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Final presentations of work. Alex Jae Eun Kim generated fictional city scapes from collated Google Street View images. 

Increasingly, the production of images relies on automated processes; from photoshop filters to deep fakes. The automation of visual culture brings with it several critical issues, most notably a ‘foreclosure of the future’ (McKim, 2017, p.291) led by those with the power to render and disseminate the most convincing or powerful imagery the fastest. The prevalence of convincingly real automated images limits the power of popular imagination to imagine alternatives by saturating visual culture in a particular aesthetic and ideological predilection. This predilection is manufactured through the particular qualities of the tools used and who uses them.

Lecture opening the workshop.

Examining the extremes of cinematic colour grading, particularly the western attraction to cyan and orange. 

Drawing on DiSalvo’s notion of using design to ‘foster knowledge through engagement’ (DiSavlo, 2009, 56) this workshop will use a mixture of critical media and design techniques to identify and locate the automation of visual culture and speculate on alternatives or ways that this hegemony may be challenged. Consequently, projects may take the form of investigative critical media pieces or present speculative designs as alternatives.

Riccardo Righi’s work explored the representaiton of male bodies in CGI and the idealisation and plasticisation of them in imagery aimed at gay men.  

Willow explored the way we see images in found places. Here she rendered the moon distorted by other objects which divines a future for us.

This ten-day workshop was conducted with students of MA Graphic Media Design at London College of Communication.&


Part-way presentation of work in proress. 
Mark

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Computing the Real (Talk 2022) – Haunted Machines at Talk To Me (Talk 2021) - Conditional Values (Panel 2020) – What if Our World is Their Heaven? (Workshop 2020) – Designing an Ecological Alexa (Workshop 2019) –  Histories and Myths of the 21st Century Home (Panel 2019) – Deep Fakes or Rendering the Truth, IMPAKT (Panel 2018) – Deep Fakes or Rendering The Truth, Ars Electronica  (Panel 2018) – IMPAKT 2017: Haunted Machines and Wicked Problems (Curation 2017) – The Hermetic Machine (Talk 2017) – Accursed Creator (Panel 2017) Bot Like Me (Talk 2017) – Alchemy (Project 2016) Uninvited Guests (Talk 2016) – It Came Through The Seams! (Talk 2016) – Scrycasts 1.0 (Project 2015-17) – Haunted Machines (Festival 2015) – Haunted Machines (Talk 2014)