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Frederick Wiseman cracks open institutions: the military, the insane asylum, the high school, the police, the welfare system, the Paris Opera Ballet, the National Gallery of London, and now – in his 43rd film in 50 years – the New York Public Library, an institution eminently worthy of his immersive style. If you thought libraries are just repositories for books, you’re in for a big, wonderful surprise.  The NYPL owns (and makes accessible) millions of images; sponsors lectures by people like Patti Smith, Elvis Costello, and Ta-Nehisi Coates; circulates a growing collection of e-books; maintains a vast archive of materials not available online; and gives classes in digital technology. The magnificent Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (and 5th Avenue at 42nd Street) is the spine of the film, but equally vital is the role of branch libraries that act as community centers for civic life. “Libraries are the pillars of our democracy” says Toni Morrison – as Wiseman’s opus, EX LIBRIS, makes abundantly and fascinatingly clear.

USA • 2017 • 197 MINS. • ZIPPORAH FILMS

@ Metro Pictures, 519 W 24th St

Trevor Paglen will present public walk-throughs of the exhibition at 3:00 p.m. on September 9 and 23. On September 16 at 1:00 p.m., he will be joined in discussion by leading computer vision and artificial intelligence researcher and AI Now Initiative co-founder Kate Crawford.

Trevor Paglen’s A Study of Invisible Images is the first exhibition of works to emerge from his ongoing research into computer vision, artificial intelligence (AI) and the changing status of images. This body of work has formed over years of collaboration with software developers and computer scientists and as an artist-in-residence at Stanford University. The resulting prints and moving images reveal a proliferating and otherwise imperceptible category of “invisible images” characteristic of computer vision.

Paglen’s exhibition focuses on three distinct kinds of invisible images: training libraries, machine-readable landscapes, and images made by computers for themselves. For Machine-Readable Hito, for example, Paglen took hundreds of images of artist Hito Steyerl and subjected them to various facial recognition algorithms. This portrait of Steyerl presents the images alongside metadata indicating the age, gender, emotional state and other signifiers that the algorithms have interpreted from the images. For other portraits in the show, Paglen trained facial recognition software to read the faces of deceased philosophers, artists and activists. Ghostly images of Frantz Fanon, Simone Weil and others show the facial signatures—the unique qualities of faces as determined by biometric recognition software— that are used by computer vision to identify individuals.

To make the prints in Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, Paglen trained an AI to recognize images associated with taxonomies such as omens and portents, monsters, and dreams. A second AI worked in tandem with the first to generate the eerie, beautiful images that speak to the exuberant promises and dark undercurrents characterizing our increasingly automated world.

The video installation Behold These Glorious Times! brings together hundreds of thousands of training images routinely used for standardized computer vision experiments and pairs them with visual representations of an AI learning to recognize the objects, faces, expressions and actions. A loose narrative begins to emerge about the collapsing distinctions between humans, machines and nature. Electronic musician Holly Herndon composed a soundtrack using libraries of voices created to teach AI networks how to recognize speech and other acoustic phenomena.

Tentative itinerary via the Vera List Center for Art + Politics:

Signature event for the 25^th anniversary of the founding of the VLC, with artists, curators and scholars hailing from twelve countries in celebration of Maria Thereza Alves’ prize winning project Seeds of Change, and five prize finalists.

Friday, November 3
Conference Day One

Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall, 55 West 13^th Street
12:00-2:00pm   Maria Thereza Alves Panel Discussion I: The Ground We’re Standing On
Participants:       Seth Denizen, University of California, Berkeley, Department of Geography; Josette Kehaulani Kauanui, Professor of American Studies and Anthropology, Wesleyan University; Tomaz Mastnak, Institute of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana

Unpacking the co-production of land, plants and peoples in the research for Seeds of Change, this conversation challenges our assumptions about how and what we think we know about a site. In Maria Thereza Alves’ words: “The earth you think you’re on is not, it is someplace else. The only way you would know the place is from the flower.” By looking at human-instigated histories of soil movements – and plants as evidence thereof – we examine radical forms of geography that help uncover obscured histories of sovereignty and oppression, and consider the potential of interspecies co-operation. In this talk we reframe our relation to place as well as what we risk when we do so when the “local” or so-called native is elsewhere. The New School faculty who guides this conversation considers who and what can call a place home and the means necessary of elaborating on that definition in order to move it beyond exchange.

