UAAC 2025 - Critical Image Forum: Forum: Grounding Global Image Ecologies
Grounding Global Image Ecologies explores how locally-focused approaches to photographic practices and scholarship exist in dialogue with historical and contemporary global networks of migration, technology, and communication. As attention economies are depleting as the speed of circulating image networks increases, we recognize the urgency of considering the environmental cost of maintaining databases and uneven distributions of access. This panel explores place-based research and practices as not simply concerned with the topics and subject matter of location, but as embedded methodologies situated in the land and communities, which are also, by extension, determined through global movements of people, ideas, and material cultures. How do practices that prioritize local knowledge, rigorous listening, and/or contextualized dissemination contribute to and challenge implications in global image ecologies, and vice versa? About the presentations:SYDNEY HARTThe proposed talk will survey and evaluate satellite imagery as integrated into key Conceptual and Post-Conceptual art practices. Since the early 1970s, artists have worked with satellite imagery in a way that reflects the technology's growing prominence in industry, but its potential as a photographic and artistic material, and its epistemological implications for figuring place, remain underexplored. The proliferation of this medium coincided with large-scale changes in ecological consciousness, the logistics counter-revolution, and the spread of neoliberal policy. In the face of the medium's impersonality, artists have cut and pasted images produced from space, revealing a tactile relation to the medium that undercuts its domineering opticality. Do satellite images inevitably represent imperial, colonial, or capitalist instrumentality, or can its production circumvent these systems? At a time when detailed views of the Earth from space are available more widely than ever before, to what extent can its images meaningfully refigure our relations to place at a human scale? This talk will address the work of artists from North and South America, including Sol LeWitt, Bill Vazan, Laura Kurgan, and Carolina Caycedo. I will analyze artworks notably through Deleuze's concept of the diagram, as a latent map that organizes the play of psychic and material forces, transpiring through the organizing principles of paintings, according to Deleuze. I will examine recent artworks in terms of such relations, focusing on the historical context of top-down technocratic imperatives led by US market dominance, and how artists have reflected or critiqued these imperatives through situated knowledges and humanist perspectives on place. THY PHUTraces of Displacement: “Garbology”, Vernacular Photography, and Diasporic Image Ecologies PROPHECY SUN & MONIQUE MOTUT-FIRTHAs the environmental and energetic costs of image production and distribution escalate alongside the expanding demands of global media networks, artists and researchers are increasingly rethinking the ethics of digital practice. This paper responds directly to those concerns, presenting Flic Flaque (2024), a 5-minute stop-motion animation created using low-carbon methods and situated, interdisciplinary collaboration. Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the speculative work was made in response to the climate crisis and centers water as a subject, a medium, and a material condition of life. The project is visually composed of found archival and contemporary imagery of a peacock navigating water in its many states—flowing, leaking, raining, freezing—and sonically grounded in in-situ recordings 1 captured across two bioregions: the Lower Mainland, on the unceded traditional territories of the xwməθkwəyəm, Sḵwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw, səlilwətaʔɬ, qícəy, kwikwəƛəm, Qayqayt, Kwantlen, Semiahmoo and Tsawwassen Peoples; and the Columbia Basin region around Nelson, located on the tum xula7xw/traditional territory of the snʕayckstx (Sinixt) Peoples. These recordings foreground the acoustic ecology of place, drawing from Bernie Krause’s (2002) typology of biophony, geophony, and anthropophony to emphasize subtle but critical sonic distinctions between ecosystems. In an era of fire, flood, drought, and digital excess, Flic Flaque (2024) presents layers of affective, ecological, and creative rhythms and offers a quiet provocation: What does it mean to archive and distribute visual culture differently? How might we listen to water—not just for its aesthetic or metaphorical power, but as an indicator of ecological thresholds and technological responsibility?How can we resist hierarchical authorship and value ecological attunement?
