#5imag002w

The Image As Artefact

Daguerreotypes:

- Precious

- One off, no negative

- Had to be held in a certain way to see the image

Photographs as index or trace:

For a photograph to happen there must be an object to reflect light etc.

Photography and the Body: Camera as Artefact

Embodied subject and cultural context exist in a reflective relationship, they form a ‘dynamic unity’.

 1.     Body- technology relations… technological mediation; the technologically augmented body.

2.     The act of photography as embedded in the world… the photograph as ‘in place’ and ‘in movement’.

 The idea of mediation:

Many of the relations we have in the world around us are either mediated by or directed at technological devices.

 We experience the world through mediating artefacts – everything we use to complete tasks that can’t be done with our body alone.

 Cameras, and other visual display instruments, change our bodily movements.

The Return of The Body: Affect and Embodied Perception.

The western subject is mono-sensory and disembodied.

Mind/ Body dualism – the mind as a cartesian theatre.

 Representational thinking: The belief that representations serve a mediating function between knower and known and a faith in the power of words to mirror pre-existing phenomena.

 Modern vision is the product of relations between the body and institutional and discursive power (cultural forces)

 Vision is a ‘historical practice’ with “no autonomous history. What changes are the plural forces and rules composing the field in which perception occurs.”

 Our minds would not be the way that they are without the input of the body.

The mind functions on the basis of the frame of reference that the body continuously provides.

Mind and body form an indivisible organism, which interacts with the environment as an ensemble.

 Perception involves more than just vision and rational thought; it involves all of the senses.

 Proprioception- The sense that tells us where our bodies are in space.

Kinaesthetic sense- To tell if your body is moving or not.

Vestibular Sense- Balance.

Self As Spectator

Perspective:

-       Only has one sense: sight.

-       Has no use for the physical body.

Reference:

Reading, Anna (2009). ’Mobile Witnessing: Ethics and the Camera Phone in the ’War on Terror’.’ Globalizations vol. 6 no. 1 (March 2009), pp61-76.

SUMMARY OF YOUR CHOSEN TEXT

I felt a connection between my personal project and this text as the writer refers to the camera phone as a “DANGER”: “Drawing on a range of studies on mobile phones […] the danger of mobile camera phones is developing new languages and practices within visual culture […] extending and modifying media languages […] Phone developed into a handy multimedia computers that is effectively personal […] virtually unique and wearable multimedia functionality  […] it lives with us and on us.” All of these phrases are, in a way, expressing the meaning of my project. Though my critique/observation is addressed to the people who, being so busy with the speed in which they scroll images on mobile phones, are forgetting the depth of them, therefore it doesn’t matter how much effort, time, planning and commitment the photographer invest into taking photographs because the will still be scrolled in a frantically and accelerate timeframe.

The approach used in my project is similar to that used by Anna Reading when she talks about “the velocity in which the mobile witness image traveled from the realm of private experience into public virtual space”, and “The speed with which mobile image can travel and transform is significant here, enabling the rapid translation of a private sensory experience into a public mediated record”, in her case is the mobile phone and in my project is Instagram.

Anna Reading also uses the term “Mobile Phone Penetration” meaning that almost 100% of the world population own mobile phones with a camera in it. This is having a huge impact on photographers as well as on the way in which people look at photographs and only those who really care about photography can recognise and appreciate a good photograph. (the meaning of my project)=

CAMERA

Every week I used a different medium to demonstrate the effort that photographers put into creating an image.

Digital ( My Canon 6D and Canon 5Ds) Medium Format ( Digital PhaseOne and Bronica) 35mm Canon A1 (Black&White and Colour Films) Large Format, Phone Photography, and Screen Shot from a Video Camera.

This has also helped me understand which medium I feel more closed to, what medium to use in order to achieve the result that I am looking for and what is more suitable for my taste and needs.

I am very impatient, therefore I don't particularly love using the large format, although I absolutely love the quality of the images that can be produced from it.

The medium format PhaseOne camera is my favorite in terms of image quality and result, yet it is limited in terms of speed of processing images.

The point of the project is, however, to demonstrate that it does not matter what medium photographers use because from the moment that the picture gets uploaded on Instagram becomes ephemeral, immaterial, an “information” on the computer.

PRODUCTION & PRESENTATION

The presentation will be a recorded video projected onto the wall.

Simply because I wanted to explore diverse ways of presenting images that were not the typical prints hanged to a wall.

