Kris Fallon | University of California, Davis (original) (raw)
Papers by Kris Fallon
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Jan 15, 2018
University of California Press eBooks, Nov 27, 2019
Truth in Visual Media
While free speech and freedom of the press are often treated as eternal rights in democratic syst... more While free speech and freedom of the press are often treated as eternal rights in democratic systems, the protections they offer individuals and their role in society are in constant flux. For much of the past century, the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor justified these protections and provided the working model for their implementation. Within a democratic framework, this is intended to give citizens various ideas and opinions to critique and elect their political leaders. Recently, however, a series of contested elections have exposed deep, long-simmering rifts in the political frameworks of many western democracies. Simultaneously, the emergence of new digital platforms capable of spreading individuals’ speech at mass media scale have upended the traditional roles of media and ordinary citizens. This chapter explores the interplay of new digital technologies and the abstract political ideals of free speech and a free press, treating the debates around “fake news” as symptomatic o...
At HASTAC 2016 we took part in a Wearables and Tangible Computing Research Charrette, where charr... more At HASTAC 2016 we took part in a Wearables and Tangible Computing Research Charrette, where charrette was used in order to signal a session that was collaborative and participatory with the goal of shaping and extending how we engage with concepts around wearable technologies. We are now proposing for HASTAC 2017 a workshop on the same topics
Female Agency and Documentary Strategies, 2018
Interactive Film and Media Journal, 2021
This article offers a working draft of a larger qualitative analysis of the popular smartphone ap... more This article offers a working draft of a larger qualitative analysis of the popular smartphone application Instagram. It offers a reading of the ubiquitous contemporary form of self-portraiture, the selfie, locating its origin in the longer evolution of digital photography into a form of social media. Though its function as a basic self-portrait and signifier for our various social profiles appears straightforward, it has somehow become the ‘face’ of online sociality and subjectivity, a portrait of the promise and peril of our online existence. And yet, a closer look at the various feeds and streams in which the selfie appears reveals that it is one genre amongst many, no more or less common than a variety of landscapes, still-lifes, and other modes of photographic observation. Taken together, these various views of the world reveal an emplaced mode of image-driven autobiography, one far more complex and nuanced than a straightforward meme would appear to be. Image Credit: Jeremy Bi...
Recent scholarship treats the transition to the digital format in documentary film as a straightf... more Recent scholarship treats the transition to the digital format in documentary film as a straightforward change in production practices or distribution channels, ignoring the deeper implications of digital technology for non-fiction moving image media. Far from a simple transition in the technology used to shoot and produce these films, however, digital technology has altered, and been altered by, documentary film to a far greater extent than any previous period in its history. The first decade of the twenty first century gave rise to dramatic technological, aesthetic and political revolutions around the globe, dramatic events mirrored in the rapid evolution of documentary form across the same time period. This project focuses on the emergence of digital documentary in the context of the ideological shifts and social conflicts of the early 21st century. As blogs, social networks and mobile technologies became the connective tissue of political dissent and social mobilization over thi...
Panel Proposal Taking Form: From Ontogenesis to Repetition and Exhaustion This panel will explore... more Panel Proposal Taking Form: From Ontogenesis to Repetition and Exhaustion This panel will explore how film and digital media “take form,” performing something akin to what Gilbert Simondon calls ontogenesis and Henri Bergson calls creative evolution. Yet, this taking of form does not always imply emergence as the becoming of formation, becoming in-formation; the act of taking form is also an act of repetition which puts more emphasis on the concept of “taking” (Deleuze), and sometimes this repeated formation even amounts to the undoing of form (the exhaustion of form). For Simondon ontogenesis involves a mediation between forms of individuation — a mediation between vital, collective, and technical modes of individuation. We aim to look at how films like La Vallee close (Jean-Claude Rousseau, 1995), installations like Nouvelles histoires de fantomes (Georges Didi-Huberman, 2014) and data visualizations like Selfiecity (Lev Manovich, ongoing) make visible sets of relations or “allagm...
Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing: Adjunct, 2016
StressSense is smart clothing made of fabric sensors that monitor the stress level of the wearers... more StressSense is smart clothing made of fabric sensors that monitor the stress level of the wearers. The fabric sensors are comfortable, allowing for long periods of monitoring and the electronic components are waterproof and detachable for ease of care. This design project is expected to be beneficial for people who have a lot of stress in their daily life and who care about their mental health. It can be also used for people who need to control their stress level critically, such as analysts, stock managers, athletes, and patients with chronic diseases and disorders.
In their non-fiction modes, film and photography have long traded on optical metaphors drawn from... more In their non-fiction modes, film and photography have long traded on optical metaphors drawn from philosophy. Phenomena like observation, objectivity, truth and reason translate into terms such as light, transparency, clarity, exposure, etc. These function in an almost homophonic fashion to describe both the aesthetic properties of images as well as the understanding and awareness an observer might achieve regarding an external phenomena. In a political and social context, these optical metaphors and their materialized media forms further translate into questions of governance and power. The degree of exposure a state or individual citizen is subject to often equates with the force of accountability on one hand (in police worn body cameras, for example) or the erosion of individual privacy (in the case of pervasive video surveillance). What’s good for the state, in other words, might be detrimental for the citizen, and vice versa. Where the state can marshall vast resources to tr...
Screen Studies Articles, 2019
Where Truth Lies: Digital Culture and Documentary Media after 9/11, 2019
Luminos is the Open Access monograph publishing program from UC Press. Luminos provides a framewo... more Luminos is the Open Access monograph publishing program from UC Press. Luminos provides a framework for preserving and reinvigorating monograph publishing for the future and increases the reach and visibility of important scholarly work. Titles published in the UC Press Luminos model are published with the same high standards for selection, peer review, production, and marketing as those in our traditional program. www.luminosoa.org This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)-a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries-and the generous support of the University of California-Davis. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org. Illustrations 2.1. A soldier scans the horizon in The Fog of War 24 2.2. "Overeager" sonar men 28 2.3. The domino theory in action 28 2.4. The observed and the observer in The Fog of War 29 2.5. The "number cruncher" becomes the bomber 31 2.6. Graphic superimpositions of the percentage of devastation caused by the firebombing of Tokyo in World War II 33 2.7. The database of images rendered in different aesthetic configurations 46 3.1. Robert Greenwald's "Un" Trilogy 53 3.2. MoveOn's remake of the "Daisy" ad 60 3.3. The MoveOn home page circa January 2004 61 3.4. The FoxAttacks home page circa October 2007 71 3.5. Elinor from Host an Event! 75 4.1. The Gone Gitmo space in Second Life 90 4.2. America's Army everywhere: public version and the arcade game 103 4.3. The "Medic Training" section in America's Army, version 2.5 106 5.1. The initial recovery.gov home page 131 5.2. Recovery.gov circa 2011 132 5.3. Data visualization in The River and on recovery.gov 135 5.4. Edward Tufte's "Lights-On Map" 137 5.5. Interactive IED visualization tool on The Guardian's website 152 xi Acknowled gments Like many books, this one may have a single author's name on the cover but owes its existence to many others. While the final form of the book took shape over the last two years, the questions that it seeks to address have been with me in one form or another across many years, countless conversations, and four institutions. My thinking on documentary aesthetics and the capacity of moving-image media and digital technology to explore the world has been indelibly shaped by many of the wonderful teachers and mentors with whom I have been fortunate enough to work over the years, including Marina Goldovskaya, Katherine Hayles,
International Journal of Clothing Science and Technology, 2017
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to understand what dimensions consumers prefer to track usin... more Purpose The purpose of this paper is to understand what dimensions consumers prefer to track using wearable technology to achieve a healthier lifestyle and how these tracking dimensions are related. Design/methodology/approach An online survey was conducted with potential consumers in the USA, and a series of Pearson’s correlation and regression analysis and multiple regressions was conducted. Findings The most preferred self-tracking dimensions, tracking dimensions on others, most private tracking dimensions, most variable dimensions, and the dimensions that need to be improved were identified. The results of this study showed positive relationships overall among similar types of tracking dimensions, such as among dimensions of physical health condition (disease and disorder symptoms and general vital signs), mental health condition (stress level and mood/feeling), healthy lifestyle (fitness, and pose and posture), and productivity and task management (work productivity, location, ...
