In this session, four image-makers present three short lecture performances, each of which mines the productive distance between the viewer and the image. Each lecture interrogates the power of the image, highlighting how passive forms of spectatorship have been conditioned by algorithms animated by profit. Offering resistance, each lecture offers an antidote to this passive intoxication by asking for more active forms of spectatorship, ones that rupture the spectator’s fusion (and proximity) with the screen.

With a plethora of references to meme culture, from ASMR baking to GlenCallan Whiskey, Maud Craigie’s lecture opens up the space between subjects and their images and considers ways in which, “the real must be fictionalized in order to be thought” (Ranciere, 2013, 34). Craigie is followed by 2girls1comp whose lecture focuses on a mod that allows players to write messages across the map of GTA V. In the final lecture Alice Lenay focuses on ‘the twisties’, a potentially perilous phenomenon where gymnasts lose their sense of orientation while mid-air, using it as a vehicle to investigate the relationship between our bodies and the networked image.

Focussing on the productive space between the image and the spectator, each lecture explores the idea that while proximity collapses distance, closeness paradoxically relies on it.

The lecture performances will be followed by a conversation between the artists.