“The Accidental Tourist” in the Context of Zoomed-In Images in the Multimodal Interpersonal Video Communication (original) (raw)

Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera and the Phenomenology of Perception

The present study is animated by the conviction that there exists a meaningful link between, on the one hand, media and the vehicles of expression most widely used during a certain period of time and, on the other hand, the perceptual engagement with the world that is forged during that same period of time. Its principal contention is that the documentary cinema of Dziga Vertov functions as a prosthetic extension of sensory perception that allows for the reorganization of experience that better responds to a dynamic of physical, conceptual, and experiential movement generalized in larger part by technological developments in the realm of communication. The underlying assumption at work in this reflection is that modes of perception and cognition are fundamentally shaped by developments in the realm of communication, communication understood as both transport and physical translation.

Moved Images Velocity, Immediacy and Spatiality of Photographic Communication

Texts and translations © by the authors, except translation of Winfried Gerling's essay © by John Benjamin Artworks and images © by the artists (unless stated otherwise) Cover image: Maija Tammi Untitled #4, from the series Leftover, 2014. Pigment print 60 x 65 cm Aalto University publication series ART + DESIGN + ARCHITECTURE 9/2015 School of Arts, Design and Architecture ISBN 978-952-60-6392-8 ISSN 1799-4861 © CC-BY 4.0 Helsinki 2015

The conversational image. New uses of digital photography

Favored by connected tools and social media, the second revolution of digital photography is that of the conversational uses of image. Since the advent of cinema or television, this mutation profoundly transforms our visual practices. Photography was an art and media. We are contemporaries of the time when it reaches the universality of a language. Integrated via versatile tools into connected systems, visual forms have become powerful shifters of private and public conversations. The part individuals can play in their production and interpretation contributes to a rapid development of formats and uses. The visibility conferred by social network sites accelerates their diffusion and gives rise to self-made norms. Appropriation of visual language makes us witness a reinvention of the everyday.

Too Hard to See? A Forum on Visual Studies and Russia

The Russian Review , 2022

It is hard to elaborate a common language without having a common platform where a sustained conversation about the importance and use-value of Russian visual studies could take place. To change this situation, I asked a group of scholars working with visual materials to share their views on the state of visual studies of/in Russia. Their insightful and informative opinions constitute this forum. Clearly, this is not an all-encompassing review of the field; opinions and comments below reflect the experience and the academic perspective of their authors. Yet I believe that these views help us understand both the exciting nature of the field of visual studies and the difficulties that the profession must overcome in order to make this field better… Coming from different disciplinary traditions, generational contexts, and countries, these stories about the past and present of visual studies of/in Russia are a good reminder of the large and barely realized potential that is waiting to be discovered by new generations of Slavic scholars. Almost a century ago, El Lissitzky noticed that people in early Soviet Russia went through a process of “the perpetual sharpening of [their] optic nerve.” Back then, the artist passionately called for a radical shift from a word-based culture to a culture based on visual representations; that is, for prioritizing “optics instead of phonetics” as our sociocultural default. We might not be quite ready yet for such a complete overhaul. But it is certainly about time to sharpen our optic nerves and to consider this call seriously. Table of Contents: Let’s Sharpen Our Optic Nerves by Serguei Alex. Oushakine 610 TURNING TOWARD THE VISUAL A Socialist Gaze by Emma Widdis 614 Seeing in Focus: Snapshots of the Visual Turn by Oksana Sarkisova and Olga Shevchenko 617 Visual Reverberations by Stephen M. Norris 620 Studying Russian Art: Originality as a Form of Bravery by Silvia Burini 623 Early Soviet Cinépoetry and Visual Culture Studies by Aleksandar Boskovic 626 On the Margin of Discourse? By Vlad Strukov 629 Outside the Text by Angelina Lucento 631 The Slavic Soul and Visual Culture Studies: A Marriage of Inconvenience? By Oksana Bulgakowa 635 A Difference in Track Gauge? by John E. Bowlt 638 Going through Circles and Déjà Vu: Visual Studies of Russia by Margaria Tupitsyn 641 Let’s Talk Numbers by Natalia N. Mazur 645 PRACTICING VISUAL STUDIES Doing Media Studies from a Philological Point of View by Yuri Leving and Ekaterina Margolis 647 Field Notes from the Visual Wing by Gabriella A. Ferrari and Natalia Plagmann 650 Discovering the Vkhutemas Archives, Expanding the Avant-Garde Canon by Anna Bokov 654 Ethno-Eye by Dmitry V. Arzyutov 657 Seeing through … (On the Necessity of Prolonged Looking) by Jane A. Sharp 660 Photography and Failure by Craig Campbell 663 Is Contemporary Academic Art in Russia Contemporary Enough? by Svetlana Gracheva 666 The Politics of Vision: Limiting the Perception of Soviet Culture by Kirill Svetliakov 670 Studying and Exhibiting Photography in Russia by Daria Panaiotti 673 Russian Global by Daria V. Ezerova 677 Seen and Heard by Rosalind P. Blakesley 679