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Jan 15, 2018
University of California Press eBooks, Nov 27, 2019
Truth in Visual Media
While free speech and freedom of the press are often treated as eternal rights in democratic syst... more While free speech and freedom of the press are often treated as eternal rights in democratic systems, the protections they offer individuals and their role in society are in constant flux. For much of the past century, the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor justified these protections and provided the working model for their implementation. Within a democratic framework, this is intended to give citizens various ideas and opinions to critique and elect their political leaders. Recently, however, a series of contested elections have exposed deep, long-simmering rifts in the political frameworks of many western democracies. Simultaneously, the emergence of new digital platforms capable of spreading individuals’ speech at mass media scale have upended the traditional roles of media and ordinary citizens. This chapter explores the interplay of new digital technologies and the abstract political ideals of free speech and a free press, treating the debates around “fake news” as symptomatic o...
At HASTAC 2016 we took part in a Wearables and Tangible Computing Research Charrette, where charr... more At HASTAC 2016 we took part in a Wearables and Tangible Computing Research Charrette, where charrette was used in order to signal a session that was collaborative and participatory with the goal of shaping and extending how we engage with concepts around wearable technologies. We are now proposing for HASTAC 2017 a workshop on the same topics
Female Agency and Documentary Strategies, 2018
Interactive Film and Media Journal, 2021
This article offers a working draft of a larger qualitative analysis of the popular smartphone ap... more This article offers a working draft of a larger qualitative analysis of the popular smartphone application Instagram. It offers a reading of the ubiquitous contemporary form of self-portraiture, the selfie, locating its origin in the longer evolution of digital photography into a form of social media. Though its function as a basic self-portrait and signifier for our various social profiles appears straightforward, it has somehow become the ‘face’ of online sociality and subjectivity, a portrait of the promise and peril of our online existence. And yet, a closer look at the various feeds and streams in which the selfie appears reveals that it is one genre amongst many, no more or less common than a variety of landscapes, still-lifes, and other modes of photographic observation. Taken together, these various views of the world reveal an emplaced mode of image-driven autobiography, one far more complex and nuanced than a straightforward meme would appear to be. Image Credit: Jeremy Bi...
Recent scholarship treats the transition to the digital format in documentary film as a straightf... more Recent scholarship treats the transition to the digital format in documentary film as a straightforward change in production practices or distribution channels, ignoring the deeper implications of digital technology for non-fiction moving image media. Far from a simple transition in the technology used to shoot and produce these films, however, digital technology has altered, and been altered by, documentary film to a far greater extent than any previous period in its history. The first decade of the twenty first century gave rise to dramatic technological, aesthetic and political revolutions around the globe, dramatic events mirrored in the rapid evolution of documentary form across the same time period. This project focuses on the emergence of digital documentary in the context of the ideological shifts and social conflicts of the early 21st century. As blogs, social networks and mobile technologies became the connective tissue of political dissent and social mobilization over thi...
Panel Proposal Taking Form: From Ontogenesis to Repetition and Exhaustion This panel will explore... more Panel Proposal Taking Form: From Ontogenesis to Repetition and Exhaustion This panel will explore how film and digital media “take form,” performing something akin to what Gilbert Simondon calls ontogenesis and Henri Bergson calls creative evolution. Yet, this taking of form does not always imply emergence as the becoming of formation, becoming in-formation; the act of taking form is also an act of repetition which puts more emphasis on the concept of “taking” (Deleuze), and sometimes this repeated formation even amounts to the undoing of form (the exhaustion of form). For Simondon ontogenesis involves a mediation between forms of individuation — a mediation between vital, collective, and technical modes of individuation. We aim to look at how films like La Vallee close (Jean-Claude Rousseau, 1995), installations like Nouvelles histoires de fantomes (Georges Didi-Huberman, 2014) and data visualizations like Selfiecity (Lev Manovich, ongoing) make visible sets of relations or “allagm...
Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing: Adjunct, 2016
StressSense is smart clothing made of fabric sensors that monitor the stress level of the wearers... more StressSense is smart clothing made of fabric sensors that monitor the stress level of the wearers. The fabric sensors are comfortable, allowing for long periods of monitoring and the electronic components are waterproof and detachable for ease of care. This design project is expected to be beneficial for people who have a lot of stress in their daily life and who care about their mental health. It can be also used for people who need to control their stress level critically, such as analysts, stock managers, athletes, and patients with chronic diseases and disorders.
In their non-fiction modes, film and photography have long traded on optical metaphors drawn from... more In their non-fiction modes, film and photography have long traded on optical metaphors drawn from philosophy. Phenomena like observation, objectivity, truth and reason translate into terms such as light, transparency, clarity, exposure, etc. These function in an almost homophonic fashion to describe both the aesthetic properties of images as well as the understanding and awareness an observer might achieve regarding an external phenomena. In a political and social context, these optical metaphors and their materialized media forms further translate into questions of governance and power. The degree of exposure a state or individual citizen is subject to often equates with the force of accountability on one hand (in police worn body cameras, for example) or the erosion of individual privacy (in the case of pervasive video surveillance). What’s good for the state, in other words, might be detrimental for the citizen, and vice versa. Where the state can marshall vast resources to tr...
Screen Studies Articles, 2019
Where Truth Lies: Digital Culture and Documentary Media after 9/11, 2019
Luminos is the Open Access monograph publishing program from UC Press. Luminos provides a framewo... more Luminos is the Open Access monograph publishing program from UC Press. Luminos provides a framework for preserving and reinvigorating monograph publishing for the future and increases the reach and visibility of important scholarly work. Titles published in the UC Press Luminos model are published with the same high standards for selection, peer review, production, and marketing as those in our traditional program. www.luminosoa.org This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)-a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries-and the generous support of the University of California-Davis. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org. Illustrations 2.1. A soldier scans the horizon in The Fog of War 24 2.2. "Overeager" sonar men 28 2.3. The domino theory in action 28 2.4. The observed and the observer in The Fog of War 29 2.5. The "number cruncher" becomes the bomber 31 2.6. Graphic superimpositions of the percentage of devastation caused by the firebombing of Tokyo in World War II 33 2.7. The database of images rendered in different aesthetic configurations 46 3.1. Robert Greenwald's "Un" Trilogy 53 3.2. MoveOn's remake of the "Daisy" ad 60 3.3. The MoveOn home page circa January 2004 61 3.4. The FoxAttacks home page circa October 2007 71 3.5. Elinor from Host an Event! 75 4.1. The Gone Gitmo space in Second Life 90 4.2. America's Army everywhere: public version and the arcade game 103 4.3. The "Medic Training" section in America's Army, version 2.5 106 5.1. The initial recovery.gov home page 131 5.2. Recovery.gov circa 2011 132 5.3. Data visualization in The River and on recovery.gov 135 5.4. Edward Tufte's "Lights-On Map" 137 5.5. Interactive IED visualization tool on The Guardian's website 152 xi Acknowled gments Like many books, this one may have a single author's name on the cover but owes its existence to many others. While the final form of the book took shape over the last two years, the questions that it seeks to address have been with me in one form or another across many years, countless conversations, and four institutions. My thinking on documentary aesthetics and the capacity of moving-image media and digital technology to explore the world has been indelibly shaped by many of the wonderful teachers and mentors with whom I have been fortunate enough to work over the years, including Marina Goldovskaya, Katherine Hayles,
International Journal of Clothing Science and Technology, 2017
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to understand what dimensions consumers prefer to track usin... more Purpose The purpose of this paper is to understand what dimensions consumers prefer to track using wearable technology to achieve a healthier lifestyle and how these tracking dimensions are related. Design/methodology/approach An online survey was conducted with potential consumers in the USA, and a series of Pearson’s correlation and regression analysis and multiple regressions was conducted. Findings The most preferred self-tracking dimensions, tracking dimensions on others, most private tracking dimensions, most variable dimensions, and the dimensions that need to be improved were identified. The results of this study showed positive relationships overall among similar types of tracking dimensions, such as among dimensions of physical health condition (disease and disorder symptoms and general vital signs), mental health condition (stress level and mood/feeling), healthy lifestyle (fitness, and pose and posture), and productivity and task management (work productivity, location, ...