Tomáš Dvořák

The lecture will investigate the practice of making or taking images in relation to seeing or rather recognizing images. I believe this relationship is crucial, so far underexplored in scholarship on photography, arts, and visual media and gains much importance in contemporary visual culture, when technical systems of pattern recognition became the dominant form of observation. Although the lecture will centre on photographic approaches and discourses, it will situate them within a larger set of discursive and image-making practices and envelop photography, on the one hand, within the aesthetic ideals, sentiments, and techniques of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century picturesque (variously defined as something suitable for a picture, like a picture, or that which can be converted into a picture) and, on the other hand, within the contemporary technologies of operational images and machine vision. This wider context of pre- and post-photographic techniques of recognizing image-like forms will be demonstrated by various examples of artistic, scientific and vernacular images. 

Tomáš Dvořák is Assistant Professor in the Department of Photography at FAMU in Prague. He studied philosophy, art history, media studies and sociology at Charles University in Prague and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. His research focuses on philosophy and history of media and philosophy and history of science, and the interrelations between these fields, especially media archaeology of science and knowledge. He has authored or co-authored a number of books: Epistemology of (New) Media (NAMU 2018), Photography, Sculpture, Object (NAMU 2017), Temporality of (New) Media (NAMU 2016), Contemporary Approaches in Historical Epistemology (Filosofia 2013), Chapters from the History and Theory of Media (AVU 2010), and Waste Management: Texts, Images and Sounds of Recent History (Filosofia 2009). His most recent book is Photography off the Scale. Technologies and Theories of the Mass Image (Edinburgh UP 2021), co-edited with Jussi Parikka.