Lila Lee-Morrison
Associate Professor Adjunct
Lila Lee-Morrison is a visual culture and art history scholar and writer with research interests at the intersection of computational machine vision, image theory, and power relations of the gaze. Her research addresses specific case studies of machine vision technologies through analyses of their aesthetics, operational contexts, computational processes and image outputs. These case studies have included environmental monitoring platforms, automated facial recognition technology and drone warfare systems, examining the ways these technologies reconfigure modes of visual perception and intervene in socio-political and cultural forms of meaning. Her research is conducted through an interdisciplinary lens engaging with discourse in the fields of art history, media theory, philosophy of science, critical theory and environmental humanities.
Her current research examines the aesthetics of technical images generated by planetary-scale environmental monitoring technologies. She explores the epistemic role of earth observation and environmental data in shaping and visualizing non-human entanglements within a framework of discourses on the Anthropocene, planetarity, and colonial constructions of landscape. Her research has been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a European Research Council Grant (ERC) and the Danish Independent Research Fund (DFF).
Lee-Morrison received a B.A in Political Science from Hunter College and a M.A and a Ph.D in Art History and Visual Culture Studies from Lund University in Sweden. She has written for Artforum, Theory, Culture & Society and been published by MIT Press, Liverpool University Press and Oro Editions.
Lee-Morrison's CV is available here.
Projects
Portraits of Automated Facial Recognition
Book: Portraits of Automated Facial Recognition: On Machinic Ways of Seeing the Face (Transcript Verlag, 2019)
This book critically analyses the visuality of automated facial recognition (AFR) technology through the eigenface algorithm as a case study in machinic vision and its concurrent modes of perception. It addresses a general problematic of facial recognition technology in asking how an act of recognition can be defined through a technical process. The primary visual logic is traced through the merging of statistics and vision, a method that is historically visualized through photographic practices of composite portraiture and within a context of the theory of eugenics. This discussion is expanded through countering statistical forms of seeing in the philosophical work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, his production of a composite portrait and his concept of aspect perception. The analysis then moves to contemporary contexts of AFR application through a survey of contemporary artworks that critically engage with the social and political investments in technical representations of the face and asking what it means to see and be seen in the contemporary moment.
Machinic Visions of the Planetary
Editor of Special Theme Issue: “Machinic Visions of the Planetary” (Media+Environment Journal, Vol. 5:1, 2023. ISSN: 2640-9747)
At a time of increasing challenges that concern our relationship to the environment, including looming and continuing environmental crises, sociopolitical designations of alterity, and the uncertainty of a planetary future outside of capital’s globalizing social forms, we address how new forms of vision and visuality brought forth through technologies envision planetarity and planetary relations. The development and dependence on machine vision technologies such as satellite imaging, wide-scale algorithmic platforms, statistical modeling programs, drones equipped with LiDAR, and other sensing networks with visual output bring about an expansion of the perceptual scope. Through inquiries into the themes of scale, alterity, nonhuman entanglements, and operational imaging, this issue asks how machinic ways of seeing generate a new aesthetics of planetarity. How do modes of perception by machine vision intervene in our knowledge production of the environment? How can interdisciplinary inquiries into the output of machine vision (e.g., resulting technical imagery) contribute to the role they play in understanding planetarity and its contemporary conditions? This inquiry is based on an understanding that our knowledge of the physical environment—both in the threats that are posed to it and its expansion beyond earthly borders—is increasingly negotiated through technological and automated engagements of machine vision, and that the visuality of these technical systems is a central aspect to consider through a historical and critical as well as speculative lens.
The Environmental Gaze
Anthology Contribution: “The Environmental Gaze: Visual perspectives on monitoring landscapes of ecological devastation.” (Media Matters in Landscape Architecture [eds.] M’Closkey, K. & VanDerSys, K., ORO Press, 2025)
This chapter examines the aesthetics of environmental monitoring through three different technological perspectives of a landscape of the coastal wetlands of Louisiana, a site of ecological devastation with a history of intensified extractivism. This is explored through a visual culture and art historical perspective, focusing on a concept of the gaze and the ways in which technologies of data imaging and visualizations of environmental monitoring enact an “environmental gaze.” I look at multilayered data maps of a federal conservation project, Coastwide Reference Monitoring System (CRMS), the cross-referencing of multiple visual data sources by Forensic Architecture in collaboration with the non-profit RISE St. James, and two multimedia artworks by the artist, Imani Jacqueline Brown.
