Photography after the Human
DCRC Presents The Anthropocene: Looking for the Emergency Exit
Please note: This event took place in Oct 2015
As the main topic of this talk Joanna Zylinska will draw on the existence of images after the human. In particular, those light-induced mechanical images known as photographs. The ‘after the human’ designation does not just refer to the material disappearance of the human in some kind of distant future, but also to the present imagining of this disappearance of the human world as a prominent visual trope in arts and cultural practices. Such ‘ruin porn’ has some historical antecedents: from the sublime Romantic landscapes of ruined abbeys by the likes of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, all the way through to paintings such as Rotunda by Joseph Gandy, commissioned by John Soane, the architect of the Bank of England, and depicting the aforesaid bank as a ruin even before it was built.
Yet the comprehension of ruins has gained a new inflection in the Anthropocene, a period that is said to be suffering from a dual eco-eco crisis: the current global economic crisis and the impending – and irreversible – environmental crisis. Think here of the seductive and haunting images of Detroit, a financially bankrupt North American city with a glorious industrial and architectural past – but also of TV series imagining our demise as a species, such as the History channel’s Life after People.
The talk will end with a brief presentation of Zylinska's own artwork - The Anthropocene: A Local History Project.
Joanna Zylinska is Professor of New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College. She is a writer, lecturer, curator and artist. Author and editor of numerous books on media and culture, her recent book calling for A Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene (2014) combines writing with photographic work on the theme.
Patrick Crogan (Chair) is Associate Professor of Digital Cultures at UWE Bristol. He is the author of Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation and Technoculture and works on a range of themes and elements of digital media technoculture from games to drones.