Narcissus to a Man: Lifelogging, Technology and the Normativity of Truth

The growth of the practice of lifelogging, exploiting the capabilities provided by the exponential increase in computer storage, and using technologies such as SenseCam as well as location-based services, Web 2.0, social networking and photo-sharing sites, has led to a growing sense of unease, articulated in books such as Mayer-Schönberger's Delete, that the semi-permanent storage of memories could lead to problematic social consequences. This talk examines the arguments against lifelogging and storage, and argues that they seem less worrying when placed in the context of a wider debate about the nature of mind and memory and their relationship to our environment and the technology we use

Visual Dynamics: Stochastic Future Generation via Layered Cross Convolutional Networks

We study the problem of synthesizing a number of likely future frames from a single input image. In contrast to traditional methods that have tackled this problem in a deterministic or non-parametric way, we propose to model future frames in a probabilistic manner. Our probabilistic model makes it possible for us to sample and synthesize many possible future frames from a single input image. To synthesize realistic movement of objects, we propose a novel network structure, namely a Cross Convolutional Network; this network encodes image and motion information as feature maps and convolutional kernels, respectively. In experiments, our model performs well on synthetic data, such as 2D shapes and animated game sprites, and on real-world video frames. We present analyses of the learned network representations, showing it is implicitly learning a compact encoding of object appearance and motion. We also demonstrate a few of its applications, including visual analogy-making and video extrapolation.Comment: Journal preprint of arXiv:1607.02586 (IEEE TPAMI, 2019). The first two authors contributed equally to this work. Project page: http://visualdynamics.csail.mit.ed

Perverse Martyrologies: An Interview with Ron Athey

This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form has been published in the CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW © 2008 [copyright Taylor & Francis]; CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW is available online at: www. tandfonline.com. Article URL: http://www. tandfonline.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1048-6801&date=2008&volume=18&issue=4&spage=50

Ethnography

Ethnography is a methodology based on direct observation. Of course, when doing ethnography, it is also essential to listen to the conversations of the actors \u2018on stage\u2019, read the documents produced by the organization under study, and ask people questions. Yet what most distinguishes ethnography from other methodologies is a more active role assigned to the cognitive modes of observing, watching, seeing, looking at, gazing at and scrutinizing. Ethnography, like any other methodology, is not simply an instrument of data collection. It is born at particular moment in the history of society and embodies certain of its cultural features. This chapter, embracing a theory of method, focuses upon why (right now, notwithstanding more than one century of history) ethnography has come into fashion

Hack the Experience: Tools for Artists from Cognitive Science

Hack The Experience will reframe your perspective on how your audience engages your work. This will happen as you learn how to control attention through spatial and time-based techniques that you can harness as you build immersive installations or as you think about how to best arrange your work in an exhibition. You’ll learn things about the senses and how they interface with attention so that you can build in visceral forms of interactivity, engage people’s empathetic responses, and frame their moods. This book is a dense bouillon-cube of techniques that you can adapt and apply to your personal practice, and it’s a book that will walk you step-by-step through skill sets from ethnography, cognitive science, and multi-modal metaphors. The core argument of this book is that art is a form of cognitive engineering and that the physical environment (or objects in the physical environment) can be shaped to maximize emotional and sensory experience. Many types of art will benefit from this handbook (because cognition is pervasive in our experience of art), but it is particularly relevant to immersive experiential works such as installations, participatory/interactive environments, performance art, curatorial practice, architecture and landscape architecture, complex durational works, and works requiring new models of documentation. These types of work benefit from the empirical findings of cognitive science because intentionally leveraging basic human cognition in artworks can give participants new ways of seeing the world that are cognitively relevant. This leveraging process provides a new layer in the construction of conceptually grounded works

Between Hollywood and Bandjoun: art activism and anthropological ethnography into the mediascape

Audio-visual media are a powerful vehicle of globalization engaged in the creation of widespread mediascapes shaping the imagination and the feelings of the people all around the world. As a consequence the audio-visual media are not only a means of anthropological research but a constituent part of the ethnographic field as well.It was in this perspective that in 2009 I asked the Italian artistic collective of Alterazioni Video to accompany me to the Bamileke chiefdom of Bandjoun (Cameroon), where I usually conduct my research. The main topic of our work was fear, an emotion we investigated by filming some traditional masquerades of secret societies (which also made use of some Hollywood-inspired masks) and by making a horror movie with a local cast, using the set and the backstage as an ethnographic field. The vampires and the zombies who were the subject of the film form a part of a shared global imagery but they are also an invisible, effective presence in local sorcery practices. We have tried to stay on the border between facts and fictions, feelings and actors’ performances, as well as art and anthropology, but also to question it, in order to test the way in which anthropology and artistic activism could find a meeting point on the terrain of ethnographic practice.Les médias audiovisuels sont un puissant véhicule de mondialisation, agissant par la création de paysages médiatiques très répandus qui modèlent l’imagination et les émotions des personnes dans le monde entier. Par conséquent les médias audiovisuels ne sont pas simplement un outil de la recherche anthropologique, mais ils sont aussi bien une partie constitutive du terrain ethnographique.C’est dans cette perspective, qu’en 2009, j’ai demandé au collectif artistique italien de Alterazioni Video de m’accompagner au Cameroun, à la chefferie bamiléké de Bandjoun, où je mène mes recherches depuis des années. Le sujet principal de notre travail a été la peur, une émotion sur laquelle nous avons enquêté en filmant les danses masquées des sociétés coutumières (qui utilisaient aussi des masques inspirés de Hollywood) en tournant un film d’horreur avec des acteurs non professionnels recrutés au village et en utilisant le plateau de tournage et les coulisses comme terrain ethnographique. Les zombies et les vampires, qui étaient le sujet du film, font partie d’un imaginaire global partagé, mais ils sont aussi une présence invisible et réelle dans les pratiques locales de la sorcellerie. Nous avons essayé de travailler à la frontière entre les faits et les fictions, les émotions et les performances des acteurs, l’art et l’anthropologie, tout en cherchant en même temps à la questionner, pour explorer les façons à travers lesquelles l’anthropologie et l’activisme artistique peuvent trouver une zone de contact sur le terrain de la pratique ethnographique

