Focused Discussions (Asynchronous Session)
Seeing is Believing: : The Ethical and Legal Ramifications of Digital Manipulation View Digital Media
Focused Discussion Christy Schmidt
As an attorney, communication scholar, and professional photographer, I am interested in exploring the legal and ethical ramifications of digital photo and video manipulation. In an open invitational dialogue lasting an hour or so, I would like to introduce concepts for the audience to explore and comment upon. What is acceptable / ethical photo manipulation (for example selfie filters, online dating, commercial and real estate photography)? When does a photo become digital art and not pure "photography?" Should we and how do we regulate photo manipulation (considering journalism, advertising)? How do manufactured or manipulated images affect our perception of reality or truth - and alter our mythos or shared symbolism? This is a summary of an expansive topic area that I have been studying and discussing with students.
Negotiating Presence and Formulations of The Experiential within Co-Design for Virtual Reality View Digital Media
Focused Discussion Daniel Bacchus
This study examines the methods employed across two virtual reality (VR) co-design projects which critically engage with the concept of presence in VR. Undertaken within a practice-based PhD, the co-design projects explore how notions of presence relate to formulations of the experiential, using art practice and design methods to develop a new understanding of the specific affordances of VR when used as a platform to approach the life experience of another. Here, presence is understood as the sub-representative, pre-cognitive condition that signals the emergence of a co-dependent, subject/object forming relationality between a participant and virtual space. It is through a design for presence that the ground for an embodied, affective relationality between a participant and the experience of another may be formed. The first project, ‘Life is Beautiful. Always.’, explores the life experience of multi-disciplinary artist and vascular dementia sufferer, Marcel Schreur. Two works produced in the second project, ‘I Look For Them’ and ‘Be That Ocean’, explore the memories of ninety-six-year-old Ukrainian and survivor of the Soviet Gulag, Ivanna Masczcak. Through a reflective comparison of the methods used to produce the works across both projects, a discussion is catalysed on the various ways of being in virtual space and how they relate to real life experiences. The exploration considers how different manifestations of presence encourage specific types of affective engagement with VR experiences, and the appropriateness of methods employed to extrapolate and express another’s real-life experience in virtual space in different contexts.
Identity and Transphotography in Colombia: A Genealogy of Subaltern Photographic Practices View Digital Media
Focused Discussion Norman Esteban Gil Reyes, Gigiola Caceres
This is a research project in visual arts to make visible the photographic practices carried out by minorities and groups that are on the margins of professional artistic production. To do this, it uses genealogical analysis of collective practices and local experiences that use the photographic medium to mobilize reflections on identity. The project privileges aspects of analysis and research methodologies that include visualities as an important part in the production of meanings over representations of identity. It takes up the thought of authors such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Stuart Hall, Prathiba Parmar and Enrique Dussel who advocate research that privileges "the gaze" of those who are mainly in the place of the subaltern. Thanks to the proliferation and increasingly wide use of digital capture devices (phones, tablets, cameras, etc.), photographic practices have become a powerful means of expression that communities use to convey new aesthetic nuances, reflections, and claims around identity. From this perspective, the concept of transphotography is used in this research to point out the use that minorities (individuals, groups and communities) have made of the photographic medium, with the aim of making political expressions and struggles visible from their own place of enunciation. According to the above, this project contributes to the political right that individuals have to create and mobilize symbolic representations that contribute to the recognition and dignity of communities and their discourses.