I have also used material objects such as eyeless and brainless ceramic dolls to represent humans while using phones.

In addition. created an Instagram account under the project’s name where every week I would upload all the images created.

Ultimately, I have made 3 metal stands in the 3D workshop to support the dolls.

The fact that the video will be on loop with no sound makes it feel like a “meditation”, where you just look and reflect. The dolls are symbolising people too.

My initial idea was to place a phone connected to a projector at the exhibition for people to play with, but I thought just a projection would be better for people to just watch and reflect as the phone can be distracting if people start just playing with it.

What techniques you use to produce, display, or disseminate your images (fine printing? Instagram? Digital postproduction? Fly-postering?).  How does the presentation play into the meaning of the work?

COMMUNICATION

Emotionally, my project communicates my feelings towards the changing status of photography and the role of the viewer as well as the fact that we are slaves of it.

Mine is MEDITATION to what’s happened to photography in the 21st century, more specifically to the speed in which images are consumed, forgetting about the depth of them.

It does not matter how much effort, time, planning and commitment the photographer is investing into making a photograph, using the most expensive and sophisticated medium or model or setting or equipment or concept, because when uploaded on Instagram, the pictures will all be looked at roughly the same way.

The viewer will stare at the soundless video and “meditate”, also will look at the dolls and realizing that those are there as a “comparison with us human, they represent us,

We are becoming brainless and eyeless creatures since technology is having such a strong impact on social development.

The experience  :

SUBJECTIVITY

As photographer I am expressing my personal feelings towards what is happening, I am my self producing those images with these magnificent pieces of equipment, I am even making the metal stands, I am my self investing so much of my time and creativity in planning, producing and processing these images that will be then “scrolled” in quick and effortless way.

I am also putting my self in these images in a very intimate and vulnerable way to see if the viewer will notice that or will simply “scroll” through.

IMAGES OF MY WORK

(Screen Record of Instagram Scrolling - Will be projected on the wall) and ( Ceramic dolls on stands made by me )

Spirit photography (Tom Gunnning)

While photography is viewed as scientific but photography is frequently associated with the occult and supernatural.

Spiritualism came around 1950s

Speaking, seeing + communicating with the dead.

The have their own newspaper, meetings, going to church.

If you can talk to someone far away (telegraph) why not the dead?

Can’t see electricity, but it still exists.

They try to use science to justify.

People chose to not see clearly because they didn’t want to 'rock the boat’.

William Mumler

His pictures would have faint people in the background.

He just didn’t clean the plate properly, so the last picture was still slightly there.

His wife claimed to be a medium.

It all played to the story.

The idea of ghosts have been integrated into our society for hundreds of years. They are slightly see though, glow green and walk though walls. Shakespeare talked about ghosts.

William Mumler

Almost done for fraud.

Reputation was ruined.

> Sayonce buildings in London <

They exploit upset, vulnerable of their dead friends and family.

They will believe anything for hope.

Spiritual drawing - someone takes over your hand and just starts to draw.

Edouard Bugvet, Le Gront, 1875.

Prosecuted for fraud.

Put in prison for a year in 1875.

People still believed after he was convicted (why are people so desperate to believe?)

William Crookes - he was a scientist. So, must be real?

The body admits magnetism which can be seen by a photographic plate.

Louis Darget

Photographs, thoughts and dreams.

Puts plate on head.

Dealing with grief

In the war bodies were not found. So, people couldn’t grieve.

Religion didn’t have the answers, but spiritualism did.

Lost in action and sometimes people weren’t even seen killed.

1920 - The Cenolat

People find a way to deal with their loss.

So, they start to look away from spiritualism.

Ada Deane - 1922

Photographing the dead on Armistice Day.

But, actually, the faces were footballers who you can see stuck onto her images.

Harry Price tried to expose William Hope. Price brought along his own plates. He marled his plates, but Hope actually never used them.

-> “The ghost stamp”

They were always out of focus.

Around 1923.

Paranormal

4th Dimension?

WWI = shell-shock; people carrying dead bodies; through so many people being involved with death, it brought up questions.

Sayoncecs in 1924.

Magic = levitation, damage the portrait/doll and you ca damage the person (voodoo magic).

Jeffrey Sconce - haunted media, 2000.Halloween + day of the dead??

Susan Hiller

People would have their “auras” read.

Taken on polaroid.

Mood rings, done by heat not mood.

