Symposium
Friday, March 10, 2017
10 am – 6:30 pm
Room 1002
Audain Art Centre
6398 University Boulevard
Under Super Vision seeks to provide a critical platform for scholarly and creative discourse on the significance and normalization of surveillance strategies both currently and historically. The importance of this matter continues to permeate recent scholarship in materialist, geopolitical, postcolonial and visual culture discourses on surveillance within art and art history.
While security at the physical borders between countries is made ever more stringent, the comparably permeable nature of the Internet provides opportunities for collecting and sharing information freely across state-imposed borders. Whether it is the use of drones in overseas war zones, the arguably more neutral situations of self-surveillance or the subsequent harvesting of personal data via social media, issues of surveillance and its repercussions are omnipresent. However, a passive acceptance of the insertion of surveillance structures into the everyday has inevitably led to our fatigued tolerance of it. It has never been more pertinent to actively challenge these invasive structures.
Schedule
10:00 am – Refreshments
10:30 am – Welcome
Under Super Vision Committee
10:45 am – Opening Remarks
Dr. Serge Guilbaut, Professor Emeritus, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC
11:00 am – Panel I
Neil Sanzgiri, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ecologies of The Black Palace: Subjugation and Representation in the National General Archives of Mexico
Hannah Tollefson, McGill University
Biometrics and Body Doubles
Blythe Chandler, University of Melbourne (Alumnus)
Everyday Life at Twenty Paces: Defining Westworld (2016) as an Iterative Dystopia
12:30 pm – Lunch
1:30 pm – Panel II
Justin Barski, University of British Columbia (Alumnus)
The Society of the Seen
Yani Kong, Simon Fraser University
They Cannot Just Disappear: The Unpublished Bodies of September 11
Nolan Oswald Dennis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
From the Anxious South
3:00 pm – Break
3:15 pm – Panel III
Blake Finucane, University of British Columbia
Beyond the Screen: The SMBAs’ Fight Between Creativity and Control on Instagram
Cameron MacDonald, University of Toronto
Deconstruction of the Gaze in Charles Burns’ Black Hole
Jorma Kajala, Simon Fraser University
Surveillance and Soundwalking
4:45 pm – Break
5:00 pm – Keynote
Wafaa Bilal, Associate Arts Professor, New York University: Tisch School of the Arts
6:30 pm – Closing Remarks
Dr. John O’Brian, Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC
We thank our donors for their generous contributions:
Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies
Museum of Anthropology
Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory
Department of Asian Studies
Department of Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies
Department of History
Faculty of Arts HSS Grant
Faculty of Graduate Studies Dean’s Office
Provost and Vice President Academic
Liu Institute for Global Issues
