December Must Sees @ The Hmm

It’s been a while since my last update, but as you might imagine it’s just PhD life going on as usual: reading, writing (occasionally about stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with my dissertation), and generally doing work that takes time to brew. Luckily I have a couple relevant things to share in the next month or so that you’ll know about in due time.

The first thing is I had the chance to curate this month’s Must Sees at The Hmm. The Hmm is a “real-life Tumblr”, a series of events happening at different venues in Amsterdam and featuring lots of cool presentations about visual culture. It’s fun. The Must Sees section is a sort of online residency program they have: a different Image Editor each month selects four images, which can be weird or zeitgest-y or relevant to the research the editor is doing.

My own selection predictably reflects the topics regular readers of this blog (all four of you) are already familiar with: the construction of the criminal through social media voyeurism (e.g. 6ix9ine memes), the aesthetics of the digital nomad (most notably the #solotraveller pose), creative tactics of stereotype subversion (represented for example by this IG account), and a reminder of AI fallacy (a bit of a Xmas present). Each image represents an aspect of my research project and there is a little text below that explains it, with lots of links.

Check out the full thing on The Hmm’s website and also follow them on their Instagram account (and me, since you’re at it).