Start the new year with a one-day masterclass offering an introduction to self and surveillance through an alternative lens.
Resident Somerset House Studios Artist Manu Luksch will present new notions, investigations and ideas around hiding in plain sight. Showing short screenings and inspiring a shift in perspective through her practice.
Visit the 24/7 A Wake Up Call For Our Non Stop World exhibition to stimulate ideas.
Before individually and collectively partaking in an afternoon of open discussion and skills development, designed to express your identity whilst hacking societal systems such as CCTV.
Manu will offer two hands on approaches to articulate critical issues and respond to key questions using both moving image and experimental conversation to consider issues including:
What are some possible points of friction or resistance to 24/7 life & monitoring?
What tactics and strategies can be developed by an individual or a group in response?
How is language used to justify or criticise 24/7 life?
About the Artist Lead
Manu Luksch, Somerset House resident and Open Society Fellow 2018/19, is an intermedia artist and filmmaker who interrogates conceptions of progress and scrutinises the effects of network technologies on social relations, urban space, and political structures. Her current focus is on corporate-governmental relationships and the social effects of predictive analytics in the algorithmic city. Her works have ended up everywhere from street protests in Hong Kong to the collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
One recurring element of Manu’s work is the archive exposed to tactical fiction. Her seminal speculative fiction film FACELESS (2002–07), compiled from surveillance recordings recovered under data protection legislation, treats CCTV images as ‘legal readymades’, and derives its scenario from these legal properties. DREAMS REWIRED (2015), her second collaboration with Tilda Swinton as voice artist, draws on over 200 films from the 1890s to the 1930s to explore current hopes and fears relating to hyper-connectivity. This questioning of the archive extends to its contemporary use in prediction: her forthcoming film investigates data analytics and the (cognitive) Internet of Things.
