Online Lightning Talks
Me Too: The Power and Implications of Visually-Based Social Network Movements
Virtual Lightning Talk Leandra Preston-Sidler
As one of many socio-political movements that take place across social networking communities, the “Me too” response to a call on Twitter immediately took off, filling up Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. The call was a seized opportunity to discuss the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault. Taken by the number of “Me too” posts on my own page, I collected screenshots of the images and articles related to the fast phenomenon to demonstrate what it looked like on Facebook and to analyze the response and discussions around it to facilitate dialogue around digital image-based activism and its implications, particularly where sensitive or personal topics are concerned. Since by the time of this conference, the Me Too phenomenon will likely be replaced by a series of similar visual social activisms, I will focus on visual activism within social networking communities, using the “Me Too” moment as an example and providing more current examples as appropriate next year. This visual presentation will feature screenshots of visual representations of “Me Too” posts, women/men/non-binary folks offering their stories, men acting as allies and sharing their own stories, and critiques around the “Me too” practice. I will frame the discussion with research related to online activism, feminist theory, and image analysis.
Art of Recovery: Migrant Imaginaries
Virtual Lightning Talk Emma Rose, Macarena Rioseco
Working in collaboration with the charity Freedom from Torture, this research explores how forcibly displaced people who have experienced trauma are supported in their recovery through engagement with the arts. The participatory arts intervention focusses on re-imagining places; safe-havens from their homeland, their journey, or a place they wish to reach, expressed as paintings. For this group understanding the self can be complex, having experienced physical movement and dislocated shifts in identity. Cartography typically used to survey physical landscapes is an inaccurate instrument for the task of locating the individual. The research explores the benefits of participatory arts as deterritorializing method, and the strategies necessary to find the self within the intersecting and overlapping territories of nations, ethnicities, linguistic communities, and geography. Workshops provide a safe space enabling participants to explore new territory - a transitional space between abandoned homeland and new habitation. The approach has potential to enable refugees to cultivate new ways of thinking and talking about their experiences, to connect the past with their present lives, and discover new abilities. We suggest that if such individuals can develop a reformed concept of self in a new territory, it begins a process of personal deterritorialization supportive for recovery.
Snapchat: Impacts on Beauty Standards, Ethical Preferences and Ideological Bonds of Pakistani Students
Virtual Lightning Talk Niba Khalid
The advent of technology has posed some serious challenges to the perceived ideas and notions of consumers. From social media, Snapchat as an application has a growing rate of popularity amongst users, as it offers various features including electronic cartoonization and beauty enhancement filters changing the skin tone, eyes shapes and facial structures of images. These features have severely challenged the previously determined beauty concepts and standards of consumers and have posed questions on self-confidence regarding their facial characteristics. On this ground, drawing upon the theory of cognitive dissonance, the study aims at exploring impact of Snapchat usage on the beauty standards, ethical preferences and ideological bonds of Pakistani students. A sample of 200 university students using snap chat will be selected through purposive sampling and surveyed through a questionnaire developed on 5 points Likert scale.
On UFO Photography
Virtual Lightning Talk Evan Hume
This paper investigates the significance of photographs of alleged unidentified flying objects. I am concerned only with photographs that remain unresolved. The intent is not to renter into the debate between skeptics and believers, but rather to examine UFO photographs in terms of aesthetics. Currently, there is no such scholarship. I argue that the dominant frameworks through which UFO photographs have been seen should be discarded. In order to get closer to the significance of UFO photographs they must be analyzed outside the confines of Hollywood, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories. Looking to aesthetics and contemporary photography discourse, a more complex set of possibilities for understanding these images unfolds. UFO photographs reveal themselves to be images that expose a shared condition of all photography – that one need not know what something truly is in order to photograph it. Furthermore, UFO photographs show the epistemic limitations of photography through their inability to disclose information that can act as empirical evidence. If one cannot comprehend this strange phenomenon through the senses or photography, then what can be obtained through reason? This question requires a return to Plato’s Cave. To grapple with the saucer-like shadow on the wall, one must consider what Form it is an iteration of. UFO photographs are particular instances of what can simply be called the Unknown, a Form of which there is no conception of. Thus, allegory becomes the essential function of these photographs as way of picturing an aspect of reality that is not yet known.
Not Content with the Original: “The Resemblance Was Imperfect” so… Photoshop
Virtual Lightning Talk Rae Ann Smith
The corporate photograph is often seen as an object of communication rather than one of truth, so staff photographs for the website aren’t usually approached with hypotheses about representing likeness or questions about vanity; your job as photographer is to make it work. Sitters just want the photos to look good. A loaded statement. They also want to see the image in the camera’s display in order to “approve” it before leaving it in your hands. A question about the photographer’s competence? To this digital photographer, the raw image is unfinished and imperfect. It must and will be edited. To this digital photographer as sitter, the raw image does not resemble the me in my head and therefore needs to be fixed. In either case… Photoshop. This paper therefore examines the process and visual construction of the Caribbean School of Media and Communication (CARIMAC) staff photographs (which includes the image of the photographer herself) using 3 elements: Lighting (with limited resources), Composition and Editing (specifically Frequency Separation) to show that these digitally mediated images, these objects of communication are artificial but none un-true.
Framing Ourselves: Selfie Portraiture and Big Data
Virtual Lightning Talk Ann Pegelow Kaplan
In this age of social media, selfies reign supreme. Perhaps their ubiquitous nature, particularly among Millennials and those younger, is what has caused their general abandonment as a subject of critical inquiry. However, through selfies we frame ourselves. Through aesthetics, publication, and circulation, they offer visual primary sources not previously encountered. And their inherent relationship to social media and big data comes ready with numerical and geospatial information that would make any data scientist giddy. Yet still, one might consider selfies in regards to the socio-political implications of their aesthetics, through the lens of such theorists as John Berger. We might contemplate selfies in regards to the performance of identity detailed in the works of philosopher Judith Butler. Selfies exist not in a vacuum and not by a generation of narcissists, but in the exploding intersection of the popularization of digital technologies within cultural history of portraiture. Viewing selfies within this context allows us to trace the affordances of selfie portraiture as popularized art form, cultural capital, engagement of a spectacle society, and symbolic communication. Couched within visual culture, cultural studies, and critical theory, this presentation will trace the aesthetic and use values of the selfie in the age of social media and big data.
Murals: Image, Performance, Narrative
Virtual Lightning Talk Yiru Lim
This paper will look at how murals about heritage and identity in Singapore offer the public a unique experience – an experience where the past (memory / the archive) and the present (space and place) are not only simultaneously encountered, but created and recreated through the performance of the image. The performance is enacted through the viewers who insert themselves into the murals, creating multiple and varied "new" images in the process. Taken together, these images create narratives that speak of constantly evolving relationships between the past and the present, and of evolving identities in the here and now.
