Bleeding Images: Culture in a Time of Multiple Screens and Cameras, talk by Lawrence Liang, Sunday November 24 2013

Bleeding Images: Culture in a Time of Multiple Screens and Cameras

Photography and film’s emergence as ‘new media’ at the turn of the 19th century unsettled the ontological stability of visual arts. A century later we see a similar destabilizing of film with the emergence of a wide range of visual practices enabled by digital technology. The emergence of you tube and the rise of amateurism, the proliferation of new screens from tablets to smart phones which also double up as cameras – all of these developments raise the question of what it means to make sense of cultural production in the era of the digital. But is the move from analog to digital as seamless as it appears? In this talk I am interested in examining a set of ordinary digital objects such as surveillance videos, leaked images – all of which share an immediate proximity and distance from the cinematic image and pose the question of how we think of the internal contradiction even within the digital moment. I will examine a set of questions about the ethical stakes of what seems to be involved in the transition from digital to analog and link them to the question of the emerging regime of images in the era of the digital leak.

Lawrence Liang is a cultural scholar, theorist, legal researcher and lawyer based in Bangalore, who is known for his legal campaigns on issues of public concern. He is a co-founder of the Alternate Law Forum and has emerged as a spokesperson against the politics of intellectual property. Liang's key areas of interest are law, popular culture and piracy. He has been working closely with Sarai, New Delhi, on a joint research project on Intellectual Property and Knowledge / Culture Commons. Liang is a keen follower of the open source movement in software and has been working on ways of translating the open source ideas into the cultural domain. Liang is author of " Sex, Laws and Videotape: The Public is Watching" and "Guide to Open Content Licences" published by the Piet Zwart Institute in 2004. He is currently working on a book on Law, Justice and Cinema. He is one of the few scholars in India working on the influence of technology and new media on visual culture. He writes and lectures widely internationally.