Turbid Media:
Fog, Froth and Foam in the Age of the Device

Instructor: Esther Leslie Date & Time: Saturdays June 12, 19, 26, July 10. 9:00 to 11:30 ET

Enroll – 200 USD

DESCRIPTION: This course observes the prevalence and expansion of forms of fog, froth and foam in our device-filled world and in our language: e.g. in pollution and the urban atmospheres produced by particulates hovering in the air, in tear-gases directed against protests, in streams and seas clogged with toxic foams and froths – results of chemically effluence and climate change, in space-time foam, a new Ether, and, metaphorically, in Cloud and Fogging computing, in speculative ‘frothy’ financial markets, in constructions of the social as foam and as bubbles in social theory. Foggy and foamy forms are turbid, a perceptible quality defined by Goethe as generative of vision per se. Media too can be turbid. ‘Turbid media’ is the name given by physicists to muddy water or particularly polluted air in which the particles of poisonous dust are so dense as to be visible. This project explores turbid media, not from the perspective of the physicist measuring propagation of light and other optical properties for determined ends, but from the perspective of a viewer speculating on a moment of optical engagement in which particles float on the air or gather atop a latte or lend a name to pixel-based cultures. What matter and media are fog, froth and foam? How do these forms remake our worlds in their light and through their productions?

 

IMAGE: J. M. W. Turner, Rain Steam and Speed the great western railway, 1844

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Enroll – 200 USD