Visual chitchat: The use of camera phones in

2012

Photography and photo sharing nowadays form an important part of mobile phone communication, as evidenced by the rather ubiquitous camera phone. The purpose of the article is to examine how the practices of mobile phone communication influence the sharing of camera phone photographs. In pursuing this goal, the ritual view of communication, formulated by James W. Carey, is utilized as a theoretical framework. According to the ritual view, communication serves in sustaining contact between communicators, without placing importance on the information that is exchanged. The conclusion in the article is that ritual communication is evident in how camera phone photographs are captured and communicated in order to maintain social cohesion among a group or among individuals. In addition to a theoretically oriented analysis, the article utilizes results from a qualitative study focusing on the mobile photo sharing practices of a group of Finnish camera phone users. inTroducTion Interpersonal communication is a fundamental feature of mobile phone communication, which for a long time was about connecting people, mostly two at a time. Nowadays, to a degree, the use of modern mobile phones, the so-called smart phones in particular, has diverged from interpersonal communication, and people now use the device for such tasks as information retrieval Mikko Villi 40 or gaming. Thus, an important part of the use of the mobile phone occurs without involving any direct communication with other people. Examples of this include using the phone for listening to music or the radio, navigating with the help of a built-in GPS receiver or browsing the web. Earlier, a phone would have been quite useless without another person with whom to communicate. Another way in which mobile communication has changed has to do with the fact that the mobile phone as a communication device is no longer limited to just transmitting voice, as is exemplified by the rather ubiquitous camera phone. In parallel to introducing visual communication to the realm of telephone communication, the camera phone has incorporated interpersonal communication more firmly into photography, or better, photographic communication. In order to shed light on the novel interpersonal aspects of photographic communication, I address the question, how do the practices of mobile phone communication influence visual interpersonal communication? In the article, I concentrate in particular on photo messaging-a form of communication in which photographs taken with a camera phone are sent directly from the mobile phone. A common technological application for photo messaging is MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service). In addition, photo messaging is increasingly realized via e-mail, IM (instant messaging) and other Internet-based media. The justification for calling photo messages 'messages' is that they are sent, not shown. Although immaterial and digital at every stage, photo messages appear to be concrete messages that move from one place to another (for instance from a mobile phone in Australia to a phone in Finland) (Villi 2007: 52). A photo message is, in a formalist sense, a photograph (Batchen 1999: 12, 20, 176); yet, at the same time, it is a photograph shaped very much by its communicative uses and thus dependent on specific cultural practices. An important motivation for my study is that the emphasis in communication studies has been on verbal communication at the expense of visual communication (Becker 2004: 149-50). In my view, it is critical to study visual communication, especially in the context of interpersonal communication. Visual interpersonal communication is a quite rare line of study; prior research on interpersonal communication has mainly focused on verbal communication. Knapp et al. (2002: 10) note that 'interpersonal communication scholars still do not agree on whether it is important to examine nonverbal as well as verbal behaviour or whether both parties to the interaction have to speak'. In addition, 'non-verbal interpersonal communication' often refers to gestures, body movements and facial expressions-body languagein face-to-face communication situations (Burgoon and Hoobler 2002: 243), but not to the use of photographs or other images in communication. The need for research on visual interpersonal communication is also emphasized by the fact that the studies on visual communication, especially on photography, have not focused much on interpersonal communication. One obvious reason for this omission is that the camera as a communication device has not been able to provide a direct interpersonal link between individuals. When interpersonal communication has occurred around photographs, it has mostly taken the form of verbal commentary; images have more been a subject than a medium of interpersonal communication (Villi 2010: 67). Paradoxically, this article also includes verbal accounts of visual interpersonal communication. As a theoretical framework, I utilize the ritual view of communication, formulated by communication theorist James W. Carey (1989: 15-18). Carey

Transit, ethnography and the camera gaze: a cross-cultural perspective

International Communication of Chinese Culture, 2019

Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein was one of the first artists who saw an affinity between film and architecture. In an essay entitled 'Montage and Architecture' (2010 [1938]), he reflected on the apparent paradox of the immobility of the film spectator, confronted with different fragments of the real space, filmed from different angles and brought together in the editing. By analysing the structure of the Acropolis in Athens, he realised that, while the immobility of architecture called for a mobile spectator, who experiences space by traversing it, film's unique ability to travel through space invites the immobile spectator to embark on a journey, moving around through different sites and different time zones. Both types of spectators have in common the experience of moving through spaces, and the consumer of the architectural space can be seen as the prototype of the film spectator. In this highly innovative approach, Eisenstein brought to the fore the importance of the mobile dimension of the apparently immobile gaze of the film spectator, approximating cinema and architecture from the point of view of their spatial journey. More recently, Harvard Professor Giuliana Bruno, drawing on Eisenstein's insightful understanding of cinema as a spatial art, called attention to how the appreciation of filmic space should always be considered from the point of view of touch and movement. Cinema, as proposed by Bruno, would set into motion an emotional journey through multiple spaces. She evokes Michel de Certeau's well-known phrase 'every story is a travel story-a spatial practice' to suggest that 'film is the ultimate travel story. Film narratives generated by a place, and often shot on location , transport us to a site' (Bruno 1997, p. 46).