a day ago via Facebook

Meet the presenters of SPE’s 2027 Annual Conference! We’re excited to introduce Ashley Gillanders, presenting “The Specular Ghost: Resisting the Invisible Apparatus in Virtual Communities” “Photography’s lineage is historically bound to the mirror. From the daguerreotype’s silver surface to the SLR’s pentaprism. This lineage implies a pact: the image indexes not only the world but, inherently, the witness and the apparatus. However, as contemporary image systems move toward mirrorless mechanics and generative pipelines (3D rendering/AI), this pact is broken.” About the Presenter Ashley Gillanders is an interdisciplinary visual artist from Winnipeg, Canada, currently working in Denton, TX. Her practice incorporates sculpture, new media, and experimental approaches to photography to explore notions of artificiality, perception, and the distance between physical and virtual space. She received her MFA in photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was a New Artist Society Scholar. She currently teaches at Midwestern State University, where she is an Assistant Professor of Photography in the Lamar D. Fain College of Fine Art. Join us at the 2027 SPE Annual Conference to hear Ashley explore photography’s relationship to the mirror, the invisible apparatus, virtual image systems, and the ethics of visibility.