2017 ~ Sunday April 23: ROAMING ASSEMBLY #13 ~ THE NAVIGATION PRINCIPLE: ‘After Montage?’ ~ by Tom Holert

In one of the last public lectures preceding his premature death in 2014, filmmaker, artist and writer Harun Farocki pondered the question to what extent, in the age and realm of the digital image, the foremost visual methodology of political modernism, namely montage, has given way to the paradigm of navigation. Already in Parallel I-IV, his inquiry of computer game visuality, Farocki had raised the issue of the epistemological and aesthetic consequences of such a shift. In his talk Tom Holert will attempt to continue this interrogation of the condition of contemporary digital visual cultures, mobilizing the notion of "navigation" to trace the terrain of operational image production and usage. Particularly interested in the fate of the idea of the political or dialectical image, this line of questioning aims at addressing the modes through which images are being converted into data spaces to be traveled as well as the instrumental life of images as tools of navigation (from neurosurgery to targeted killings).