Postface

Both of the conferences organized in Arles by CCS and the Human Rights Project at Bard College under the auspice of the LUMA Foundatin — “The Human Snapshot” and “The Flood of Rights” — produced an object, be it in a somewhat tentative, fragile, perhaps inconsistent way. The object we have been trying to establish is composed of three sets of practices, each of which is undergoing its own set of transformations: contemporary art and its legacy; human rights, at its edges; and the digital revolution in media and journalism. We might have different determinations of what that object is. "The Flood of Rights" conference gave shape and traction to this still-uncertain manifold object-under-invention: what was striking across the discussions was the centrality of the image as a primary vector for historical rights claims, political congregation, media organization and reorganization, psycho-noetic formation, and art.