Iphoneography as an emergent art world (original) (raw)
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Art of the Masses: From Kodak Brownie to Instagram
Networking Knowledge, special issue Be Your Selfie: Identity, Aesthetics and Power in Digital Self-Representation, 2015
In history of photography, new technological developments often provide a basis for new forms of imagery. These, in turn, are followed by new ways of theorizing the photographic image. For example, the cheapness and ease of use of the Kodak Brownie camera around 1900 gave rise to a massive movement of amateur photography, introduced the snapshot, and established a tradition of family photograph albums. Similarly, around 2010 we saw a rise in popularity of a new kind of image-making, image-sharing, and image-viewing device, which I propose to call the networked camera. This networked camera is a curious hybrid consisting of a smartphone with a built-in camera, wireless internet connection, and online image-sharing platforms and other social media. The availability of such devices have provided the technological basis for the formation of a new sub-genre of amateur photography – selfie. Selfie continues the tradition of photographic self-portraiture yet at the same time presents us with a radically new type of image that demands equally new ways of analyzing it. Arguments put forward in this article are grounded in research project Selfiecity (2013-2014) led by Lev Manovich and his research lab Software Studies Initiative. This project was based on a dataset of 3,200 selfies posted to Instagram during one week from five global cities: New York, Moscow, Berlin, Sao Paulo, and Bangkok. Research methods included computational analysis (such as software-driven face recognition and use of custom-made data visualization tools) as well as formal and content analysis of each individual image. The article reveals some of the inherent complexities of understanding selfie that the methods and findings of Selfiecity have helped to articulate. Seeking for valid methods of theorizing and contextualizing selfie, the article attempts to combine insights from the perspectives of history of photography and art history, digital humanities, and software studies.
Between image and information: the iPhone camera in the history of photography
Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone, 2012
Ingrid Richardson (Eds) (2012) Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone (Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies) Raise the iPhone with its back pointing towards your subject. Tap and hold the camera button on the touch screen. Release the button. Hear the familiar shutter release sound effect, and watch the shutter animation.
This article underlines some aspects that relate, on the one side, to the technological devices necessary to photography production and, on the other, the kind of practices that shape and are shaped by those devices. It discusses how those relationships have shaped different visual regimes. Based on theoretical approaches like Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the Socio-technical Interactions Network (STIN) perspective, the article starts with a brief historical description focusing on the production of photos as a three-step process: 1) infrastructural elements of image production; 2) technologies of processing images; and 3) distribution/showing of images. It is proposed that photography has had four moments in this history. Finally, the article discusses the latest socio-technological practices, and proposes that the iPhone is the best example of the kind of devices that are possibly opening a fifth moment in photography technologies.
The Liquid Aesthetic of the Cameraphone: Re-imagining photography in the mobile age
Journal of Creative Tecnhologies (Special Issue), 2014
The cameraphone has emerged as a dominant device for the production and sharing of photographic images in the new millennium. No longer constrained by technological parameters of the past, the cameraphone continues to remediate and refashion the tropes of traditional photography, thus giving rise to new image making processes and, arguably, new ways of seeing. From early model cameraphones manufactured in 2004 through to the enhanced capabilities of the ubiquitous Apple iPhone, the cameraphone has evolved from a crude digital imaging/communications tool into a sophisticated networked media device. It is now capable of capturing, editing, storing, and exporting high-resolution images. As the cameraphone continues to evolve, constant technological shifts have facilitated a liquid aesthetic whereby cameraphone images, and photographic practices are shaped and/or influenced by the constantly fluctuating nature of this transformative technology. With this in mind, my research examines the shape-shifting parameters of the cameraphone and its impact on the field of photography. I explore ways in which cameraphones may reconfigure our relationship with imaging and facilitate new modes of photographic practice.
Instant analysis: Mobile photography as a research method
What is it about social media that so captivates us? Once popularly viewed as entertainment, cultural gatekeepers such as art galleries an dmuseums are now beginning to embrace social media practices as effective means for life long learning and community engagement (See Appendix 1). Even the heritage branch of the Canadian government is promoting applications like Instagram© and Pinterest© for use by local museums (http://www.rcipchin.gc.ca/sgc-cms/nouvelles-news/anglais-english/?p=7094).Many individuals, (especially youth), are continuously documenting their daily lives, collecting digital artifacts that represent components of identity, and re-distributing these artifacts through social networking spaces (Delacruz and Bales, 2010). Gardner and Davis (2013) explain that for the “App Generation,” social media holds a fundamental position in the enacting, performing and creation of community. How might visual content creation and distribution through social media be a form of artistic production as well as a personally engaging mode of inquiry for students and researchers alike? My pilot study with tagged mobile photography is one demonstration that through our interdisciplinary, experiential aptitudes, art education specialists are well positioned to develop new ways of knowing, using the myriad of technological tools available. Through research creation, we can provide critical guidance for “app-enabling” (Gardner & Davis, 2013) practices for use with social media and in the digital world that we, and our students, increasingly inhabit.
