Category: Contextual Studies

CS & BOW Book Notes & Quotations: Data Selves, Deborah Lupton 201C

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

Lupton, D. (2019) Data selves: more-than-human perspectives. Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA: Polity.

I am not sure when I started following Deborah Lupton’s blog or how I came across it but as we were preparing the installation for Pic London, I read her post about the forthcoming publication of her book Data Selves in my WordPress app. The word ‘assemblage’ stood out as one of the other artists, Josh Phillips had mentioned it several times. I wrote about it here and mentioned a discomfort with the word as it felt like an adjective that was being used as a noun. I have become used to the word now and it no longer jars every time I hear it. (I am not sure why I felt annoyed by the word – irrational irritation perhaps.)

Whatever the reasons, the work our group constructed, A rumour reached the village (2019) might be described as an assemblage of many smaller assemblages. There is something fractal about the ‘village’ of things we constructed. And so after reading Lupton’s blog, I ordered her book and am glad to have read it now, not only because it seems so relevant to my overall inquiry in which I am attempting to make sense of the way in which digital culture is changing the structural nature of existence, but because it led me to Karen Barad’s work. Actually, Barad had been mentioned to me before by another of my Pic London collaborators, Rowan Lear. But her name only sunk in while reading Data Selves.  

I expect I will need to investigate Barad further for CS and BOW but in the meantime here are some quotations from Lipton’s book with page numbers that could come in handy.

  • “Popular representations of these personal data and their futures often lean towards polar extremes.” (4)
  • “lively data” and “these data can continue to be lively even once the human they refer to is dead” (6)
  • “function creep”  – tech used in ways that go beyond their original purpose. (8)
  • Surveillance Capitalism (8)  – see https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook
  • “predictions that are made by data analytics can result in predictive privacy harms, in which people can be categorized against within certain social groups” (8) (See end of book where she talks about the limitations of data analytics – how our paranoia that too much is known about us prevents us from seeing how basic and limiting the categorisations can be (124)
  • (13 – NB pa) Personal data blur and challenge many of the binary oppositions and cultural boundaries that dominate in contemporary Western societies.
  • Rather than user – exister Amanda Lagerkvist (2017)
  • “In new materialism, the poststructuralist emphasis on language, discourse, and symbolic representation is enhanced by a turn torwards the material: particularly human embodied practices and interactions with objects, space and place.” (15)
  • “Braidotti (2018) terms ‘critical posthumanities’, in which the concept of human exceptionalism is done away with. This more-than-human approach sees human bodies as extending beyond their fleshy envelopes into the physicalenvironmentt, while the environment likewise colonised human bodies” (15)
  • “If we view personal digital data as manifestations of vitality, as recording, monitoring and influencing human lives, generating biolvalue and indeed as essentially part of humans, then they become part fo the domain of biopolitics.” (15)
  • “Feminist new materialists celebrate the renewal and liveliness of the capacities that human-nonhuman assemblages generate at the same time as identifying the ways in which these capacities can be closed off or limit the freedoms and potentials of some people or social groups or generate harm for the more-than-human world, as in environmental degradation, global warming, species extinction, pollution and climate change.” (17)
  • “While digital data assemblages are often conceptualised as immaterial, invisible and intangible, I contend that they are things that are generated in and through material devices (smartphones, computers, sensors), stored in material archives (data repositories), materialised in a range of formats that invite human sensory responses and have material effects on human bodies (documenting and having recursive effects on human flesh (19)
  • See quote by Koro-Ljungber et al. 2017; Taylor et al. 2018) NB
  • Diffractive methodology  – making entanglements visible. Barad suggests a diffractive approach is “good to think with”. (21) I agree. (Also 29)
  • More-than-human rather than posthuman (22) good para over to 23 – “interconnected and trans-agential.” Life, or vitality is not seen as possessed by any individual actor, but rather as constantly generated” (24)
  • Line about Caterisan dualism between mind and body (but see Alan Jasanoff (2018) for this too)
  • Animism – (25) quotes Haraway ” human ontologies must be understood as multiple and dynamic rather than fixed and essential (Bhavnani and Haraway, 1994)
  • Haraway’s ‘composite’ theory (26) See my own comments in BOW A2. (tentacular thinking)
  • Barad – “humans don’t know about the world because they are observing from outside it. They know about the world because they are inseparably part of it” (27)
  • Re agential cuts (29) And “Photographs make agential cuts that produce life forms rather than simply documenting them. “It is a way of giving form to matter” (Kember and Sylinska 2012:84) See 45 Years in lit review. more about agential cuts here: https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/a/agential-cut.html – “Any attempt to impose meaning and order” […] “inevitably part of the matter it seeks to preserve or document” . Link this to Flusser and apparatus  – what he says about photographers (funny!)
  • Thing power and enchantment (30) “strange ability of ordinary, man-made items to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence and aliveness, constituting the outside of our own experience” Quoting Jane Bennett (2001 and 2009) – compare this to OOO Graham Harmen
  • Page 31 – assemblage “function of grouping of different things in an assemblage, each operating in conjunction with the others (including humans)” (Bennett 2004: 354)
  • 32 – Bennett recognises “mass-produced commodities as possible sites of enchantment” NB para
  • 33 – others working in technological design …recognise “humans invest digital devices with animistic or magical properties” See Marx and use-value.
  • 39 “death is more of a continuum” see page 40 too (Re mummies text)
  • 42/43 Summary about human and non-human entanglement inc. data and machine.
  • Liquid metaphor “data sweat” (Melissa Gregg 2015) ; data leaking, emerging from within the body to outside  – reveal ambivalence to data as it moves between “high value and useless – or even disgusting – waste product” (Abjection) 46
  • 53 uncanny valley, not quite right, see Mario Klingman – my blog S&O
  • 57 – Good Kristeva quote re creepiness, abjection.
  • 59 – Dirty data, “What matter is considered dirty or clean?” – attitudes can be related to underlying fears and anxieties about loss of control. Rowan Lear suggested the following after I posted a picture of the mould produced by her yeast started in the collective work and a picture of this section of the book – https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/against-purity?fbclid=IwAR1W0EQEaOOzd4jWd1Knp2iBmyse8bB22tN6sM0GayAg7o33KF1KyVo-Yj0
  • 63 – emphasis on all senses, not just visual “data physicalisations” See http://dataphys.org. Plenty of artists listed who are making alternative to visual art drawn from data
  • 68 NB – bias/visual data materialisations  – instead list artists making “multisensory, unconventional and surprising” materialisations
  • Doing Data chapter – less than critical of some of the neoliberal ways in which data is enmeshed with people’s lives, potentially making them more rather less neurotic. Little critical analysis, more reporting of her data about how this affects people who use the data.
  • Sharing and exploiting data  – caring/intimate surveillance concerns 103

