Date/Time
Thursday
27 Sep 2012
4:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Location
470 Stephens Hall

Event Type
Colloquium

Hanna Rose Shell
Associate Professor, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This talk proposes a history and theory of the drive to hide in plain sight. Camouflage developed in counterpoint to technological advances in photography, innovations in warfare, and as-yet-unsolved mysteries of biological evolution; its origins date to the turn of the last century. Today, camouflage is commonly thought of as a specific textile pattern of interlocking greens and browns, or alternatively its twenty-first century pixelated “digital” update. But it is in fact much more — a set of institutional structures, mixed-media art practices, and permutations of subjectivity, that evolved over the course of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries in natural, aesthetic, and military environments increasingly mediated by photographic and cinematic intervention.