In Jason Evans essay from Words without Pictures titled “Online Photographic Thinking”, Evans addresses the role of the internet in contemporary art photography. In his essay written in 2008, Evans stated, “I am underwhelmed by photography’s presence online and the lack of innovative explorations of the new medium.” He went on to speak about his relationship to the medium, in regards to his online presence and also gave examples of what he deemed successful uses of the internet. Most of which are now defunct. Evan’s website the http://www.thedailynice.com is still running today. In the comments section of the essay, there is criticism of Evan’s thoughts.
The main theme of the criticism is the lack of context when photography is online. Context is integral to art. Questions arise about how to control context and how to guide the viewer. Internet gives one agency over how you want the work to look. Context needs to be controlled in order for web presence or even the work on a wall or a book to convey something. Evan states: “I’ve never been very interested in qualitative judgments brought to bear on photographs; all photographs can work given the right context.” He makes a qualitative judgment that web presence, book form, and art for the wall are equal. Each work can exist in multiple forms, however, it does not mean that it should be online just because you have the ability to. Evan’s make a point about audience and how many people you want the work to reach, though it comes off as snide; “If an audience is what you prefer (as opposed to a physical thing like a book or a show as the testimony to your photographic talent), then the internet is for you.”
The thing I take away from Evan’s is the potential for work to exist on the web. The comments from 2008, would be different if responded to today. There has been a significant change in the types of online photographic presence and art presence in the past 5 years. Myspace no longer exists in same sense; Twitter’s presence has dulled; Vine and snapchat have been introduced, Instagram top’s social media and facebook recognized this by purchasing it in 2012.
There is a recognition of this shift. Last week, with Susan Bright visit, Bright gave us insight into how she begins (as an independent curator) trying to find work for an exhibition. Bright told us in seminar, that she begins with her ideas and posts on Social Media; Instagram, twitter, facebook, etc. then through word of mouth, she gets artists work. She mixes well-known and lesser known. A lot of the art, I do look at comes in blog form on tumblr (http://mpdrolet.tumblr.com) Iheartphotograph used to be a big one. There is a growing community using blogs and other social media to promote artists, galleries, their own work. I think an important example of using the internet for an exhibition is Andy Adam’s flakphoto Looking at the Land. It combines digital media and print in a gallery and online. http://flakphoto.com/content/looking-at-the-land-21st-century-american-views.
Another example of web presence is Mitch Epstein. To accompany his monograph, Epstein launched the website http://whatisamericanpower.com that provides more context to work than the actual book. The website has more textual information; The book operates visually.
A quote I took from the article, from Penelope Umbrico,
The idea of exchange and engagement with the platform itself (creating work on, with, and for this platform) is where the interesting space on the Internet is for me, with regard to photography. I am inspired by the many artists’ projects on the Web that use the Web and its technology to produce the work… By addressing the shifts in meaning that result from the shifts in content and context inherent on the Web, artists are finding agency by utilizing the potential of the Internet as a tool for making, as well as circulating.
The readings made me think about my soldiers project and how the online aspect is integral to the work. Marrying the visual and textual information. The visual brings you in and how what textual information I can link, to can direct the project. The Lee Manovich article from Aperture also expanded my thinking. The article provides concrete examples of how textual in the form of statistics and data information can inform form.
But by rendering the same set of images in multiple ways, we remind viewers that no single visualization offers a transparent interpretation, just as no single traditional documentary image could be considered neutral. The tremendous diversity of social photography reflects the complex patterns of life unfolding in the world’s cities—this can never be fully captured in a single visualization, despite our ability to harness an excess of images(Aperture, Spring, 2014).
Lee Manovich’s The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Consumption to Mass Cultural Production, written after Jason Evan’s essay about a year later, expands on Evan’s argument. Web 2.0 introduced social media and user-generated content. Manovich’s idea of the remix is similar to, what was addressed in last weeks readings, “Post-Production” by Nicolas Bourriaud. Bourriaud’s approaches contemporary art practices and Manovich’s acknowledges the culture surrounding it, before bringing it an art context.
Manovich tracks the progression after the introduction of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 changes how one relates to the world. Introducing user-generated context and user-controlled content (that can be customized within a given framework) leads to the sharing of the everyday. Through social media. This increase or progression will end up at having the ability to broadcast one’s life 24/7.
(First minute only)
The YouTube clip is also an example of what Manovich acknowledged about users appropriating content from consumer media products. “They now make their own cultural products that follow the templates established by the professionals and/or rely on professional connect.” The clip is an unofficial copy from the film, uploaded multiple times.
Manovich also addresses how conversation takes place.