The first section of the book is probably the most useful to me as it expresses ideas that I have found while reading about systems, a move away from mind-body dualism and digitisation’s impact on our perception of a less fragmented world. It is one of many books and articles which follow on from Kathryn Hayle’s posthuman book which has been so influential for me. I am inundated by such essays on Academia since reading a number of them. I like the sensible and pragmatic relationship Lupton has with data and technology even though she doesn’t seem all that critical of some aspects of data monitoring which strike me as nuts/unhealthy/hellish such as the constant surveillance of babies breathing – this kind of thing is very telling about our society and I could probably write a thesis on it alone.

 

BOW & CS Notes/Research: Karen Barad

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

“A phenomenon is a specific intra-action of an ‘object’; and the ‘measuring agencies’; the object and the measuring agencies emerge from, rather than precede, the intra-action that produces them.” (Barad, 2007, p. 128). From Sauzet, 2018 – https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/p/phenomena-agential-realism.html Accessed 21/10/2019

From Deborah Lupton’s Data Selves (2019) I have discovered Karen Barad who is a key figure within new materialist philosophy. Her background in quantum physics makes her significantly important to the ideas behind the work I’ve been developing. There are lots of relevant things going on in this short video but I will do some reading before doing a longer post about some of her ideas. But essentially, for her, everything starts with entanglement and in the following video, she describes how measurement is one aspect of an assemblage (entangled collection of processes) that results in a phenomenon (how does this relate to objecthood?). Things don’t exist independently of each other – they come into being due to their interaction. I feel like there will be much to gain from looking into her theories further and I may need to reword some of my lit review to be more accurate/specific and ascertain that measurement is seen as an emergent process not a fixed external object. Here are some links for now.

Ideas in here relate to DI&C work specifically A2 & A5

A2: Polar Inertia; the depletion of time, the negation of space – Assessment submission

A4/5: Film slightly reworked following feedback

One of the other collaborators from A rumour reached the village posted the following, so I had come across Barad before but her name had not stuck – although I liked the post very much when it first appeared.

All of this also ties in very much with some of the arguments I made in the DI&C essay I wrote in particular referencing Ariella Azoulay’s ideas about reconfiguring logocentric linear history.

CS: Assignment 2 – Literature review

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 2 Comments

Write a 2,000-word literature review that identifies, summarises and critically discusses the most relevant texts that currently explore the subject area of your practice (i.e. the subject area you are exploring in Body of Work). Try to contrast differing points of view and indicate how you will expand your research into your extended written project.

