Nottingham Contemporary

This series of study sessions explore notions of ‘opacity’, ‘imperceptibility’ and ‘disappearance’ from a number of different perspectives, and in relation to questions of ethics, politics and aesthetics.

In collaboration with Centre for Critical Theory, University of Nottingham and M3C.

Informatic Opacity, with Zach Blas

“The outside is always an opening on to a future,” wrote philosopher Gilles Deleuze, “[it] is a thought of resistance.” Oriented around one such theory of “the outside” in minoritarian thought, this study session will engage Édouard Glissant’s philosophy of opacity as a theoretical and aesthetic modality in which to think, imagine, and act outside of a major technological hegemony of the historical present, namely, biometric governance. We will put opacity into relation with informatics, in order to develop a critical framework for analyzing biometrics in regimes of security and control today. There will be a particular emphasis on the aesthetics and politics of the face in biometric technologies, critical theory, and artistic practice. Participants will also be introduced a variety of concepts, including biometric failure, nonexistence, and capture, alongside Blas’s writings and artworks. All readings will be circulated in advance.