Super Vision

Published to accompany the exhibition that opened the Institute of Contemporary Art's new Boston building in September 2006, Super Vision surveys how visuality has shifted in the digital era, as computer graphics, imaging, digitization, and virtuality reshape what it means to see and be seen. The exhibition and book bring together work by 26 artists spanning painting, sculpture, video, and photography, including Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Gerhard Richter, Jeff Wall, Harun Farocki, Mona Hatoum, and Yoko Ono, alongside surveillance-adjacent pieces by artists like Jack Goldstein and Tony Oursler. As the book's foreword puts it, the works employ macro and microscopic vision, manipulated and virtual imagery, techniques of surveillance, and effects that alter viewers' sense of reality, treating the eye itself as a site of both pleasure and threat. The catalog was edited by ICA chief curator Nicholas Baume, with essays by art historian David Joselit and media theorist McKenzie Wark situating the exhibition within broader debates about looking, image manipulation, and control in contemporary visual culture. Co-published by MIT Press and the ICA in 2006, it functions as a broad survey of surveillance-inflected art of the period rather than a single artist's monograph.