Your essay should include a bibliography, be fully illustrated and reference citations appropriately throughout. See the extended written project submission requirements at the end of Part Three for more information about how to format your literature review.

 

I have sent the following draft to my new tutor Matt White. This PDF does not include (c) images. The offline version does. Web CS Assignment 2 Can you be dead and alive at the same time_ Draft 4

He sent the following link a couple of weeks ago which I found useful.

The structure of a literature review

Here is my reflection:

Demonstration of subject-based knowledge and understanding:

I didn’t set out to write about Brecht but once I realised that Fried had relied on his theory to prop up his own writing I was able to draw on previous knowledge. As an A level student in 1989 or so I was barely literate but I managed to get top marks for my Brecht essay. I just loved learning about his plays and methods. I am also interested in reality so pulling these strands together was enjoyable although I feel I have only scratched the surface. I will need to read Fried more carefully as I’m pretty sure I’ve made some mistakes based on assumptions.

Demonstration of research skills:

As I say above I need to dig deeper and make sure I’m not assuming things. Having written this, I feel I can now go on to do the real research. I have just about finished the Lupton book and once that’s done I can get to grips with Fried and Object Ontology.

Demonstration of critical and evaluation skills:

I have shown that I am able to question established views and even if others don’t agree with me, I hope I have given reasons which go some way towards supporting my arguments.

Communication:

It’s always tricky getting the balance tight – overly academic writing isn’t fun to write or read. Before she left, Ruth suggested experimenting with the form and I would enjoy that – not sure the OCA assessors would agree though. I love Chris Kraus’s ability to intertwine critical theory and autobiography and novel into one.

Writing a literature review was new to me – should we include our thoughts? Some fo the advice I got from fellow students was contradictory and confusing to say the least!

Please note: I will need to go through it with a very fine-tooth comb before printing for assessment, and there will be typos and repetitiveness, however, I am likely to revisit it and hone it in the run-up to sending it in.

BOW & CS: Notes on Object Orientated Ontology (OOO)

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Fellow OCA student Holly suggested looking at Graham Harmen

  • A useful counter-argument to the overwhelming direction in science to reduce everything to process/event (naive realism)
  • Two kinds of knowledge – 1 what it’s made of (physics), 2 what it does (Some modern philosophy) But problem with these – they are related. Duomining (over and undermining but never really getting the true essence of the thing) PDF of paper  – http://dar.aucegypt.edu/bitstream/handle/10526/3466/Duomining.pdf?sequence=1
  • Relate to New Materialism
  • Relate to Michael Fried’s writing about photography
  • See assemblages (Feminist New Realism) (Lupton 2019 – very relevant, will need to record notes/bullet points soon for CS)
  • Rhizome
  • Relate to Thing-Power (Bennet, 2010, Lupton 2019)
  • Harmen – a phenomenologist
  • Relate to Klein object relations
  • Objects relate to each other, there is some causal power – this is also key in new materialism although much else is opposing. Harmen is not a materialist. But link this to Santiago theory of cognition.
  • like new materialism humans are not better than other objects (compare this to animism)
  • Read and liked Alfred North Whitehead who is actually into the process (confusing!) but was a step forward from Heidegger https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alfred-North-Whitehead
  •  And Xavier Zubiri https://metanexus.net/introduction-philosophy-xavier-zubiri/
  • To perceive, you must enter into a relationship with another object
  • There are dormant objects which may never relate with another object (
  • Mention’s Tristian Garcia frequently http://continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/viewArticle/74
  • Doesn’t believe in matter – the world is made of substantial forms, there is no such thing as shapeless forms
  • You can’t describe the world, the best you can do is hint at what the real is
  • Does not believe in absolute knowledge, likes art because it alludes which is a better way of trying to describe the world than spelled out scientific language, believes metaphor is a better way to access the real (i.e. Zizek’s real rather than Lacan’s version)

Harmen’s philosophy is directly opposed to Donald D Hoffman’s theory about reality.

 

 

CS: Notes on Objecthood

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 3 Comments

One of the people who was recommended to counter James Elkin’s final sentences in What Photography Is that photography might actually be ‘boring’, was Michael Fried. I’d not read his work at length before, although had read the passage about him in Fifty Key Photography writers, and so have spent some time trying to introduce myself to a few of his key ideas. (Of no genuine importance unless you’re an avid Freudian, he has the same family name as my dad before he changed it when he was a young man.)

