Representations in Focus (Asynchronous - Online Only)
Image in Motion versus Image Implying Motion: Creating Paintings for Stop Motion Animation and Decorative Art View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Laura Margulies
In my thirty-five years of painting with oil paints for both the moving image in the case of stop motion animation as well as decorative still paintings, I have come to understand that the two art forms require very different processes. While the imagery shares certain qualities, such as my use of color, texture and brush stroke, the act of making the paintings come from different intentions and require distinct mindsets. In this paper I explore the creative processes involved in both of these art forms and delve deeper into these distinctions.
Immersive Experiences in Social Shared Spaces : Audio/Visual Artistic Research in European Immersion Labs View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Adnan Hadzi
This study analyses the use of Immersive Experiences (IX) within artistic research, as an interdisciplinary environment between artistic, practice based research, visual pedagogies, social and cognitive sciences. The paper examines IX in the context of social shared spaces. It presents the Immersive Lab University of Malta (ILUM) interdisciplinary research project. ILUM has a dedicated, specific room, located at the Department of Digital Arts, Faculty of Media & Knowledge Sciences, at University of Malta, appropriately set-up with life size surround projection and surround sound so as to provide a number of viewers (located within the set-up) with an IX online reality environment. The set-up is scalable, portable and provide easy to use navigation and allow the user to move around within the online environment. The paper discusses how ILUM combines and integrates three research strands that are part of a major, sustained artistic or scientific focus of the partnering academic institutions, namely the Immersive Pipeline (IP) at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, the ICST’s ‘Immersive Lab’ (IL) at the Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland, and the Spatial Media Research Group (SMRG) at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. In those labs researchers, artists, film-makers investigate and create different kinds of IX. ILUM provides the opportunity to situate artistic research in the context of scientific. The thematic backgrounds of these research strands and the infrastructure of ILUM serve as starting points from which the partners collaboratively create new communication content, exhibition settings, and research as well as teaching materials.
Foreign Travel in Indiana: An Exploration of the Dogma of Photojournalism View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kevin Moloney
Normal travel circumstances did not exist in 2020. Unable to travel far or deeply as I would as a photojournalist, I set off to explore Indiana where nearly 150 cities, towns, and even some lonely crossroads are named for foreign places. I could not enter them as I normally would. I was masked. I did not want to become a virus vector. I stood back and photographed quietly and at a distance. I stood outside of my subject, gazing downward at a quiet surface. This inevitably began to feel predatory, presumptuous, and bias confirming. The venerable dogma of photojournalism was summed up by The Family of Man curator Edward Steichen on his 90th birthday: “The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself,” he said. However, Susan Sontag and many after her observed that it could also be a predatory “sustained look downward” by outsiders obsessed with the exotic. “…essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own,” she argued. I balked for decades at this criticism; my photojournalism work was intimate, empathetic, and a net social good. This paper describes and illustrates how an innocent exploration of Indiana landed me on philosophically foreign shores, how I returned with a deeper understanding of criticisms that had for decades failed to convince me, and how I might teach young photojournalists to constructively critique their own beliefs and actions.
#MemóriasCovid19/ #Covid19Memories: Collecting and Disseminating Testimonies along the COVID 19 Pandemic View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ana Carolina de Moura Delfim Maciel, João Felipe Rufatto Ferreira
#MemóriasCovid19 is a website based at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil. The main goal of our project has been to collect, select (through a process of shared experts board curation), and share personal registers produced during the Covid-19 global pandemic. Since may of 2020 we have been receiving submissions through an online questionnaire available at our Website. We have already received around 300 submissions which have been analyzed by our curatorial board and more than 190 of them have been selected and are now available at the project’s website. The main characteristic of the collection built within the project is the subjectivity of the perspectives as much as the diversity of visual supports of those testimonies. From texts, to photographs, videos and drawings, the diversity of the digital images within the collection generated a series of challenges on the best ways to share the records with the public and, at the same time, on how to preserve all those sources for further consultation by scholars or any public interested on the subject. For that proposal, we have established a partnership with CLE's Historical Archives (Center of Logic and Epistemology of UNICAMP) who will preserve all the submissions sent and also all sort of documentation produced along the project development itself. The theoretical reflections and methodologies implemented by the project includes questions involving the fields of oral history, multimedia. and also memory studies (and the production of testimonies) precisely during this traumatic context of the pandemic environment.
Touch: Reflections on Making - a Crafted Digital Event View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sofie Boons, Wuon Gean Ho, Niamh Fahy
This paper reports on the online symposium titled Touch: Reflections on Making developed between the Centre for Fine Print Research (CFPR) at the University of the West of England and the UK Crafts Council in December 2020. The event addressed the theme of ‘touch’ within the context of craft and was developed in response to the global pandemic’s impact on our ability to haptically engage with the world. As artists, researchers and craftspeople, the theme, format and presentations of the symposium were designed to adapt to the needs of makers for whom touch is often intrinsic to practice. The pandemic created a requirement to limit physical connection and exchange. This has transformed the ‘notion’ as a carefully curated operation, performed to create the least amount of impact. While fear of touch proliferated across the collective unconscious, artists and craftspeople were faced with a heightened awareness on the significance of touch to creation and exchange within their practice. Limited to the use of a digital platform, the organisers were challenged to adjust this format to suitably deliver an event that would acknowledge the role of tactility and touch as a crucial component of creative practice and knowledge generation. In light of this the aim was to deliver an experience that looked at technology, digital format and delivery as a project to be crafted. Within this paper we discuss the development and production of the digital platform, workshop delivery and materials created, as well as reflect on the user experience.
Flickering Windows: Teaching Design through Videoconference
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Maria Sieira
Almost one hundred years ago Walter Benjamin assessed that both film and architecture are art forms perceived in a "state of distraction" in his clear-sighted essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." This pandemic year of teaching design through videoconference provides a unique opportunity to analyze the perception of architecture through the moving images of professors' and students' teaching and learning windows. The videoconference-based architecture design studio operates simultaneously as the focused, captive-audience exchange of our camera-facing bodies, and as an extreme version Benjamin's "state of distraction." This paper analyzes hundreds of hours of recorded architecture design teaching, originally videotaped for practical distance learning reasons, but ultimately useful in understanding how much visualities in film and architecture overlap. Contemporary neurobiological research hypothesizes that our collective consumption of moving images for decades has necessarily affected how we perceive. A year of architecture teaching as moving image making permits analysis of immersive visual modes that straddle the filmic and architectural imagination.
