This article interrogates artist Hasan Elahi’s claim that an increased supply of a surveillance commodity will decrease its demand, a premise that led to his web-based artwork Tracking Transience. As a form of “artveillance,” the website archives thousands of images documenting Elahi’s daily movements, which he began recording in an effort to subvert government surveillance. Taking seriously the idea that information should be treated as a commodity, this article uses Marxist theory to articulate how surveillance data fit within the broader information economy. Drawing from Thomas Keenan’s rhetorical reading of Marx, it argues that surveillance enacts the figurative trope of catachresis. Just as the commodity is an abstraction of the labor that went into its making, surveillance data is an abstraction of the subject being surveilled. The information commodity supplants the subject, who becomes a ghostly remainder that haunts the data archive. This maneuver then makes it possible to treat certain individuals, often those marked as racial outsiders, as nonsubjects who can be acted upon outside of the law. This process is visualized by the Tracking Transience website, which is analyzed within this Marxist framework.

the conference sought to explore the growing interest in the figural as a productive shift away from representation and signification in film and media theory. The word "the" appears parenthetically in the title to invoke Paul Klee's assertion that painting should aim " [n]ot to render the visible, but to render visible", which becomes a central provocation for Gilles Deleuze in his Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (40). Whereas the previous conference had been concerned with the implications of the digital turn for theories of visuality, this most recent colloquium turned its attention toward the gestural, the affective and the rhythmic.The figural, then, invites us to enquire into the relationships between sensation and representation. Deleuze's aforementioned text on Francis Bacon was a frequent point of reference for the presenters, as was Jean-François Lyotard's Discourse, Figure . Deleuze shifts our attention from the figure to the figural, arguing that the task of art is to capture affective forces and make them visible. Similarly, Lyotard uses the figural to describe the opacity within an artwork that escapes language and disrupts signification from within. Placing Lyotard and Deleuze in conversation, D. N. Rodowick's Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After the New Media was another recurring reference point, offering the figural as the blurred meeting point between semiotics and materiality in aesthetics. Thus, a theoretical through line developed throughout the weekend as the assembled scholars worked to illuminate and complicate these well-known understandings of the figural. The major questions informing the papers presented included: How might we think of images beyond their seeming representational fixity? What is the quality of "imageness"? What are the powers and capacities of audiovisual art? How can we as critics write about the nonvisual dimensions of the sensory experience? What is, in the words of Deleuze, "the logic of sensation" of cinema specifically and of art generally? How might cinema help us (re)define the distribution of the sensible?

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