Objecthood – I suspect this is probably a subject quite close to my heart, but reading further will help talk about it using language that people writing about art tend to use. And certainly, there is a lot more to it that my constant referrals to Rovelli’s statement about relationship rather than objects. “[Quantum mechanics] does not describe things as they are: it describes how things occur and how they interact with each other… [] Reality is reduced to a relation.” (2014)

From a handy summary by the ever-reliable Chicago School of Art. “Maurice Merleau-Ponty breaks down Descartes system of binaries and conceptualizes the self and bodies as thoroughly intermeshed and indistinguishable, especially with respect to the body. With no clear distinction between subject and object, objects can be part of the subject’s being.” (See Klein’s object-relations).

This ties in with the quote I’d identified in Hayle’s work and which is discussed at length in various essays about cyborgs and the way we other-ise cyborgs/AI in fiction. “Only if one thinks of the subject as an autonomous self independent of the environment is one likely to experience the panic performed by Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics and Bernard Wolf’s Limbo. This view of the self authorizes the fear that if the boundaries are breached at all, there will be nothing to stop the self’s complete dissolution. By contrast, when the human is seen as part of a distributed system, the full expression of human capability can be seen precisely to dependent on the splice rather than being imperilled by it.” (1999)

  1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty seems to go onto say that paintings are above and beyond that – they have a special place in the world. “The special category of objects, paintings, especially eludes this process, and returns the spectator for a moment to a time when the dichotomy, between subject and object, was not yet formed. The view of a painting does not move to perceive and define the object before them.” This seems rather like Benjamin’s aura. As if some objects carry something of ‘god’ or the ‘spirit’ in them.
  2. According to Fried, “During the experience of art subject and object, space and time become collapsed, negating the possibility of objects [see time, space].” [See Hoffman’s dissolution of space-time and therefore of objects within space-time. Also Rovelli, System’s theory and a number of other books I’ve read recently]
  3. Apparently, “Descartes relegates color to a secondary property of reality. This allows him to construct a unitary and undifferentiated model of objects, by making shape, a spatial property, the defining characteristic” which seems a bit nuts nowadays.
  4. “The essential norms or conventions of painting are at the same time the limiting conditions with which a picture must comply in order to be experienced as a picture. Modernism has found that these limits can be pushed back infinitely before a picture stops being a picture and turns into an arbitrary object. [11]” Modernism in these terms is the start of expressions which refute the existence of God, even though they still continue to refer to a kind of divine experience.
  5. “By virtue of its opposition to the banality, worldliness, and gracelessness of objecthood, art takes on transcendental significance.”
  6. Ah – here is what is at the core of my own thinking – Other writers do not distinguish art from objects by way of arguments about perception or phenomenology, but examine the way art objects behave socially to gain their status. Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “aura” depends on art as an object residing in specific spaces. The fact that forms of art such as painting and sculpture must exist in one spatial location corresponds to their social and class function. But Benjamin is still thinking in Cartesian terms because this aura relating to social class and function is tied to religion too as these institutions cannot really exist as they do without each other.
  7. “This art, unlike art with an aura, has no specific spatial location, and is unable to be located as an object. It would be difficult to term the art of film as an object in the sense that has been discussed above.” Well, I am not so sure about this. A film can be seen as an object if we think about the screen on which it is shown and we begin to imagine that we might function in a similar way which is what theory likes to point to nowadays – we have a desktop (reality) and we draw on information to construct objects [icons] in our world (Hoffman, 2019) This assertion that non-aura art has no spacial location remind me of the mentality that just because something is digital its not material. If I am looking at the letter on my screen (underlined in red due to all the typos – I know exactly where it is. It is here, in my construction of space and time which my many ancestors evolved to ‘exist’ within in order to recognise what will help my system continue for long enough to procreate and take care of the little systems that emerged from me. (ibid)
  8. “Rather it is a set of social practices that define and declare the object art.” Re Raymond Williams. This makes the most sense to me – art seems to be mostly about money and status and daft games. I say mostly because I am sure there is valuable work being made which has nothing to do with all of that. What is probably quite a good question is what if all of that nonsense is eschewed and just a few people see the work, perhaps in someone’s back garden in Croydon (honestly hypothetically as I know no-one there), is it art? Does something only become art when a middle-class art-history graduate deems it so? If it’s not got any fiscal value because no-one wants to buy it, is it art? Is Art just about something being a commodity? If yes, then art is a load of tosh that deserves the reputation it has amongst some people. I don’t think it is just that – but wading through it can be challenging.

https://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/objecthood.htm

Artist: Allan Kaprow

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https://www.guggenheim.org/blogs/findings/how-allan-kaprow-helped-create-happenings

I have been thinking about this word ‘assemblage‘ and ended up talking about it with friends. I was directed towards Kaprow who used the word and titled a book with it – but relied on the French accent – I have a feeling it wasn’t really used in English at that time (50s) although I can’t pinpoint why I would think such a thing and may just be making it up.

