Towards a Philosophy of Photography

Key Quotes:

"It is a mistake to decipher images as if they were "frozen events." On the contrary they are translations of events into; situations; they substitute scenes for events."- 2

"The function of technical images is to emancipate their receivers from the need to think conceptually". - 6

"Technical images thus suck all of his-tory into their surfaces, and they come to constitute and eternally rotating memory of society." - 7

Research: 

"For Flusser, photography is not only a reproductive imaging technology, it is a dominant cultural technique through which reality is constituted and understood". - Taken from wikipedia which is quoting Becker, Claudia, "Image/Thinking", POP, 2 (2), p. 251

"The photographer’s gesture as the search for a viewpoint onto a scene takes place within the possibilities offered by the apparatus. The photographer moves within specific categories of space and time regarding the scene: proximity and distance, bird- and worm’s-eye views, frontal- and side-views, short or long exposures, etc. The Gestalt of space–time surrounding the scene is prefigured for the photographer by the categories of his camera. These categories are an a priori for him. He must ‘decide’ within them: he must press the trigger." - Flusser (Taken from Wikipedia)

My thoughts/Notes:
Oral History (Magical)> 
Linear Texts (non- Magical)> 
Traditional Images (Magical) > 
Technical Images (Non-Magical) 

    Yields the desire to create Magical Texts


This abundance of photos/videos leads to a "mass civilization" that has a core bank of similar reference points. For example I can meet anyone my age and we know exactly what was happening to us and remember the video footage from 9/11. But all of us might not have read the same texts.


I think that the magical oral history still exists as a part of family history. You can hear stories about ancestors where a photograph for that event didn't exist; will this still happen in the future? 

Response to Wasteland

This is my 3rd time to watch this film. And I've enjoyed it equally each time. The initial draw of the images themselves has worn off for me although I still love the concept of creating high art out of garbage. Like I said in class my favorite part has become the human interactions. Particularly the interaction of Vik with the pickers. It's such a challenging role to play. How do you improve their lives, but in a way that is maintainable for them. I think this is the essential question that all non-profits face. I've participated in many mission trips throughout my life, and it always seems that the organizations that do the most good are run by people who exist in the space they are improving. I think Vik did help them, but he might of done more damage to them long term. The best way to help the world is to help your corner of it. I think this project was more about completing Vik's vision for his art than helping the people there. He could of done the same thing in NYC with the homeless population and then continued to help these people there.

Response to Gillespie & Hayles

Hayles, N. (n.d.). Traumas of Code. Critical Inquiry, 33(1 (Autumn 2006), 136-157. Retrieved from http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/traumas_of_code_by_n._katherine_hayles

This article discusses how prevalent code is within our everyday lives.

A note I have from discussion says, "Just because there are more images doesn't mean it's more objective."

We also talked about glitch art in reference to this article and I played around with a few Marilyn Monroe images, a la Andy Warhol.

The Relevance of Algorithms by Tarleton Gillespie forthcoming, in Media Technologies, ed. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo Boczkowski, and Kirsten Foot. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

This article discusses how prevalent algorithms are in todays society. 

Key Terms-

Algorithms - encoded procedures for transforming input data into a desired output, based on specified calculations. 

Quotes-

"We live in a historical moment in which, more than ever before, nearly all public activity includes keeping copious records, cataloging activity, and archiving documents -- and we do more and more of it on a communication network designed such that every login, every page view, and every click leaves a digital trace." - 4

In class we talked about other things that are algorithms, in particularly knitting, which I'm familiar with. So here is a sample of a pattern for a hat.

Round 1: *[P2, k3]  4 times, p3, k6, p1, repeat from * to end of round.

Round 2: *[P2, LC, RC] 2 times,  p3, C6F, p1, repeat from * to end of round.

Round 3: *P3, [k6, p4] 2 times, k6, p1, repeat from * to end of round.

Round 4: *P3, [C6F, p4] 2 times, k6, p1, repeat from * to end of round.

For someone who has no experience knitting this would just look like jumbled letters and numbers. 

