week Fourteen

New Media Theory (network culture, photobloggin, ect)

This weeks reading on new media made me think about blu-ray discs, I have not had the pleasure of viewing one, however the advertisements are hard to ignore. So this is what I found out,  they are for high-definition video and hold substantially more data than DVDs. However you are not just getting a moving when you purchase one they are loaded with interactive features. A new Blu-ray feature is BD-Live which allows you to connect to the internet to download new content, peer interactions, live events and gaming activities. 

Flickr and Shutterfly are online photo management and sharing application for the consumer, which let you create, print and share photo albums and prints.

Rather than traditional albums which are less interactive. 

Week Thirteen

Why Photography Matters (as Art) as ever Before:

Fried~Modernism

Realism Modernism conceptual 'other'

conceptual concerns

ontological issues

'tobeseenness'

theatricality-between representation & presentation

beholding/&or objecthood

absorption & theatricality

relationship between viewed & viewer

~'near documentary'- depiction of straight photography, pictorial construction, factual 

~absortive mode- inner engagement, a key figure in a image is involved in a private activity, a contemplative mode regardless of the presence of other figures.

'near documentary'

Jeff Wall, A sudden Gust of Wind, 1993

'painted drama' Theoretical Large-scale photographic transparency in a light box

Jeffris Elliott, Islamic Woman Ascending Stairs, 2007

Does not consider this work documentary, but an interpretation of the Middle East world.

Jeffris Elliott, Afghani Praying in Desert, 2008

'absorptive mode'

Jessica Bruah, Untitled #39 from "Stories", 2006

A visual narrative, which explores the idea of constructed reality to discuss gender, identity and domesticity. 
Jessica Bruah, Untitled #4 from "Stories", 2003

Week Twelve

Convergence of art and Photography

~1st  theoretical object

~2nd destruction of the conditions of the aesthetic medium in a transformative operation

~3rd relationship between obsolescence and the redemptive possibilities enfolded within the outmoded itself.

Photography has moved past its identity as a historical or aesthetic object and now is a theoretical object introducing  photoconceptual practice. 

Examples: of "postmedium" or the reinventing of the medium

Postmodernism.

These photographers mix painting and photography indifferent ways to reinvent and bend lines

Gregory Scott, Flip Side (2004)

Is a Painter and Photographer, His painting started out as photographs now it was only natural that they became connected, to explore the demarcations between photography and painting and the perceptions of photographic truth. 
Holly Roberts, Hard Ride III (2008)

Likes to bend the line between painting and photography, blending the two mediums creating new dialogue.

Lynn Geesaman, Parc de Sceaux, France (2004) [#4-04-16c-8]

Does not push the medium, but takes photographs to re-experience like paintings. 

Artists from the readings

Sander

Dan Graham, created photoconceptual work, marrying written text to documentary- photographic illustrations

Robert Smithson
Cindy Sherman, Untitled film still #11

Sam Taylor Wood

Insightful links

Reinventing the Medium, Rosalind Krauss

Rolan Barthes, "The Third Meaning"

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernity

and Pastiche

Week Eleven

Portraiture

Narrativity/Stasis

Narrativity:

~Sustain a readable discourse 

~duration, movement and sense of plurality

~inherent embrace of duration, of time (historical consciousness)

Stasis:

~opposed to narrativity

~petrifaction of motion (freezing of time)

~instead of plurality (fixed or receptive motif)

~refusal of duration (anti historical)

Julie Blackmon, Girl Across the Street (2008) Shows Narrativity,  The viewer witness an act showing a Readable discourse, Movement. Her work depicts her children  engrossed in reality and fantasy narratives of their lives.

Jeffrey Wolin, Nguyen Vin Luc (2008) Shows both Narrativity and Stasis, Jeffs work is inserting to look at after completing this weeks reading, because of the literal narrative that is included in the portrait. Weather the viewer interprets the portrait has narrativity or stasis, Jeff inclusion of text in the image gives it a narrative (In his earlier work the text is hand written over the images)

Josephine Sacabo,  La Jaula I (The Birdcage) (2005) Shows only Stasis, This image was choses for its  lack of a narrative, however it has me second guessing that it could have a narrative. While the image does not have or hint at motion, its frozen in time it does have a historical element. So does this portrait have Stasis (at first glance) or narrativity or both?

Week Ten

Race Are we So Different? an exhibit of the Science Museum of Minnesota. Link

To distinguish between

racialization as a visual process

racism as an ethical political dilemma

Race system of representation vs truth about a group of people

Week nine

Acts

Moral philosophy='action theory'='to do'

Social agents constitute social reality through

Language

Gesture

Symbolic social sign

Gender/ stylization of the body

week eight

The Gaze

Scopophilia- the desire to look, which is a primary human instinct.An interesting response on Laura Mulvey's essay is Epidexiphilia, or, I'll show you Mine by David J Tremblay

The majority of "viewers" for the Reality TV series The Girls Next Door is women in their 20's and 30's, which is rather shocking. It appears to be a guilty pleasure for women to day, we have the desire to look just as much as men. 

Barbara DeGenevieve "Gordon #3" from the Panhandler Project 2004, her work explores the connection between power and sex, in the historical and inverse relation ship.

Bettie Page, till this day there is still a fascination with her, the way she "looks" at the viewer.

Barbara Kruger's work is still power full with today's audience.