Beyond the Visual (original) (raw)
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The Return of Technology as the Other in Visual Practices
In this thesis I will ponder on the claims made by the protagonists of the contemporary philosophy movements Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology. They are looking at (technological) objects to understand them better from themselves, without any human intervention. The New Aesthetic can be seen as the visual branch of this philosophy. The works collected under this name look at how computational devices perceive our world through their sensors and software.
The Antropology of New Visuality as the Reflection on "Digital" Visual Culture
Visualist 2012 International Congress on Visual Culture: New Approaches Communication, Art and Design „Digitalization”, eds. Işık Zeybek, Deniz Yengin, Papers/Volume I, Istanbul: Istanbul Kültür University Art and Design Faculty, p. 96–106, (pp. 11), 2012
Abstract: The Anthropology of New Visuality is a project formulated by Arturo Escobar concerning visual aspects of the Anthropology of Cyberculture. The issues addressed in this project include new forms of visuality in the context of "digital" technologies of seeing. Within this theoretical scope the technologies of virtual reality, the technologies of the control of public and private spaces as well as the technologies of net-work are included. The main thesis of this article is based on conviction that Escobar’s project finds new research areas in Visual Culture Studies and is discussed basing on the research of theoreticians indentifying themselves with this field of knowledge. The name “the anthropology of new visuality” was proposed by Ryszard W. Kluszczyński, who came to the conclusion that its theoretical scope are included within: technologies of virtual reality, technologies of control of public and private space, and network technologies. The research contexts within its scope of this article have been divided into three groups of issues: “virtual cultures”, “panoptical cultures”, and “interface cultures”. On the one hand, "virtual cultures" include the issue of new visualities, which are the effect of functioning of various types of virtual realities. On the other hand, "panoptical cultures" are a current reflection, which refers Michel Foucault’s theories directly to web-cameras monitoring private, public and satellite space, as well as to the pro-cinema media (photography, panorama as well as diorama). Whereas, "cultures of interface" are aspects of identity on-line, telepresence, and "artificial life", which are obtained by means of Internet and web-cameras monitoring private and public space.
“Invisible Visualities: Augmented Reality Art and the Contemporary Media Ecology
Augmented reality (AR) art is a form of artistic expression that complicates traditional notions of the visual arts. A visual AR artist trades in what we might call invisible visualities. In this essay, I consider the questions why does AR art matter as a cultural form of expression? and what does AR art contribute to contemporary technoliterary theoretical discourse? by putting several recent AR artworks into dialogue with some of today’s most important literary-media theorists.
Cultural expression in augmented and mixed reality
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2014
Most readers of Convergence will have some familiarity with the developing digital media forms that go under the name of augmented reality and mixed reality (MAR or separately, AR and MR). The widespread availability of smart phones in the last 10 years has redefined AR and MR that had previously been confined to the laboratory. Smart phones and tablets have become the platform for a variety of applications in which digital text, images, video, and audio are overlaid on the screen and appear to be present in the space around the user. In addition, the smart phone or tablet can typically determine the user's location in the world and orientation in his/her immediate environment. Along with the commercial uses for location-sensitive advertising, new forms of cultural expression (e.g. for art, design, and social media) are beginning to appear. Appropriately for this journal, these new forms can best be studied by a convergence of disciplines, including media studies, art history, literary theory, philosophy (particularly phenomenology), interaction design, sociology, anthropology, communication studies, human-computer interaction, and computer science. Many of these disciplines are represented in the contributions in this special issue that focuses on the ways in which AR and MR participate in cultural expression in today's heterogeneous media economy. Do AR and MR constitute a new medium? What are the specific qualities of the new medium that give rise to new forms of cultural expression? Are AR and MR two different media with different characteristic qualities and affordances? Over the past two decades, computer scientists have analyzed AR and MR as media forms from their own technical and operational perspectives (e.g. Milgram and Kashino, 1994). These questions are addressed from artistic and theoretical perspectives by the contributions to this special issue. The 'medium' question still underlies much of our discourse about the various digital technologies and their uses today, and the notion of medium has been naturalized today to such an extent that we may overlook its history in the 20th century. It is worth recalling that history in order to understand how the notion may limit our ability to appreciate the position that new forms such as AR and MR occupy in our media culture.
Welcome to the revolution: art history and the sensory turn
Discourses concerned with the sensorially embodied subject have emerged since the 1990s in various disciplines including history, anthropology, sociology, geography, film studies and literary studies. The purpose of this article is to bring the conversation regarding audiences’ embodied engagement in culture closer to art history by investigating the implications of, what has been termed, the ‘sensory turn’ for this discipline. One of the accusations lodged against art history by supporters of the multi-sensoriality of embodied human experience is its alleged ocularcentrism, the implication of which is a detached autonomous subject. In this article, the sensory turn is defined and contextualized, particularly in light of the body of criticism targeted at art history’s emphasis on the visual. The proposed ways in which art historians might usefully deal with audience’s embodied experiences of not only immersive installation works of art, but also artworks in traditional media, such as painting and photography, are teased apart. Keywords: sensory turn, art history, multi-sensorial subjectivity, embodiment
The digital turn, and with it increased use of location-aware technologies, has yielded innovative image applications and posed new questions about the status and value of the image. These applications rely on algorithmically defined relations between the viewing subject and the world viewed, offering robust alternatives to the visual economies of the past. If we take seriously Heidegger's insights regarding the Welt-bild as a metaphor for the modern era, the algorithmic reconfiguration of subject-object relations in this emerging visual regime potentially offers insights -and a metaphoric alternative -through which we can reflect upon the current era. This essay uses two entry points to explore this possible reconfiguration, and with it, the question of value. Downloadable applications such as Photosynth aggregate location-tagged photographs into a near-seamless whole, and offer a way to consider such issues as collaborative authorship of the image, unstable points of view, and the repositioning of subject-object relationships -all elements that fundamentally challenge Western representational norms dominant in the modern era. In this new regime, the spatial referents of greatest value are points of uniqueness sought out and built upon by the program's algorithms --and not those perceived by the viewer. The viewer is in turn free to explore an extensive and dynamic image space unconstrained by (and indeed, without access to) an authorized or 'correct' viewing position. A second case, built upon certain augmented reality applications, works by 'recognizing' particular spaces and, through the use of computationally enhanced viewing screens, superimposing new images over real space. In this case, a system of virtual spatial annotation depends upon the 'correct' positioning of the viewer (and portable computing device) in the world. The virtual image gives the viewer access to an encoded and location-based domain of signification, augmenting her encounters with the world and potentially transforming the meaning of its sights. The two cases stand in a rough reciprocal relationship, one loosening our spatial moors and leaving us to wander 2 within a deep, wide and constantly changing image-space ripe with multiple meanings; the other using the requirements of the image to fix our physical place, offering overlays of information and specific meaning. Both cases turn on differing notions of algorithmic intermediation, a reconfiguration of subject-object relations, and new dynamics for the generation of meaning and value.