On Faces: An AMT Symposium with Grant Bollmer Event

Our guest speaker is Grant Bollmer (NCSU, USYD) whose talk “Books of Faces: From the Optical Unconscious to Object Metadata” excavates a history of the face which is shaped by exclusions and deviations. Bollmer’s paper surveys the symptomatic condition of the facial image across three centuries, from the emergence of photography to Facebook. In response to the lecture, scholars from WSA will share their past and current research projects on faciality. AMT doctoral candidates Eda Sancakdar Onikinci and Yiğit Soncul will address how they utilise facial images in their projects, which look at the veil and photographic portraiture, and the contemporary media ecology of the face. Alessandro Ludovico will be sharing his artistic collaboration with Paolo Cirio, “Face to Facebook” and situate it in relation to the contemporary debates. The day will conclude with a round table chaired by Professor Jussi Parikka.

The event will be convened by Yiğit Soncul as part of Archaeologies of Media and Technology research group. Please contact yigit.soncul@soton.ac. uk for any enquiries.

Open to all but please register your interest via Eventbrite.

 

Grant Bollmer is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at North Carolina State University, where he teaches in the Department of Communication and the Ph.D. program in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media, and is an Honorary Associate of the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. He is the author of the book Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of Connection(2016), and is currently completing a manuscript titled Theorizing Digital Cultures.

Yiğit Soncul is a PhD candidate and Visiting Lecturer in Global Media at WSA. Previously a visiting fellow at the University of Sydney, his work appeared in journals Theory, Culture & Society and Between.

Eda Sancakdar Onikinci is a PhD candidate at WSA. She previously taught and conducted research at Istanbul Bilgi University and Bahcesehir University.

Alessandro Ludovido is Associate Professor in Art, Design and Media at WSA, as well as chief editor since 1993 of Neural, critical digital culture magazine and one of the authors of the award-winning and internationally exhibited trilogy of artworks Hacking Monopolism (Google Will Eat Itself, Amazon Noir, Face to Facebook).

Jussi Parikka is Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics at WSA and the co-director of AMT. Most recently, he published the book A Geology of Media (2015), which was a Choice-magazine "outstanding academic title for 2015".

 

 

[Image: John Logie Baird's test subject 'Stookie Bill' for his experimental television work c. 1926 from The Plessey Museum.]