Images of Surveillance: three BISR mini-seminars at the Goethe-Institut

In the age of algorithms, surveillance has exceeded the boundaries of centralized government control to permeate every part of our lives and transform our collective sensorium. As vast communication networks spread over the world, intensive data gathering accelerates the abstraction of human life to feed the market’s ever-expanding appetite. Mass surveillance, then, is not simply the mark of a rogue security state but underpins a much larger technological and economic complex set to radically reconfigure human interactions as the separation between organic and inorganic matter becomes ever more blurry.

As part of the Goethe-Institut New York upcoming symposium  Images of Surveillance: The Politics, Economics, and Aesthetics of Surveillance Societies, the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research is proud to present a series of mini-seminar sessions which will take place throughout the symposium. These sessions will look at surveillance in theory and practice in a number of sites: the city, the battlefield, the transnational, and even critical theory itself. No preparation is necessary, readings will be provided and done on-site. These sessions are free and open to the public: Strategic Mapping: Surveillance and the Battlefield from ‘Radical Theory’ to ‘Facts on the Ground’, Media, Society, and Spying for the State: Transatlantic Reflections on Autonomy, Social Expression, and the Antinomies of Surveillance, Surveillance, Biopolitics, and the City:Health, Foreign Bodies, Visibility, and Discipline.