VISION & MACHINES (CRE374)

Victoria College, U of T

2023 -

Visual technologies are pervasive in our world: so indispensable, and so disposable that thousands are made, used, and discarded every day. Yet not long ago, technologies such as telescopes, maps, cameras, and VR headsets were both rare and strange technological things. Behind this transformation lie contentious stories of objects and people, makers and users, global forces and local dynamics, metropoles and colonies, and technologies and cultures. This course introduces a broad range of research in the fields of STS and cultural history, and takes the long view of the history of visual technology from the early 1500s to the present. Each week illuminates the politics of vision and machines by centering on a particular keyword, including world-making, instrumented vision, observers and observatories, panoramas, performance, cosmic literacy, virtual realities, micrographies and macrographies, surveillance, attention economies, and computer vision.

These themes draw attention to a number of related issues, to which we will keep on returning throughout the course. Why do we tend to willfully forget the omnipresence of visual technology in the everyday? What makes a technological image scientific, objective or trustworthy? How have constructions like territory, nation, property, class, race, gender, and the human/non-human divide mediated the proliferation of visual technologies? How do these technologies, in turn, render these constructions tangible? How has the formation of visual technological systems redistributed power in different social contexts? How have other traditions of practices of vision traveled and shaped modern technology in various parts of the world?