Search for etymology brings up the following:

1704, “a collection of individuals,” from French assemblage “gathering, assemblage,” from assembler (see assemble). Earlier English words in the same sense include assemblement, assemblance (both late 15c.). Meaning “act of coming together” is from 1730; that of “act of fitting parts together” is from 1727.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/assemblage

It is used extensively in the blog and book I mentioned yesterday by Deborah Lupton – Data Selves: More than Human (2019) – due out tomorrow.

From the Guggenheim website:

“One of the movement’s major texts, Assemblage, environments & happenings is in the special collections. It features Kaprow’s theory of the evolution of abstract expressionist painting into Neo-Dada, assemblage, environments, and happenings of the early 1960s. This rare book documents works by Kaprow and artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Red Grooms, Robert Whitman, Jackson Pollock, Jim Dine, Yayoi Kusama, Claes Oldenburg, George Segal, Jean Tinguely, and the Gutai group.”

https://www.guggenheim.org/blogs/findings/how-allan-kaprow-helped-create-happenings

I hope I can see a copy of the book as it may prove useful for both BOW and CS research.

I may add to this post as my investigations continue.

Artist: James Richards

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One of my Pic London collaborators told me about James Richards:

From the Tate site:

“Richards generates meaning through abundance, by way of allusion, ellipsis and unity of tone, the lack of legibility counterbalanced by a strong sense of mood. The White Review”

Richard’s work will be really useful for me as he’s doing the same sort of thing – improvising, mixing, creating audio-visual collages. Here are some of the key phrases which stuck out for me from his Tate SHots interview:

  • The material… none of it is abstract… it is all stuff from the world… continuously gather and experiment
  • sound can enforce or go against an image

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/turner-prize-2014/turner-prize-2014-artists-james-richards?fbclid=IwAR0AfSyI70ZWTbs7o4H8xx8ma_7KZeZCBe4NEXW_l365H1h7_Mg6zzGCJRc

In the film below the time-lapsed Lillies are filmed in front of a painting that has a slight cartoon quality to it  – of a wolf and bloody sheep, creating a ‘moving image still life‘ with death and gore in the Lillies as we watch them open and wilt, and in the painting that surrounds them. Death, dying, life, living, beauty, terror, sex all in this tightly compacted text. Content becomes abstracted by the close-up crop.  Good for me to see how he relies on others to edit and animate. This later work has more of a polished feel and although I’m beginning to feel that the Brechtian/Deren habit of opting for less polished settings is not fashionable at the moment – I think my heart still resides more with a raw and under-commodified aesthetic.

CS 2: Reflection feedback

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After sharing the previous blog where I reflect on topics and subjects I aim to explore in my extended essay, and looking at the references I will discuss in A2: Literature Review, I have had some useful comments from other students which include helpful sites as well as suggestions of writers and practitioners. I will add to this page as more arrive.

  • A guide to writing a critical review (as opposed to a literature review):

https://xerte.ucreative.ac.uk/play.php?template_id=93#item0_PG1549360927916

  • Another note that fellow students have reminded me of:  The literature review is not an essay. (Yet, it should still be written as well it can be.)

Work I might find useful

  • I mention in my blog that I want to begin to tackle Deleuze. A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari has been recommended as a good start. I have looked at a couple of videos in the meantime. And immediately thought, Oh! this is related to Systems; and to how a linear Cartesian understanding of existence is being usurped by a picture of a networked reality, and the end of the Triangle of Being, replaced by a less hierarchical system. Therefore it will inform knowledge already embedded most notably from a System’s View of Life, Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi, 2014 (Kindle)
  • Charlotte Cotton’s Photography is Magic 2015/16 Exhibtion and essays, which I have downloaded. There is an optimism in this show and, I believe the essays, which might act as a counter to Elkins’ darkness. Cotton also talks about ‘post-disciplinary art’ which sounds very much like ‘multidisciplinary’ as discussed by Capra.
  • Comments via email:
    A few thoughts in response to a quick read …
    I wonder whether Michael Fried’s “Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before” might be a work worth looking at for a ‘counter view’. He’s a good old modernist (though you yourself say, in passing, that “intention is key” Emoji).
    You also say …
    So the poor old still photograph has a great deal to compete with.
    I might, if being contrary, argue that we still get an enormous amount of our information (and, perhaps, unconsciously, our perception of reality) from still visual images – even if they’re sometimes flashing by us momentarily. I’m not sure – are you looking to argue that the moving image has a closer relationship with reality; or that we humans regard it as more ‘real’; or that there’s more of it so it’s more influential on our perception of ‘reality’; or possibly something else or a combination (Emoji)? Are you, maybe, looking to understand (justify Emoji) your own focus on the moving image?
    Maybe (just ‘maybe’, not definitely) you will need to focus your attention somewhere? Be it still or moving image, the contextual scope – selfie/holiday video/online newsreel/archive photo/celebrity publicity/Jeff Wall artwork/feature film/indie documentary/magazine ad shot – is huge, and that list could go on and on and on.
    Hope that’s useful – fascinating stuff, as always.

