McLuhan Conversations 2024 #1: What's the big deal about reality, anyway?
The march of technology has time and again raised the question of the balance between objective representation and the artist’s interpretation. When are we obligated to visually represent reality without interpretation? And more importantly, why are we so certain that we can tell the difference, or that there even is such a thing as an objective visual representation? What are the ethics of “idealized versions” when welling everything from clothes to architecture?
This presentation and conversation will discuss these questions in relation to three disciplines:
⁃ photography in advertising, art, and photojournalism;
⁃ the “digital render” and how it is used to sell publicly funded projects (using the Edmonton downtown public library project as a case study)
⁃ Artificial intelligence and the future of visual representation
Presented by Brad LaFoy, who has been professional photographer (Icecastles Photography) for 18 years, and is the Canadian Bureau photographer for the Kyiv Independent (formerly Kyiv Post). He studied philosophy in the 1990s at the University of Victoria and graduated from the University of Manitoba’s Architecture program in 2012.
