MCA Australia and Power Institute host major forum on vision
Visions will take place from 15 to 17 August 2024 at the MCA Australia in Sydney. The forum will bring together 15 artists and researchers from around Australia and the world for 3 days to share their ideas on the art, science and politics of seeing today. The forum will involve five panels and three keynotes and include artists Trevor Paglen, Christopher Bassi and Ben Grosser, researchers and curators Kate Crawford, Huey Copeland and J. Joon Lee.
The forum expects to attract a wide audience of people interested in what is at stake in vision today. Vision is often an assumed precondition for our experience of the world, and especially for our experience of art. But how do scientists understand vision today? What is its history? And what utopian or dystopian futures lie ahead for vision?
The forum is co-presented by the MCA Australia and the Power Institute and forms part of their broader collaboration entitled the Visual Research Program (VRP). The VRP, announced in 2023, is a multi-year collaborative partnership between the two institutions that aims to explore and showcase new ways of conducting research on contemporary art and visual culture.
MCA AUSTRALIA with Lara Strongman, Suzanne Cotter, Director MCA Australia; Professor Mark Ledbury, Director Power Institute, University of Sydney; Marni Williams, Publications Manager Power Institute; Nick Croggon, Events and Programs Officer, Power Institute; Director Curatorial and Digital, MCA Australia; Jane Devery, Senior Curator Exhibitions, MCA Australia; and John Saxby, Publications, MCA Australia.
Professor Mark Ledbury, Director of the Power Institute, and co-convenor of the forum explains: “Vision has long been a shared site of investigation for artists, humanists and scientists. Yet rarely are these various perspectives brought together. Today, the need to do so is more urgent than ever, as artists and engineers extend vision in thought-provoking, exciting and sometimes quite frightening directions”.
Suzanne Cotter, Director Museum of Contemporary Art Australia says, "Contemporary art enables us to see the world from multiple and coexistent perspectives and offers new ways to think about not only present but also our future.
As a defining platform for contemporary art and ideas in Australia, MCA Australia is delighted to partner with the Power Institute, to bring the ideas of eminent researchers and artists to a wider public audience through the Visions Forum."
A key focus of the forum will be the science and technology of vision. The opening panel, which Professor Ledbury will moderate, will consider how recent research in psychology and the biomedical sciences are changing our understanding of what vision is, and how it works. Joining this panel will be Trevor Paglen, an internationally renowned artist and geographer whose work has investigated how vision has been harnessed by machine vision and facial recognition.
Paglen will present a keynote presentation on his recent work at the forum, as will Kate Crawford, a professor at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles, and a leading international scholar of artificial intelligence. Crawford is the author of The Atlas of AI, which maps the global structures and ideas underpinning artificial intelligence. As AI-generated imagery continues to expand into the public sphere, Crawford’s research is more important than ever.
A second key focus of the forum will be the different ways vision is culturally constructed, and how these constructions in turn shape our lives. Day two of the forum will feature a panel led by Rebecca Ray, the MCA’s Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collections and Exhibitions. This panel will bring together artist Christopher Bassi, curator Peggy Kasabad Lane and Emmy award-winning story-teller Aaliyah-Jade Bradbury to discuss what it means to see the world from a Torres Strait Islander perspective.
A third keynote presentation will be delivered by Huey Copeland, an art historian and curator based at the University of Pittsburgh. Copeland’s research focuses on African/Diasporic, American and European art, and in particular on different expressions of blackness in the Western visual field. Copeland will also be part of a panel exploring the ways in which vision relates to questions of race and identity, alongside scholars J. Joon and Katerina Teaiwa, and curator Erin Vink.
For further information and to get tickets for the forum, please visit www.vrp.org.au.