Another thing we said was that people who are familiar with algorithms see the world in equations, which is an interesting thing to think about. 


* This response if far less detailed because it was the class following Installation weekend for 614

Response to Gonzalez

Gonzalez, J. (2009). The Face and the Public: Race, Secrecy, and Digital Art Practice. Camera Obscura, 70(1), 36-65. doi:10.1215/02705346-2008-014

People like to think of the internet as a race-less space, but Gonzalez argues that race relations and tensions are present throughout online media. She references artists who do work based on this concept.

Quotes-

"...then might it be possible to undo the power of race discourse as an oppressive regime by decoupling it from vision or the visible? Or, alternately, might it be that visual culture is the very place where contemporary race discourse might be most powerfully critiqued and transformed?" - 38

"Race is always an embodied discourse that cars on and through living human beings at the level of corporeal practices, movements, features, and gases, ultimately constructing and deconstructing the psychological states of individual subjects." - 41

"Online passing is never free from the social, historical, linguistic, and psychological constraints and conditions that also shape racial discourse offline. The invisibility of 'real' bodies cannot, alone, Produce a racially neutral space or even racially neutral subjects." - 42

"Racial schemas work to hide or mask not only individuals as individuals but also their real and imagined historical conditions." - 59

A few of my notes from the reading-

- She talked about the internet freeing up our encounters between each other, because we are invisible, and while there can be good from this there is also bad. Cyberbullying is a real problem on the internet because people don't have to own what they say. In another class we also talked about the "Yik Yak" app that lets you make anonymous comments and the content you see is based on your radius. This is causing problems because people are also being hatful on platforms like this as well.

- I wonder how the #blacklivesmatter fits into this discussion. I'm not exactly sure, but I think it's work mentioning. 

Response to Hawkins & Thacker

Hawkins, J. (n.d.). When Taste Politics Meet Terror. CTheory.

This article is about the recent harassment of the Critical Art Ensemble 

Quotes-

"This episode, then, seemed to signal that art and theory both are reduced, in times of crisis, 'to an academic parlor game' -- something we do when there's nothing really on anyone's radar screen. Something we do only when it's 'appropriate'." - 2

"This case is really about the battle for and over the political unconscious of the U.S., and the ways in which art can tap into (or at least temporarily intersect with) that unconscious." - 10

Thacker, E. (2003). Data Made Flesh: Biotechnology and the Discourse of the Posthuman. Cultrual Critique, 53 (Winter), 72-97.

This article discusses the merging of the medical industry with the technology industry.

Terms –

Posthumanism -

a. Extropianism – “includes theoretical-technical inquiries into the next phase of the human condition through advances in science and technology.” - 73

b. Critical posthumanism – “includes key texts by contemporary cultural theorist brignging together the implications of postmodern theories of the subject and the politics of new technologies.” – 73

Uploading – “the parallels between neural pattern activity in the uman mind and the capacity of advanced neural networking computing will enable humans to transger their minds into more durable (read: immortal) hardware systems.” - 74

Quotes –

"Extroianism can be characterized along three main lines: (1) as a technologically biased revision of European humanism, (2) as an approach to technology as both self and not-self, and (3) as a tendency to apply life science concepts toward social and political problematics." - 75

"One of the crucial requirements for the postman is that technology be approached first and foremost as a tool. This technology-as-tool motif-an investment in enabling technology-operates in several ways." - 77

1.     “It presupposes and requires a boundary management between human and machine, biology and technology, nature and culture”- 77

2.     “Provides the assurance of the neutrality of technology” – 77

3.     “The ontological separation of human and machine is also the establishment of a certain distance between the natural and technical domains, and this distance provides a source of security for the ongoing development of the human as a product of evolution” - 77

On page 74 he discusses the singularity which makes me think of two films that include this concept, Avatar and Chappie.

Response to Dixon and Smith-Windsor

Smith-Windsor, J. (n.d.). The Cyborg Mother. Politics, Gender and Religion: Gender and Sexuality, 348-356.

This article is about her experience having a premature baby and watching as machines raised her daughter for the first month of her life.

