Photography, Liquid Intelligence and Digital Information

Professor Esther Leslie

Birkbeck College, University of London

Thursday 7th February

6.30 pm G7 Pavilion Parade, All Welcome

Techno science is unthinkable without the intelligence of the liquid crystal. It makes possible the very application of intelligence in its data-crunching algorithmic somersaults, in the form of government and commercial intelligences. Liquid crystal enables the virtual border guard, iBorderCTRL, who determines if the stranger is telling lies or truth, which are the conditions of the stranger’s entry into states. This paper posits a deep history of intelligence wrapped up in the liquid and the crystal – made more or less manifest in our many screens – and it asks how the extending vocabularies of qualified intelligence – military, emotional, artificial – are augmented in the age of the device, and with the emergence of device intelligence, whose capacities include pre-cognition, and in whose future lies the promise of radical atomic intelligence.

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