Poster Session
University of San Jorge (Venue in the city centre) Calle San Voto, 6-8 50003 Zaragoza, Spain
Representation of Unconscious Images: Photographs of the Landscape, a Metaphor for the Mind View Digital Media
Poster Session Susan Leigh Moore
Since the invention of the permanent photographic image in the 19th century, photographers have considered the relative accuracy of the photograph as the representation of the subject that stands in front of the camera. While many photographers value the veracity of the photographic image, many intentionally distort their images to disrupt the relationship between the image and its referent. This type of disruption can be seen in the work of many artists, such as Michals, Ulesmann, and Tress, who often reference the surrealist movement when speaking about their images. In addition, artists from that era, including Dali, Magritte, and Tanguy, often referenced the unconscious as first described by Freud. In my own work, I draw on these ideas about surrealism and the unconscious to make minimalist still-life photographs created as a metaphor for the mind and memory. In a studio, I rephotograph projections of images. I begin this project by making minimalistic photographs of water and the sky in the landscape. The subject is the sky or the water without other identifiable objects. Then, I use a small projector to cast the digital photographs onto transparent fabric prior to recapturing the projection with a digital camera. Due to the quality of the fabric, the images are distorted and, sometimes, blurry. These photographs are removed from the context of the subject and, while they are camera-based images, are free of representation. Thus, they become illustrations. In this way, the images do not represent us, they create us.
Season's Greetings: Celebrating Diversity at Christmas - Practice-led PhD Research Project View Digital Media
Poster Session Carol Ryder
Season’s Greetings is a one of several practice-led research projects, executed as part of the researcher’s PhD study, that aim to promote greater diversity through illustration. The range of secular Christmas cards currently on offer in the West is very limited in terms of the people it represents, e.g., the elderly are represented only by images of Santa Claus, women only by young shoppers, and black and brown people are barely represented at all. ‘Season’s Greetings’ is a set of playful, secular Christmas card designs, created to update and offer greater diversity to the current seasonal offering, and challenge the limited number of repetitious stereotypes that permeate the Christmas card market. The cards depict diverse Christmas characters of different ethnicities, ages, and body-types, including people who are underrepresented in the current Christmas card market, to reflect the rich cultural diversity of Western society and celebrate the valuable contribution that diverse communities make to the broader landscape of contemporary style and culture. Revelling in the spirit of a contemporary Christmas, the characters are dressed in the finest designer fashions and celebrate the festive season by drinking champagne, pulling crackers, enjoying presents, smoking, and enjoying a little retail therapy.
Insights from AI Heatmaps for High and Low Creative Drawings View Digital Media
Poster Session Andrew Johnson, Danielle Whitfield
Our entry point is from the cognitive science perspective. Our study of the image is centered upon drawings and measuring their creativity. Determining the creativity of an image is very challenging and a definitive measure has eluded researchers. From prior research, we compare two different types of creativity measurements (online rating and criterion-based) for 45 drawings. We discover similar outcomes from the measurements and that each approach featured different trade-offs. We wondered if there is another way to evaluate the creativity of drawings by applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) heatmaps. AI heatmaps are graphical representations of data that use color-coding to show the relative intensity or importance of different areas of an image. For the study reported here, we use an online AI heatmap generator (https://zyro.com/ai/heatmap) to visualize 18 drawings (9 highest and 9 lowest ranked creative drawings) from our prior study. We coded the heatmaps based on the number of embedded figures highlighted, the total number of embedded figures in the drawings, and the number of heatmap hot spots. The results show more hot spots for low creativity drawings and more highlighting of embedded figures despite no differences in the number of figures between the high and low creativity drawings. We were surprised that heatmaps identified essentially ‘hidden figures’. Perhaps higher ranked drawings hid the embedded figures better. One high-creativity drawing had 13 figures embedded and none of them were highlighted. These results support the use of AI software to discriminate creativity levels in drawings.
Photo Based Social Media: The Relationship Between Deliberate Alteration, Self-Esteem, Social Comparison, and Appearance Motivation View Digital Media
Poster Session Megan Nagle, Richard Metzger, Colleen Spada
Previous research has investigated the relationship between self-esteem and social comparison issues within social media users. Individuals who had social media accounts for a long period of time were found to have higher inauthentic, which we refer to as deliberate alteration (i.e., editing photos of oneself to emphasize or manipulate natural features), in online presentation presumably as an attempt to impress or attract others. The purpose of the current study was to further understand deliberate alteration on social media, including exploring the relationship of self-esteem, social comparison, and appearance motivation with deliberate alteration. This study asked U.S. undergraduate students from a small liberal arts university (N = 147) to complete surveys related to their online behaviors and usage of social media including their self-esteem, social comparison, appearance motivation, and deliberate alteration. We predicted that lower self-esteem, higher social comparison, and higher appearance motivation would correlate with more frequent deliberate alteration. Multiple linear regression showed that social comparison and appearance motivations predicted the frequency of deliberate alteration while self-esteem did not. Contrary to popular opinion, it appeared that self-esteem was not the dominant predictor of altering image on social media.
