Lila Lee-Morrison

Research Areas

• Visual culture of machine vision
• Intersections of art and technology
• Socio-political agencies of the image

Current Research

Most recently I have focused on the intersections of art, technology, and the environment. There is an increasing dependency on forms of machine vision and remote sensing technologies such as drone systems and satellite image processing, 3D LIDAR scanning, algorithmic programs of spatial design and simulative technologies, that have been developed to monitor and model physical environments at planetary scales.

I aim to interrogate the role of images that result from these technologies as well as their corresponding imaging systems, highlighting an inquiry into the aesthetics of their modes of perception and forms of representation to expand an understanding of the epistemic role of AI imaging in contemporary knowledge claims on the environment and our relationship to it. This is explored within a broader discursive framework within the environmental humanities on the Anthropocene, and planetary scale climate crises. This inquiry is framed by an interdisciplinary approach found at the intersection of media studies, environmental humanities, philosophy of technology and art history. This research direction incorporates ideas within art historical landscape theory and an expanded understanding of media as environment and environment as media.

Attention is placed on the technical affordances and potentialities of these visual technologies and how their modes of perception contribute to emerging notions of the planetary, negotiating the Anthropocene, imaginaries of post-carbon futures and the figuring of diverse subjectivities as enmeshed and entangled with regard to both technical as well as environmental processes. This inquiry is based on an understanding that our knowledge of the physical environment– both in the threats that are posed to it and its expansion beyond earthly borders – is increasingly negotiated through a technological and automated engagement and that the visuality of these technical systems is a central aspect to consider through a historical, critical as well as speculative lens.