    I replied (edited):

    …. really useful. These discussions help me to see what holes I’m leaving and there are as usual many! Fried has been suggested to me before although I think in … 50 key writers on Photography. I shall take another look.

    Do be contrary – it helps. I like how you have differentiated what I might be arguing (I must be honest, I do not know yet!)

    I agree – I may need to focus my attention – it is such a very big topic and thank you for your suggestions. Super useful.

    Here I add:

    Am I looking to justify my own focus is a very good question and if so, I think I need to avoid doing so – I don’t need to justify it, do I? But I am more interested in using whatever form works to make the point – whatever the point might be. At the moment, I think I am trying to suggest that the momentous revolution we are living through now, moving from analogue to digital, is part of and exists in a feedback loop that is about something far more fundamental, a complete overthrow of logocentrism which dates back really far; and is probably well-served by fewer fixed boundaries between forms because the boundaries across reality are currently disintegrating while at the same time being redrawn. This view of mine is taken from far away and is not about the current decade or generation although this is a pivotal moment.

  • Some great feedback which includes potentially relevant quotes for me to look up and consider:

Something pops out at me which is that photography has been seen as this special medium, better and more real than what came before. And we have since realised that it has its limitations to capturing reality which has released an explosion of creativity that undermines its original intent. Does a loss of faith in the mediums initially perceived presentation of truth ultimately liberate it or condemn it?

Similarly the accessibility of photography through smartphones etc has democratised the medium which creates new causalities. Photography may become artisan again (analogue already is) when it is replaced by another medium. Is it a familiar cycle in all mediums?  (Yes, so agree with this which is why the current obsession with alternative processes irritates me. It’s so predictable.)

Quotes (google the bits below)

  1. Richard Serra – “Art is not democratic”
  2. John Tagg – “More significantly, perhaps, if a piece of equipment was made available, then the necessary knowledges were not.” (Tagg, 1988, p.17).
  3. Nicholas Bourriaud – “An artwork is a dot on a line.” (Bourriaud, 2002, p.21). In reference to linear art history. Do we repeat history
  4. “Otherwise put, the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities. but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist.” (Bourriaud, 2002, p.13). Have we chosen to live in a constructed reality?

Overall I think you have a lot of interesting enquiries. Try to narrow down a central idea or interest, not too many because I know the word count fills up fast. It doesn’t have to be a direct relation to your BoW. My tutor said you can’t resolve everything in 5,000 words. (Good point!) So you want to leave room to enquire in other tangents potentially in the future.

 

CS: Literature​ Review A2 Notes

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To be clear; here I discuss the topic I am aiming for as I plan for the extended essay. I mention several key texts that I think will be helpful and which I will include in my A2 Literature Review. A previous blog also links to several important texts but there is minimal reflection in that one:

I need to get on with writing the literature review element of my extended essay. I am still thinking and gathering  – but wanted to just put something down in writing to help me clarify where I’m at at the moment.

I’ve identified a key problem so far – how do I relate my inquiry which I think is about ‘the loss/destruction of reality (as it has been construed)’ to photography? After all, the degree has photography in its title and I need to link the central theme to that discussion. Photography has played its part in that destruction – although there are plenty of other factors/actors.

NB Destruction might also be seen as transformation. I believe this is what my BOW A1.2 is expressing.

Photography’s role in mythmaking

  1. As I said in parenthesis in A1, “photography may have been a very brief interlude in the journey that begun with cave drawing, developed to become printing, followed by the invention of mechanisation, and moving towards a total simulated reality” (2019; 6) In response, Roberta suggested, “Although this has not diminished the demand for those other media – indeed it has given them a new lease of life.”

Printing is in trouble – we do still buy books but it is in a terrible competition with digital text. Painting, not mentioned above, which played such a big role in expressing religious propaganda existed in a feedback loop of development for that purpose.  Although people still paint, I wonder if it is fair to say it is no longer used for what it was originally developed for – and that is a relic like still photography is perhaps becoming. People will continue to revel in it but they are making ghosts – sorry to all painters and still photographers. I do not intend to be dismissive – I understand lots of people still gain pleasure from these media.

2. I am also aware that my first essay could be read as a justification for moving away from photography ‘proper’ and focusing instead on moving image.

