Protest Images, Collective Portraits

A aparência é uma instância política, uma vez que a representação coletiva é uma possibilidade de emancipação da comunidade, dos “povos” (Didi-Huberman, 2012) e um mecanismo de constituição de memória cultural. A possibilidade de aparência, que também participa da história coletiva é uma relação de poder em si mesma. Na cultura digital, a aparência global banalizou-se, mas também foi dissolvida sob um regime tecnológico digital de produção visual, de “imagem de massa” (Cubitt, 2016). A imaterialidade, a obsolescência programada, as versões de software disponibilizado e a dependência para produzir e criar visualidades sob a influência de regimes corporativos globais, que organizam sistemas e tecnologias, tornam esta afirmação paradoxal e problemática para uma constituição coletiva dessas representações, correndo o risco de mercantilizar a memória. Apesar disso, tem havido uma ligação entre técnicas culturais e memória, onde a “ideologia californiana” (Barbrook, 1999) organiza a cultura digital, num equilíbrio entre uma “cultura participativa” e um “empreendedorismo neoliberal”. No entanto, nunca uma quantidade tão grande de imagens foi produzida e partilhada. Hito Steyerl define estas imagens digitais como “imagens pobres” ou, como defendido neste trabalho, imagens precárias, ao criar uma correspondência entre o atual regime político de trabalho com uma produção visual digital, numa perspectiva não profissional. Mas em momentos de protesto, estas “imagens pobres”, reconhecidas como desvalorizadas, comunicam e criar memória e história, emancipando a noção de vídeo “vernacular” como parte da acção política (Snowdon, 2014). Foram momentos como os movimentos sociais de 2011, como as “Arab Springs”, “Movimento 12M”,“Madrid 15M” e “Occupy Wall Street”, em que as “redes de indignação e esperança”(Castells, 2012) se formaram e surgiram globalmente, num espaço público híbrido de contestação, que estas imagens podem ser novamente convocadas. Conforme analisado, na paisagem visual do Youtube.com, onde “a cultura participativa continua a ser o seu principal negócio” (Burgess e Green, 2009), estas imagens fazem parte do fluxo dos protestos e a sua recuperação constitui um ato de “reaparecimento”. Este reaparecimento é pensado aqui em diferentes gestos, respectivamente, como constituição de um corpus de vídeos de protesto, alinhados pela metáfora das imagens-pirilampos (Didi-Huber man, 2009), em tempos digitais, transportadas para o continente visual do Youtube.com. Também como parte de uma investigação prática, foi desenvolvido um protótipo de um documentário interativo, como um filme plataforma, organizado em torno da representação de uma “articulação do protesto” (Steyerl, 2002) onde as contribuições se organizam, entre linhas temporais individuais e coletivas. Como num editor de vídeo, é proposta uma mesa de montagem como experiência participativa, utilizando os materiais dos protestos. Este estudo propõe experimentar práticas artísticas como num “laboratório crítico” (Hirschhorn, 2013) com um efeito de “coletivos encontrados” presente no arquivo (Baron, 2013) que se constituem neste artefacto multimédia, interativo enquanto hipótese de persistência na memória coletiva, ou retrato coletivo de aparência política, a partir de momentos de protesto de movimentos sociais como os de 2011. Produzir uma intervenção activista e estética, uma intervenção artivista, como “forma de arte” política do século XXI (Weibel, 2014).Appearance is a political instance, as collective representation is a possibility to an emancipation of communities, of the “peuples” (Didi-Huberman, 2012), and a mechanism of constitution of cultural memory. The possibility of appearance that also participates in the history of collectives is a power relation in itself. In digital culture, global appearance seems to have exploded, but it has also been dissolved under a digital technological regime of “mass image”(Cubitt, 2016) visual production. Immateriality, programmed obsolescence, pervasive software and a dependence to produce and visualize under global corporations regimes, that organize systems and technologies, make this affirmation paradoxical and problematic to a collective constitution of these representations with a risk of commodifying memory. Despite this, there has been a connection between cultural techniques and memory, that under the “Californian Ideology” (Barbrook, 1999) digital culture is organized as a balance between “participatory culture” and “neoliberal entrepreneurship”. However, never such a quantity of images have been produced and shared. Hito Steyerl defines these as “poor images” or as stated here, defined as precarious images, making a correspondence between present political regimes of labour with visual and cultural production digitally produced, as non professional video. But in moments of uprisings, these poor images, commonly recognized as devalued, served to communicate and create memory and History, emancipating “vernacular” videos as part of the political actors (Snowdon, 2014) Such were moments as 2011 social movements, like “Arab Springs”, “Moviment12M”, “Madrid15M” and “Occupy Wall Street”, when “networks of outrage and hope” (Manuel Castells, 2012) stepped out globally, in an hybrid public space of insurrection. As analyzed in visual landscapes of Youtube.com where “participatory culture is its core business” (Burgess and Green, 2009), these images were part of the uprisings flow, and their retrieval constitutes an act of “reappearance”. This reappearance is oriented here in different gestures, respectively as a constitution of a corpus of protest videos, aligned through the metaphor of fireflies-images (Didi-Huberman, 2009) in digital times, transported to Youtube.com visual continents. Also, as part of a practice based research, a prototype of an interactive documentary, as a platform film, has been developed, aligned with a representation of an “articulation of protest”(Hito Steyerl, 2002) where, as an editing table, between individual and collective timelines, a participatory interactive experience is proposed, using remnant materials of protests. This study essays how to relate artistic practices of “Critical Laboratory” (Hirschhorn, 2013) with “found collective” effect of archive documentary (Jaimie Baron, 2013) related in this digital, online, multimedia, interactive, audiovisual artifact, produced by individuals with digital images, in a way to persist in collective memory and become a collective portrait of political appearance from historical moments of social movements uprisings as those of 2011. At the same time, an activist and aesthetic intervention, an artivist intervention takes place, as a political “XXIst Century art form” (Weibel, 2014)

