Exploring and Expressing Points in Time through iPhoneography

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how iPhoneography extends a personal expression of lights, lines, patterns previously captured on film and digital devices through arts-based research that includes social media feedback. This thesis explores the elements of photographing fleeting moments of time using new technology. This work investigates how to capture moments from daily life through recording the essence of light on surfaces and objects. Images arise from spontaneous and/or semi-spontaneous artistic moments. Visual investigations explore and question light, time, and space, and are categorized into the themes of Shapes, Shadows, and Showers. The work has roots in some of America’s most venerated photographers, who became early inspirations. They include Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Joseph Jachna (a college professor of mine), and Minor White. Their points of view inspired me during my formative years as a photography student and have instilled in me the visual voice I use in my work to this day. Like many of these photographers, I looked locally and across the country for moments in time that moved me. Photographs were captured using an Apple iPhone 5 and 6. Light and easy constant companions, they served accessible tools always in reach and served as a digital sketchbook. The iPhone allowed the capture of the immediacy of the moment using existing light. Kept on High Dynamic Range (HDR) mode, the camera amazingly caught highlight and shadow detail

Language in Our Time: An Empirical Analysis of Hashtags

Hashtags in online social networks have gained tremendous popularity during the past five years. The resulting large quantity of data has provided a new lens into modern society. Previously, researchers mainly rely on data collected from Twitter to study either a certain type of hashtags or a certain property of hashtags. In this paper, we perform the first large-scale empirical analysis of hashtags shared on Instagram, the major platform for hashtag-sharing. We study hashtags from three different dimensions including the temporal-spatial dimension, the semantic dimension, and the social dimension. Extensive experiments performed on three large-scale datasets with more than 7 million hashtags in total provide a series of interesting observations. First, we show that the temporal patterns of hashtags can be categorized into four different clusters, and people tend to share fewer hashtags at certain places and more hashtags at others. Second, we observe that a non-negligible proportion of hashtags exhibit large semantic displacement. We demonstrate hashtags that are more uniformly shared among users, as quantified by the proposed hashtag entropy, are less prone to semantic displacement. In the end, we propose a bipartite graph embedding model to summarize users' hashtag profiles, and rely on these profiles to perform friendship prediction. Evaluation results show that our approach achieves an effective prediction with AUC (area under the ROC curve) above 0.8 which demonstrates the strong social signals possessed in hashtags.Comment: WWW 201

Iconic architecture through the lens of Instagram: the case studies of the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao and the Dongdaemun Design Plaza, Seoul

Architecture has played an enormous role in the branding of cities, initially through cultural institutions such as museums, which have become the preferred platform for the expression of iconic architecture to boost the image of a city’s modernity and economic prosperity, and to express its civic pride. In recent years the seemingly endless potential of social media has allowed the consumption of architecture to surpass the boundaries of space and time. The instant image sharing and dissemination of Instagrammably photogenic iconic architecture has made the notion of ‘iconicity’ more questionable than it might have been before the social media era. This research aims to explore the manner in which contemporary iconic architecture is represented in social media, with a specific focus on the manner in which such architectural imagery moulds ‘iconicity’ in architecture; in doing so, it investigates the ways in which city image is incorporated into the social imagery of architecture. Using the two case studies of Frank Ghery’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and Zaha Hadid’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza and Park in Seoul, the thesis scrutinises user-generated photographic images and accompanying textual descriptions, which were downloaded from Instagram. The empirical work involves a two-part multi-method approach combining visual content analysis and discourse analysis, using an adaptation of Panofsky’s Iconology, which was borrowed from art history. A general picture of the representational practices of Instagram images was gained through content analysis; this is followed by qualitative readings of individual images using Panofsky’s iconographic-iconological method. The results demonstrate that there are key elements that convey architectural iconicity in Instagram images. These include: (a) the heightened aesthetics of image-taking through the maximisation of aesthetic value in the portrayal of a building; (b) verbal texts alongside an image, which deliver information on the building; and (c) geographic associations through geo-tagging and hashtagging, and textual components, such as a caption and comments. The findings further indicate that, given that a majority of images are depicted in relation to architectural context, this context, in other words, the place in which a building is situated, is essential for the reception and perception of iconicity in the building. The present study is cross-disciplinary in nature, which serves as an important contribution to academic research into place branding by bringing together architecture, city branding, and social media. This is the first time that the Panofsky model of iconology has been applied to the field of place branding