3. It seems like a key question in that essay and previous ones, along with the way my work is going is: Why is it more useful/fun/relevant/interesting to look at how images are used rather than the making of them? This is where Postmodernism is relevant.

But I’m not sure that’s really what I believe or what I want to ask.

If the construction of reality is a continuous re-invention of the moment we’re in (which I think is a simplistic way of describing current scientific understanding), the conscious self relies on…

i. memory – an intangible remnant of consciousness which we sometimes exteriorise using various forms/materials;

ii. our hyperdyadic* existence – perhaps represented by collage made with appropriated material;

iii. and mechanical construction (which includes language as a technology – see Andy Clark)  – perhaps represented by the output of machinery we have invented, and which to greater or lesser extent becomes prosthetic – i.e. phones.

*dyadic  – interconnection between two things. Hyerdyadic – interconnection between many  – lots of people but also the environment

4. Whatever route I take, James Elkins book What Photography Is (2011) is an entire book which isn’t really about photography, even though its title suggests that’s all it is about. It’s a response to Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1980), another book which suggests photography is its main topic but it might also be read as an elderly man coming to terms with his mother’s – and so his own impending – death. I need to learn from them.

How do I keep this related to photography?

  1. I think I need to state early on – that I am looking at the moving image as well as still and come up with a generic term to encompass both. I might use ‘image’ and then qualify that. Image, therefore, might refer to drawing /painting/film. In which case, is there space or a need to address the arguments made about differences between each of these forms and attempt to lay them to rest for the sake of the discussion? (See Barthes – indexicality of photography and also Elkins’).
  2. Perhaps I need to also talk about why moving image is key nowadays, and perhaps more so than still – as the masses embrace technology which makes video recording so easy, and advertisers use it more and more as it can potentially grab our attention with its movements and flickers more successfully than still. Or at least suggest we can make that assumption with some certainty.  This feels a bit like a justification again and might take up too many words, but it feels crucial.
  3. Although it may seem like I am dismissing still photography, I am not. In amongst the plethora of photographic projects and bodies of work which all seem very similar and flaccid, there are a number of photographers making potent and striking work, such as (but not exclusively) Thomas Ruff and  Zanele Muholi.
    (Intention is key)
  4. Elkin says, “beyond that, talking about the surround as I did for the photograph of the greyhound reveals that the surround is boring, and possibly also that photography as a whole is, in the end, also a bit boring.” (loc 1706) Perhaps, I will suggest that if this is true it is because we as a society are desensitised to photography, now that its initial magic qualities have faded. Seeing a photograph in 1845 must have been incredible and exciting and perhaps awe-inspiring. To capture a person and then have them rendered as delicately as those older processes were capable of would have seemed extraordinary. But now it is mundane and every day. Now our representations move, can be built by anyone – even children as young as two, and offer adventure and flexible narratives. They are engrossing and enticing and overstimulating. So the poor old still photograph has a great deal to compete with. While some, perhaps people with time on their hands, may revel in the luxury of contemplating an image of a leaf or a fragment of a person or people, or the emptiness of a blank page, others are fed a diet of shiny, fast-paced, noisy and enticing media. Most of us have this latter fodder in our lives and perhaps that is where the mythology I am interested in exists. If still photography (academic art) is to remain relevant, then perhaps it can a useful tool for deconstructing the myth I’m exploring.
  5. Art photography is often inherently elitist. Not always, but so much of it can’t help being so – refs from Elkins:
    “It is easy to agree that photography’s apparent realism has been formed by the middle-class hope that the photographs give us reality itself (as Bourdieu says).” (loc 762)“‘photography is most frequently nothing but the reproduction of the image that a group produces of its own integration’. (Bordieu, Un Art moyen, 48)” (loc 707)“For Bourdieu, photography is bourgeois to its bones, and it even includes its own futile anti-bourgeois gestures, like my own attraction to things that aren’t family photographs.” (loc 716)
  6. Still photography is one fragment of a re-enactment of our biological processes – by focusing on it alone we persist with a Cartesian construction/understanding of reality. But it might be more relevant nowadays to explore these topics more holistically. Intro/preface?

Mythmaking

Hoffman’s book below references advertising and images extensively. Held within these images are myths.

I have become really interested in mythology – and the relationship between science and religion. It seems to me that both do the same things, i.e. put difficult concepts into narratives we can try to manage.

The following is from the author, Jonathan Raban’s biography A Passage to Juneau.

“Within the last 9,000 to 12,000 years, when people were present to witness such events, they would have seen the sea close over islands as earthquakes rearranged topography. You couldn’t look at the delicate compromise made here between land and sea without imagining the Flood: and you couldn’t imagine the flood without inventing a Noah or a Gilgamesh” (1999) (Perhaps this quote will be on the cover page or at the top of the essay).