The Forking Paths revisited: experimenting on interactive film

Based on the triad film-interactivity-experimentation, the applied research project The Forking Paths, developed at the Centre for Research in Arts and Communication (CIAC), endeavours to find alternative narrative forms in the field of Cinema and, more specifically, in the subfield of Interactive Cinema. The films in the project The Forking Paths invest in the interconnectivity between the film narrative and the viewer, who is given the possibility to be more active and engaged. At same time, the films undertake a research on the development of audio-visual language. The project is available at an online platform, which aims to foster the creation and web hosting of other Interactive Cinema projects in its different variables. This article focusses on the three films completed up to the moment: Haze, The Book of the Dead, and Waltz.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Understanding video through the lens of language

The increasing abundance of video data online necessitates the development of systems capable of understanding such content. However, building these systems poses significant challenges, including the absence of scalable and robust supervision signals, computational complexity, and multimodal modelling. To address these issues, this thesis explores the role of language as a complementary learning signal for video, drawing inspiration from the success of self-supervised Large Language Models (LLMs) and image-language models. First, joint video-language representations are examined under the text-to-video retrieval task. This includes the study of pre-extracted multimodal features, the influence of contextual information, joint end-to-end learning of both image and video representations, and various frame aggregation methods for long-form videos. In doing so, state-of-the-art performance is achieved across a range of established video-text benchmarks. Second, this work explores the automatic generation of audio description (AD) – narrations describing the visual happenings in a video, for the benefit of visually impaired audiences. An LLM, prompted with multimodal information, including past predictions, and pretrained with partial data sources, is employed for the task. In the process, substantial advancements are achieved in the following areas: efficient speech transcription, long-form visual storytelling, referencing character names, and AD time-point prediction. Finally, audiovisual behaviour recognition is applied to the field of wildlife conservation and ethology. The approach is used to analyse vast video archives of wild primates, revealing insights into individual and group behaviour variations, with the potential for monitoring the effects of human pressures on animal habitats

Self-Representation in an Expanded Field

Defined as a self-image made with a hand-held mobile device and shared via social media platforms, the selfie has facilitated self-imaging becoming a ubiquitous part of globally networked contemporary life. Beyond this selfies have facilitated a diversity of image making practices and enabled otherwise representationally marginalized constituencies to insert self-representations into visual culture. In the Western European and North American art-historical context, self-portraiture has been somewhat rigidly albeit obliquely defined, and selfies have facilitated a shift regarding who literally holds the power to self-image. Like self-portraits, not all selfies are inherently aesthetically or conceptually rigorous or avant-guard. But, –as this project aims to do address via a variety of interdisciplinary approaches– selfies have irreversibly impacted visual culture, contemporary art, and portraiture in particular. Selfies propose new modes of self-imaging, forward emerging aesthetics and challenge established methods, they prove that as scholars and image-makers it is necessary to adapt and innovate in order to contend with the most current form of self-representation to date. The essays gathered herein will reveal that in our current moment it is necessary and advantageous to consider the merits and interventions of selfies and self-portraiture in an expanded field of self-representations. We invite authors to take interdisciplinary global perspectives, to investigate various sub-genres, aesthetic practices, and lineages in which selfies intervene to enrich the discourse on self-representation in the expanded field today. Ace LehnerEdito

Be YourSELFIE: The Meanings of Gay Bodies on Instagram

This Major Research Proposal (MRP) observes common characteristics among selfies taken by gay men on Instagram, seeking to understand the meanings inherent in these images; to investigate their relation to precursory media, such as analogue photography; and their historical precedentes in self-portraiture. Through the lens of the queer theory and in addition to images and interviews with famous gay Instagrammers, this article also analyses Instagram’s popular gay hashtags, as well as compares selfies with the works of gay artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Tom of Finland and Pierre et Gilles

A Crack In Everything

Contained herein is a close examination of self-awareness and self-portraiture as it applies to the works of artist Jeffrey Hoffman. Water, frozen into various forms and combined with natural elements of wood, slowly melt over an indeterminable amount of time, each droplet documented as the process transforms the elements. Through this process, we see change. We see time. We see truth. This documentation of change and time through natural elements is where the artwork comes full circle. Working with new media to explore man\u27s interconnectivity to life, energy, and the cosmos, he produces time based installations, photographs, videos, and sculptures that serve as both existential metaphors and Tantric symbols. With the use of digital cameras and video, a record is created by which the disintegration which occurs from the unseen forces of gravity, heat and time upon sculptures made from natural elements and ice is examined. In its sculptural form, his work can be categorized as Installation art and Performance art due to its evolving nature. Each piece is intended to either change over time or to have that change halted by another temporal force like that of flowing electricity. The possibility of allowing varying levels of self-awareness to emerge through self portraiture is also examined. The existential, as well as the metaphysical, can be present in a physical form when the form is imbued with evidence of an evolutionary process. In many ways, the work serves as a self portrait. It is a means for Hoffman to examine his own existentialism as a student of the modern western world and life