Living With Everyday Evaluations on Social Media Platforms

The Like button is simultaneously a means of social interaction and a tool to evaluate social media content. Likes are built into the infrastructure of platforms, fueling personalized searches, recommendations, and targeted advertisements while contributing to the economic valuation of platforms and users alike. Working at the intersection of infrastructure and practice, we analyze the experience of everyday evaluations on social media to understand how platforms shape what people care about. Based on in-depth interviews with 25 artists who use Instagram, we identify three overlapping orientations to the Like button: affective, relational, and infrastructural. We show how the flexibility of the button creates ambiguity around the meaning of a Like which drives practices of metaevaluation, and argue that the platform architecture incentivizes an economic approach to evaluation that crowds out other value schemas, shaping how artists use the platform, make art, and even understand themselves. We conclude with a discussion of the broader implications of everyday evaluations, algorithms, and platforms. &nbsp;</p

Beyond the authenticity bind - Finstagram as an escape from the attention economy

Our study examines ‘Finstagramming’ as a resistance strategy from influencers trying to circumvent the prescriptive nature and restrictive algorithm of Instagram. Without ever leaving the platform, Finstagram acts as an emancipatory outlet that enables influencers to share more intimate, less-conforming and unpolished content without jeopardis-ing the highly curated, monetizable person-brand of their main account. Through a dual-method qualitative approach of netnography and in-depth interviews, we unravel this paradox of embedded escap-ism, where influencers toggle between main and Finsta accounts in their pursuit of authenticity. Our findings reveal the porosity of these multiple digital personae and differentiated digital work taking place on the platform. We argue that Finstagram affords a momentary escape from the digital attention economy whilst remaining tethered to socially mediated authenticity markers

Perspectives of High School Photography Teachers Regarding Visual Literacy

This qualitative study investigated the perspectives of high school photography teachers regarding visual literacy. A qualitative methodology that used a phenomenographic research design was employed to gain understanding about the perspectives of high school photography teachers in their conceptualization, perceptions, and experiences surrounding visual literacy. A survey/ questionnaire was used to explore participants’ paths towards becoming a high school photography teacher, the amount of years they have been teaching, and their geographic location. Participants perception of school demographics such as school size, community contexts, racial, ethnic, and economic diversity were also collected. Additional prompts were designed to investigate curricular influences, pressing concerns, and pedagogical considerations regarding the various aspects of visual literacy. 100 survey/ questionnaire responses were collected along with five semi-structured interviews. Data were analyzed through constant comparison and in vivo coding was used to construct categories of description. The categories of description were further organized into three main themes: Curricular Influences, Pedagogical Considerations and Creative Applications. Data were then sorted into structural and referential aspects of experience to provide an overview of the outcome space. The structural aspects are described as teachers’ influential experiences and the referential described as the teaching of visual literacy. The results of this study were organized into five major discussion points: 1.) Participants’ lived experiences directly impact their teaching of visual literacy, 2.) Curriculum standards have limited impact on the teaching of visual literacy, 3.) Participants employ dialogue-based strategies when teaching visual literacy, 4.) Both analyzing and creating images are important aspects of visual literacy, 5.) Visual literacy addresses the needs of high school photography students

SEE

"Vision traditionally occupies the height of the sensorial hierarchy. The sense of clarity and purity conveyed by vision, allows it to be explicitly associated with truth and knowledge. The law has always relied on vision and representation, from eye-witnesses to photography, to imagery and emblems. The law and its normative gaze can be understood as that which decrees what is permitted to be and become visible and what is not. Indeed, even if law’s perspectival view is bound to be betrayed by the realities of perception, it is nonetheless productive of real effects on the world. This first title in the interdisciplinary series ‘Law and the Senses’ asks how we can develop new theoretical approaches to law and seeing that go beyond a simple critique of the legal pretension to truth. This volume aims to understand how law might see and unsee, and how in its turn is seen and unseen. It explores devices and practices of visibility, the evolution of iconology and iconography, and the relation between the gaze of the law and the blindness of justice. The contributions, all radically interdisciplinary, are drawn from photography, legal theory, philosophy, and poetry.