Terms-
Cyborg - "part human, part machine, never completely either."- 349
Panopticism - "Being a cyborg reifies the repressive technologies of the pan optical illusion. To reify the panopticon inherently denies the possibility that there are ways of being, beyond the cyborg experience" -353

Quotes-
"14 February 2003 - I hold my child for the first time. She is naked, against my chest. Her ventilator curls around my neck, taped to my shoulder, disappears inside her. There are other tubes , too, taped to my other limbs by peach-colored surgical tape." -352

This gives me the visual of an umbilical cord. And that instead of being connected to her the first time the mother holds her daughter she is connected to the machines.

"The mother-child symbiosis provides the necessary relationship for infantile language to be communicated. The infant is incapable of distinguishing between 'sameness' and otherness', between 'subject' and 'object', between itself and the Mother. ... But what if this symbiotic relationship between mother and child were interrupted? What happens when technology begins to work itself into the infantile discourse severing the symbiosis between mother and child? What happens when the infant, instead, becomes incapable of distinguishing between itself and - the machine?" - 350

When she talks about the baby recognizing the machine as mother, that is so interesting. I know they call the first three months of a baby's life the 4th trimester, so I wonder what implications it has to have the baby be so close and connected to machines during that time. Does her daughter feel at home in a cold sterile hospital environment?

Dixon, S. (n.d.). Metal Performance: Humanizing Robots, Returning to Nature, and Camping About. Culture, Art, and Communication: Perception, 485-518.

Dixon argues that all art with robots (and sometimes humans) is either obviously camp or has camp overtones. (I wonder if this isn't more to do with the time frame that all of his art works are from.)

Terms-
metallic camp - "the word 'metallic' denotes not only the physical substance that the artists employ, but also its contemporary connotations within popular music and culture as signifying loud, aggressive, and resistant expression. This is juxtaposed with the knowing irony and pleasure of camp, which Susan Sontag defines as 'love of the unnatural:of artifice and exaggeration'." - 486

Quotes-
"Robots become more homelike through developments in artificial intelligence, and humans become more rootlike as they grow more alienated and remove from their own and others' humanity through their increasing reliance on technology." - 490-491

"The Czech word robot, variously translated as 'work', 'serf,' or 'forced labour', was adopted in the English-speaking world as 'robot' directly through the title of Karel Capek's 1921 expressionist play R.U.R. (Rose's Universal Robots). The play concerns the supplanting of humans by robots, and it has been widely discussed both as a warning against Frankensteinian scientific hubris and as an allegory of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, with the oppressed masses 'recast' as robots." - 492

"Metal Performance frequently highlights a postmodern concern to return to nature and the animal, and it often celebrates an eroticized sexuality of metal, with 'them fuckin' robots' both fucking (signaling the humanization of machines) and being fucked (signifying the mechanization of humans). Metal performances exalt in the conjunction of the hard and the soft, the natural and the technological, the metal and the meat." - 513

Response to Crary

 Crary, J. (2013). 24/7. Brooklyn, New York: Verso.

This article discusses the 24/7 attitude of our current US culture, while referencing it's historical connotations as well as social, political, and capitalist roots.

Terms-
"sleep mode" - "the notion of an apparatus in a state of low-power readiness remakes the larger sense of sleep into simply a deferred or diminished condition of operationally and access." - 13

Key Quotes -
"A 24/7 environment has the semblance of a social world, but it is actually a non-social model of mechanic performance and a suspension of living that does not disclose the human cost required to sustain effectiveness." - 9

"Clearly, sleep needs to be understood in relation to distinctions between private and public, between the individual and the collective, but always in recognition of their permeability and proximity" - 24-25

"My argument may seem to contain two inconsistent threads. On on hand I am affirming, along with some other writers, that the shape of contemporary technological culture still corresponds to the logic of modernization as it unfolded in the later nineteenth century. ... On the other hand sometime in the late twentieth century it is possible to identify a constellation of forces and entities distinct from those of the nineteenth century and its sequential phases of modernization. "- 41-42

