NEWS: Lila Lee-Morrison was recently awarded the prestigious 2023 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant under the book category. The program supports writing about contemporary art and aims to ensure that critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging with the visual arts. Lila was awarded the grant for a book proposal titled, Machinic Landscapes: Technology, Art, and Environment in an Age of Planetarity that will address contemporary artists who produce imaginary conceptions of landscape by recontextualizing images of the planet made by digital imaging systems. Running counter to scientific and military contexts of technological development, these artists’ practices address the figuring of diverse subjectivities as enmeshed in both technical and environmental processes

Beginning September 2023, I have position as a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC funded research project, “Show and Tell: Scientific representation, algorithmically generated visualizations, and evidence across epistemic cultures” headed by Alison Gerber at Lund University. I am also a Visiting Fellow at University of Copenhagen with Intersect, an interdisciplinary community headed by Kristin Veel and Henriette Steiner. I am also a member of the research cluster, Anthropocene Aesthetics at SDU and an affiliate member of Digital Theory Lab at New York University.

Lund Research Portal: https://portal.research.lu.se/en/persons/lila-lee-morrison/publications/

My broader research interests focus has concerned an analysis of the visual culture and logics of machine vision technologies and how these systems incur modes of perception redefine a notion of seeing. My analyses include addressing this subject through image theory and tracing historical and socio-cultural logics in the processes by which machine vision systems operate. This interest connects to intersections of art and technology, digital culture, history of scientific photography, art theory and the ethical agency of contemporary images. My current research involves analyzing machine vision technology in relation to the environment and at planetary scales. My entry point concerns the role of subjectivity as expressed through artworks in knowledge production about environment and through landscape representation.

My dissertation project titled, Portraits of Automated Facial Recognition: On Machinic Ways of Seeing the Face (Transcript Verlag, 2019) analyses the visuality of automated facial recognition technology and its designed algorithms as a case study in machinic vision and its concurrent modes of perception. It addresses a general problematic of facial recognition technology in asking how recognition can be defined through a technical process. I trace the cultural logics of representing the face within historical scientific and artistic contexts, relating the representational mechanisms of algorithmic recognition with the practice of composite portraiture in the wider contexts of sociology and a theory of eugenics and philosophy. This analysis poses alternative visual logics of facial recognition through the work of philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein as well as in the work of contemporary artists, Zach Blas, Trevor Paglen and Thomas Ruff. Overall, this analysis highlights the contemporary social and political investments in technical representations of the face.

Previous to working in academia, I worked in the photography industry in postproduction, retouching and as a digital archivist at Magnum Photos, Impact Digital and art+commerce in New York.

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