Books

Return of the Real Hal Foster 1996

The Case Against Reality Donald D Hoffman 2019 (see below) (He mentions Plato’s Cave his description may be useful to quote.)

How we Became Posthuman Kathryn Hayles 1999 (in particular Chapter 7, Turning Reality Inside Out and Right Side Out: Boundary Work in the Mid Sixties of Philip K. Dick)

What Photography Is James Elkins 2011 (see identified quotes here – https://sjflevel3.photo.blog/2019/09/08/a2-useful-links/)

Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes, 1980

Essays

Myth Today Roland Bart’s 1957 https://uvcsjf.wordpress.com/2016/06/28/notes-on-myth-today-by-roland-barthes-1957/

Baudrillard (Disneyfication): From Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988), pp.166-184. https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Baudrillard/Baudrillard_Simulacra.html

Originality_in_Postmodern_Appropriation – JULIE C. VAN CAMP (Academia.edu)

I need to look at Deleuze but I do not know his work and have no idea where to start.

Popular Culture, films, TV

The AO (Netflix) 2016-19 TV – Series One explores a kind of inverted Plato’s Cave which becomes a metaphor for digital culture. As part of my research, I have been watching plenty of reality-bending films and TV, this being one of them.

Total Recall, 1990 and 2012 Film

Inception, 2010 Film (this leads to Memento – also directed by Christopher Nolan but I am trying to avoid clinging to memory as a key theme, even though that is an important topic.)

Added 2/10/2019 45 Years, 2015 Film

Specific Artists’ work

  1. Mark Lecky’s O’ Magic Power of Bleakness 

(In the link above, I talk about several influencing works which had fed into my own practice but which may also be useful for the essay.

I will need to revisit this at Tate Britain as there is much to link to, moving image, youth culture, myth, everydayness.

2. Katinka Schuett, Cosmic Drive – I have only just come across this work and will look at it as a possible example of still photography looking at similar themes. ““Cosmic Drive primarily explores the way humans handle ignorance,” says Katinka Schuett of her Female in Focus winning series, which examines the contradictory spheres of fantasy and hard science. “I am interested in our perceptions of space, and the question of whether or not life can be found in the universe.” Schuett is as concerned with fantasy as she is with facts, merging the two to consider the illusions we create when there is a void of information. ” (Roberts, 2019)

https://www.bjp-online.com/2019/09/female-in-focus-cosmic-drive/

I probably need to have a few more references here.

Blog Conclusion (not essay) – is there a question/title here yet? 

I’m not sure … perhaps:

Should we re-evaluate our relationship to myth/humanity’s need to create myth? (And what role does the image play?)

I feel it will be necessary to use the word image in the extended essay rather than photography – because photography is such a nebulous term and describes a range of activities –  and perhaps I need to explain in a preface. Does a preface count towards word count? Something to ask when submitting the review.

Something I’ve not addressed here which I think fits but which may be too far outside the inquiry – the body/blood/softness/boundaries/flesh. Hayle’s looks at this and references Donna Harraway several times  – I don’t think I fully comprehend what’s going on here yet and need to read these sections again, as well as Haraway’s Cyborg essay which I’ve only read once so far (and found it a little bewildering – perhaps I was tired/distracted).

I know I am interested in the fractal nature of reality and our conscious understanding of it. So, we function (construct reality) in a certain way and the patterns of that construction are evident in our expressions (media –  films/adverts.any narratives, the way we produce them.)

I still think I’m focusing too much on why photography is becoming irrelevant and need to look more at boundaries/flesh/death – life/self-other; I suppose these things to tie into myth and the breaking down of self as a definitive object as technology and science evolve. Therefore perhaps we might say, “it is a myth that you and I exist at all”  – however, this myth is all we have and so we need to take it seriously even though we understand it is a myth.”

Added 2/10/2019 – https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-ai-will-forever-change-create-find-truth-images

“Sometime in the not-too-distant future, anyone will be able to take a picture without a camera. Instead, we will be able to generate photographs, indistinguishable from those made by a camera, using artificial intelligence (AI) software. You will be able to create an image by simply typing out a description of the scene, or describing it to (presumably) Siri. “Siri,” you’ll say. “I’d like an image of a red-haired woman walking through a park in autumn, the breeze blowing red, orange, and yellow leaves around her.” And—though it may require more detail than that—presto! Your phone will provide various options on the screen to choose from.” (Palumbo 2018)

 

Other refs:

Raban, J. 1999 A Passage to Juneau, Picador, Basingstoke and Oxford