We see new kinds of communication where factual content, opinion, and conversation often can’t be clearly separated… Often content, news, or media become tokens used to initiate or maintain a conversation. Their original meaning is less important than their function as tokens…web infrastructure and software allow such conversations to become distributed in space and time; people can respond to each other regardless of their location, and the conversation can in theory go forever (227).
The introduction of responding to a video with a new video. My examples are below, in terms of critique, through parody:
The use of video response can be akin to an artist responding to a previous work of art, Nicolas Bourriaud, “Post-Production” examples would fit here. Manovich stated:
Conversations between people con- ducted through and around visual and/or sound objects can also be related to exchanges between professional critics. Through the medium of a journal, modern art critics were able to respond to each other relatively quickly—if not in hours, then at least in weeks. In fact, such exchanges between critics (and sometimes modernist artists who also acted as critics and theorists) played a key role in the development of modern art (329).
The Internet sped up this interaction considerably. I wonder how this immediacy has an affect on the progression of photography to what it is now and what it will be? I want to end with the last line from Manovich because I believe it as relevant as it was in 2009, “The true challenge posed to art by social media may not be all the excellent cultural work produced by students and non professionals…The real challenge may lie in the dynamics of web 2.0 culture—its constant innovation, its energy, and its unpredictability (331).
Jeff Wall splits photography into two sides, wet and dry. ‘Wet’ photography or described by Jell Wall as liquid intelligence. It is linked to water and that connects photography to the past. Wall also uses liquid intelligence to talk about natural forms in photographs. Wet or liquid is represented in photographs through natural forms. ‘Dry’ relates to the optic and mechanical side (lens, shutter) or technological intelligence. There is technological intelligence and liquid intelligence. The change from wet to dry is neither good nor bad necessarily, but it alters the “historical consciousness of the medium.” When wet is removed:
The symbolic meaning of natural forms, made visible in things like turbulent patterns or compound curvatures, is to me, one of the primary means by which the dry intelligence of optics and mechanics achieves a historical self-reflection, a memory of the path it has traversed to its present and future separation from the fragile phenomena it reproduces so generously.
Jorge Ribalta, “Molecular Photography…”
Ribatta finds it problematic because the same issues may still be posed in the post-photographic era. “Post-photography means that a cultural transformation is involved in the technological decline of chemical photography.” This decline of analog photography signals the death of photography disjointed from traditional medium. Photography is dead and the “photographic” or to use Ribalta’s phrase, photography become “molecular.” Digital photography changes the relationship between photographer and the photograph. The indexicality of the analog photograph has been stripped by digital photography. The question is how does digital photography now show the real? Without realism, photography is irrelevant. A photograph loses its power when we no longer believe it. This is connected to the historical discourse on photography’s vital role “truth” as a document, indexical. For Ribalta, it is still possible, however a new set of rules or challenges are set up because of the amount of easy manipulation that can happen to a digital photographic image. It has to redefine realism. Realism is something that we need; it is what gives images relevance. Realism will continue with our notice or without, so he claims that photography will find the happy medium in portraying realism because our culture is based around images.
Gillian Wearing
Signs That Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say
Nicholas Bourriaud, “Post Production”
Post production is a technical term from the audiovisual vocabulary used in television, film, and video. It refers to the set of processes applied to recorded material: montage, the inclusion of other visual or audio sources, subtitling, voice-overs, and special effects.
Post production in Bourriad’s definition are artworks created from preexisting works, partially as a response to the over-saturation or increase of access and supply to objects, things, ideas. Bourriad uses music creation as a parallel to address to post production and detournement in artworks. Using terms like, crossfader, pitch control, cutting, playlist, to speak about the different ways artworks or forms are mixed to create something new. Bourriad outlines some tactics artists used post production with examples:
reprogramming existing works
inhabiting historicized styles and forms
making use of images
using society as a catalog of forms
investing in fashion in media
DJ Mark the 45 King uses pre existing products to create his own. “Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can serve in making new combinations… Anything can be used…One can also alter the meaning of these fragments in any appropriate way.” (Guy Debord)
Each form or material has its own history. When mixed with other forms, a conversation between the elements is created; “objects already informed by other objects.” The new art is created with the analysis of how they coexist by considering their original histories and their new contexts. The arrangement of these objects matters. For instance, an artist could use a “simple” chair to make a piece; also one could use Rodney McMillian’s Chair and the resulting piece would include the history of that object and the context it was created.
“I’m not stealing all their music, I’m using your drum track, I’m using this little ‘bip’ from him, I’m using your baseline that you don’t even like no fucking more’.”
Digital technology has become the default equipment choice in photography. I am increasingly having to defend my use of film (image creation) mainly because of cost. Post-production (output) in digital photography is a different consideration.
