Seeing Ourselves Through Technology

Cultural and Media Studies, New Media and Digital Media, Media and Cultural Theory, Popular Cultur

Image at Surface

When we see an image, by here I mean a visual image such as a photograph, film or video, we perceive it at its surface, just like when we approach a physical object, we experience the physical surface of it. My project and research focus on digital image, which manifests the virtual materiality at the image surface. When we describe materiality at the physical surface, we usually describe a sensory experience of looking, touching, tasting, etc. Similarly, the materiality of an image is associated with bodily experiences—while our minds comprehend and dissect the image, our body are simultaneously sensing its surface. The image’s materiality, influenced by the recorded material, space, time, rhythm, motion, and story, corresponds to the physical space, real time, physical motion, as well as our body. Eventually the recorded materials in the filmic scenes appear as the imagery materiality at the image surface. Our experience of the image surface is then connected with our perception of the physical surface, and our attachment to the physical material shifts to an attachment to the virtual body

A Portrait of a ‘Selfie’ in the Making

This paper focuses on an iconological analysis of Roberto Schmidt’s photograph of Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt taking a selfie with U.S. President Barack Obama and U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron during late President Nelson Mandela’s memorial service on December 10th, 2013, at the First National Bank Stadium in Soweto. This analysis shows the compositional strength of the photograph and argues that part of its power rests in the way it contains, albeit unintentionally, a sort of lexicon of portraiture, iconically juxtaposing new forms (selfie-posture) with others that evoke cultural archives, such as the Renaissance female profile portrait or the front-faced memorial portrait.Schmidt’s photograph also offers an image that captures the complex nature of the public and private images of public figures, and the issues of visibility in relation to power or fame. This leads to comments on Obama’s use of selfies in his communication strategy during his time at the White House.Finally, the multiplicity of gaze directions in Roberto Schmidt’s photograph as well as its meta-photographical dimension opens up a discussion on the more general issue on the nature of the selfie per se, with its transformation of the connection between sitters, photographer and viewer, in terms of distance, focus and exchange of gazes. Current technological developments of front-faced cameras, allowing an unprecedented increase in reproducibility and exposure levels, have spread conventionality in selfie photography, not only making for a normative, standardized or formulaic arrangement of the body posture, but also for a transformation of both the photographed’s and the viewer’s gaze, arguably weakening the potential experience of an aura for the viewer, and leading to a type of image (selfies) and skewed gaze which, as argued by Bertrand Naivin, breaks away from the traditions of (self-) portraits

“Nobody Is Ever Alone”: The Use of Social Media Narrative to Include the Viewer in SKAM

publishedVersio

Augmented facets: A semiotics analysis of augmented reality facial effects

Augmented reality facial effects represent a new trend in social media communication based on ‘short forms’. The article proposes a tripartite analysis: a semiotic analysis of digital facial effects used to empower the natural users’ faces; a deconstructionist analysis of Spark by Meta, one of the major software applications to create such effects and, finally, a critical reflection on the practices prescribed by Spark and the stereotypical aesthetics of augmented selfies. The conclusion states that such forms of augmented reality effects must be conceived not as oriented to the cognitive improvement of users’ performance but rather as forms of users’ empowerment and self-awareness.    &nbsp

Data’s Intimacy: Machinic Sensibility and the Quantified Self

Today, machines observe, record, sense the world – not just for us, but sometimes instead of us (in our stead), and even indifferently to us humans. And yet, we remain human. Correlationism may not be up to a comprehensive ontology, but the ways in which we encounter, and struggle to make some kind of sense of, machinic sensibility matters. The nature of that encounter is not instrumentality, or even McLuhanian extension, but a full-blown ‘relationship’ where the terms by which machines ‘experience’ the world, and communicate with each other, parametrises the conditions for our own experience. This essay will play out one such relationship currently in the making: the boom in self-tracking technologies, and the attendant promise of data’s intimacy. This essay proceeds in three sections, all of which draw on a larger research project into self-tracking and contemporary data epistemologies. It thus leverages observations from close reading of self-tracking’s publicisation in the mass media between 2007 and 2016; analysis of over fifty self-tracking products, some of it through self-experimentation; and interviews and ethnographic observation, primarily of the ‘Quantified Self’ connoisseur community. The first section examines the dominant public presentations of self-tracking in early twenty-first century discourse. This discourse embraces a vision of automated and intimate self-surveillance, which is then promised to deliver superior control and objective knowledge over the self. Next, I link these promises to the recent theoretical turns towards the agency of objects and the autonomous sensory capacities of new media to consider the implications of such theories – and the technological shifts they address – for the phenomenology of the new media subject. Finally, I return to self-tracking discourse to consider its own idealisation of such a subject – what I call ‘data-sense’. I conclude by calling for a more explicit public and intellectual debate around the relationships we forge with new technologies, and the consequences they have for who – and what – is given which kinds of authority to speak the truth of the ‘self’

"Why can't I take a full-shot of myself? Of course I can!" Studying selfies as socio-technological affective practices

This article studies selfie-production as a socio-technological affective practice, bringing attention to a new and largely unstudied type of selfies, private selfies. Discussing an example of five Finnish women's experiences with a body positive #righttobeseen campaign, the article argues for selfie scholarship to move beyond analyses of representation and image-sharing on social media platforms, if it is to understand selfies' diverse role in selfie-takers' lives. The article offers an analytical schema for studying selfies as socio-technological affective practices, combining the method of interview studies with affect theory and examination of selfies' socio-technological underpinnings

Protopian mises-en-scène: The collaborative design of a queer femme augmented reality face filter

Augmented reality face filters, found on social media platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat, have gained in popularity in recent years. While some are amusing and playful, like butterflies flying around you, the filter landscape is primarily populated by “beauty filters”, a digital beautification of face features that reinforce heteronormative standards. While this research-creation project aims to challenge the current filter norms, it does so with a reparative approach: it focuses on the generative potential of face filters and offers a gender nonconformant alternative by creating a face filter through a participatory methodology. I led two workshops that I held with three queer femme friends of mine who were also invested in challenging the norms of face filters. The result, seen more as an experimental prototype than a final design, was shared with participants to get their feedback. A key aim was to create visions for a non-heteronormative augmented reality future. As such, protopian futurism, the prototyping of hopeful and radically inclusive futures, as developed by Monika Bielskyte, is a guiding concept along Eve Sedgwick’s reparative reading. The workshops resulted in a collaborative experience of self-discovery and the development of new face filter themes

Media language: Video practices

This project explores the blog as a context considering the articulations between the context and content (blog and videos) forming this project. In order to do so, hyperlinks to practitioners’ videos (uploaded to individual Vimeo accounts), are gathered together on a blog page. Contributors are asked to consider the prompt of a glass of water for a video-based active reflection on their practice. A glass of water is an object of the everyday, yet one often present in interviews; this project started as a series of interviews. The water or the glass can be present or not present in the video, for example materiality could be considered, or perhaps the ‘publicness’ connected with the water glass at a site of presentation could be explored. Other ways may be found. This is a collaborative work where practitioners survey their individual use of media through the prescribed method of digital video. The result of the work can be accessed on Seminar Project website ( http://www.kmbosy.com/blog/seminar-project)