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The University of Southampton
Winchester School of Art

WSA Staff Seminar Series: Professor Ryan Bishop Seminar

Origin: 
Winchester Centre for Global Futures in Art Design & Media
Prof Ryan Bishop
Time:
16:00 - 17:30
Date:
3 June 2015
Venue:
Harvard Suite (Room number: 3032), Winchester School of Art

For more information regarding this seminar, please email Professor John Armitage at J.Armitage@soton.ac.uk .

Event details

Felo de se: The Munus of Remote Sensing

Abstract:

Polyscaler autonomous remote sensing systems are presently constituting new regimes of tele-activity for real-time surveillance and data-gathering.

This paper continues several ongoing projects that examine the philosophical, technological and political ramifications of these systems as they pertain to the constitution of the subject, community and the imaginaries operative within and through them.

Working with the concepts of nomos, munus and autos to read these systems, exemplified here by the IT/weapons systems for the new US destroyer the USS Zumwalt and the non-profit Planetary Skin Institute, this paper explores the geopolitical and philosophical stakes of these systems and their intended and unintended consequences.

The article argues that autonomous remote sensing systems configure a specific kind of self/autos within a munus constituted by a nomos.

The autos, munus and nomos have been remade in and through these tele-sensing systems that simultaneously repeat, reify and modify the politics of the self that remains a default mode for thinking geopolitics in the West in its global reach. And it does so in ways that counterintuitively and counter-intentionally might result in the opening to alternatives to this specific yet pervasive kind of politics of the self.

Biography:

Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Art and Politics at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.

He writes about critical theory, aesthetics, military technology, urbanism, and visual culture. He edits the book series Theory Now (Polity Press) and co-edits the book series Technicities (with John Armitage and Joanne Roberts, Edinburgh University Press).

Speaker information

Professor Ryan Bishop,Professor of Global Art and Politics

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