A transcript of the discussion "Image Lessons. Visual Pedagogies in Troubled Times", which took place at the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw on December 18, 2018.

Provoked by the terrorist-related murders in England that marked the spring and summer of 2017, I have felt compelled to write this article on the idea of observance (observe, care, follow, obey). I engage with this idea in the context of our contemporary Memory Industry – that confluence of memorialization, remembrance and commemoration culture; Memory Studies and Trauma Studies; tangible and intangible heritage; digital memory and media archaeology; and its series of facing-backwards-to-go-forwards impulses (the archival impulse, the genealogical impulse and the archaeological impulse). Through the Contemporary’s prism, I deploy observance as a rejoinder to the seeming irreconcilability between, on the one hand, the incomprehensibility of the Shoah and, on the other hand, the prevalence of its rendering in figurative and abstract memorials, literature, art and film; and by way of dark tourism, Shoah selfies and genealogy websites. I propose that, because of its assorted senses, as a grievable moment observance may be a way of negotiating (without necessarily wanting or needing to reconcile) such irreconcilability. I argue that this is possible because of how observance (observing a minute’s silence, for instance) as a (secular, vernacular) performative action somehow opens up a space of the imagination that might lead, for good and ill, to a decipherability all the more necessary in our interminable state of exception that is the Contemporary.

This Roundtable on Numbers/Data began life as a live, public event on the power and influence of numbers in contemporary visual, material, immaterial, and media cultures.1 To imagine such an ambitious event, and to do it justice, the event’s programme brought together academics, industry professionals, and practitioners. Taking Steven Connor’s recently published book Living by Numbers: In Defence of Quantity (2016) as a springboard, each contributor to the event was invited to deliver a 10-minute presentation, an opening statement to set the scene, and to raise fundamental questions to be considered in the ensuing discussion. The authors retain this structure here, along with some of the informality that live conversation affords. By way of these four presentations and the conversation between the event’s speakers and audience, the Roundtable raises a series of pressing concerns around data and big data, life tracking, digital health studies, and the quantifiable self; the quantitative and the qualitative; data forms and flows; climate change data and social media; the bleed between private and public computational infrastructures; labour, productivity, and accountability; time, money, and economies; and the contemporary intensification of surveillance, audit culture, marketization, and outcomes-based performance management. Notwithstanding data dystopia’s numerical sublime, the contributors are always looking to keep an eye out for reasons to be optimistic in their discussions around: numbers in education and numeric literacies; the materiality of numbers and numbers as artifacts; data’s flexibility and manipulability; sensors, sensor data, and everyday life; the rise of amateurism and citizen scientists; data and numbers vis-à-vis experiences, embodiment, emotions, intensities, and their affective powers; and the contributors’ absolute delight (or abject horror) at the very arbitrary nature of numbers, all of which offer hope towards more democratic, creative, imaginative, and personalized futures … Interested in the Quantified Self community? Ever wondered what role numbers played in the UK’s Referendum to leave the EU? Intrigued by the idea of an exhibition about odd and even? Curious about what folk data might be? Read on!

In 2013 I curated an exhibition entitled ‘The Global Archive’ at Hanmi Gallery in Fitzrovia, London.1 By way of the exhibition, I wanted to pinpoint conceptually and articulate curatorially the idea of ‘the global archive’ as an organizing principle of knowledges and as a communicative medium of exchange. To this end, I sought out artistic practices that figured interestingly the archive (and the holy trinity of temporality – past, present, future) through global networks, global knowledge systems, and global information ecologies. This article concerns one of the works in that exhibition, and a tear it cleaved in the very fabric of the time- space continuum of the Internet as an archive, and as archival; or, rather, the minor juridical disturbance that that artwork provoked for the Internet as a global archive or ecology of images.

Since the 19th century, dolls have served as toys but also as objects of obsession, love, and lust. That century witnessed the emergence of the term and of modern concepts of fetishism, perversity, and animism. Their convergence, and the demands of a growing consumer society resulted in a proliferation of waxworks, shop-window dummies, and customized love dolls, which also began to appear in art. Oskar Kokoschka commissioned a life-sized doll of his former lover Alma Mahler; Hans Bellmer crafted poupees; and Marcel Duchamp fabricated a nude figure in his environmental tableau Etant donnes. The Erotic Doll is the first book to explore men's complex relationships with such inanimate forms from historical, theoretical, and phenomenological perspectives. Challenging our commonsense grasp of the relations between persons and things, Marquard Smith examines these erotically charged human figures by interweaving art history, visual culture, gender, and sexuality studies with the medical humanities, offering startling insights into heterosexual masculinity and its discontents.

