Transformative Approaches (Asynchronous - Online Only)
Live-Action, Virtual Reality, and the Production of The Lion King (2019): How Filmmakers Have Enlisted Virtual Reality to Redefine Live-action Film Production and Imagery, and to Bring Their Bodies into the Story World View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nicolette Freeman
The release of the 2019 film, The Lion King, triggered the sort of anxious anticipation often surrounding the remake of a successful original. Popularly referred to as a live-action version of the animation original, the imagery of The Lion King (2019) is however one hundred percent computer-generated. But is it? The film’s cinematographer, Caleb Deschanel, says the film was produced in a way that "senses" the presence of living, moving filmmakers being amidst the CGI story environment. There is "something about feeling the human touch behind the camera" that the production sought to harness, he says. This paper asks us to reconsider notions of live-action film production and imagery – and specifically to examine the possibilities of Virtual Reality technology, such as that used in The Lion King’s production, to enable film crews to enlist their embodied knowledge, experience and sensory perception of filming in real-world locations, in the creation of "unphotographed" story worlds. Drawing on the interdisciplinary groundwork of scholars of the Sensory Turn, in anthropology, geography and sociology, this presentation highlights filmmakers’ full-bodied perception of production spaces, and the potential of using that perception as a creative tool in bringing cinematic story environments "to life" for audiences.
Painted Text View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gizela Horvath
In post-World War II art, text appears on more and more works of fine art. In this paper I propose a classification of these cases and I analyse some significant examples from contemporary fine art. I classify the image-text relationship in contemporary art into the following categories: the cohabiting text and image (e.g. Magritte, Barbara Kruger), the scribble situated between text and image (e.g. Cy Twombly, Basquiat) and the text as image (e.g. Ben Vautier, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Barrry, Anatol Knotek). From an aesthetic point of view, the central question is how the text changes when it becomes an image? What is the beauty of the painted word, what kind of aesthetic experience does it provide? My hypothesis is that this evokes a new kind of joy of the text, and I try to outline the particularity of this joy.
Humanized Data Revisited: The Issues behind Anthropomorphic Forms of Data-driven Images View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eugene Park
Data visualization is a field that has conventional and experimental methods to bring data into a visual form. Despite all of the utilitarian benefits that conventional forms of visualizations (i.e. bar/line graphs, pie charts, scatter plots) can provide, designers and mathematicians alike have offered new modes of representing data by shaping graphs into the likeliness of humans. One of the impetus behind these propositions is rooted in the idea that when reduced to numbers, bars, lines, and dots, humans are stripped from their identities and individualities in favor of an empirical view of the world. While the motivations and approaches to these experimental and anthropomorphic forms of data-driven graphics raise important questions and novel opportunities, some of the resulting visualizations have unfortunately yielded problematic portrayals of BIPOC groups. In this presentation, the shortcomings of two data-driven images, ISOTYPE and Chernoff Faces, will be examined. While both graphics have their formal and structural advantages, they have a history of reducing BIPOC groups into their own racial and cultural stereotypes. What these shortcomings show is the implicit bias and the shortsightedness in the field of data visualization that can serve as important lessons to its practitioners. They can teach us that any attempt to construct new forms of visualizations—particularly those that resemble human figures—must be sensitive and inclusive to all peoples. The intention behind this critique is not to suggest that efforts to humanize visualizations is a self-defeating ambition, but to help promote inclusive practices for practitioners of the field of visualization.
Visualizing COVID-19 View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Madeleine Sorapure
The pandemic has provided a real-time test of public-facing data visualization. Ben Schneiderman (2020), a leading visualization researcher, writes that “The complexity and importance of COVID-19 has put data visualization center stage in worldwide discussions,” as specialists in academia, journalism, government, and the corporate world create data visualizations to guide leaders and inform the public. The hope is that the data will convey what is truly happening, and that the visualization of data will make it easier for people to gain insight and ultimately make good decisions. It is precisely because data visualization has become such an important mode of COVID-19 communication that we need to apply our full rhetorical attention in examining how data about the virus is visually represented. As Collins and Ball (2013) put it, “Visualization is the latest in a long line of media that exhibits the expectation of objectivity while being inherently rhetorical” (p. 174). Data and its visualizations are the result of choices made by humans, and those choices must be examined in order for us to understand both the insights and the limitations of data visualization. Anthropographics—design strategies that highlight the connection between data and the humans represented by that data—play a role in making COVID-19 data visualizations more accessible and impactful as communications to a general audience. This presentation looks at several projects that use anthropographics rhetorically—along with animation, interactivity, and textual annotations—to increase the engagement and insights of readers.
Featured Spatially-immersive Networked Composites: A Media Archaeology of the Photogrammetric Image through Glitch Practice View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tom Milnes
This paper engages new artistic production in an examination of the aesthetics of 3D imaging technologies. In particular, the research concerns the photogrammetric image and its aesthetics as encountered in art practice. Critical discourse on photogrammetry in art practice is underexplored. Where such discourse does exist, for instance in and around the work of Forensic Architecture, it has tended to focus on questions of functionality. This study proposes a new starting point for an understanding of photogrammetric representation in its own terms. The investigation finds the partiality of recent critical research writing on photogrammetry to be too heavily conditioned by discourses of photography. Such discussion fails to appreciate the computational mediation at the heart of photogrammetry. This research of photogrammetry outlines a way of foregrounding qualities of layering and assemblage through computation as pivotal to understanding the image. These images are created through algorithmic analysis resulting in the formation of a computational, navigable environment. New forms of Media Archaeological methods are employed, focusing on glitch practices that explore this evolving technology. Under certain conditions, peculiar errors and aberrations occur. These attributes reveal a glimpse of the image’s materiality by showing estimations and extrapolations of algorithms. Methods devised include generating the conditions for such errors to better understand the aesthetics of Spatially-immersive Networked Composites (SiNCs), both on screen and removed from navigable, screen-based space. This research sets the conditions for discussion for emergent forms of imagery, encouraging wider and more critical engagement with the photogrammetric image and its associated, evolving technologies.
