No School! Automatic for the People
A reading group on the hopes and struggles of technology.
6.30 – 8.00pm, Wednesday 20 May 2020, **Online
Join us for the 6th session (online) of Automatic for the People, you can read more about the reading group here.
You do not have to have attended the previous reading sessions in order to join us for this one.
Whilst pre-reading is usually not required, to ease things online, this time, it is really encouraged!
We will use Zoom to conduct this session – more information to come in an email after registration.
If you wish to attend the reading group, please book your place by emailing us at info@rhubaba.org by the 18th of May.
For this session we will be reading texts* considering tactile technologically driven changes in the ways of viewing, producing art, and making sense of events in an era of rampant instantaneous proliferation of images across distant geographies. From creating an excess of images on the World Wide Web, to enhancing human vision with machininc augmentation, and to auto-created images that humans cannot discern, advanced technologies drastically reform visuality, both challenging and elevating its privileged subject (the human). The texts selected for this session investigate this extended field of vision by grounding it within contexts of power, arguing that is both a force of oppressive policing of bodies and emancipatory intervention.
*Hito Steyerl, ‘In defense of the Poor Image’ and ‘In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective’, both from her book The Wretched of the Screen (2012).
Trevor Paglen, Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You) (2016).
No School! is a learning programme inspired by the value crisis of desperate measures, desiring the political agency of wrongness, badness, inefficiency, laziness and defeat, heartbreak and loneliness. No School! also wants for contradiction, publics, furniture, hooting joyous clapping shouts of laughter, good food shared and the logical contortions of revolutionary praxis.
Practically, No School! is a series of workshops and events, whose existence is in debt to histories of radical pedagogy and self-organised education.