What Can We Learn From One Billion Images? - The Bartlett International Lectures

This event will be held on Zoom Webinar, regsiter above, and will also be streamed live on The Bartlett School of Architecture's YouTube channel at 12:00 GMT on Thursday 3 March.  

Please note this lecture is rearranged from Wednesday 9 February. 

About

Streamed live on The Bartlett School of Architecture's YouTube channel, this event will be a discussion between host Roberto Bottazzi, student co-host Trishla Chadha and speaker Dr Lev Manovich. 

This event forms part of The Bartlett International Lectures Spring 2022.

This spring, each of the International Lectures will be curated by one of the school's programmes to inspire, invent, imagine, and provoke.

Abstract

What Can We Learn From One Billion Images?

Over the last 15 years, the emergence of large online collections of digitised cultural heritage and the rise of social media created new unique opportunities for the study of culture. These opportunities come with their own challenges. How do we explore patterns in massive visual collections that may contain billions of images and video? How can we observe giant visual cultural universes, without reducing them to averages, outliers, or existing categories? How does analysis of big visual data allow us to challenge our assumptions about culture? How can it help us to rethink our understanding of architecture and urbanism?

Dr Lev Manovich will discuss these questions using as examples both projects created in the Cultural Analytics Lab since 2008 and selected projects by other scientists and data designers. 

Speaker biography

Dr. Lev Manovich is leading theorist of digital culture, and a pioneer in using big data to study visual culture. He was included in the list of "25 People Shaping the Future of Design" in 2013 and the list of "50 Most Interesting People Building the Future" in 2014. He is the author and editor of 14 books including Cultural Analytics, AI Aesthetics, Theories of Software Culture, Instagram and Contemporary Image, Software Takes Command, Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database and The Language of New Media which was described as "the most suggestive and broad-ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan." Manovich is a Presidential Professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Director of the Cultural Analytics Lab. The lab created projects for the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), New York Public Library, and other organizations.

Image: 'Visual Dislocation' by Trishla Chadha, Urban Design MArch, RC14