Retrospective Insights
University of Texas at Austin
Looking for Low-Key: Noir and Neo-Noir from a Cinematographic Perspective View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Vanden Bossche
Film Noir has always been an elusive category, determined by vague definitions. Even scholarly work has its focus on thematic connections and standards of tone and mood and periodization of both ‘classical noir’ and ‘neo-noir’ has always been problematic. Kathrina Glitre and Patrick Keating have championed an approach that categorizes ‘noir’ as a visual category, determined by changing technical standards. This paper compares these arguments against changes in filmmaking technique and cinematography from the fifties onwards and will argue that – save for some nuances – the technical evidence undergirds an approach to ‘noir’ and ‘neo-noir’ in which the visual element is maybe not a sufficient, but at least a required condition for any form of ‘noir’.
“715 Haven Street: Art Looks Back” - Public Digital Curation of Art Resistance and the Archival Question of Abolitionist Public Disruption in the Context of Colonial Understandings of Pacification View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mari Aparecida Stanev
My paper considers my experience helping compile the Art Archives for the Department of Afroamerican And African Studies at the University of Michigan, and the theoretical insights on a gallery proposal that emerged from this archival work, “715 Haven Street: Art Looks Back.” Art murals used to be displayed outside of the department’s first address at 715 Haven Street, until a series of fires deemed accidental forced the artwork and the department “indoors.” My digital recreation of the exterior of 715 Haven Street and its 3 internal gallery spaces offer a semiological methodology of re-hearing the attempt to remove the house and its art from public spaces. This public humanities and historical and literary intervention on the making of digital images contributes to the bibliography of abolitionist futures situating itself in a critique of carceral forms of source interpretation. I situate my re-reading of these objects and the juxtaposition of digitally rendered and digitized material objects in the anti-pacification critique that has emerged in Latin American police reform contexts, which align themselves with BLM-led police reform protests. Bringing back the physicality of the house in its digital presence by projecting the gallery on the exterior space that used to be occupied by 715 Haven Street counters the effects of the culture of policing where it attempts to use violence to curate public spaces in a reluctance to foster BIPOC, immigrant, poor, and queer histories out in the open; a challenge on many University campuses in the U.S. and beyond.
Art and Technology: Understanding an Entangled Ethos between Visual Images and Technology View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Roberto Archundia
Because of the imaginative, sensitive and visionary work of many, the argument seems settled: art and technology are entangled beyond definition and contemporary art has no need of philosophical or sociocultural approaches that understand this relation. Or is it? Is this aspect of the fruitful relation an innocent one? Or we haven't yet fully realized the probable future? Our contemporary mind has left us with nothing more than a profitable, productive yet hierarchical relationship in between visual images and technology. Nothing more than a farsighted technique to be embraced and built upon. Yet, a future of unavoidable substitution for the true meaning of words and an undistinguishable entanglement within Art, artist and “machines“ is yet to be experienced. Today we need to think and wonder: Is it that cyberspace -The areas in which habits and relations in between humans, animals and machines find themselves interacting- is now entangled with human culture as one, as a true cyberculture in which society’s needs and goals are entangled with science, technology and art? Is Ai going to acceptably -for human beings- produce human art by itself? Are the incoming organic-technologies, apparently opposites, going to be accepted as creative beings far beyond an elephant-painter and intimidatingly, for some, closer to a Cyborg-artist-avatar on the metaverse? The same curiosity that took first engineers, then artists, into manipulating computers and printers to produce complex images already in the 1960’s, feels categoric about a thread that, through algorithmic works, would erase boundaries in between art and technology.
Questioning Images: GIFs and Emojis as Art View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Christian John Gerstheimer
When physical artworks are juxtaposed with animated GIFs of the same subject the overall meaning of the pair is compounded. Because the virtual simulations used in the juxtapositions represent the same subjects as the still images this research endeavors to explore the new knowledge that is revealed. Each exploration of this kind uncovers new directions and brings up more questions for further study. This work straddles the study of still, moving and virtual images as well as language formation based on hand gestures. Consisting of various GIFs composed of specific emojis which correspond with the drawing to which they are juxtaposed, this research explores the multitude of meanings found in the real and the virtual. Because emojis are based on historic hand gestures, some with more and multiple meanings, the resulting juxtapositions differ in depth. Evaluations (questioning images) are ongoing and change slightly each time they are undertaken, and in response to global health crises such as pandemics. Research to this point has produced provocative results: one, that the virtual is indeed a part of the physical, two, that the significance of emojis should not be overlooked, and three, that differing viewers and differing settings produce different outcomes. These juxtapositions are intersections of the momentary and the prolonged suggesting further investigations using new technologies such as augmented reality, or settings such as public spaces.
