Tech Shifts
University of San Jorge
Photographers Need Not Apply: Photography Doesn't Need You Anymore View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Stafford Smith
Photography no longer needs photographers as it has achieved a self-perpetuating autonomous level of existence. As a photographer, this epiphany is akin to outright blasphemy. However, as I look around at the powerful and viral images today that are changing lives and opinions I am struck by how few, if any, are taken by trained professionals and given prominence by the cadre of elite gate keepers on editorial boards who controlled channels of distribution in the pre-digital age. Instead, we have operators who are carrying out a program of taking pictures guided by a narcissistic addiction to "likes" on social media, driven by a primitive impulse not much different from that which motivates ants. Think of them not as individuals but as a collective entity, casually recording, unencumbered by the thought process, photographing as if by ritual or habit, at last making a reality, Borges' map of the world that exactly duplicates it in a 1:1 ratio. What made photography powerful was its ability to be reach millions. But what made photographers powerful was the fact that so few of them were allowed to reach those millions. With access to the world now open to all with the touch of a button the floodgates are open, reducing the importance of any one photographer and any one photograph. With more images being uploaded in a minute today than were taken during the entire 19th century the skilled and thoughtful photographer has become a quaint anachronism from an earlier age.
Disappearing Affordances: Design, Agency, and the Technological Surface View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jason Farman
Since the 1920s, the inner workings of our technologies have receded from view. When someone looked at a technology from the early-1920s (from vacuum cleaners to automobiles; from tractors to clothes irons) they could easily identify what it is capable of, what we would call the tool’s “affordances.” Users could see the affordances visibly on the surface of the technology itself. While affordances have carried over from early technological eras, and have come to shape the very notion of what makes good design, the “how” of interacting with technologies remains largely a mystery for the everyday user. Affordances have become disconnected from the thing they refer to; that is, a button works simply because it has become an archetype instead of being visually connected to an obvious system that makes it work. This paper connects industrial design and art from the early-20th century to contemporary digital design to consider the ethical implications of the disappearance of affordances behind streamlined surfaces. It bridges the fields of industrial design, art history, cultural studies, and gender studies to argue that the surface aesthetics of our technologies have largely removed the body from the affordances of our technologies. As such, the human agency connected to the perception of affordances (i.e., our ability to make informed decisions based on “how” a technology works) has disappeared along with the affordances that are hidden behind the surface of technologies.
The Doubted Image
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andrew Lee Mount
At this moment painting is in the process of a massive shift that involves two specific important and deeply intertwined properties- 1 The crisis of the social 2 The crisis of aesthetics. What I am calling a crisis of the social refers just as much to the composition of issues in the social field as to the ways that imagery has been and continues to be modified by technology in the devices that it is made to be viewed upon. While this latter point cannot escape its relation to the various social media platforms it is the after-effect of the usage of imagery through this technology that presents a crisis in the social. This range of imagery is also highly problematized by the seemingly endless vectors of modification that digital imagery can perform which then connect the experience of imagery to a simultaneous experience of doubt. When the veracity of images is in question, a crisis has occurred in the social that is resident in the aesthetic. The crisis that we may perceive in aesthetics – particularly in images – occurs because when image-form changes the aesthetic dialogue around it also has to change and today this dialogue must include the urgencies we find in the social field - particularly from the youth. Aesthetics then is directly defined by the uses and construction of imagery derived from the social field which now freely traverses both a virtual and actual terrain but also includes the problem of veracity in contemporary imagery.
