Visualizing Reality (Asynchronous - Online Only)
Images of Covid-19 Graffiti on Instagram: Documenting a Global Pandemic View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ann Graf
Now a decade old, Instagram has become the most popular mobile image application, featuring 43,911,055 images alone that are tagged with #graffiti and 9,937,228 tagged with #graffitiart as of May, 2020. Despite very limited search capabilities, the platform remains a wealth of images of graffiti art, and an arena ripe for research possibilities, including examination of graffiti image hashtagging for evidence of time, space, artist, and style documentation. Well into the second month of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, specifically on two days in late April and early May of 2020, I screenshot all posts and their respective images on Instagram that were tagged with #covidgraffiti (131 posts on April 30) and #coronavirusgraffiti (144 posts on May 5). I examined how images of graffiti posted on Instagram were tagged in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic, along with the themes, icons, characters, and text common across this sample. Previous research on graffiti art processes and description formed the basis for inclusion of general categories of graffiti work types. I noted the appearance of visual themes, such as toilet paper, masks, and images representing the virus itself. Also noted were numerous political references and messages of both caution and of thanks to medical professionals and delivery workers. I was also able to determine which tags were most popularly co-assigned to the works in my sample, revealing distinct patterns of artistic representation of the virus and associated issues via Instagram.
Evoking Visual Sound from Desert Landscapes: A Documentary Look at the Music of Steve Roach View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kurt Lancaster
From Edward Abbey to Georgia O’Keefe, the desert holds a mystique for writers and artists who attempt to cull beauty, texture, and meaning from what many perceive as an empty space. Grammy-nominated, Arizona musician Steve Roach revolves his art around desert spaces, translating these visuals into ambient music that stirs the soul just as much as O’Keefe stirs the soul visually through her art. Struggling as a “high-sensitive” from childhood, Roach found peace in the desert and takes the qualities of the desert and turns it into a creative compass for his life and music. He has released nearly 200 albums since the early 1980s, making him one of the most prolific and significant cultural figures of the American school of electronic/ambient music scene. Living in the Sonoran Desert south of Tucson, Arizona, Roach uses the inspiration of desert spaces to find peace in the cacophony of life, a place where he discovers moments of what he calls “suspended time.” He takes those inward moments of slow-paced, quiet places and translates them into music. It’s his way of sharing what he discovers to his listeners, some so trapped by the rushing time-clock of everyday life, that they value the liminal doorway Roach’s music opens up for them. This study includes theoretical frameworks and video clips from my work-in-progress documentary on Steve Roach as I confront how to visualize the image as it relates to what Roach calls, “living in the sound current.”
Featured Impermanence in the Context of the Amazon Forest View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Celia Kinuko Matsunaga Higawa, Ayana Saito Mira de Carvalho
We present this study on Japanese aesthetics, linked to the concepts of impermanence - wabi-sabi -, in the context of the experience in the Amazon. The investigation was born from a net of associations between concepts that start from Zen Buddhism to cycles climatic, biochemical, and behavioral aspects of Amazonian life. From Zen, the experience and intuitive perception are placed as fundamental elements in the understanding the theme and the establishment of its relations with art-making. The life in the Amazon, walking as a process of art, participatory observation, and visual ethnography were adopted as artistic research methodology. We sought to carry out a dialogue between perceptions of sensations and meanings of the experience in the forest. Thus, based on the qualitative method, immersion has become a relevant aspect for the development of research in the arts. The records of memories, reports, and annotations, proved to be quite effective for documenting subjective aspects. With reference to Suzuki Shunryu (1994), one of the founders of Zen in the United States, were relevant segments for the process as it places the beginner, empty, receptive, and alert state of the mind as an axis of his teachings. Such a state would provide an even more immersive experience and also attentive to the philosophical questions of the perception of beauty according to the aesthetic terms studied. Each report reflected what was observed in the forest, being able to offer in its readings, an individual atmosphere of the creative process, and the look of the artist.
Lessons from Ukiyo-e and Sumi Ink: The Influence of East Asian Art in Architectural Visualization View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Saral Surakul
Architectural visualization is an illustration communicating design intentions and ideas. The conventional illustration style stems from Western paintings depicting accurate perspective, lighting, and shading, while Asian art influences are rare. The author discusses his new illustration style, blending Western and Eastern arts through manual rendering, digital imaging, and advanced 3D software. The study focuses on composition, perception, and colors based on Sumi ink painting and Ukiyo-e prints as the primary influences. The process begins with the image orientation that echoes a scroll or folding screen, resulting in a longer format. Both Sumi ink and Ukiyo-e are ink-based; the author blends manually inked components with digital elements to achieve the desired fluidity. The built environments are computer-generated in 3D software to contrast with the flatness and oblique projections of East Asian paintings. The emphasis of the composition is the use of positive and negative spaces to complement the narrative. The landscape elements, such as mountains, water, and clouds, are more abstract and symbolic than realistic. When using Sumi ink as a source of inspiration, color palettes are more desaturated, while colors become vibrant when using Ukiyo-e as a reference. The final paper and scratch textures are composited digitally to give the impression of realistic media.
Wealth of Not Seeing: On Interruptions, Voids, and Spaces Between Images View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Patrick Ceyssens, Toon Leën
In a fifteen minute online lecture-dialogue, Patrick Ceyssens and Toon Leën exchange ideas on the use of interruption as a stylistic device. Both artists share a fascination for the space between images. They look for moments of transition, moments in between the action, gaps that are meaningful, blind spots that are revealing,... While using interruption as an essential element in their own dialogue, they trace the effects of interruptions on our perception with regard to two seemingly unrelated topics: our experience of landscapes and the visualisation of military coups.
Cheating Death: The Visual Logic of Pandemic Culture in Playable Media View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eric Freedman
Crises reveal precarity and uncertainty, speak to evolving psychosocial and material relations, and lead to commercially and politically bound narratives that reconstitute society. Data, tethered to algorithmic projection, plays a significant role in crisis management. This research is focused on artificial intelligence in playable media and playable pandemic narratives and the visual logic of algorithms. Video game play rules and structures, the evidenced-based decisions that impact game outcomes, are made possible through a game’s underlying AI frameworks. Gameplay can be understood, in part, as a cycle of interaction that leads from information gathering and analysis to decision-making. While AI is a software architecture associated with data management, it also creates clear signposts of agency in its animated bodies. By reading embodied AI systems, by studying loops, cycles and environmental vectors, players gain control over playable space. As a case study of the interplay of AI, visuality and agency, this paper examines the AI systems of Naughty Dog, a California-based video game developer that has advanced this work across its most recent playable pandemic narrative, The Last of Us Part II. To survive, to progress in The Last of Us is to read embedded algorithms as overdetermined pattern agents. Writ large, pandemic culture fosters dependencies toward pattern recognition, to seeing (and mastering) contagion across a number of navigable geographic vectors. This paper argues toward a common framework for understanding how agency operates through algorithmic projection and points to the importance of holding onto both data and image in playable media.
