I recalled seeing this work in a Foam magazine #51 (the previous post is also from that edition) and being really struck by the way it was put together, and incorporated a range of images, styles, as well as text. On the website there are still images, text, a bit of processing and a freedom that one doesn’t see in more ‘conservative’ examples of photographic work. I did not recall the name of the work and had to flick through old copies, and now see a similarity to one of my own texts – Orpheus in Homebase. The linking again of old myth to today’s world. What I take mostly from this work is freedom to play. (Which is interesting given my sense that there is an ever decreasing sense of play related to online forums where the conservatism of Flusser’s apparatus appears to dominate and rule.)
I have had the film returned, digitised. I have not looked at it yet and held off writing more or making any decisions until I saw it. The company who did it were super helpful – and ended up sending two versions, one at the original cine-speed of 18fps and one at the more up to date speed (I will double-check to see if they’ve used of 24fps or something slightly slower as 24fps is still impressionistic even though we are so used to seeing that speed.)
Screenshot of the dropbox that has been sent below. It looks so tantalising! ‘A Commentary’ – how exciting… or perhaps it will just be disappointing and I shall need to go back to the drawing board. Let’s see.
Am trying to find out more about this work. I am particularly interested in Martins’ ability to mix archival and original photography as well as text. Looking for as much exposure to this work as possible – if anyone has the book, I’d love to take a look at it.
Having only seen the work online so far, I am so impressed by its power and focus. I am also interested in the range of forms – still gallery prints, videos, book, interviews, talks – utilising every way possible to convey information.
Some useful links from Doug – Martins talks about relevant ideas (uncertainty principle – although important to recall Barad opts for indeterminacy over uncertainty as interpreted by Bohr)
Colberg reprints Martins’ response to NYT withdrawing his images – ‘As fraught and as contradictory as much of the information being portrayed often is, it reveals a polymorphic and multiform reality, a world of flux and flow that is in a perpetual state of uncertain transformation and where the constant search for answers only leads to more questions.’ (Colberg, 2009) Martins alludes to entanglement as the housing crisis and the issue of ‘reality’ in photography intersect in this episode.
Add peer feedback comments and response to relevant page CS A2
Make adjustments to draft where necessary
Update where I’m at with BOW A3 planning and ideas
Begin writing (in note form if necessary) CS A3
It’s busy here (pre Xmas/school/work etc.) and I am feeling a little overwhelmed with everything that needs doing in order to keep on top of deadlines, as well as not losing touch with the unfolding thread. I think the hardest thing is about this – other than the difficulty of pulling apart thoughts relating to a tricky subject – is doing two courses together. Managing time and thoughts is incredibly challenging.
Ordering of the above:
Update where I am with BOW A3 planning/ideas
Add peer feedback to CS A2
Make adjustments to CS A2 where I can at this time
According to Donald Hoffman’s theory which I have discussed several times (Literature review ), we did not evolve to see reality as it truly is, as has been argued. Rather, we evolved to see the sort of reality we need to see to for ‘optimal fitness’. We perceive far less than there actually is because to see it all would be unhelpful. What’s more, according to Hoffman, the objects we see, including space and time are like desktop icons – constructed objects that represent the goal we are either after or trying to avoid. As hard as this is to understand, and Hoffman admits he may very well be wrong but that his theory makes the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness approachable, his idea sits well with many of the other theories I have been reading about since I picked up The Ego Trip by Julian Baggini (2011) (when I began UVC) followed by a raft of other books exploring similar themes.
I have been trying to express and understand these subjects in my writing, and looking at and photographing objects and phenomena in the world. The photoshopped images below are attempts to explore these ways of thinking about the world.
Fred Ritchin’s After Photography (2009) has some good sentences which I will introduce into my Lit Review and no doubt take forward into the essay.
“…some quantum theorists, foremost amongst them, Neils Bhor and Heisenberg himself, argued that fundamental reality is essentially indeterminate, that there is no clear fixed, underlying ‘something’ to our daily existence that can ever be known. Everything about reality is and remains a matter of probabilities […] We have tried to use the photograph to concretize the probabilities (isn’t that what the “decisive moment” is all about?), reassuring us that reality is more solid than what our theories tell us.” (180)
In Data Selves (2019) Deborah Lupton quotes Kember and Zylinska (2012) to describe how photography is an “agential cut” aimed at imposing “meaning and order” and “delimiting choices” (29). As Ritchin says an alternative “may be too disconcerting, if not terrifying.” (ibid) As he describes, digital technology and photography in particular “can begin to be receptive to the oddities described by newer theories” [quantum and consciousness related]. (177) Superpositions, endless possibilities, entanglement, for instance, can all be alluded to using malleable data either as a process or a representation (which if one takes Hoffman’s idea on board are completely intra-related in any case).
Some sketches – I wonder if these would benefit from more contemporary mixes (a bit like Flowers for Donald). Still a bit Guardian headline pics for my liking :
Isle of White – windswept hilltopSimilar to above but layered with an anonymous 17th-century pencil landscape downloaded from Google Art and supplied by the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Windswept tree – shaped by the elements – differentiation reduced by processing decisions.
(See Orpheus story – trees to this day in shape of dance to his music)
Hoffman, D. D. (2019) The case against reality: how evolution hid the truth from our eyes. London: Allen Lane.
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)
“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
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.
SJField - OCA Level Three Study Blog 