Evento

RETINAL DISPLACEMENT AND (COUNTER) INSURRECTIONS: AN EVENING WITH MITRA AZAR

Spectacle is pleased to welcome filmmaker and media theorist Mitra Azar for a one-night-only presentation investigating how processes of gaze disembodiment/virtualization related to new technologies of vision can be addressed as an emerging political-aesthetic battlefield - marking new regimes of visibility and, in parallel, new regimes of truth.

Mitra deploys a post-phenomenological approach to connect the use of POV in cinema to mobile technologies, documenting uprisings: Google gaze circuit (Google-based technologies of vision such as Google Maps, Google Car, Google360, Google Glass), drone technologies, virtual reality devices, neural network for robotic visions, etc. The research investigates processes of gaze disembodiment/gaze virtualization as processes of subjectivation, de-subjectivation and trans-individuation, envisioning their social, aesthetic and political consequences.

Coming from a background in aesthetic philosophy, Mitra Azar is a self-described "schizo-nomadic video-squatter" and "ARTthropologist". He admits to be haunted by images and by the relational-performative-philosophical aspect of "doing" them; the idea of borders as fluid, flexible, amorphous entities, and the political role of art and digital technologies within the frame of an aesthetic of crisis and of mass events, have been the framework of his practice based research.

Over the last several years, Mitra has investigated areas located both at geographical borders and during uprisings and revolutions, focusing on off/online mass behaviors and politics of space mainly through the lens of visual anthropology, art, and media philosophy, applying this idea of border from the physical spaces to the parallels online/offline regimes of visibility.