PHILIP GLAHN & CARY LEVINE
This talk focuses on the work of the visionary art techno-activist group Mobile Image and how it modeled new individual and social subject formations. Among the most prescient and understudied artists in postwar history, Mobile Image creatively redeployed futuristic communication devices, unleashing their latent potentials for radically new forms of exchange among diverse peoples and publics. The group’s appropriation of emergent telecommunications technologies in the 1970s and 80s served to analyze and perform the self in ways that continue to challenge late-modern notions of subject and subjectivity.
Glahn and Levine’s recently published book, “The Future Is Present: Art, Technology, and the Work of Mobile Image” (MIT Press, 2024), traces the group’s experimentation with technological mediations and embodiments through devices such as satellite transmission, television, video, electronic writing tablets, and databases. Building upon core components of the book, this talk focuses on how Mobile Image modeled an early form of planetary thinking that at once de- and re-centered the human user as a newly co-dependent and empowered “dividual” self.
Glahn and Levine argue not only for the historical importance of Mobile Image, but for a process that is at once critical and transformative, that reconfigures fundamental notions of the public sphere, democracy, communication, and political participation, along with efforts to change contemporary relations of power, representation, and identity. Mobile Image’s approach to the aesthetic politics of technology—how certain devices (digital or otherwise) impact what can be imagined, how they reinforce structures of authority even as they enable new dreams, perceptions, and expressions—has profound implications for today’s world of ubiquitous digital re/production, networking, and social media.
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