| dc.description.abstract | In the art project Optics. Compression. Propaganda. artist Sean Snyder collected and further experimented with appropriated material. Snyder appropriated the images and texts from a number of different sources: televisual imagery, stills and moving images from 20th Century films, and imagery from the Carl Zeiss Archive, which is an archive of optical technologies. Most importantly, the project encompasses samples of Internet-distributed propaganda images and written propaganda strategies of Al Qaeda and the (U.S.) Department of Defense. This material culminated into 36 works and additional untitled archive material that were exhibited at Lisson Gallery in London in 2007. In Snyder’s project, this thesis argues, the Internet is displayed as a new space for visual warfare. The thesis will argue that Snyder’s exploration of Al Qaeda and the Department of Defense’s propaganda is more concerned with the technical infrastructure of propaganda than with it being an intentional construct of semantic information. In the space of the Lisson Gallery, one could see multiple depictions of cameras and other optical instruments that invite inquiries on the production of images. Further, several markedly pixelated images drew attention to digital image production and distribution. Following this, the thesis argues that a thorough investigation of how digital compression technologies function, and what they answer to socially, is crucial to understand Snyder’s project. The terms in the title of Snyder’s project have provided the structure for the dissertation. The thesis investigates these elements (optics, compression and propaganda) accumulatively by detailing their individual values in the project in designated chapters. The final chapter provides a cohesiveness that binds them together to display their association. With this, the structure demonstrates one of the claims of the thesis. Specifically, the thesis argues that Snyder’s project negotiates the relationship of different image producing actors – such as military organizations, cameras, compression technologies and the distribution platform of the Internet – as networked. Following Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), a network consists of actors that bring their own traits, which lend themselves to the construct of the whole. The complete network at play is here revealed only after the singularity of each player is explored. Also discussed with ANT, the thesis argues that Snyder’s project challenges the human/ non-human dichotomy where the former is thought to author and control the latter. With ideas deriving from different sources, ranging from media theory and media archeology (most notably Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler and Wolfgang Ernst) to political theory (Brian Massumi, Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman), theory on compression (Jonathan Sterne) and geopolitical analyses (George Friedman and Naomi Klein), the thesis argues that the works negotiate how the explored image-producing actors guide perception and affect human bodies and minds. | nob |