Date: March 9th, 2020 from 19:00 until 20:00

Location: Karel Doormanhof 45, 3012 GC Rotterdam

About the lecture:
Christopher Meerdo will be lecturing on digital colonialism through his research-based photographic and emerging media projects Eigengrau (infrared facial recognition camera images mined from restricted international factory employee work registrations) and Channeling (a Generative Adversarial Network trained on the complete 70,000 image file archive of Osama bin Laden’s computer cache, released by the Central Intelligence Agency). The artist considers the working space of emerging technologies to question the power of non-human camera and data aggregations. 

Artist bio:

Christopher Meerdo is an artist who grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and spent his teenage years in Šiauliai, Lithuania. He resided in Chicago for the last 15 years before relocating in 2019 to the Dallas/Fort Worth area.
Meerdo received his MFA in Photography from the University of Illinois at Chicago, taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 2012-2019, and was recently appointed tenure track Assistant Professor of Photography and New Media at the University of North Texas. 
Recent exhibitions include Exgirlfriend (Berlin); The Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago); Wilfried Lentz (Rotterdam), The National Gallery of Kosovo (Pristina), and The Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art (Pittsburg). He was an artist in residence at the SIM Program in Reykjavik and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Meerdo was most recently a fellow at the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands for the 2018-2019 program. 

Image credits:

Channeling, 2019Modular LED display, Switcher/Scaler, Media Player, 8×8 ft (2.5×2.5m)Generative Adversarial Network trained on complete 70,000 image file archive of Osama bin Laden’s computer cache, released by the Central Intelligence Agency