Views and Viewpoints
University of San Jorge (Venue in the city centre): Calle San Voto, 6-8 50003 Zaragoza, Spain
Steadicam and Neurocinematics: Images and the Neural Motor Cortex View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Vanden Bossche
When Uri Hasson et al. coined the term ‘neurocinematics’ in a 2008 article in Projections, it was an important next step within the field of cognitive film studies that was initiated in the 1980s, and gained momentum when David Bordwell wrote his (in)famous A Case for Cognitivism in 1989. Since then, scholars like Semir Zeki have looked at how images and repeated exposure to certain imagery interact with the neural pathways of our brains, while others such as Warren Neidich and Norman Bryson have linked these findings to broader visual culture and its interdependence with the functioning of the human brain. My text explores how the special relationship between the stimulation of the neural motor cortex and Steadicam images – as established in experiments by Vittorio Gallese and Michelle Guerra – can offer a new way of looking at Steadicam’s influence on changing film aesthetics and what this might teach us about similar processes at work in regards to digital imagery and immersive CGI (Computer Generated Images).
The High Malar Beauty and the Photograph: How Twentieth Century Photographic Aesthetic Skewed our Sense of Beauty View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Julian Cubby
“Driven by an innate extended physiological proprioception we 'feel' with our eyes and 'touched' in response, transforming ourselves into the embodiment of photograph. It may be that the model and viewer interchangeably aspire to become sealed as thin and close to a two-dimensional being as a three-dimensional object can physically be, like the page of a magazine or strip of film sealing the image and fixiing the gaze both ways. “It seems to me that today all American women have high cheekbones, long graceful legs, delicate wrists and thin hands,” says Beaton… A generation ago nobody had high cheekbones. Now everybody has them. I don’t really understand how women manage to change their actual bone structure, but apparently, they do.” (British fashion photographer, Cecil Beaton, 1956). The zygomatic or malar bone shapes the prominence of the facial cheek, there appear no historical precedents within western culture of high cheekbones accepted as an essential characteristic of beauty prior the widespread advent of photography and movies. Nothing of the elevated malar until the development of early professional lighting within industrially nascent, monochromatic, fashion photography, glamorous movies and commercial styling. At that modernizing moment, high cheekbones arrive in magazines, movies, salons, advertisements and everyday conversation. Subsequently, facial features of the industrial era became refracted through studio lights and camera pentaprism casting a vacant photogenic gaze, deep large eyes, pale complexion, full lips, straight medium-sized nose, paired back oval ears, white teeth, long neck, almond-shaped visage and high malar bound within symmetrical countenance.
Which Pixels Does Absence Deserve?: Traces of Absence and the Aftermath of Unfinished Conflicts View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alexander Gümbel, Federico Jaramillo
Aftermath photography as an offspring of photojournalism has become a common feature in the visual language of photographers since live news of conflicts are covered increasingly by social media. Nevertheless, the resulting narrative remains in the realm of testimony. In order to pursue new narratives in the particular context of unfinished conflicts, this study explores the traces of absence (being a shared consequence of human crisis) in photography and thus seeks to articulate anti-photojournalism with a new perspective on aftermath. Parting from a philosophical, anthropological, and psychoanalytical inquiry about the implications of absence, and analysing photographic works that have portrayed a range of conflicts and crises, we discuss the difference between ‘traces of absence’ versus ‘marks of the facts’. Traces are defined, in opposition to marks, not as remnants with an unequivocal significance of the past, but as a continuous process in which absence emerges like relational frameworks in ongoing transformation. Consequently, ‘traces of absence’ operate within the image from a kind of creative and reflective silence in front of the notion of ‘it’s not anymore’, and so attends to the very specific temporality of the experience of absence. In other words, this work encourages the consolidation of a photographic language and a visual framework of interpretation in which, first, the power of absence within the image implies the counterfactual reading of the present; and second, the power of the image itself reveals the performative agency of absences in the shaping of the future allowing for new and open-end narratives.
