Colloque « Digital unconscious ». 20-22 juin 2024 – Aberyswyth University, Wales, UK

Part One Experimental Research Practices

Présentation

Walter Benjamin’s concept of the optical unconscious has received substantial analysis across the visual arts. Rosalind Krauss famously revisited modernist art through the prism of his concept. Krauss puts forward the principle of a flawed vision that modernist painters sought to capture. Following Frederic Jameson, Krauss further associates the optical unconscious with a political unconscious and the invention of imaginary or formal “solutions” to unresolvable socio-psychical contradictions.

How do we approach the unconscious in the digital age? This research program looks across aesthetic domains of computation — from cinema to video games to virtual reality — at the ways in which digital technology continues the visual dimensions that inform the optical unconscious while introducing layers of code, networking, and infrastructure below the visible interface.

Part one is programmed to take place in June 2024 in Wales, and will engage with the topics and approaches that are central to Aberystwyth University’s teaching and research expertise: practice-based research, as well as concepts of deep mapping, the landscape as palimpsest, environmental transformations, and contrasted notions of space and place.

The proceedings take the form of a symposium and summer school, with presentations and screenings involving doctoral students from Paris and Aberystwyth.

Programme

Jeudi 20 juin 2024

9h30 – Accueil et introduction par Kim Knowles

10h – Emmanuelle André, ‘The New Optical unconscious 1 (Full Rehearsal, Martin Arnold, 2017)’

10h30 – Martine Beugnet, ‘The New Optical unconscious 2 (In Tinseltown, Martin Arnold, 2017)’

11h – Guillaume Soulez, ‘Virtual Place, Actual Place, from Phantasmagoria to Virtual Reality Headset’

11h30 – Sarah Benedyczuk, ‘Cosmic Reveries: Projections of a Digital Unconscious in the Point Cloud’

12h30 – 14h Buffet

17h30 – Screening, Thomas Dekeyser ‘Machines in Flames’

19h – Evening Meal

Vendredi 21 juin 2024

10h – Anne-Gaëlle Saliot, ‘Godard’s Le Livre d’image and Digital Orientalism’

10h30 – Charlie Hewison, ‘Karrabing Film Collective, ecocidal and colonial dreamings through a mobile lens’

11h – Aya Motegi, ‘Representations of Post-Disaster Landscapes: Storytelling and Digital Aesthetics in Films Made after the Great East Japan Earthquake’

11h30 – Harrison Patten, ‘AI Warfare: Images, Recognition, Vision’

14h Aim King – Borth-Aber Walk followed by evening drinks

Samedi 22 juin

9h30 – Valentine Charles, ‘Covering/ Uncovering : Floral Wallpapers in Films and the Aesthetics of the Hidden’

10h – Quentin Lepetitdidier, ‘Behind the material at Leighton Pierce’

11h – Anthony Blanc, ‘Through Frontex’s thermal imaging cameras: revealing clandestine migration and the hidden dimensions of “hunting images’

11h30 – Phil Layton ‘The Magic of Emergence’.

12h30 Buffet

14h00 –  Lucy Gough and Piotr Woycicki ‘Mapping the Soul VR’

14h30 – Rémi Sagot-Duvauroux, ‘The Body-Montage: manipulating and moving through space fragments’