Contemporary society is overwhelmed with images. Personal photography has in recent decades gone through a considerable change in terms of practice and technology. Traditional forms of production, dissemination and presentation are being uprooted and replaced by new ones. One cause for this change is the emergence of new technologies such as Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS) and Social Network Sites (SNS). These technologies are collapsing the traditional temporal and spatial aspects of personal photography. These current technologies and practices have a distinct relationship with postmodernity. This research is interested in the epistemological implications of these changes. This research utilized a critical and historical examination of photography theory and photography history. I have used
The unstoppable rise of mobile imaging and aesthetics
EVA London 2014 Electronic Visualization and the Arts Conference Proceedings , 2014
Smart phones are ubiquitous; light, portable and indispensable. The spatial, perceptive and visual connections among scene, subject and photographer are different, compared to a regular camera. This fact enables the photographer to focus on different topics, try practices s/he has not tried before. Mobile devices change the way we create, edit, sequence and share photography. When you do street photography with a smart phone camera, one of the advantages is that people do not really understand where you aim at and what you photograph. They do not react as consciously as they would in front of a regular camera. The reason is; almost all people, including locals and tourists, own a smart phone and taking a snap with them is very common practice for all. Okabe and Ito (2006) argue that: “The camera phone is a more ubiquitous presence, and is used for more personal, less objectified viewpoint and sharing among intimates. It tends to be used more frequently as a kind of archive of a personal trajectory or viewpoint on the world, a collection of fragments of everyday life.” Ease of use seems to make smart phone recording as one of the "sine qua non" practices of photography. There are many documentary photographers, reporters, journalists, professional photographers and even artists, film directors who take this apparatus seriously and use it. Some camera makers, like Samsung, are aware of the power of mobile imaging (described as “quantum imagery” by Fred Ritchin) and started to produce cameras 3G / 4G connectivity. Before the digital revolution, the percentage of the “amateur” photographers was relatively less as compared to the digital era. Shooting with film was more difficult as analogue processes allowed less room for errors. After the launch of cheap compact digital cameras amateurs generated more self-confidence in imaging since they were offered the possibility of fixing any mistakes by just erasing any faulty photo. The introduction of cameras into smart phones was yet another dimension at which people felt even more poised to take photos, since the tool is not a “professional” apparatus with which you are expected to create expert results. In the light of above facts, I think it would not be wrong to say that phone cameras give a personalized power to their users. Nowadays, with the possibilities offered by social media tools, regular people contribute to the making of their local and global histories with the “amateur” personal images they make, which partially shape their identities. This can defined as power of the individual, using visual imagination as a tool. This paper aims to discuss how mobile digital imaging alters the creation, perception and aesthetics of visuality. Contemporary photographic culture is definitely more intricately intertwined with popular culture as compared to photography in the 20th century and this should not be interpreted as a weakness but strength, when used consciously.
Mobile art: Rethinking intersections between art, user created content (UCC), and the quotidian
In many countries across the world, mobile media has become an embedded part of everyday life. And yet, despite the influence of mobile media in and around art, the notion of " mobile art " or " mobile media art " remains relatively undertheorized and discussed. So what constitutes mobile art? Is it defined by a mobile interface in the process or delivery of the artwork? Or is it defined by a relationship to mobile content or context? Located in and around the field of mobile communication, mobile art has often been sublimated with locative, hybrid, mixed reality, or media arts. This paper argues for an understanding of mobile art as a broader field of creative practice than just locative media practice or media arts. Rather than survey all the examples of mobile art on offer today, this paper will structure mobile art into key three thematic rubrics: intimate copresence, emplaced visuality, ambient play.
The (Be)Coming of Selfies. Revisiting an Onlife Ethnography on Digital Photography Practices
This chapter focuses upon a central digital and visual phenomenon of contemporary culture: selfies. The main premise for my argument is that the conditions that configured the development of imagery as a core element in online interactions were shaped in early textual-based practices and therefore represent a distinct trajectory from the tradition of self-portraiture in painting and photography. Building upon a previous account on the topic (Gomez Cruz and Thornham 2015), I suggest that selfies represent the latest stage of an evolution and convergence between technologically mediated practices of communication and visual cultures. This convergence has been refined through mass adoption, technical innovation, corporate and media discourses and the rise of algorithmic culture (Striphas 2015). Digital photography practices, and specifically selfies, represent an interesting case study to characterize some of the virtues and possibilities of digital ethnography. At the same time, the digital, as an object of inquiry “makes us aware and newly self-conscious about those taken-for-granted frames” (Miller and Horst 2012, 12) and photography (traditional, familiar, vernacular) was one of them (see Gómez Cruz 2016; Hand 2012). By bringing together digital ethnography and the study of contemporary digital and visual practices such as selfies, I illustrate how digital ethnography represents a powerful tool to envision early emergent phenomena in digital culture (Hand 2008) while it is taking place. In particular I explore how use of previous fieldwork, as an historical archive, could help us rethink current phenomena in alternative ways and via alternative, even non-linear, genealogies, while attempting to avoid focusing merely on new technological platforms or iterations. I close with three elements that I consider fundamental to understand digital ethnography as an epistemic intervention in the era of Big Data