Sustainable Images: Degrowing Visual Culture and Computation

15:10–15:40

Lecture by: Ava Zevop

@afo - 1st floor | conference hall

The confluence of visual culture and digital devices has brought unprecedented connectivity while contributing to an expansive and vastly unsustainable media (eco)system. The materiality of communication, devices, and their encompassing infrastructure indicate a visual culture that is materially extractive and computationally heavy. At the same time, it creates specific subjectivities, relational engagements, and perceptual effects. With “Sustainable Images” I speculate on the degrowth of visual culture and computation in line with ecological concerns, and on its reconfiguration in terms of material, computational, and affective operations. In addition to pemacomputational principles, I advance on Shane Denson’s concept of discorrelationed images. I argue that further examination of the relationship between technical processes of perceptual coding and a broader sociotechnical coding of perception can offer an opening for de-acceleration of visual cultures’ perceptual engagements while degrowing the computational strata.