Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan | The Violent Forensics of Digital Imagery: Abu Ghraib, Ukraine, and Cat Videos

Please join us for a very special event with Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan who discusses his new book Code: From Information Theory to French Theory. At Digital Aesthetics he also be discussing his future project, Screenscapes: How Formats Render Territories.
 

About the Speaker

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a Reader in the History and Theory of Digital Media at King's College London. An overarching theme of his research is how “cultural” sciences shape—and are shaped by—digital media. This concern spans his writing on the mutual constitution of cybernetics and the human sciences, ethnicity and AI, and the role of mid-twentieth century military vigilance in the development of interactive, multimedia computing.  His attention to cultural factors in technical systems also figured in his work as a curator, notably for the Anthropocene and Technosphere projects at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

Bernard's book Code: From Information Theory to French Theory examines how liberal technocratic projects, with roots in colonialism, mental health, and industrial capitalism, shaped early conceptions of digital media and cybernetics. It offers a revisionist history of "French Theory" as an effort to come to terms with technical ideas of communications and as a predecessor to the digital humanities. N. Katherine Hayles wrote of this book that it “upends standard intellectual histories” and Lev Manovich that “after reading this original and fascinating book, you will never look at key thinkers of the twentieth century in the same way.” Early drafts of the book’s argument appeared in journals including Grey Room and Critical Inquiry.

Bernard's current book project, Screenscapes: How Formats Render Territories, draws on infrastructure studies and format studies to offer a radical account of how digital screens produce global space. It considers the digital interface in terms of articulation, i.e., in its technoscientific formatting of territories, temporalities, and practices as “ecologies of operations.” Excerpts appear in Representations (An Ecology of Operations) and MLN  (The Bitmap is the Territory).