Forms in Focus (Asynchronous Session)
Projection of Multiple Fantasies: De-subjectivity of Images in Long Day’s Journey into Night View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yu Yang, Linli Zhang
Gilles Deleuze demonstrated the key role of flashback in dealing with the relationship between actual image and recollection-image when interpreting the temporality of images. He established two criteria for judging whether a flashback implies a recollection-image: 1) it serves as some kind of prompt in the narrative; 2) it relies on fate or forking time. But Deleuze also mentioned that if the context or condition disappears, the recollection-image represented by the flashback will lose its support, at which point, the pure recollection will also disappear. In this case, the actual image no longer forms a connection with the sensor-motor, but is suspended, which produces a fantasmatic effect. Bi Gan extends this suspension in his film Long Day’s Journey into Night, by removing the character being referred to in the flashback, striping it from figure and confining it in the voice-over. The film features an extreme use of several effects in the sensory-motor situations and the flashbacks, as described in Deleuze's Cinema 2: Time-image, namely recollection, dream, and falsification. The boundary between flashback and reality is completely broken. In addition, Bi Gan uses doppelgangers in the second part of the film to reconstruct the ambiguity of actual images and recollection-images in the first part, turning them into pure fantasies. This paper analyzes issues relating to the images and characters in Long Day’s Journey into Night, and show how this film constitutes a typical case of recollection-images transformed into fantasies through the power of falsification.
I Can Go Anywhere: The Unconstrained Travel of the Virtual Body View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kenneth Knies
I show how certain ordinary image experiences reveal an extraordinary bodily ability: the ability to travel to any viewpoint on the real world. I develop this idea by drawing a phenomenological distinction between an actual virtual perception and a possible empirical perception. I then connect actual virtual perception to an unconstrained ability to travel that resides in the virtual body. Far from depending upon the imagined extension of the motion of the empirical body, this ability is already exercised in the discovery of any empirical body and its constrained motions. The domain available to actual virtual perception coincides with the whole of what is real. I explore what this implies for viewpoints remote in space and time. If each embodied ego has the whole world as a domain for virtual perception, the empirical perceptions had by others at remote viewpoints are a priori open to coincidence with my actual virtual perceptions. In imaginative understanding, I can virtually transport myself to remote viewpoints without thereby opposing a possible world to the real world or entertaining any changes to the latter. When I imagine remote events, I am envisioning what I would actually see, not if the world were different and I were there, but if I had an adequate mirror.
Featured Screen Camera: Screenshots as Image-making Practice View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Charu Maithani
This paper rethinks the images produced in the common practice of screenshots. Screenshots are images that capture a part or the whole of the display on the screens. Mostly used for the purpose of documentation, computers and mobile phones are commonly used to take screenshots. Instead of merely displaying, the screens become image capturing devices. This indicates that screens play an active role in the operations of networked images. Analysing screenshot images from a photographic aesthetic is insufficient since screenshots is a practice where data and computational processes are entangled with the human action to capture an instance on and through the screens. The screen-operator assemblage produces a new kind of image-making practice which has to be understood as a move from the indexical to the technical and data processes in image-making. Such an understanding contributes toward how such images inform our computational contemporary visual culture. Furthermore, the paper is interested in the recognition of material objects such as the screens in the process of making images and aims go deeper into the technical processes that they facilitate. In the process of this examination, the paper offers insights into these new kinds of images.
“Promised Landscapes” into the Normative Visual Experience of the Philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1905-1930) View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session María Eugenia Pizzul
We present the teaching and learning style of the Spanish philosopher, which was forged in the visual experience of the landscape. Such a pedagogy sought the regeneration and education of people through its national topography, involving issues of nature, history, pedagogy, morality, and art. Although José Ortega y Gasset adopted the educational ideal of Francisco Giner de los Ríos, founder of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza in 1876, he displayed a broader understanding of landscape as we will show. Focusing on this image - and its Spanish, German, and Argentine visual experience-, this case study evidences the "pictorial or iconic turn" framework. We aim to reconstruct and describe the historicity of the visual experience of the university pedagogical landscape, and analyze the act of seeing and the modes of "observer" as part of scopic regimes or general systems of visuality. From a biographical approach, which uses tools of heuristics and discursive analysis, this research contributes to Visual and Cultural Studies, Histories of Pedagogy, Law, and Art, and GeoHumanities. We explore how the dynamic nature of Ortega y Gasset's pedagogical style, which legitimizes visual experience as a form of production of normative knowledge, is the result of the coexistence of various scopic regimes joined theoretically in Mission of the University of 1930: the promised landscape of university pedagogy.
Photography and Collage: Towards a New Distinction View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alisdair Lochlin MacRae
The distinction between drawing, painting, and photography to render a scene or portrait typically emphasizes a particular relationship between photography and its subject. However, what happens when photographic images are manipulated, either in camera, or once they have been produced? The following paper will consider how photography functions through the technique of collage. Emerging in the nineteenth century, photography was taken up by collage artists at the time. Artists of the early twentieth century contributed ground breaking works through the reconfiguration of photographic images. These techniques blended and developed further with cinema, using the repetition of photographic images to not only present realism, but also motion. With the introduction of digital photography in the late twentieth century, the notion of photographic collage may have disappeared altogether, with the ability to eliminate seams between images, and stitch larger images together from many single smaller ones. The paper traces the historical use of collage in photography to consider whether its distinction from drawing and painting still holds true, or if its relationship to its subject has also become a matter of interpretation.
Do We Still Need Still Photography? : Alternately, Are we Making Images in Photo-stasis, in Equilibrium? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Julian Cubby
For almost two centuries chemical and mechanical analogue photography followed by its electronic palingenisis, digital-photography, maintained a massive modernizing and industrial presence as well as global creative influence on depiction, communication, language, and thinking. Reformations of photography from monochromatic to chromatic, glass screen to paper document, still to motion film took decades to develop compared with the accelerated shift from analogue to digital screen formats. This paper references and expands upon a recent term ‘meta-photography’ as propounded in a recent dissertation "Introduction to Meta-Photography: A Self Reflexive and Self-Critical Mirror for Photography in Digital Culture" by Denis Guzel premised upon “digitized, networked and manipulated photography” regarding “different propositions of the ‘next-photography’” or “new-photographies” operating on “two meta-levels, both as an act of self-criticism” and “new…ontological difference.” My own (re)search into the ontology of photography also questions: “Do we still need still photography?” On the menu bar at the foot of the camera screen of my already outdated iPhone, I can select between “Time Lapse – Slow-Mo – Video – Photo – Portrait - Pano”. There appear to be greater, immediately accessible options innate to the digital platform, and it is that menu-bar with some of the options that pop-up that I find to be indicative of a redefinition of stillness. I am not concerned with second-guessing technological ‘advances’, but I am questioning emotional and intellectual affects of past, present, and future technologies transitioning meta-formats intimating new sensations of stillness, slowness, contemplation, movement, and dimensionality of extensive thought, communication, and language.
