Tom Holert
Travelling the Image. On Navigation as a Paradigm of Digital Visual Cultures (01.02.2017)
In one of the last interviews preceding his premature death in 2014, filmmaker, artist and writer Harun Farocki pondered the question to what extent the prime visual metholodogy of political modernism, namely montage, has been replaced by the paradigm of navigation. Moreover, Farocki implicitly asked what the epistemological and aesthetic consequences of such a shift would be. In my talk I will attempt to continue this interrogation of the condition of contemporary digital visual cultures, mobilizing the notion of "navigation" to trace the terrain of operational image production and usage. Being particularly interested in the fate of the idea of the political or dialectical image, this line of questioning aims at addressing the modes through which images are being converted into dataspaces to be travelled as well as the instrumental life of images as tools of navigation (from neurosurgery to targeted killings).
Main Research Interests
- Contemporary and Late Modernist Art
- Governmentality of the Present
Publications (selected)
- Übergriffe. Zustände und Zuständigkeit der Gegenwartskunst. Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, 2014.
- With Mark Terkessidis: Fliehkraft. Gesellschaft in Bewegung – von Migranten und Touristen. Köln: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2006.
- With Mark Terkessidis: Entsichert. Krieg als Massenkultur im 21. Jahrhundert. Köln: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 2002.
- With Mark Terkessidis: Mainstream der Minderheiten; Pop in der Kontrollgesellschaft. Berlin / Amsterdam: ID Archiv, 1996.