Boundary Images

2023
Authors:

Giselle Beiguelman, Melody Devries, Winnie Soon, and Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver

How are images made, and how should we understand their limits, capacities, and forces in digital media?

Boundary Images investigates the political, material, and visual work that images do to cross and blur the boundaries between the technological and biological and between humans, machines, and nature. Exploring the limits of the visual and beyond what can be seen, Boundary Images posits these boundaries as starting points for the production of new and radically different ways of knowing about the world.

While functioning as representations or mediations of the political, images also act through the technologies and social processes that they claim only to represent. In both capacities, images can be innovative, but they can also reproduce harmful phenomena such as racism, misogyny, and conspiracy. Boundary Images investigates the political, material, and visual work that images do to cross and blur the boundaries between the technological and biological and between humans, machines, and nature. Exploring the limits of the visual and beyond what can be seen, Boundary Images posits these boundaries as starting points for the production of new and radically different ways of knowing about the world.

Giselle Beiguelman is an artist and professor at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Her research focuses on the aesthetics of memory and decolonial approaches to technology. She is author of several books and articles about digital culture. Her artworks are part of collections in international museums, including ZKM (Germany), Essex Collection of Art from Latin America (UK), and Pinacoteca de São Paulo (Brazil).

Melody Devries is a PhD candidate at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her digital ethnographic work examines how interactions with media develop political convictions and other embodied beliefs. She has recently published with the Canadian Journal of Communication and is coeditor of Rise of the Far-Right: Technologies of Recruitment and Mobilization.

Winnie Soon is an artist and course leader/senior lecturer at Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts London, as well as associate professor at Aarhus University. Their latest coauthored books are Aesthetic Programming: A Handbook of Software Studies and Fix My Code, intersecting critical art and technology practices.

Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver is associate professor of digital communication and culture at Aarhus University, curator of digital art and design, and arts and humanities scholar of critical data studies. Her recently curated exhibitions include Screenshots: Desire and Automated Image (2019), and her current research and curatorial project is Fermenting Data.

Contents

Series Foreword

Introduction: Boundary Images

Melody Devries, Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver, Winnie Soon, and Giselle Beiguelman

1. Cartographies of Unerasable Images

Winnie Soon and Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver

2. Real-Making with Boundary Images: Ethnographic Explorations of Far-Right Worlds

Melody Devries

3. Galton Reloaded: Computer Vision and Machinic Eugenics

Giselle Beiguelman

Authors