Browsing by Author "Kasumovic, Mark"

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    A Human Laboratory and the Radical Image
    (University of South Wales, 2023-06-01) Kasumovic, Mark
    Delivered as part of the Documentary Futures Symposium at the European Centre for Documentary at the University of South Wales. In the second edition of the Documentary Futures international symposium, we address the state of the image and the rapidly altering landscape of photographic practice in the wake of the explosion and commercialisation of Artificial Intelligence. We explore what role artists, theorists and documentarians can assume within or against the architecture of machine learning at this critical juncture in human-machine development whilst exploring the implications of big data on photography and our shifting relationship to reality as affected by technical imagery. The second aspect and panel of the symposium will seek to understand how we use documentary's own shortcomings and blind spots in a world where fact rather than truth is debated. We discuss what methods are used by practitioners and researchers to embrace the faults, power dynamics and fictions inherent in their medium(s). In doing so we can look to engage in documentary's speculative potential and function in imagining hopeful futures. Recording: https://themothhouse.com/2023/05/08/documentary-futures-online-symposium-redefining-technical-images-and-speculative-blind-spots/
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    Ad-hoc Artist Residencies and the Artist as Researcher
    (London Conference of Critical Thought, 2023-06-01) Kasumovic, Mark
    “A Human Laboratory” is an ongoing visual arts project that explores the many relationships between the artist’s camera and the contemporary scientific techno-instrument. It employs photographic theory, media theory, the philosophy of science and practice-led research to document and explore elaborate scientific experiments. It is particularly interested in complex experiments where researchers are asking questions that are difficult to articulate and whose ramifications are yet unknown. Experiments such as the search for dark matter, understanding the mysteries of quantum mechanics and modelling complex climate change call for creativity and ingenuity, but also require cultural and artistic investigation, which is often considered “after the fact”. What can artists contribute in such curious spaces?
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    Everything is Made of Light
    (Bermondsey Gallery, London, 2022-05-17) Kasumovic, Mark
    Everything is Made of Light features images and texts from four contemporary artists that question, challenge, and converse with notions of the “unrepresentable” within our contemporary culture. Jacques Rancière, in his essay, Are Some Things Unrepresentable?, scrutinizes the challenges faced by images in depicting the world around us. This raises provocative questions surrounding camera-based images whose truth value is constantly being eroded within contemporary culture, and a world that is seemingly always becoming more difficult to represent. How can images and language be used to expand, rather than contract, our understanding of contemporary culture? How are new strategies created to represent the intangible, imperceptible and elusive? What is the camera’s role in enlightening us regarding complicated notions of “truth”?
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    GardenShip and State
    (Museum London, 2021-10-07) Kasumovic, Mark
    GardenShip and State is an artistic research project conceived at the intersection of environmental critique, decolonial theory, and artistic practice. It is motivated by timely questions: How can widespread environmental issues be approached democratically, to address complex and often competing claims by differing communities? Can art broaden awareness and stimulate individual and collective agency in the face of urgent environmental and colonial problems? GardenShip examines urgent issues confronting us, particularly climate change and global warming, and the measures states and non-state actors can, or should, take to resolve them. These important issues are of global concern because local actions and global effects are intertwined, as evidenced by the deleterious effects of environmental degradation on the lives of colonized peoples. The GardenShip project is guided by two important objectives: to address the complex entanglement of socio-cultural and ecological issues, particularly in relation to climate change and global warming, by using art's imaginative and participatory methods; and to examine the effectiveness of art-as-research in the creation and dissemination of knowledge. Three important topics shape the conceptual framework guiding the research: 1) The notion that we are living in the Anthropocene (in a period of human-induced climate change). 2) The necessity that decolonial critiques and practices must be used to expand our responses to the Anthropocene. 3) The idea that artistic practice is creative research that produces and mobilizes knowledge and understanding. GardenShip is a logical extension of projects led by artists Jeff Thomas, Patrick Mahon and the project’s other collaborators that used contemporary art to address the impact of colonialism and environmental problems. A fundamental premise of the project’s first objective is that artists make innovative contributions to research, using imaginative and experiential means. By suggesting different ways of conceiving important issues (creating so-called “imaginative propositions”), art can elicit unforeseen questions. Since questions drive research, art will play a fundamental role in GardenShip, both in the form of artworks as the outcome of research, and in conversations between scholars and artists where art is the catalyst. GardenShip’s second objective, the reflexive examination of art's effectiveness, will provide valuable information to others who wish to use art to make research widely available.
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    A Human Laboratory: Imagining the invisible worlds of science
    (2022-09-16) Kasumovic, Mark
    Featuring 12 large-scale photographs, an experimental documentary film and an immersive installation, this exhibition allows visitors to explore the often hidden world of the scientific laboratory. Grounded within a larger body of work, artist and researcher Mark Kasumovic thoughtfully explores the relationships between science and technology, and the evolution of both in tandem with the optical world. Where once information about the world was collected mostly on slides and test tubes, now it is collected and stored in data centres filled with huge server banks. Much like the rest of contemporary culture, scientific enquiry is becoming difficult for the camera to fully represent, and this intriguing exhibition asks viewers to consider the array of technologies we rely on to increasingly understand the world around us.
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    Radical Documentary and the GardenShip Project
    (University of Alberta Press, 2023-04-18) Kasumovic, Mark
    GardenShip and State embraces a form of radical curating that seeks to address issues which, due to their scale and complexity, are inherently difficult to represent. In his essay, “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?” Jacques Rancière scrutinizes the challenges inherent within representation. He locates these challenges in the aesthetic and political limitations embedded within the contemporary image. The pursuit of depicting and questioning problems that are as intermingled and multifaceted as global warming and colonization must address these limitations head-on. This opens up an important conversation whereby issues of representation within contemporary culture must be considered alongside notions of documentary, critical curating and new ways of displaying images together.
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    The Scientific Instrument and the Camera
    (holt Journal, 2024-01-19) Kasumovic, Mark
    A Human Laboratory is an evolving artist publication consisting of one hundred photographs taken during site visits to thirty-five international scientific research centres, laboratories and field stations over the course of five years. Photographs within this project are accompanied by scientific facts that have been decontextualised and anonymised, loosely chosen for their hypothetical connection to the imagery. This combination of text and image harnesses the symbolic nature of scientific instruments, making apparent the notion that human knowledge is indeed heavily codified and increasingly intangible and that such physical spaces can come to represent the ever “black-boxing” of knowledge construction within culture, amongst other things. This paper proposes that if the primary tool we collectively rely on to understand our visual world is inadequate for describing contemporary visual reality, it sincerely amplifies the notion that we are enveloped within a reality that has little relationship with the material forms that surround us. This problem challenges image makers to move beyond limited and traditional representations and put to work fresh symbolic languages that can reflect a shifting reality. Via examples from A Human Laboratory, poetic and radical photographic documents are analysed for their ability to bring forth new connections in understanding complex phenomena. These categories specifically—via a politic of incoherence—can employ the inventive notions of radical experimentation towards novel interconnections in a visual way.