Event Details-
York Universit Toronto
SYDNEY HARTSydney Hart is an artist, art critic, and lecturer in the Faculty of Culture and Community at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. He received a PhD in Cultural Studies from Queen’s University (Kingston, ON) and an MA in Aesthetics and Art Theory from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University (London, UK). Previously, he studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and Concordia University. Sydney’s research interests focus on a re-examination of modernist legacies through the contemporary, aesthetic dimensions of data and information. His critical writing on art and digital media has appeared in magazines including C Magazine, ESPACE art actuel, and Esse arts + opinions, and in journals including Synoptique, PUBLIC, and Intermediality. He has worked in various editorial roles, notably co-editing the journal livedspace and the book Weaving Histories. He is based on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations in Vancouver. MONIQUE MOTUT-FIRTHMonique Motut-Firth is a multidisciplinary visual artist, writer and arts educator working primarily in paper, paint and animation. Her current works investigate the use of collage and photomontage as critical strategies for exploring the role of technical images in knowledge production and cultural representation. The resulting scrap-systems link, layer and weave together disparate image cultures, eras and visual signifiers. She is the recipient of a number of Canada Council for the Arts grants. She has gained national and international recognition for her animation shorts. In 2019, Motut-Firth was a finalist for the Georgia Straight & Capture Photography Festival Canada Line Competition and a finalist for the Vancouver Arts Society Emerging Artist Award, 2016. Her solo exhibition CONSUMED, Gallery 1515, was a Selected Exhibition for the Capture Photography Festival 2017. In 2014, she was awarded a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta Canada, The Universe and Other Systems with Shary Boyle. A graduate from the MFA Visual Arts program at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, her work has been shown nationally and internationally. She also holds a BFA from Emily Carr and a BA in Psychology from the University of British Columbia where she was awarded the Margaret Lawrence Scholarship for the Arts. Monique currently works as a sessional instructor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design as well as providing instruction for Foundation Arts at Kwantlen Polytechnic University for the Entertainment Arts Program and the Wilson School of Design in Richmond & Vancouver, Canada. Motut-Firth is a 3rd generation settler of mixed heritage, born into a distinctly mixed cultural heritage of French Roman Catholic and Russian Doukhobor, she developed a sense of critical curiosity surrounding pop-culture’s influence on cultural identity. She would like to acknowledge that she grew up in the shadow of St. Mary’s Mission Indian Residential School (1861-1984), on the ancestral and shared territory of the Stol:Lo people. She gratefully continues to live, work and play on the beautiful and unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh nations. THY PHUThy Phu is a Distinguished Professor of Race, Diaspora and Visual Justice at the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media. After completing her PhD at the University of California Berkeley, and a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto, she joined Western University, where for more than a decade, she taught courses on visual studies, cultural theory, and Asian North American culture. Her research and public humanities practice examine the intersections between media studies, diaspora and migration, vision and justice. She is the author of two books, Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture and Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam. She is also coeditor of another three volumes, Feeling Photography, Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada, and Cold War Camera. In 2017, she was elected as member of the College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists at the Royal Society of Canada. She is co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal of Trans Asia Photography and is currently co-director of Refugee States, a community-led project that creates counter-archives of refugee and migrant digital storytelling, which is funded by a SSHRC Race, Gender and Diversity Initiative grant. PROPHECY SUNI am an interdisciplinary performance artist, queer, movement, video, sound maker, and mother of three. I have a PhD from Simon Fraser University and an MFA and BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. As a practicing artist-scholar and ecofeminist, I contemplate how new technologies, humanity and environment can engage, collaborate and connect to each other through more-than-human shared spaces of temporality. I define the environment as everything that surrounds us, energy, plants, animals, air, water, land, fire, light, spirituality, dreams, stories, bodies, matter, sound, frequencies, politics, literature and culture. I am living between two cities: Vancouver, on the unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territories. and Nelson, which is on the unceded traditional territory of the sn̓ʕay̓ckstx, Sinixt Arrow Lakes and the Yaqan Nukij Lower Kootenay Band peoples. These regions hold five generations of my family’s experience as settlers and my research delves into this history from a place of curiosity with the landscape; co-composing with voice, objects; extraction and surveillance technologies; and site-specific feminist engagements along the Columbia Basin region, the West coast and beyond. Following a rich genealogy of feminist knowledge production, my work meshes academic and non-academic sources with intersectional and ecological perspectives, to generate a broader conversation within the canon of feminist media art, celebrating conscious and unconscious moments and the vulnerable spaces of the in-between in which art, performance and life overlap.
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