Virtual Public Lecture: John May, “Rules for the Electronic Zoo”

This is meant as a brief pause, amidst the gathering weight of pressing institutional deadlines and professional decisions, to reflect on the historical and theoretical conditions around our deepened dependence on real-time electronic images, and to connect those reflections to practical realities in the present. A passing glance at the technical history of computational images reveals that we have not suddenly found ourselves living on our screens. Long before Covid-19, it was possible to declare: we already see with electronic images; we already think and act and live by way of them. The ongoing pandemic exaggerates and magnifies this fact, but also reveals it as a preexisting condition—in the design fields, and in culture more broadly—with extensive psychosocial, political and environmental consequences. We know now that life will not suddenly “return to normal.” But life must be lived, and decisions made, individually and collectively. If our ideas are inseparable from the media through whic