MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | EPHEMERA | SPRING 2021

The Twenty-First Century Image Dilemma

Avram Finkelstein •  Artist-Activist, Founding member of Silence=Death
                                   and Gran Fury

March 8th @ 6 P.M.
Zoom Conference: https://wesleyan.zoom.us/j/98396636283

In the formative decades of the twenty-first century we carry archives around on pocket computers, and ephemera moves at the speed of light across a landscape of Möbius non-orientability. Boosted by digital accelerants, centuries of suppositions about how images function are largely vestigial, and the evanescence of digital ephemera neutralizes its potential as “proof.” Truth, and its evidence, is increasingly contested. And so, the earliest predicament of the twenty-first century is an “image dilemma.” How do we discern what is actual when bots are as convincing as the humans who developed them, and Deepfake technology can deliver photo documentation in a machine-learned zeptosecond? Within a rapidly intensifying digital commons how do we perform participation when we can’t exactly know what we’re participating in? How do we map the tensions between access and limitation, literacy and illegibility, marking and erasure, identity and colonization, agency and refusal? How do we organize a substantive resistance? And finally, if we can’t believe our eyes, what becomes of a culture based on images?

Ephemera
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Center for the Humanities · 95 Pearl Street, Middletown, CT 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/humanities