2:30-4:30pm      Maria Thereza Alves Panel Discussion II: Seeds as Storyteller/Witness
Participants:       Jane Bennett, Professor, Department of Political Sciences, Johns Hopkins University; Marisa Prefer, art and Horticultural Advisor; Radhika Subramaniam, Assistant Professor, School of Art and Design History and Theory, Parsons

Moderator: Lara Khaldi, Curator, Palestine

In their narrative and expository role seeds collude with human actors and fertile ground to tell a story, sometimes a different story than expected, about the history of a place. Alves’ work takes up the narratives carried by dormant seeds that endure in ballast, i.e. the soil that was used to balance trade ships as they crossed the ocean. These dormant seeds have the potential to activate alternative ways of knowing buried and obscured histories of oppression that are “flashing up,” as Walter Benjamin wrote, in the present. As such, it is our, very necessary, job to grasp these stories in those moments. An environmentalist, a playwright/writer, and an art historian guide this investigation about the illustrative agency of seeds, and elaborate on and bolster the conceptual tools Alves has developed in regards to their own research and practices. The New School interlocutors and respondents, a botanist and a historian, elaborate on these interpretations to further consider how the sciences, humanities and design collaborate to imagine tangible alternative pasts and futures, and what is lost when we choose not to consider them in concert but select one over the other.

4:30-5:30pm      Meet & Greet with conference participants
Prize Presentation & Keynote Conversation

The Auditorium at 66 West 12^th Street
6:00-6:45pm      Keynote Conversation with Maria Thereza Alves and Saidiya Hartman

Prize presentation

Introduced by Executive Dean Mary Watson, Maria Thereza Alves receives the Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics 2016-2018 and the prize object, Yoko Ono’s sculpture The Third Eye, for her project Seeds of Change.

Seeds of Change explores the social, political and cultural history of ballast flora in port cities and reveals patterns, temporalities and instruments of colonialism, commerce and migration going back many centuries. In the conversation that follows, Maria Thereza Alves discusses her prize-winning project and its repercussions in the current political moment with Saidiya Hartman, Professor at Columbia University and author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. 

Exhibition Opening

Maria Thereza Alves, Seeds of Change: New York—A Botany of Colonization

Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries in the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center
6:45-8:00pm      Exhibition Opening & Reception
For the exhibition Maria Thereza Alves, Seeds of Change –A Botany of Colonization, the artist, in association with students at The New School, has been mapping the artifacts and entities that trace the proliferation of foreign flora that travelled to New York and the surrounding region via trade ship ballast over the past two centuries. The installation includes a verdant collection of propagated ballast flora that will fill the Aronson Galleries in the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons School for Design. A new series of watercolor drawings supplements this botanical collection and its cultivation, and shows the artist’s reflection on these historical ciphers through text and images. In addition, Alves has hand-drawn largescale maps on canvas that further highlight those areas in historical New York harbor sites that have been filled in with ballast over the past few centuries. In anticipation of the exhibition three partner organizations have sourced, potted and germinated the documented ballast flora at their outdoor locations to which they will be returned after the exhibition to create actual Ballast Flora Gardens in the spring and summer of 2018.

Saturday, November 4
Conference Day Two

Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall, 55 West 13^th Street
12:00-2:00pm   Prize Finalists Panel Discussion I: The House We’re Building
Participants:       Doris Bittar, Nitasha Dhillon and Greg Sholette (Gulf Labor), Hannah

Meszaros Martin, Colombia (Forensic Architecture)

Try as we might, the materiality of structures and infrastructure still determines much of how we interact with others. Finalists for the Vera List Center Prize, Forensic Architecture and Gulf Labor are artist research groups dedicated to reassessing and activating the visible and invisible aspects of infrastructures. Forensic Architecture has established a form of history writing that skips over the historical significance to architectural forms, to focus instead on architecture’s performance as material witness. Gulf Labor has focused on the Guggenheim Museum’s labor practices to propose that artistic practices entail ethical positions. Representatives of the two groups discuss the visibility of markers of absences, and how alignments between organic and non-organic matter can result in an affirmative acts of community building.

2:00-4:00pm      Prize Finalists Panel Discussion II: Languages For Us(e)/Ways of Knowing
Participants:       Irene Agrivina, Indonesia (House of Natural Fibers), Gabriela Gamez, Mexico,

(IsumaTV), Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho, South Africa (MADEYOULOOK)

In light of rampant skepticism towards democratic forms of political representation, media platforms have recently been positioned as the new commons. But in the struggle for social justice, visual and discoursive media languages can only be effective if they enact as much as they convey social justice values shared among their members. This panel is informed by current debates in the U.S. on self-representation and protocols of accessing images, words and other culturally specific narratives. IsumaTV is a collaborative multimedia platform for indigenous filmmakers and media organizations in Canada; House of Natural Fibers (HONF) is a new-media arts laboratory in Yogyakarta, Indonesia; and MadeYouLook uses Johannesburg’s public transportation system in order to stage performative interventions that jolt different relationships among commuters. Here, representatives of all three groups elaborate on the specificities of visual and discoursive languages and the dynamics of media production that seeks distinct and different audiences and co-producers especially when addressing trans-local environmental challenges.

4:00-5:30pm      Festive Closing Reception with music, dance and song

With Courtney Stephens, Kevin Jerome Everson, Lewanne Jones, Penny Lane, Ross Lipman, Michael Robinson, & Rick Prelinger.

More Info + Registration @ UnionDocs