"Even among the plural voices affirming that 'another world is possible,' there is often the expedient misconception that economic justice, mitigation of climate change, and egalitarian social relations can somehow occur alongside the continued existence of corporations like Google, Apple, and General Electric." - 49

"The fluctuating textures of human affect and emotion that are only imprecisely suggested by the notions of shyness, anxiety, variable sexual desire, distraction, or sadness have been falsely converted into medical disorders to be targeted by hugely profitable drugs." - 55

"Because of the infinity of content accessible 24/7 there will always be something online more informative, surprising, funny, diverting, impressive than anything in one's immediate actual circumstances." - 59

When referencing Inception (and I think Minority Report) - "The manifest unlikelihood, or absurdity, of such possibilities ever being realized is less important than how they are shaping and regulating contemporary imaginaries." - 97


Thoughts -

On 7 he references solitary prison cells, the main character on Orange is the New Black is in solitary for a portion of the show and her mental state is greatly affected.

On 12 he talks about different sleep cycles and I've read before about segmented sleep, where people used to wake in the night to take care of various activities.

On page 31 he talks about how "in-use devices and apparatuses have an impact on small-scale forms of sociality". This makes me think of a photographer (not super great work, but relevant) who removes the phones/tablets from peoples hands in photographs.

On page 52 and 53 he discusses watching a large event on television and also looking at social media to see others opinions of what's happening at the same time. I totally do this during things like presidential debates, and awards shows. 

On 85 he argues that television is the cause for large increases in childhood autism. I would have to disagree and say that prepackaged synthetic food is a larger cause for this rise (particularly "low fat" diets and food dyes).

Response to Shephard & Gates

Shephard, M. (2013). Minor Urbanism: Everyday entanglements of technology and urban life. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 27(4), 483-494.


This article covers ways that artists are using "technology" or commenting on the use of technology. 

technicity - the productive power of technology to make things happen
transduction - the constant making of a new domain in reiterative and transformative practices

"practicing minor urbanism involves reconfiguring, recircuiting and redirecting these normative systems and infrastructures in ways that open them up alternate social and political dynamics."
"Also indicates trend towards increasingly mobile actors and the role of technologies of convince as an indicator of contemporary culture."


I really enjoyed the Corner Convenience work. The video and the book are both good works that push us to think about things in different ways. 


Gates, K. (2004). The Past Perfect Promise of Facial Recognition Technology (pp. 1-16). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Kelly Gates Paper is about the use of Facial Recognition software, and particularly looking at it in a post 9/11 world. 

technostalgic - Thinking something would have happened differently if a technology we have currently existed in the past. 

"Other questions that are considered relevant to development of automated recognition concern how children recognize faces, what role facial expressions play in recognition, the role of race and gender, and our ability to recognize faces in ages of varying quality." - 8
"Computerized forms of bodily identification are in many ways consistent with these earlier state efforts, and similarly tied to cultural preoccupations with constructing the limits and possibilities of the nation-state." - 5

Something that this article made me think of was a TED talk about how screens will be able to read our emotions.

Response to Veel and Hansen

Hansen, M. (2012). Calm Imaging: The Conquest of Overload and the Conditions of Attention. In Ubiquitous Sensation: Toward and Atmospheric, Collective, and Microtemporal Model of Media (pp. 63-88). Boston: MIT Press.

Hansen argues that ubicomp, or trying to achieve it, is something that is distinctly linked to how we process visual information. 

Key Quotes:
"Visual Ergonomics is linked to traditional forms and materials of representation like painting; but because certain ideas of space and its representation discovered in say landscape painting, were carried over to photography and later cinema, it also has some relevance to them. Cognitive ergonomics is a later phenomenon and is involved in delineating dynamic processes. Whereas visual ergonomics was involved in defining space, cognitive ergonomics is involved in describing temporality." -65

"My  Argument is that technics does impact time at the level of its absolute constitution - which is to say, prior to any experience in time - and that this impact paradoxically holds far greater significance for our experience that the fact that media proximately mediate our intratemporal lives." - 80 (emphasis original)

This "third wave of ubicomp" that he references makes me think of a few things. 

