ghent: Snoeck Publishers, 2019), 223 pages, ISBN: 978-9461615176 (French version) / ISBN: 978-8461615169 (Dutch version), €29.
Exhibition | Drawing in Britain, 1700–1900, New Acquisitions
Opening in April at the National Gallery of Art in DC:
Drawing in Britain, 1700–1900: New Additions to the Collection
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 2 April — 6 August 2023
Curated by Stacey Sell
John Hoppner, A Young Boy Seated beneath a Tree, ca. 1790s/1810, red and black chalk with brush and grey and black ink (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2022.78.1).
Selected entirely from the National Gallery’s permanent collection, this exhibition of approximately 80 recently acquired drawings and watercolors provides an overview of two centuries of British art.
Works on view reveal European influences on British art starting in the 1700s. They trace the development of watercolor as a national specialty and introduce the varied approaches that emerged during the Victorian era. Drawing in Britain not only includes significant examples of the landscapes that are traditionally associated with British art, but it also highlights portraits, history scenes, and nude studies. Works by British women provide glimpses into the lives and work of several fascinating yet little-known artists.
The exhibition is curated by Stacey Sell, associate curator of old master drawings, National Gallery of Art, Washington.
6th Annual Ricciardi Prize from Master Drawings
From Master Drawings:
Sixth Annual Ricciardi Prize from Master Drawings
Submissions due by 15 November 2023
Édouard Manet, Woman Writing, brush and black ink on paper (Clark Art Institute, MA).
Master Drawings is now accepting submissions for the Sixth Annual Ricciardi Prize for Young Scholars. The $5,000 award is given to the best new and unpublished article on a drawing topic (of any period) by a scholar under the age of 40. The winning submission will be published in a 2024 issue of Master Drawings. Information about past winners and finalists is available here.
The average article length is between 2,500 and 3,750 words, with five to twenty illustrations. Submissions should be no longer than 10,000 words and have no more than 100 footnotes. Please note that all submissions must be in article form, following the format of the journal. We will not consider submissions of seminar papers, dissertation chapters, or other written material that has not been adapted into the format of a journal article. Written material that has been previously published, or is scheduled for future publication, will not be eligible. Articles may be submitted in any language. Be sure to include a 100 word abstract outlining the scope of your article with your submission, along with a current CV or resume, as well as your birth date. Please submit your application online by 15 November 2023. If the file is too large, please use Wetransfer.com addressed to administrator@masterdrawings.org.
Call for Articles | Spring 2024 Issue of J18: Color
From the Call for Papers:
Journal18, Issue #17 (Spring 2024) — Color
Issue edited by Ewa Lajer-Burcharth and Thea Goldring
Proposals due by 1 April 2023; finished articles will be due by 1 September 2023
The question of color has been at the center of artistic debates at least since the seventeenth century, and it has remained a key issue in the historiography of art. What may be at stake in reconsidering color in its historical dimensions now? Recent research on the issue has gone in two directions. On the one hand, color has been studied as a material substance and a technology. Scholars have documented the relation between technological, industrial, and commercial developments and the quality, range, and availability of pigments and colorants available to artists, manufacturers, and consumers. Another approach has focused on the key role of color in the construction of social, racial, and gender hierarchies. Recent scholarship has revealed the intimate connection between aesthetic debates on chroma and the development of the modern discourse of race. Moreover, the eighteenth century’s feminization of color entangled with the notions of make-up and artifice has been reexamined. Clearly, it is no longer viable to think of color in purely aesthetic, ideologically innocent terms.
This issue of Journal18 aims to consider how the current interest in materiality and the matter of art could be harnessed to alter–enrich, complicate, or challenge–our understanding of the historical functions and social and cultural meanings of color in the long eighteenth century. In what ways may the materialist discussion of color as a substance inflect the account of its ideological and discursive functions? What were the new meanings and effects of color as the physical product and sign of growing global trade networks, colonial and slave economies, and expanding empires? How did colored materials—pigments, dyes, feathers, shells, mineral—serve as tools of hybridity and a means to delineate cultural difference? Can color’s inherent capacity for infinite nuance offer modern art historians alternative lenses onto to the past? We welcome papers that are attuned to color’s mobility, look beyond Western Europe, and decentralize Euro-centric narratives. We are especially interested in papers that consider the broader methodological questions raised by their subject and seek to develop tools to address the urgent issues posed by color.
