Evan Hume’s art practice explores the intersection of abstraction, photography, and secrecy in the context of declassified government archives. This work began by researching photographs from Project Blue Book, the U.S. Air Force’s investigation into unidentified flying objects between the late 1940s and 1960s. The degradation of these images through photocopying and microfilm transfer rendered them abstract and ambiguous, undermining their evidentiary function. These photographs become a point of departure for grappling with the limits of photographic legibility and representation when recontextualized, recalling the negation of modernist abstraction.

Hume’s most recent projects examine photography as an instrument of the military-industrial complex for reconnaissance, surveillance, and documentation of advanced technologies. He obtains photographs primarily from the Central Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, and the National Archives. Although a wealth of information about covert photoreconnaissance has been released, much remains redacted and classified. Hume combines photographs pertaining to Cold War developments in photographic technologies with contemporary documents and devices, connecting past and present. Processes including analog printing, digital collage, scanner manipulation, and data bending are used to animate the archival material as well as emphasize the tension between informational and enigmatic source images. Through these interventions, historical fragments are presented in a state of flux, open to alternate associations and implications. What we are allowed to know and see is often incomplete and indeterminate, encouraging critical speculation.

Evan Hume is an artist and educator based in Ames, Iowa where he is Assistant Professor of Photography at Iowa State University. He earned his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and MFA from George Washington University. Raised in the Washington, DC area, Hume’s approach to photography is informed by the experience of living in the nation’s political center for much of his life and critically examines the medium’s use as an instrument of the military-industrial complex. His first photography monograph, Viewing Distance, was published by Daylight Books in 2021 and his second, Critical Collection, will be published in 2025.

Participation via Zoom Link

Code: 366701

ID: 656 3202 5609

Part of the International Lecture Series

Abstraction Today: The Real and the Imaginary

From automated navigation to weather forecasts, data visualizations, and painting, abstraction has an undeniable presence in the contemporary world. Yet, it not only represents but also creates worlds. It is an operative concept that likewise possesses an imaginary thrust for perceiving things otherwise. As such, abstraction comes in many different forms: It is an aesthetic, a technology, an epistemology, and a practice. Therefore, it is also a political attitude, a mode of description, a tool of complexity reduction, and an instruction for intervention. Depending on its context and use, it can take on radically different connotations, ranging from dehumanizing to appealing, from affirmative to critical, from incorporated to autonomous.

Taking its cue from the different meanings and applications of abstraction, the international lecture series „Abstraction Today: The Real and the Imaginary“ is designed as an interdisciplinary endeavor with a focus on visual media and digital culture. Most digital technologies (like networks, computer simulation or artificial intelligence) and correlated practices are closely connected to different forms of abstraction on different levels. To do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon, the series brings together a group of international scholars, artists, and curators who speak on abstraction today as it unfolds in fields such as art, photography, film, design, image science, visual culture studies, philosophy, and more. Grounding the inquiries into the contemporary conditions of abstraction are contributions focusing on its historical lineage, most importantly its emergence within the discourse of modernism to be understood in its global and postcolonial plurality.

Further Program

November 11, 2025
Henning Engelke (Art History, University of Arts Linz): „‚Zones of Activity‘: Abstraction, Digital Culture, and Analog Experimental Film“

November 18, 2025
Till A. Heilmann (Media Studies, Ruhr University Bochum): „Sharpness Abstracted“

November 25, 2025
Isabel Wünsche (Art History, Constructor University Bremen): „Beyond Western Avant-garde Approaches: Abstraction in a Global Cross-Cultural Dialogue“

December 2, 2025
Sabine Eckmann (Director and Chief Curator, Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis): „Abstraction, Sensation and the Digital“

December 9, 2025
Sven Lütticken (Art History, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Leiden University): „Lethal Abstraction and Alter-Abstractions“

December 16, 2025
Kim Albrecht (Information Design, Folkwang University Essen): „Data Visualization as Abstract Realism“

January 13, 2026
Birgit Schneider (Media Studies, University of Potsdam): „Making Climate Data Graspable through Visualization and Sonification in Art and Science“

January 20, 2026
Alberto Toscano (Sociology, Goldsmiths London): „A Practice of Abstraction: Race in the Field of Vision“

January 27, 2026:
Crystal Z. Campbell (Art, University of Buffalo): „Abstraction, Pareidolia, and the Underloved“

For any updates see https://www.medienwissenschaft.uni-bonn.de/lehrveranstaltungen/abstraction-today-1

Organized by Svea Braeunert (Media Studies, University of Applied Sciences Potsdam & University of Bonn), Birgit Mersmann (Art History, University of Bonn), Jens Schröter (Media Studies, University of Bonn).

With the support of the Brandenburg Center for Media Studies (ZeM), the Gielen-Leyendecker-Foundation, and Studium Universale at University of Bonn.