Levitation photography - type of magic.

But there is always a trick.

The idea of subject vision, vision is always grounded in a body.

> Goethe, theory of colours     - There aren't really colours, just eyes making something up.     - Example, dress is black and blue or white and gold.

Perfect vision - to be able to see close up and far. - 20x20 vision is an invention. - Everyone sees differently. (we need to drive cars and read books)

We still have threats, so we need to see them coming.

From a cognitive neuroscience perspective... - Our minds would not be the way that they are without the input form the body. - The mind functions on the basis of the frame of reference that the body continuously provides. - Mind and body form an indivisible organism, which interacts with the environment as an ensemble.

> Perception involves more than vision and rational thought, it involves all the senses.

Neil Matheson’s lecture - 29.11.2019

For a medium like photography which claimed to be link to reality, simulation is a complex subject. Over this lecture, we’ve explored how the topic has been covered by Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard.

Definitions on ‘Simulations’

by Sean Cubitt: ‘a copy without a source, an imitation  that has lost its original’ ‘the theory of simulation is a theory about how our images, our communication and our media have usurped the role of reality, and a history of how reality fades’          Cubitt S., Simulation and social theory, London: Sage, 2001

Simulation” is seen as a sort of movement that started to appear after the war. The work of Guy Debord entitled ‘Society of the Spectacle’ (1967) is a good example of that. (We need to keep in mind that Debord was a Marxist) Cubitt described Debord’s work as a ‘brutal probe into faslity of contemporary society.’

‘Simulacrum’ and ‘Simulation’

‘Simulacrum’: 1. any image or representation of something.                        2. a superficial likeness  (both definition from Collins dict.)

‘Simulation’: 1. The action or practice of simulating with intention to deceive;                               false pretence.                       2. A false assumption or display ... a surface resemblance or                                    imitation, of something. (OED)

Taking the place of the reality itself. With reality slowly fading in the age of simulation.

Artists such as Mishka Henner have used Baudrillard theory on simulation. He sees the rise of simulacra as occurring in four stages in the evolution of the image:

The reflection of a basic reality

It masks and perverts a basic reality

It masks the absence of a basic reality

It Bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum

The ‘Hyperreal’ Baudrillard defines the hyperreal as the realm of ‘the hallucinatory resemblance of the real to itself’.

The ‘Death of the Real’ Real, replaced by new technologies.

A place like Walt Disney is an example of the perfect model of the simulations. An imaginary world build from fantasy. Baudrillard claimed that America became Disneyland. Nothing is actually real there, most of the things you can find in places like Disney Land is fake replica of something that exist. It is a bit like Las Vegas.

Ski resort like the one in Dubai, Christmas towns or the Seagaia Ocean Dome  in Japan are all a way to live in fantasy. = A ‘simulation’ of things that aren’t real. There are also environmental questions ourselves. Is it really necessary to create a “fake” ski resort in a place like for example Dubai knowing that most customer to a place like that would actually have enough money to travel to a real ski resort that doesn’t pollute the air as much as the fake one does?

Andreas Gursky has done a lot of the simulation in his work trying to highlight that the world turns around money.

Andreas Gursky, Dubai World I, 2007 Andreas Gursky, James Bond Island II, 2007

Reiner Riedler’s project called ‘Fake Holiday’ is also quite interesting and link to the topic of simulation. She explored artificial world by going to those fake resort and photographed them.

But we don’t actually need to travel to one of those  quite pricy destination to create something completely fake nowadays. Zilla Van den Born created a whole holiday in Asia from her flat in Amsterdam. By doing so, she was trying to highlight that we can fake anything. She is showing how simulations are merging with reality. Even so Zilla did it to show a problem happening on social media, many people regularly do it for less ethical reasons such as social expectation.

We also started to use simulation to preserved historical patrimony . For example The Lascaux Caves in France (contain ancient drawing made decades ago) were discovered many years ago and were opened to public in the 1940′s but quickly got shut due to how fast they started to deteriorating themselves due to all the coming and going in the caves. Instead they created a centre with simulation of the contains of the original caves.

Joan Fontcuberta ‘Fauna’ In this body of work, Fontcuberta questioned the idea of the photograph and it’s link to reality. He believes that the photograph doesn’t lies but the photographer does. Questioned the boundaries between reality and science evidence. He also touches on the subject of the technical unconscious showing landscape that don’t really excites. Simulation images are a way to detach ourselves from reality.