Issue Editors
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Harvard University
Thea Goldring, Harvard University
To submit a proposal, send an abstract (250 words) and brief biography by 1 April 2023 to the following three addresses: editor@journal18.org, burchart@fas.harvard.edu, and tgoldring@g.harvard.edu. Articles should not exceed 6000 words (including footnotes) and will be due by 1 September 2023. For further details on submission and Journal18 house style, see Information for Authors.
Conference | Rethinking British and European Romanticisms
From ArtHist.net and Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena:
Rethinking British and European Romanticisms in Transnational Dimensions
Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Rosensäle, 28–30 March 2023
Organized by Elisabeth Ansel, Johannes Grave, Richard Johns, Christin Neubauer, and Elizabeth Prettejohn
J.M.W. Turner, A Paddle-steamer in a Storm, ca. 1841, watercolor, graphite, and scratching out on medium, slightly textured, cream wove paper (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1977.14.4717).
The workshop is a first-time cooperation between the History of Art Departments of the University of York and the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. Considering the institution’s main research areas, the event aims to discuss the different concepts of Europe present in the art and culture of Romanticism.
In recent years, national tendencies have challenged the European idea, exemplified by the wake of Brexit and its aftermath. In this context, the question arises to what extent European and national identity concepts can be reconciled. Today’s debate between Britain and Europe still roots in the divergent notions of national identity that manifested in several European countries in the 1800s. This workshop, therefore, addresses the relationship between visual images and constructions of nationality and questions how European Romanticism can be understood. In contrast to literary studies, investigating transnational transfer processes of Romantic movements has been a desideratum in art historical research. Considering transcultural methods, the participants will reflect national patterns of thought and Romantic identities not as fixed but as processual and hybrid phenomena within the framework of the binational exchange. Based on individual case studies, the event aims to reevaluate the complex interplay of alterity and reciprocity of the relations between cultural spaces. For questions or more information, please contact, europaeischeromantik@uni-jena.de.
Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)
T U E S D A Y , 2 8 M A R C H 2 0 2 3
9.00 Welcome and Introduction — Elisabeth Ansel and Christin Neubauer
9.30 Introductory Lecture
• Johannes Grave (Jena) — Romantic Temporalities
10.15 Early Romantic Relations
• Johannes Rößler (Jena) — Towards a Modern Theory of Illustration: August Wilhelm Schlegel on John Flaxman
• Tilman Schreiber (Jena) — Gavin Hamilton and the Aesthetics of Dilettantism
12.15 Transcultural Romanticism and Peripheries
• Helena Cox (York) — Bohemian Romanticism
13.00 Lunch
14.30 Transcultural Romanticism and Peripheries, continued
• Elisabeth Ansel (Jena) — Visual Ossianism: Artistic Circulations, Transculturality, and Romanticism
• Rhian Addison (York) — George Morland’s ‘Emblematic Palette’: The Afterlives of Self-Fashioning Landscape Artist
• Lars Zieke (Jena) — Becoming Watteau: Artistic Self-Definition and Painted Art Theory in Turner’s Watteau Study by Fresnoy’s Rules
17.15 Evening Lecture
• Richard Johns (York) — Art of the Living Dead
20.00 Dinner
W E D N E S D A Y , 2 9 M A R C H 2 0 2 3
9.15 Greeting
9.30 Aesthetic Discourses and Translation Processes
• Sonja Scherbaum (Jena) — ‘Great Beyond All Comparison’: The Sublime as a Comparative Aesthetic Experience
• Miguel Gaete Caceres (York) — The German Picturesque: Between a (British) Landscape Aesthetic Category, a Scientific Method, and a Racial Label
11.00 Coffee
11.30 Origins and Afterlives
• David Grube-Palzer (Jena) — Copy and Self-Repetition in the Age of Genius: Using the Example of Caspar David Friedrich
• Sammi Lukic-Scott (York) — Images into Objects: Reproductions and Translations
13.00 Lunch
14.30 Romanticism in the Context of New Turns
• Marte Stinis (York) — Depicting Romantic Music-Making
• Mira Claire Zadrozny (Jena) — European Romantic Ruins? The ‘Architectural Uncanny’ in Nineteenth-Century French and British Landscape Painting
• Caitlin Doley (York) — Venerable Vulnerability? Violence against Animals in Romantic Artwork
18.30 Reception at Schillers Gartenhaus, home of the poet, ca. 1800
T H U R S D A Y , 3 0 M A R C H 2 0 2 3
9.15 Greeting
9.30 The Late Romantics
• Nicholas Dunn-McAfee (York) — Breath, Flesh, Warmth: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s Immortal Keats
• Kayleigh Williams (York) — Picturing John Keats
• Christin Neubauer (Jena) — The Romantic Embodiment in Pre-Raphaelite Visual Art
12.15 Concluding Discussion
Afternoon Field Trip to Weimar
14.30 Graphische Sammlung, Vulpius-Galerie, Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek
18.00 Goethes Wohnhaus, Goethe’s home from 1782 until his death in 1832
20.00 End of Workshop
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Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, Rokokosaal (Photo by Maik Schuck).
The Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek in Weimar was named in 1991 for Anna Amalia who in the 1760s moved the ducal book collection to the newly constructed Rococo library—famous since then for its oval hall—within the Grünes Schloss (‘Green Palace’). The Vulpius Gallery honors Goethe’s wife, Christiane Vulpius, and brother-in-law, Christian August Vulpius, the latter having worked at the library from 1797 to 1826. Much of the library was destroyed by fire in 2004; it reopened in October 2007 following an $18million restoration. –CH
New Book | The Temple of Fame and Friendship
Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:
Annette Richards, The Temple of Fame and Friendship: Portraits, Music, and History in the C. P. E. Bach Circle (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,) 336 pages, ISBN: 978-0226806266, $55.
One of the most celebrated German composers of the eighteenth century, C. P. E. Bach spent decades assembling an extensive portrait collection of some four hundred music-related items—from oil paintings to engraved prints. The collection was dispersed after Bach’s death in 1788, but with Annette Richards’s painstaking reconstruction, the portraits once again present a vivid panorama of music history and culture, reanimating the sensibility and humor of Bach’s time. Far more than a mere multitude of faces, Richards argues, the collection was a major part of the composer’s work that sought to establish music as an object of aesthetic, philosophical, and historical study.
The Temple of Fame and Friendship brings C. P. E. Bach’s collection to life, giving readers a sense of what it was like for visitors to tour the portrait gallery and experience music in rooms thick with the faces of friends, colleagues, and forebears. She uses the collection to analyze the ‘portraitive’ aspect of Bach’s music, engaging with the influential theories of Swiss physiognomist Johann Caspar Lavater. She also explores the collection as a mode of cultivating and preserving friendship, connecting this to the culture of remembrance that resonates in Bach’s domestic music. Richards shows how the new music historiography of the late eighteenth century, rich in anecdote, memoir, and verbal portrait, was deeply indebted to portrait collecting and its negotiation between presence and detachment, fact and feeling.
Annette Richards is Given Foundation Professor in the Humanities and university organist at Cornell University, where she is also professor of music and director of the Cornell-Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies. She is the author of The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque; the editor of C. P. E Bach Studies; coeditor, with Mark Franko, of Acting on the Past; and the founding editor of Keyboard Perspectives.
C O N T E N T S
Introduction
1 Exhibiting: The Bach Gallery and the Art of Self-Fashioning
2 Collecting: C. P. E. Bach and Portrait Mania
3 Speculation: Likeness, Resemblance, and Error
4 Character: Faces, Physiognomy, and Time
5 Friendship: Portrait Drawings and the Trace of Modern Life
6 Feeling: Objects of Sensibility and the ‘Portrait of Myself’
7 Memorializing: Portraits and the Invention of Music History
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
New Book | From the Ruins of Enlightenment
Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:
Richard Kramer, From the Ruins of Enlightenment: Beethoven and Schubert in Their Solitude (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022), 264 pages, ISBN: 9780226821634, $50.
Richard Kramer follows the work of Beethoven and Schubert from 1815 through to the final months of their lives, when each were increasingly absorbed in iconic projects that would soon enough inspire notions of ‘late style’.
Here is Vienna, hosting a congress in 1815 that would redraw national boundaries and reconfigure the European community for a full century. A snapshot captures two of its citizens, each seemingly oblivious to this momentous political environment: Franz Schubert, not yet twenty years old and in the midst of his most prolific year—some 140 songs, four operas, and much else; and Ludwig van Beethoven, struggling through a midlife crisis that would yield the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte, two strikingly original cello sonatas, and the two formidable sonatas for the “Hammerklavier,” opp. 101 and 106. In Richard Kramer’s compelling reading, each seemed to be composing ‘against’—Beethoven, against the Enlightenment; Schubert, against the looming presence of the older composer even as his own musical imagination took full flight.
From the Ruins of Enlightenment begins in 1815, with the discovery of two unique projects: Schubert’s settings of the poems of Ludwig Hölty in a fragmentary cycle and Beethoven’s engagement with a half dozen poems by Johann Gottfried Herder. From there, Kramer unearths previously undetected resonances and associations, illuminating the two composers in their “lonely and singular journeys” through the “rich solitude of their music.”