Credulous Spectatorship from Zeuxis to Barthes

This dissertation explores intersections between trompe l\u27oeil painting and photography. It began as an interest in contemporary photographers, such as Thomas Demand, whose photographs of constructed paper models encourage viewers to discover the nature of his interventions. His strategy resonates with a centuries-old strategy in trompe l\u27oeil painting, but now in the terms of photographic, rather than pictorial presence. That is, most of Demand\u27s photographs do not compel the viewer\u27s belief in the tangible presence of the object represented; instead, they exploit photography\u27s indexical promise of delivering the world as it once appeared, in order to temporarily trick viewers about the terms of that indexical delivery. Beyond intersections in artistic strategies, I track reception accounts of trompe l\u27oeil painting and photography for their reliance on a credulous spectator. Pliny\u27s Zeuxis, who is tricked by Parrhasius\u27s painting of a curtain, remains the model for this errant credulity. In their efforts to reveal the manipulation of photographs, historians and theorists assume that the natural attitude for viewing photographs is wholly credulous and recast postmodern viewers as contemporary Zeuxises. Instead of admonishing spectators for such credulity, I argue that trompe l\u27oeil facilitates a pleasurable experience of oscillation between belief and disbelief. I also suggest that these trompe l’oeil deployments of oscillation tend to coincide with historical moments of perceived change in visual technologies—changes due to digitalization, as well as mechanical or other forms of reproduction. Trompe l\u27oeil artists play upon our supposed willingness to accept reproductions for the objects they represent. The inclusion of photographs and/or engravings in these trompe l’oeil paintings simultaneously stages and reprimands our desire for the aura of the actual object. Finally, I suggest that a contemporary renewal of trompe l\u27oeil in the medium of photography reveals an interest in recuperating belief in photographs—a belief not unlike that which Roland Barthes narrates in Camera Lucida. Just as Barthes can discover something of photography\u27s indexical promise, even after decades of his own scholarly efforts to unveil photography\u27s rhetoric of construction, so might we, even while heeding the postmodernist lessons of disbelief, recuperate a moment of belief in a skeptical age

How sketches work: a cognitive theory for improved system design

Evidence is presented that in the early stages of design or composition the mental processes used by artists for visual invention require a different type of support from those used for visualising a nearly complete object. Most research into machine visualisation has as its goal the production of realistic images which simulate the light pattern presented to the retina by real objects. In contrast sketch attributes preserve the results of cognitive processing which can be used interactively to amplify visual thought. The traditional attributes of sketches include many types of indeterminacy which may reflect the artist's need to be "vague". Drawing on contemporary theories of visual cognition and neuroscience this study discusses in detail the evidence for the following functions which are better served by rough sketches than by the very realistic imagery favoured in machine visualising systems. 1. Sketches are intermediate representational types which facilitate the mental translation between descriptive and depictive modes of representing visual thought. 2. Sketch attributes exploit automatic processes of perceptual retrieval and object recognition to improve the availability of tacit knowledge for visual invention. 3. Sketches are percept-image hybrids. The incomplete physical attributes of sketches elicit and stabilise a stream of super-imposed mental images which amplify inventive thought. 4. By segregating and isolating meaningful components of visual experience, sketches may assist the user to attend selectively to a limited part of a visual task, freeing otherwise over-loaded cognitive resources for visual thought. 5. Sequences of sketches and sketching acts support the short term episodic memory for cognitive actions. This assists creativity, providing voluntary control over highly practised mental processes which can otherwise become stereotyped. An attempt is made to unite the five hypothetical functions. Drawing on the Baddeley and Hitch model of working memory, it is speculated that the five functions may be related to a limited capacity monitoring mechanism which makes tacit visual knowledge explicitly available for conscious control and manipulation. It is suggested that the resources available to the human brain for imagining nonexistent objects are a cultural adaptation of visual mechanisms which evolved in early hominids for responding to confusing or incomplete stimuli from immediately present objects and events. Sketches are cultural inventions which artificially mimic aspects of such stimuli in order to capture these shared resources for the different purpose of imagining objects which do not yet exist. Finally the implications of the theory for the design of improved machine systems is discussed. The untidy attributes of traditional sketches are revealed to include cultural inventions which serve subtle cognitive functions. However traditional media have many short-comings which it should be possible to correct with new technology. Existing machine systems for sketching tend to imitate nonselectively the media bound properties of sketches without regard to the functions they serve. This may prove to be a mistake. It is concluded that new system designs are needed in which meaningfully structured data and specialised imagery amplify without interference or replacement the impressive but limited creative resources of the visual brain