Seeing Ourselves
Asynchronous Session
Feeling, Thinking, Not Seeing the Image: How Images Engage Us in an Information-saturated World View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Thomas Marotta
We can no longer realise images solely through semiotic theories of interpretation and judgement fixed to earlier modes of communication, such as print. Instead, we engage with images through various networked digital devices and online social interactions. These engagements offer many possible experiences with images, some of which we have agency and others that are purely autonomic and some interactions resembling a healthy-bodied manifestation of visual agnosia. This paper utilises research from a study of graphic design students and practitioners and their views on photographic image use comparing print and online media. The author uses an interpretive approach supported by mixed data-gathering methods, including photo-elicitation, interviews, and semi-structured questions. This discussion encourages advancing visual literacy and visual culture discourses to incorporate the effects of emerging technologies and online social practices on photographic image use. These effects include sensory and cognitive responses to images, those precipitated by online social interaction and the influences of external stimuli on the way we ultimately apprehend images.
Hannah Höch, Robert Rauschenberg, and David Hockney: Photographic Dualism in Constructing and Thwarting Reality View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alisdair Lochlin MacRae
In design, the question of whether people influence a product, or whether a product influences people may have no definitive answer, given the long relationship between people and things being made that enhance their lives. The development of new products and services typically result in new behaviours that eventually bring about new developments in design, creating a circular process. Photography, and in particular, photographic images, can be seen in a similar way. The desire to reflect reality with greater accuracy brought about early developments in the practice, such as those by Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins. However, the use of photography as an objective record did not last long, and manipulation of images arose just as quickly as the technology itself. These dual aspects of photography, both its capacity to record and preserve in great detail, as well as fool us with even simple methods, could say something about how images are received, and certainly how they go on to influence our understanding of the world. The paper looks at three artists, Hannah Höch, Robert Rauschenberg and David Hockney, whose work forefronts these problematic aspects of photography, as they both highlight its constructed nature and yet rely on it to convey their ideas about the medium and their respective subjects. Their work is reviewed in light of the idea that images do not represent us, they create us.
Dames, Death, and Depravity in Film Noir: What Must Stories, Dialogue, and Characters Have to Qualify as Noir? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jenean Mc Brearty
There's more to the components of noir film, such as German Expressionist roots, camera angles, nihilism, no-goodniks and dysfunctional relationships, to make a genuine film noir. My research, through reading both history and biographies, and constructing timelines, reveals there is a serious, historical, and largely political, omission in the definition of the genre: propaganda. In the premiere venue of Hollywood, why did America come to overlook the obvious?
Cognitive Image of Sound View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gregorio De Gregoris
In primitive and first superior cultures, different elements (human beings, events, natural phenomena, things) were grouped in the same rhythmic category only because they had similar forms. This rhythmic sound substance – which can be reproduced in a song or on the drum – also characterises the individual animal, human being or object, because of their unique shape, form, movement (Schneider, 1970: 171-172). According to Benveniste’s proposal (1966), the original meaning of “rhythm” (ῥυθμός), was the perception of a ‘peculiar way of flowing’, i.e., a “spatial configuration defined by the distinctive arrangement and proportion of elements” (my translation). Now, this definition is very similar to that of form/Gestalt/structure/system, i.e., a whole which is not the mere sum of its parts but is something more and something else, determined by the relationships among the components. Gestalt psychology originated from the perception of sound, and then was also applied to speech, audio-visual and music perception. Audio-vision is an illusion, created by the fusion of the two signals that come together in a new configuration, in a new rhythm, a new form in the subject’s perception (Chion, 1990). In music, gestalt/rhythmic perception originates from a sound field structuring that changes along with the physical data, i.e., the real music structure, and the subject’s experience/expectations, that influence the mode of assumption of perceptual data. Thus, music and perception are involved in a loop of repetition/redundance/assimilation and change/variation/accommodation that reshape constantly our sound field perceptual organization (Marchetta 2010).
Water Systems 1.0: Generative Drawings as a Means to be Aware of Our Environments View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Concha García González
Here I propose an excerpt of an ongoing project in which mechanisms of drawing systems beyond human hand are explored and are put in relation with human methods of representation. The drawings that conform the video we are going to talk about, are all generative. The first ones are generative drawings made by spring rain falling on papers, and the following ones are generative drawings made with the software processing simulating water and water drops systems. I put in relation this two generative systems: the weather system and the algorithmic machine system: both practices incorporate random processes set to motion with some degree of autonomy resulting in a series of changing drawings or drawings in motion. Besides that, sound recordings of waterscapes are used. By exploring these mechanisms, and therefore creating this kind of images, we could be more aware of the actants that conform and modify our spaces beyond human action. By working with these images, far away from self-referenciality, we can develop an attitude of receptivity and deep listening of our environments.