-The Weiser quote he uses about having each computer serve many people all over the world (68) is getting closer and closer. An example is I could be using my iPhone to listen to pandora (music server) and then ordering something from Amazon. At least three computers are being used in this transaction, but in reality probably many more. 

-Another Weiser quote is "they envision a world where machines 'take care of our unconscious details'" (68). Siri is trying to do this, but always seems to just fall short. Sometimes she can do exactly what I ask, but that is the outlier. Most of the time, she's inaccurate, not to mention she must have Wi-Fi to work. 

Veel, K. (2012). Calm Imaging: The Conquest of Overload and the Conditions of Attention. In Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging With Ubiquitous Computing (pp. 119-132). Boston: MIT Press.

Veel discusses calm computing and how that affects us, particularly at an unconscious level, and how we need to be more aware of it. 

Key Quotes:
"Rather, it calls for a closer scrutiny of the nature of the apparently seamless link between human beings and technology that deals with overload situations before they reach our awareness." -122

In reference to border surveillance  "Although the situation of overload is both created and countered on the system side ant therefore, in principle, never has to be brought to our attention, process affects us significantly." - 122

Quoting Arvidson "'The margin has depth and is a genuine dimension in our lives - an ongoing presence in attending life. Just as everything in the unconscious can never be made conscious, but nonetheless some of its content ma be active in my ongoing life, everything in the margin can never be made thematic, but nonetheless some its content may be active in my ongoing life.'" -125

"Not only are we saved a great deal of unimaginative, effortful work, but we also risk loosing touch with the deliberative aspects of thinking because technology make the decision about what should be thematic and what should be at the margin of our attention for us." - 126

When she references Times Square it makes me remember the first time I saw it. I was visiting a friend who went to Pratt, and we went so I could see it. We got off the subway a few blocks away and I closed my eyes and they lead me to the center of times square. I could see the brightness of the lights/signs through my eyelids. Then I finally opened my eyes and it was overwhelming. 

She also references Youtube suggestions, which made me think of netflix suggestions, which are hilarious sometimes. I once received a category suggestion of "Independent foreign films with strong female leads". 

Responses to Marx & Shanken

Shanken E. (2014). Art and Electronic Media. New York, New York: Phaidon Press.

A concise history of Art as it pertains to Technology. Starting with early references such as Duchamp, and continuing to current working artists. 

Throughout the book, it spurs me to think of other works/technology that relate to this. 

Google Deep Dream
- You can give the AI a photo and it looks for things within the photograph. 

Here is one of mine. 

Arcade Fire Personalized Music Video

The Wilderness Downtown

AF made a music video that uses Google Street view images of the neighborhood you grew up in.

Tate After Dark

In August 2014 for 5 nights you could control robots inside of the Tate Museum in London. I never controlled a robot, but you could watch the live stream. They had 4 different robots on at a time. 


My Husband loved the "They Rule" website. We spent at least 30 minutes making different connections between companies. 

I also know where all of Katy Perrys wardrobe inspiration came from now.

Marx, L. (2010). Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept. Technology and Culture, Volume 51, Number 3. Retrieved from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tech/summary/v051/5.3.marx.html

This article discusses the term "technology" and how it's meaning changed over the course of time, particularly starting with the Industrial Revolution.

Quotes that stood out in the text:

"What requires emphasis is the republican thinkers' uncompromising insistence that advances in science and the mechanic arts are valuable chiefly as a means of arriving at social and political ends. " - 565

"To a vocal minority of dissident artists and intellectuals, the worshipful view of material progress was symptomatic of moral negligence and political regression." - 566

"Although the confluence of the sciences and the practical arts was well under way by 1847, it was not until the final quarter of the century, with the rise of the electrical and chemical industries, that the large-scale amalgamation of science and industry helped to create the semantic void that would eventually call forth the new concept - technology." -569

When talking about automotive technology and all it's parts; engine, assembly lines, engineers, corporate structure, stockholders, repair facilities. "Where, then, do we draw the boundary between the system and the rest of the society and culture?" - 575