#visionandtechnology

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 )

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.

Teemu Hupli’s lecture - 22.11.2019

Crary is an advocate of the idea that Modernism in art was driven by a reevalutaion by how the human senses work. He believe that somewhere between the Renaissance period and Modernity, there was a big break in how we understand seeing as an activity.

He wonders how, in art, we’ve got from a painting like Perugino’s “Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter” to Pollock’s “Convergence”.This development can’t be the result of artists experimenting in their studios. To him there is a much wider context to how this change happened. 

According to Crary, in order to understand art theory, we need to look at what happened in general in society. In his book ........, he questions why and how did that break from the linear visualisation technic in art happened?

Vision is “subjectivized” Idea that we need to do something to visualised the world, it doesn’t come to us naturally.

“Attention” is served from 18th century. It will fix or preserve the consistency or durability of objects.

“Sensation” is radically reconceptualizsed. Brings new external effect on our senses. It belongs in a way to the subject. Crary reads art only on the temple of frame work of mid to late 19th century. He ignore work done before this time. For example, when he reads the work  Georges Saurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884 (below), he reads Parisian social commentary on their relations at the time. Questioning whether people are there together but alienated. But in a way there are a few things that don’t work on this painting (look at the skirt of the girl sat on the grass with an umbrella, it looks funny, not quite right or the sized of people when you start comparing to each other.)

Crary: Sensation has been transformed over the 19th century. He is ignoring Kant’s work made earlier.

Kant: listening to yourself = Attention. Sensation is an effect (came up with it in 1770), we have senses gear. He mentioned it in one of his journal around 1770.

Sense + Feel = to take conscious of something.

Monet thought about sensation in a similar way. Breakthrough from general notion of what the object is to be able to only use his sight “sense” to paint his paintings. (On Monet’s late painting, we can’t really clearly see know what we are looking at). Similar things happens in Cézane’s work.

Claude Monet, The Seine at Giverny, 1897

Friday 15th November 15, 2019

- “It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis”

(Benjamin, 1931/2005, pp.511–512).

Dahlia.

(Head of florets.)

5 times magnification.

-“whether we accelerate the growth of a plant through time-lapse photography or show its form in forty-fold enlargement, in either case a geyser of new image-worlds hisses up at points in our existence where we would least have thought them possible.”

-Photography is therefore a potent instrument in the ongoing transformation of human perception

Magic and religion and our view on them…

“[Although] we have some idea of what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the fraction of a second when a person takes a step. Photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.”

Eadweard Muybridge, Ascending and Descending Stairs, from Animal Locomotion,

plate 504, 1870s.

He doesn’t look for a fraudulent idea of the unconscious thinking, he had a idea that there is a sensuous life we haven’ t paid attention to before.

Karl Dauthendey, The Photographer Karl Dauthendey with his betrothed Miss Friedrich (1837-1873) after their first attendance at church on 1st September 1857.

- “It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis”

(Benjamin, 1931/2005, pp.511–512).

Personally, I found this lecture really intriguing and felt like it relating a lot with my practice. It discussed a lot about the early history of spirit photography and the scientific factor behind it. Spiritualism started as a 19th century religious movement where people would believe that the spirits of dead could be contacted directly by the living. The year 1861 was the first recorded print of spirit photography. William Mumler captured a self-portrait where a ghost of his deceased cousin had developed in the background. Spirit photography of today differs from the history of spiritualism due to the fact that the past photography had damaged the reputation of the existence of spirit photography as it was always seen as fraud. This has been proving difficult for ghosts hunters and artists/photographers to be taken seriously.