My criticisms of digital technology:
default, after-thought
digital aspect ratio
reliance on auto features (light meter, focus, white balance)
Not utilizing the capabilities of the equipment (software, hardware, glass/lenses
immediacy (screen)
speed of taking an image (amount of time to set up)
Bill Brown’s thing theory focuses on the role of things. Objects are tied to subjects and things can become new objects. An object is “invisible” as we have become unaware of their existence. An object transitions into a thing when it becomes visible and/or one acknowledges the materiality or the function of an object or thingness. This awareness can be physical, for example when an object breaks the thingness is confronted. As Brown states:
We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily. The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation. (4)
There is a subject-object and object-thing relation. Brown speaks about this in terms of the subject/object dialectic and object/thing dialectic. As synopsized by Kim O’Connor of The University of Chicago:
A dialectic is a mode of thought, or a philosophic medium, through which contradiction becomes a starting point (rather than a dead end) for contemplation. Dialectic is the medium that helps us comprehend a world that is racked by paradox…Hegel considered dialectic a medium of truth rather than a means to uncover illusion. Hegel’s dialectic involves the reconciliation of ostensible paradoxes to arrive at absolute truth. The general formulation of Hegel’s dialectic is a three-step process comprising the movement from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. One begins with a static, clearly delineated concept (or thesis), then moves to its opposite (or antithesis), which represents any contradictions derived from a consideration of the rigidly defined thesis. The thesis and antithesis are yoked and resolved to form the embracing resolution, or synthesis. Succinctly put, the dialectic “actualizes itself by alienating itself, and restores its self-unity by recognizing this alienation as nothing other than its own free expression or manifestation” (Bottomore 122). This formula is infinitely renewable; Hegel contended it would only terminate upon the world’s end. (O’Connor).
In short, dialectic creates a relationship between two words. The relationship is complimentary and in contrast in order to create an absolute truth from their opposition, “from thesis to antithesis to synthesis (O’Connor).”
A thing defines an object and an object defines a subject. The thing or objects thingness is employed to clarify, expand, question, or complicate subject-object dialectic. A thing can stand in for and/or mean a multitude of things. Important to Brown is the distinction that things arise from objects. According to Brown, a thing “denotes a massive generality as well as particularities”:
(1) The word designates the concrete yet ambiguous within the everyday: “Put it by that green thing in the hall.”
(2) It functions to overcome the loss of other words or as a place holder for some future specifying operation: “I need that thing you use to get at things between your teeth.”
(3) It designates an amorphous characteristic or a frankly irresolvable
enigma: “There’s a thing about that poem that I’ll never get.” (4)
Another dialectic that Brown introduces is looking through-looking at.
As they circulate through our lives, we look through objects (to see what they disclose about history, society, nature, or culture-above all, what they disclose about us),but we only catch a glimpse of things.” We look through objects because there are codes by which our interpretive attention makes them meaningful, because there is a discourse of objectivity that allows us to use them as facts. A thing, in contrast, can hardly function as a window. (4)
The window scene in Byatt’s novel should be read in relation to Nabokov’s point about how, things become multiply transparent and read in the context of a dialectic of looking through and looking at: “When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object” (Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things [New York, 19721, p. 1). We don’t apprehend things except partially or obliquely (as what’s beyond our apprehension). In fact, by looking at things we render them objects. (4)
The dialectic, as stated earlier is a three-step process, more concisely from thesis to antithesis to synthesis (O’Connor), I wanted to attempt to synthesis Brown’s definition of look through and look at. Looking at is defined as “the act of directing the eyes toward something and perceiving it visually.” Looking through is defined as “to examine, esp cursorily.”
By directing the eyes towards things we render them objects by the act of perceiving them visually. We examine these objects cursorily (with excessive or careless speed) (to see what they disclose about history, society, nature, or culture-above all, what they disclose about us), but we only catch a glimpse of things.”
In “Object Lessons” written by Greg Foster Rice, Bill Brown’s thing theory is applied to specific pieces that were apart of the Black is Black Ain’t exhibition. One piece specifically, titled Chair, 2003 by Rodney McMillian.
Rice uses “Robin Bernstein’s scholarship on the role of things in the performance of identity that rely heavily on material cultural artifacts. Rice states, “her point is not to give agency to inanimate objects,” but to give objects agency to become things. A thing in this sense, “it triggers a stylized bodily performance.” The thing invites the viewer to interact and the object is animated into thingness. “As Bernstein elaborates, …Things invite us to dance, and when we sweep them onto the dance floor, they appear to become animate (Rice, 5).” And “elevates the object into thingness”, anthropomorphizing it. “They do something by inviting humans to move (Rice, 6). Things need people to exist.
Photographic History, Theory & Criticism 