Camouflage and Photographic Surveillance

Hide-and-Seek in Science, Art, and War
June 29, 2017, 7pm, Tranzitdisplay

Hanna Rose Shell, from the obverse vantage point, will argue that camouflage is an adaptive logic of escape from photographic representation.

 

Her talk traces the evolution of camouflage as it developed in counterpoint to technological advances in photography, innovations in warfare, and as-yet-unsolved mysteries of natural history. Today, camouflage is commonly thought of as a textile pattern of interlocking greens and browns. But we shall discover the ways in which it reveals itself to be much more – a set of institutional structures, mixed-media art practices, and permutations of subjectivity that emerged over the course of the twentieth century in environments increasingly mediated by photographic and cinematic intervention. The talk will reveal to the audience three conceptually linked “species” of so-called “photographic camouflage.”
The lecture is organized with cooperation of Diffractions Collective and Tranzitdisplay.