Pondering Production
Asynchronous Session
Re-imagining Space, Time and Belonging: Visualising Henri Lefebvre’s Trialectic Space through Creative Practice View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Clive Barstow
This paper presents a personal and creative reinterpretation of Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, visualised through to the production of artworks as a mechanism to propose imaginary and reconstituted truths. Several key thinkers on space and place are examined to present an abstract notion of time and space that re-presents history as a series of synchronous and relational moments in time. In line with Lefebvre’s dialectic approach, I argue that his various models of spatial triads posit a differential space that is open ended and as such is accessible to artists to develop a participatory and embodied form of praxis that is adaptable and more accomodating of cultures in flux. I extend Lefebvre’s expression of trialectics towards a model of auto-ethnography for the practice-led researcher that positions them within the dialogue as participant, thus avoiding the pitfalls of othering that can occur in traditional ethnographic studies. The concept of abstract space is used to form an interdependent and embodied relationship between theory and practice that evokes imaginary worlds through which we can question the construction of cultural norms within the established framing of history and place.
Compositing the Body: Ethics of Mediation Among Professional Photographic Retouchers View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Matthew Raj Webb
Focusing on the visual media practices of professional photographic retouchers working in the New York fashion and beauty industry, this paper explores how the body is being reproduced within a modern fashion system. I foreground retouchers’ distinctive ethical imaginaries and attempts to construct “inclusive” visual objectifications. Such imperatives are most explicit in techniques they refer to as “compositing” (verb), a term which references selective, compositional practices that combine multiple socioculturally-marked visual elements. This study points to a parallax of ethical intentions marked by competing media ideologies: while public critics seek to decrease prevalence of retouching, retouchers instead argue that more, expertly engineered and thoughtfully engaged retouching practices can generate a more ethical and inclusive media world.
Performativity and Intersemiotic Translation in Contemporary Art: The Case of Hong Kong Atlas View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Zoran Poposki, Marija Todorova
This paper considers the intersection of performativity and intersemiotic translation in contemporary art through a case study of a new media art project aimed at visually transcoding Dung Kai-Cheung’s novel Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, a book of postmodern fiction about the palimpsest nature of Hong Kong as a linguistic landscape and a city of (cultural) translation. In Hong Kong Atlas, the locations in Dung’s book are performatively mapped out onto the real semioscape of contemporary Hong Kong using psychogeography documented in digital images, which are then transcoded through a series of iterative translations into a variety of visual formats. By analysing the complex methodology and the unique interdisciplinary theoretical framework underpinning this artistic research (combining insights from fields such as visual studies, translation studies, sociolinguistics, multimodal discourse analysis, art theory, and practice-based research epistemology), the paper aims to provide a novel approach to the discussion of visual translation as intersemiotic translation.
Field Notes: Reframing Colonial Photography from the Philippines View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jason Reblando
At the turn of the twentieth century, American colonial photographers cemented perceptions of the Philippines as an uncivilized and primitive society. United States colonial administrators of the Philippines created a visual narrative of White saviorism in order to justify American presence in the Philippines. In my project titled Field Notes, I engage with archival images made during the American colonial period of the Philippines and create collages that deconstruct and critique the colonial gaze. My project works against the representations that colonial photographers created. Field Notes transforms these archival images and supplants their power. As a Filipino-American photographer and artist, I am interested in offering a more nuanced and complex narrative of Philippine history and the history of photography itself. My collages use archival images sourced from repositories such as the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology; the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University; and the Newberry Library in Chicago. These archives possess indelible images that codified colonial power dynamics between the United States and the Philippines. The cumulative effect of layering and reshaping images from these sources disrupts the reading of the original photograph. My project contributes to a growing conversation by contemporary artists who interrogate the colonizing power of the archive, not only for Filipinos, but for all people of the Global South. Field Notes considers vital questions about the intertwining roles of photography, empire, and the archive.
Augmented Reality and Cyborgean Pedagogies of Hope and Agency: Nature and Culture in Garden/Gallery Spaces View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ellen Moll
Donna Haraway’s “naturecultures” (Companion Species Manifesto) raises questions about the complex ways that nature, culture, science, and creative practice reconfigure one another in knowledge practices focused on social change; this work builds on Haraway’s cyborg feminisms that find hope and agency in technocultural assemblages that disrupt and redraw boundaries of agency and subjectivity. I argue that Haraway’s theoretical lens is vital for considering the political and ethical dimensions of augmented reality (AR), particularly in how AR implicates participants in cyborgean ways of looking, immersing, and controlling. Seeing the Invisible (2022-2023) was an augmented reality exhibition of contemporary art featured simultaneously at 12 botanical gardens and art institutions in seven countries, and featured works by Ai WeiWei, Sarah Meyohas, Daito Manabe, Isaac Julien, among many others. The exhibition’s garden setting and the environmental and scientific themes of the art, in conversation with Haraway’s theories, demonstrates how augmented reality experiences can create fleeting and socially engaged cyborgean identities and experiences for participants with particular ramifications on how to imagine hope and agency in the Anthropocene.