What is it to conduct research in the second decade of the 21st century? What is the nature (or what are the modalities) of the work that we as researchers do? What is research as a praxis? And how have recent shifts in paradigms of knowledge generation and distribution – especially around the archive and the Internet, and the Internet as archival – transformed profoundly what we as researchers do, how we do it, and in fact even our very capacity to do it? In this article, I begin from the idea of research as a praxis, and from the figure of the researcher as a locus for the discovery of knowledges by way of acts of searching and gathering. In 15 theses I engage critically with challenges raised recently for the idea of ‘history’ as a form of knowledge by our own épistémè of re-search; one whose conditions and conditions of possibility are delineated by the emergence of our late capitalist global algorithmic knowledge economy, and the Internet with its distinct operations of searchability and distributability. Because this is our present moment’s épistémè of re-search, I argue that our being in thrall of the archive has dangerous future consequences: in fact it is perilous for the very idea of the future itself as a category of historical time. Concerned by this situation and thus responding forcefully to it, in offering a few grains of dissent I will ‘look with care’ at how we might navigate our way fractiously and thus productively through such a predicament.

Este artigo interfere na emergência frequentemente muito suave dos Estudos Visuais como um campo de investigação interdisciplinar nos sistemas universitários britânico e norte-americano. Ele o faz ao chamar atenção para algumas áreas cinzas não reconhecidas entre “fazer” cultura visual e o que se tornou o “estudo” dos Estudos Visuais. Interessado nas distinções históricas, conceituais e morfológicas entre “fazer” e “estudar”, confronta as implicações dessas diferenças para pedagogia, pesquisa, escrita e pensamento inter-, cross- e in-disciplinares. (Ao fazê-lo, responde ao artigo de W. J. T. Mitchell “Showing seeing: a critique of visual culture, publicado no Journal of Visual Culture, em agosto de 2002, ao, simultaneamente, acolher o texto de Mitchell como um ponto de partida necessário para qualquer esforço sério para, criticamente, engajar-se com os estudos da cultura visual e Estudos Visuais, além de chamar a atenção para uma lacuna no seu argumento.) Enquanto, de forma geral, fico satisfeito em ver na pesquisa, na escrita e no ensino uma contínua curiosidade e interesse em nossos encontros com culturas visuais, que marcam um compromisso sustentado com os jeitos de ver, e olhar e conhecer enquanto fazer, como prática, este artigo afirma que a acelerada profissionalização e burocratização dos Estudos Visuais periga provocar uma ossificação do pensamento.

In this wide-ranging interview W. J. T. Mitchell discusses his commitment to politics, cultural politics, and the politics of culture. Always engaging, always stimulating, always provocative, he speaks at length about Barack Obama, the events of 11 September 2001, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Grhaib, and his time travelling, lecturing, and teaching in some of the world's most highly charged territories: Israel, Palestine, Cuba, and China. Forever listening and learning, in this interview Mitchell displays his passion for and his dedication to intellectual life. Here, as in the rest of his work, he provides the best kind of object lesson in how reading, looking, studying, criticising, analysing, and trying to understand all raise the question, in their own unique ways, of what it means to be political, what it means to do politics.

Visual culture studies is a contemporary, emerging interdisciplinary field of inquiry that employs a variety of approaches to analyze and interpret visual images. Visual culture studies does not designate a discipline so much as what John Walker and Sarah Chaplin call “a hybrid, an inter‐ or multi‐disciplinary enterprise formed as a consequence of a convergence of, or borrowing from, a variety of disciplines and methodologies” (1997: 1). Visual culture studies borrows from many disciplines in the arts and humanities, such as art history, cultural studies, media studies, literary criticism, feminism, queer studies, postcolonial theory, anthropology, and sociology. As a result of these borrowings or convergences, visual culture studies offers us a variety of interpretive ways of engaging with our past and present visual cultures – including semiotics, Marxism, feminism, historiography, social history, psychoanalysis, queer theory, deconstruction, postcolonial studies, ethnography, and museology. From these interpretive strategies, visual culture studies enables a wider range of analyses. It sustains investigations that are concerned with the production, circulation, and consumption of images; the changing nature of subjectivity; the ways in which we visualize or reflect upon or represent the world to ourselves; what Irit Rogoff (1998) has called “viewing apparatuses,” which include our ways of seeing and practices of looking, knowing, and doing, and even sometimes our misunderstandings and unsettling curiosity in imagining the as yet unthought.

With essays by Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, Marc Gotlieb, Serge Guilbaut, Michael Ann Holly, Akira Mizuta Lippit, W. J. T. Mitchell, Joanne Morra, Sina Najafi, Alexander Nemerov, Celeste Olalquiaga, Alexander Potts, and Reva Wolf The discipline of art history is in a moment of self-consciousness, and art historians are increasingly more self-reflexive about their practices. In this volume, thirteen authors address both the philosophical and practical issues now facing those in the visual arts field by investigating the ever-pressing issue of research. Their essays explore the remarkable nature of art historians' personal, political, aesthetic, creative, and emotive curiosity and the process of doing research in the archive, library, studio, gallery, museum, and beyond. As such, the book considers the pleasures and dangers of researchers' obsessions and encounters with the incoherence, chaos, and wonder that lie at the heart of searching for the not-yet-known. The volume is based on the 2007 Clark Conference of the same name.