Scales, Collections, and Quantities: Cultural Analytics & Photography Off the Scale – A Joint Book Presentation

Department of Photography, FAMU in Prague
25 March 2021, 13.00–14.30 CET

The record of the event is available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/oOsSFE3iwUI

Authors and discussants: Lev Manovich (CUNY), Jussi Parikka (FAMU and University of Southampton), Tomáš Dvořák (FAMU), and Annebella Pollen (University of Brighton)

Please join us for a (lunch time) book discussion of two recent publications that deal with questions of scale, quantity, and measure in visual culture. Lev Manovich’s Cultural Analytics and Jussi Parikka’s and Tomaš Dvořák’s edited collection Photography off the Scale address contemporary photography and media culture in resonating ways, offering ways to understand theories and methods of visuality beyond the image in singular.

Photography Off the Scale’s underlying reference point is the “mass image”, which relates to the vast databases and practices of digital images but also to questions of collections and archives, such as for example in Annebella Pollen’s chapter “Photography’s Mise en Abyme: Metapictures of Scale in Repurposed Slide Libraries”.

Manovich’s project on Cultural Analytics has for several years offered new methodological ways to approach big cultural data as well as link it to the broader discussion about digital humanities, digital art history, and digital visual culture. The new book brings together a lot of these projects and ideas. It importantly addresses questions of how culture is represented as data and how to study culture at a scale of, for example, one billion images

Hence both books trigger methodological propositions, offer case studies, and interdisciplinary theoretical arguments about what and where – and how many – current images are. The event will offer short presentations from the authors and editors and engage in a discussion with the audience about related themes about visual culture.

The event is organised by the Operational Images and Visual Culture project situated in the Department of Photography at the Academy of Performing Arts, Prague (Czech Science Foundation, 19-26865X).

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