lucy ashton

class of 2020

Lucy Bio Image.JPG

about

Lucy Ashton is a writer currently located in Oakland. She holds a BA in History of Art and Visual Culture from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Ashton’s specializations lie in contemporary art practices after 1980, art and politics, art and activism, post colonialism, feminist and queer studies, critical theory, and curatorial practice. Currently her writing and research is focused on surveillance and visual culture, and how visibility and invisibility are constructed in society. Ashton is currently a second year candidate in the Visual and Critical studies Masters program at the California College of the Arts.

Lucy’s Thesis

Becoming Invisible/ Against Visibility: Hito Steyerl’s How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational. MOV File

This thesis examines German filmmaker and theorist Hito Steyerl's short film How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational. MOV File (2013) through its lessons on invisibility. Steyerl's film sets up invisibility as a political and social method to escape the hypervisualization and hyper-representation of people as mediated through surveillance technologies. I argue that subverting one's image can be considered a political act against capture technologies. Such an act allows for potentialities to emerge, enabling individuals to understand how visibility operates in this technological realm. Steyerl's film shows how the conditions of electronic surveillance continue to metamorphosize into more elusive and harder to distinguish forms, and invisibility can become a political strategy in which to respond and protect oneself. Becoming invisible means manipulating visibility through tactics of resolution, pixelation, camouflage, and disguise, altering how image-capture technologies read an image. Infiltrating and subverting the systems of surveillance is a model of political action that is necessary to combat the everchanging conditions of digital surveillance.

VCS_Sightlines_KH_Ashton_Lucy_Page_01.jpg