How do we approach arts research in a pandemic?

In this article I suggest we will approach arts research in a pandemic as we have approached the pandemic itself. What this means is the methods we use will be contextualised by the five stages we experience during any state of personal misfortune (Kübler-Ross, 1969), these being: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance

Smart Regulation: Lessons from the Artificial Intelligence Act

The European Union (EU) has recently announced that it will consider a proposal to systematically regulate artificial intelligence (AI) systems. This regulation will add to the legacy of other data regulation acts adopted in the EU and move the EU closer to a comprehensive framework through which it can address rapidly evolving technologies like AI. The United States has yet to implement data regulation or AI regulation legislation at the federal level. This inaction by the United States could negatively impact global cooperation with the EU and China and innovation within the United States. The United States is currently the global leader in AI technology. However, if it wants to maintain that position, it should consider the negative repercussions of dragging its feet regarding regulation. This Comment will demonstrate why systematic regulation of the type being developed in the EU should be adopted in the United States

Virtually Invisible: Photography and the Image in the Demotic Space

The image is described by Flusser as being a significant surface. He suggests that it is the process of looking over such a surface that reveals in the image its significance. Through an exploration of practice and the photograph, it is proposed that the digital image is less a fixed surface and more a demotic space, into which the construction of personal narratives occurs. The digital image, disconnected from surface and its indexical subject, is argued to be a virtual representation of a relationship between memory, thought and significance. As Victor Burgin noted, photography contributes to hegemonic common sense and to the process of the general public exchanging meanings. Therefore, this modified understanding of the image, space and surface may usher in a sense in which photography can be described as an actant

Periphery Vision

In this chapter I begin by suggesting digital photographic images should be considered as being neither a purely visual experience nor a purely perceptual one. Instead, these may be somewhat limiting terms which confine our engagement with images to traditional linguistic interpretations. At a time when digital images are more amenable and liable to forms of recombination, fragmentation and to being encountered through associations and connections, semiotic approaches to signification may no longer be the most appropriate tools for describing and explaining images. In “Reading the Figural” (2001), D.N. Rodowick suggests a linguistic reading of images is both interrupted and disrupted by the different spatiotemporal organisation of contemporary forms of representation. His account of the figural is an attempt to reconcile image and text as being discursive in a non-linear, non-uniform and discontinuous sense. In this sense the figural is not a combination of image and text, it is an interstitial space located between them both that conforms to the properties of each but can be reduced to neither one nor the other

The Incompleteness of Looking

Augmented reality is fundamentally different from virtual reality: it does not map a real world environment into a digital one, as a virtual experience. Instead, it locates both reality and virtual within the same experiential frame. Through it, our interactions with reality are mediated via the fantasy of an augmented experience. Thus, augmented reality supplements what we see with the the purpose of trying to maintain our attention. What is most fascinating about augmented reality is how reality itself becomes a part of, rather than distinct from, digital information. It is in this sense that the very notion of seeing is fundamentally challenged. Since when augmented technology is not deployed, what is left is an apparent incompleteness of simply looking. But what are the consequences of confronting this incompleteness or blind spot? In this article I examine how augmented reality simply renders a structure that has always sustained the visual field