Digital/Media?

This week I took my photography to the next level of physicality. After selecting and printing ten 8X10 inkjet photos, I had to narrow it down to four to enlarge to 11X14. I then chose two of those four to display in the Watching exhibition at the Mudd Gallery. This process of preparing for an exhibition was new to me, but I found it to be interesting and fun to put together.

Choosing the final two photos was a challenging process, especially having to think about what they would look like together in the grand scheme of the exhibition. I decided to go with two highly saturated photos; the first choice was a close-up with rich detail in an indoor setting. The other was in an outdoor setting with less detail and a wider angle. I felt that these two went well together, and did a good job of representing my concept.

Seeing these photos framed and hanging in a gallery was a neat experience. Using digital photography as a tool to carry out an artistic idea has a different effect than more tactile media, such as painting or sculpture. Mary Ann Doane comments on the difference between index and icon in her article, Indexicality and the Concept of Medium Specificity. She explores the notion that we live in a “post-medium” era, arguing that the digital’s specificity is really “the annihilation of the concept of a medium. ... the digital exudes a fantasy of immateriality, in contrast to the fantasy of referentiality of the indexical” (Doane, p. 10). Doane presents interesting ideas that I found to be highly relevant to my project. Making inkjet prints from my digital photos seems to make my artwork more "real"; possibly more indexical.

The Shroud of Turin: Index? Icon? Or Both?

In The Public Eye: Take 2, Published Edition

Using MagCloud to create a physical version of my photo series, In The Public Eye, was easy and pain free. Publishing a magazine of my photos seems to make my role as an artist more legitimate, at least in my opinion, because I am a very tactile person. Taking the time to choose my images and put them in an order that makes sense was a difficult task, but one that made me think a lot about the importance of order. Studying Robert Frank's The Americans also made me think more in depth about the significance a certain order can have. Frank ordered his images in a holistic way so that they blend together in ways that make sense and make people think. Sarah Greenough's article "Transforming Destiny into Awareness: The Americans" looks into some of the choices Frank makes in ordering his photos and how they are significant. He takes a number of approaches, including juxtaposition of subjects, and grouping ideas.
Ordering images isn't something I had put much thought into before, but after reading the article, I rethought the order of my photos in my magazine. I decided to group each of my photo shoots together. I used two, three, or four from each separate photo shoot. Within each group, I ordered it in a way that made sense and that flowed well together. Choosing the order of the groups was a little bit harder - I ended up choosing the order based on form, color, and composition. Many of my photos were taken in the same general area - so I also ordered them in a way that made it feel that you could walk from one set to another, since they were very close by. After ordering and reordering, I came up with my final product which I submitted to MagCloud through Flickr.

in the public eye

Today, everything we do has potential to become public display, redefining the standard of "privacy". Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook allow us to update others on the most menial episodes of our lives (whether others want to hear about it or not). Video cameras are standard in any public area, and we don’t think much about it.

While Facebook may seem like a far cry from “BIG BROTHER” and George Orwell’s 1984, the ideas overlap in the sense that "privacy" is becoming outdated. Philip Agre’s ideas about privacy and the increase in “computer-mediated domination” allow for what Richard Woodward calls “the erosion of the wall between a private and public self”

Today, everything we do has potential to become public display, redefining the standard of "privacy". Social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook allow us to update others on the most menial episodes of our lives (whether others want to hear about it or not). Video cameras are standard in any public area, and we don’t think much about it.

While Facebook may seem like a far cry from “BIG BROTHER” and George Orwell’s 1984, the ideas overlap in the sense that "privacy" is becoming outdated. Philip Agre’s ideas in 1994 about privacy and the increase in “computer-mediated domination” allow for what Richard Woodward calls “the erosion of the wall between a private and public self.” Resources like Facebook make this erosion even more pronounced.

Woodward brings up in his article about self-exploitation that there is a “need to be recorded or to record one’s self.” Exhibitionism and voyeurism have been made easy with the advances in technology and the emergence of social media websites. He calls our generation (the generation with the ability to appear before billions of people), “Warhol’s children” – “a surveillance society and a wired world of voyeurs.” I myself am guilty of looking through the mundane photos of people’s lives.

My photo series relates to our society’s need to see and be seen. I took this idea literally, taking the private and making it available to the public eye. I chose to make my photos dramatic and life-like to make the viewer feel that they are actually there, experiencing something they feel they shouldn’t. I wanted both ideas of self-exploitation and voyeurism to show through in my work, so I chose to have models reenact private events in areas easily accessible to the public.

Fulfilling the Dream? The Changing Role of the Internet

Ted Nelson

With the growth of technology in the last 20 years, civilization has lost sight of its dream of free universal information sharing and collaboration. It is only in recent years that we have begun to realize that original vision. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, describes his design goal as a pool of knowledge that is as easy to update as it is to read. Similarly, Doug Engelbart envisions a network of computers that makes it easy to collaborate with other users to boost group effectiveness. Ted Nelson, inventor of hypertext, also envisions an ideal human-computer interaction where people are able to understand and contribute to the whole system. He presents a number of ideas that encourage the average person to be able to understand and use the technology to our advantage, and that we should embrace this new technology. Berners-Lee brings up a point that draws attention to the fact that at this point in digital culture, there were no for-profit services, and the Internet was commercial-free. Today, it is glaringly obvious that the Internet is a for-profit service, and everything about computers has become commercial. Consider how easy it is to make money off the web. Have we lost the vision of free domain for resource and information sharing leading to the ultimate "Augmented Human"? Recently, with the growing popularity of blogs and YouTube and other user-friendly sites, the web has become more of what Lev Manovich calls a “communication medium” rather than a publishing medium, and there has been more content contributed by users in the last ten years or so. In “Art after Web 2.0,” Manovich brought up important questions that we should be asking. Here is one particular question I found relevant: what kind of impact will the increase of collaboration and user-generated content on the web have on art as we know it?

Here It Is

This is the Blog.