Unfolding Imagos: an inquiry into the aesthetics of Action-Phenomenology

In modern civilisation, magic in its instrumental (sorcerous) sense would appear to have been completely superseded by science, but that should not blind us to the (arguably) reliable efficacy of invocation, nor to the metaphysical implication of this efficacy–that it points to the psychophysical nature of reality.3 This thesis is an inquiry into the use of imagination as being restorative of identity. Working experimentally with poetic-aesthetic method—writings initially, then visual images—I use altered states of mind, and access to the otherworldly, in order to offer re-arrangements of local realities. Preoccupied as most people are with everyday realities, radical proposals—animism, enchantment, non-ordinary ways of knowing and being— don’t often find room: in our everyday lives, workplaces, relationships; or in action-inquiry. The body of this inquiry reflects the qualities of what Bachelard terms an immense philosophical daydream.4 My claim in-depth is, firstly that working with poetic-aesthetic method in this way is restorative: of individual, groups, societies; secondly, that the framings offered in Part V Light are the bases for further in depth research. Initially proposed as inquiry into the healing of disrupted identity (a consequence of organisational and procedural abuse), the focus of inquiry shifts, unfolds. Inquiry into writing, poetry, aesthetics gives way to a deeper inquiry into connectedness; uncovering healing engendered by Seeing connections: to the morethan- human world (animism), the otherworldly (enchantment). Questions of knowing and being surface, along with how to relate these back to the world. In A Language Older Than Words, Jensen relates a story of connecting a plant—a dracaena cane—to a polygraph. The story relates the plant’s responses to a researcher imagining harming it; plant becoming attuned to human; yoghurt responding to death of remote microbes. This leads to altered ways of knowing and being not often in our consciousness; preoccupied as we are with everyday realities.5 Atelier—a series of experimental practices—provokes deeper inquiry: into the nature and frameworks of inquiry, and, ultimately, theory. The problem, the contradiction the scientists are stuck with, is that of mind. Mind has no matter or energy but they can’t escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind. I don’t get upset when they say that ghosts exist in the mind. It’s that only that gets me. Science is only in your mind too, its just that that doesn’t make it bad. Or ghosts either.6 Experience of trauma, abuse, offers distortions of mind and self. These distortions are ascribed as illness but provoked through the deepening inquiry of a series of experimental practices: referred to in this work as The Atelier. I come to suggest that this is a problem of mind; and of our relationship to the unscientific. Playing with these distortions unfolds access to rarely accessed realms: of consciousness; of seeing. Inquiring into these fields of identity reveals new putative fields: Imago-Unfolding; Via Arbora; 4th-Person Inquiry; Action- Phenomenology. These fields occur—in layers—throughout this text, and in mind

Collage as Queer Methodology: The Pleasures and Politics of Trans and Queer Photographic Representations

This practice-led research project is a critical feminist engagement with the messy complexities of making, consuming and exhibiting imagery. I use a range of material processes to develop large-scale photographic series that explore intimacy and a continued reconfiguring of the body. I consider the ethical intricacies of photographic practice and interrogate how a feminist and queer politics of ruining and remaking can inform an approach to my own practice and participation in image culture

Contemporary street photography. Its plave between art and documentary in the era of digital ubiquity.

Master in digital communication and culture, 2017.The thesis seeks to explore the discipline of modern street photography and how it is featured by means social networks and photo-sharing websites. The objective of the thesis is to figure out how the ubiquity of digital devices (mobile phones in particular) influences the development of street photography. The aim of the thesis is to distinguish the major trends or sub-genres of modern street photography and to find their placement on the scale between Art and Documentary, in the context of ubiquity of digital photography