Richard Kramer is distinguished professor emeritus of music at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the author of the award-winning Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song, as well as Unfinished Music and Cherubino’s Leap: In Search of the Enlightenment Moment.
C O N T E N T S
Preamble: 1815 and Beyond
In the Silence of the Poem
1 Hölty’s Nightingales, and Schubert’s
2 Herder’s Hexameters, and Beethoven’s
3 Whose Meeres Stille?
Toward a Poetics of Fugue
4 Gradus ad Parnassum: Beethoven, Schubert, and the Romance of Counterpoint
5 Con alcune licenze: On the Largo before the Fugue in Op. 106
Sonata and the Claims of Narrative
Beethoven
6 On a Challenging Moment in the Sonata for Pianoforte and Violoncello, Op. 102, No. 2
Schubert
7 Against the Grain: The Sonata in G (D 894) and a Hermeneutics of Late Style
Last Things, New Horizons
8 Final Beethoven
9 Posthumous Schubert
Postscript: . . . and Beyond
Acknowledgments
List of Tables, Examples, and Figures
Works Cited
Index
Seminar | Anthony Downey and Maya Ganesh on AI and Images
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From the PMC:
Anthony Downey and Maya Ganesh | Neo-Colonial Visions: Artificial Intelligence and Epistemic Violence
In-person and online, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 15 March 2023, 5pm
Part of the series In Conversation: New Directions in Art History, which will explore the changing modes and methodologies of approaching visual and material worlds. Running from January to March 2023.
Artificial Intelligence (AI), often presented as an objective ‘view from nowhere’, constitutes a regime of power that further establishes historical forms of bias and evolving models of subjugation. A key component in this process, this presentation will suggest, involves the extraction of data from digital images in order to train AI. How, therefore, do we understand the transformation of images from their symbolic and representational contexts to their contemporary function as sources of digital data? Bringing together researchers in the field of visual culture and AI technology, and taking as its starting point the representational biases of colonial imagery, Anthony Downey and Maya Indira Ganesh will explore how the digital image has increasingly become the means to extract, archive and repurpose information. Based on the extraction and statistical repurposing of data, they will observe how AI renders entire communities susceptible to encoded and overt forms of epistemological violence. Designed for the purpose of training machine vision and the apparatus of AI, these repurposed “images” reveal, furthermore, how the extractive practices of colonialism have become inexorably aligned with corporate interests and neo-colonial economies of data extraction.
Book tickets here»
Anthony Downey is an academic, author, and editor. He is Professor of Visual Culture in the Middle East and North Africa (Birmingham City University). He sits on the editorial boards of Third Text (Routledge), Journal of Digital War (Palgrave Macmillan), and Memory, Mind & Media (Cambridge University Press). He is the series editor for Research/Practice (Sternberg Press, 2019–ongoing). Recent and upcoming publications include Algorithmic Anxieties and Post-Digital Futures (forthcoming, MIT Press, 2024); Nida Sinnokrot: Palestine is Not a Garden (Sternberg Press and MIT Press, 2023); Khalil Rabah: Falling Forward/Works (1995–2025) (Sharjah Art Foundation and Hatje Cantz, 2022); Topologies of Air: Shona Illingworth (Sternberg Press and the Power Plant, 2021); and Heba Y Amin: The General’s Stork (Sternberg Press, 2020). Downey is the cultural and commissioning lead on a four-year multi-disciplinary AHRC Network Plus award, where his research focuses on cultural practices, digital methods, and educational provision for children with disabilities in Lebanon, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and Jordan (2020–2024). This award was preceded by an AHRC Development award in 2019. In 2020, Downey curated Heba Y. Amin: When I See the Future (at the Mosaic Rooms, London), and in 2022, he curated Heba Y. Amin: When I See the Future, Chapter II (Zilberman Gallery, Berlin).
Maya Indira Ganesh is a cultural scientist, researcher, and writer working on the social and cultural politics of AI, autonomous and machine learning systems. She is a senior researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and an assistant professor, co-teaching a masters programme on AI, ethics, and society at the University of Cambridge. Ganesh earned her PhD in cultural sciences from Leuphana University, Lüneburg. Her work examined the reshaping of the ‘ethical’ through the driverless car, an apparatus of automation and automobility, big data, cultural imaginaries of robots, and practices of statistical inference. Before turning to academic work, Maya Indira Ganesh spent a decade as a feminist activist working at the point of intersection of gender justice, digital security, and digital freedoms of expression. Her work has consistently brought questions of power, justice, and inequality to those of the body, the digital, and knowledge making.
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