Jujube/abstracts-text

Separating from Jujube/methods-session-3, this is a space for abstracts and less wholistic summaries intended for less relevant text. I am also including here early readings (some of which are notated with more details, but are of less importance in the context of my research now), i.e. those from Javi's classes, text on artistic research (as a discipline) and writing about contemporary art.

Criticizing Photographs: An Introduction to Understanding Images

Terry Barrett

The book gives a comprehensive introduction to photography criticism. The author is American and uses a fair share of examples from the era of Cindy Sherman. I find the following worth the read.

Verbs associated with photography criticism

describe, interpret, contextualize, judge

Facts about artist, title, medium, size, date and place or type of presentation are meaningful descriptive data.

Interpretation based on intentionalism (whether artist achieved what they set out to do) is problematic for a few reasons: a photographer might not have expressed or does not want to express his/her intent - not all photographers engage in both image-making and criticizing - artists working intuitively don't "intend" when making. The interpretive task should be on the viewer. An artist's explanation is not more privileged than other criticism.

From brief section on interpretation and feeling: Feelings provide important clues to learning about the content of an image...What is that I am feeling? Why am I feeling it? Is there a certain subject or form or a particular use of the media that I am reacting to? Being attuned to our feelings when viewing images is a way to get beyond the obvious, to begin to identify the connotations of images. (58)

The community of interpreters: critics, artists, historians, dealers, collectors and viewers — I see this as a rather conservative circle. It rings true, and the significance of each of the roles depend on the artist's operational circumstance.

Types of photography and the interpretive process (notes of my own stance)

4 stylistic trends from Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography

straight (texture, recorded by camera as is, Ansel Adams), formalistic (form for its own sake, Man Ray), documentary (journalistic), equivalent (inner meaning)

The author added new categories: descriptive, explanatory, interpretive, ethically evaluative, aesthetically evaluative, theoretical. -- I don't find these entirely useful for artists, perhaps more for curators and historians...

A few of the author's bullet points. It is obvious he criticism is part of larger cultural theories. I don't necessarily agree with these seeming aphorisms — they are his opinions and point of view. But it's worth comparing to how I see an image and deem it meaningful when I see it.

- SUBJECT MATTER + MEDIUM + FORM + CONTEXTS = MEANING

- Interpretations are persuasive arguments.

- Photographs are cultural rather than natural.

- Photographs should be seen as opinions.

- Photographs acquire meanings by how they are read.

- All images are in part about the cultures in which they emerge.

- All images are in part about other images.

- The admissibility of an interpretation is determined by a community of interpreters and the community is self-correcting. <-- this speaks about the wider field of art.

- Good interpretations invite us to see for ourselves and to think on our own.

judging a photograph

Good judgement v. not-so good

A list of adjectives: TBC

A few questions that help me explain images:

- By what criterion does this photograph seem to want to be judged?

- By what criterion will I judge this image?

- How might I help someone else appreciate this photograph?

- Is this photograph better than that photograph?

- Is this a good use of photography?

theory and photography history

ontology, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics

Screens

book ed. Dominique Chateau & José Moure

Archaic Paradigms of the Screen and Its Images

José Moure

"My concern here is with the adoption of the screen as a condition of filmic imagery. Neither of the earliest successful moving-image systems had foreseen projection on a screen as the mode of display."

Projection + screen becomes a standard after Lumière's cinematograph.

Chronology:

Phantasmagoria, late 18th century

Lantern-based shows, mid 19th century

broad adoption of screen + projection in beginning 20th century

The essay lists specific developments in material choices and asthetics (eg. beveled) of the screen. The scale and size differed among countries (e.g. UK and US).

Competition with television provoked the development of scale and shape of the auditorium. 3D, immersive experience, and IMAX are some examples of the developments.

>> The Stuff of Screens

Ian Christie

>> The concept of the Mental Screen: The Internalized Screen, the Dream Screen, and the Constructed Screen

Roger Odin

Haptic aesthetics

Chantal Faust: lead session at Transimage Conference , Plymouth UK 2016

In this lyrical paper, Faust intends to communicate the relationship between haptics and visual arts. She states that haptics pushes the limits of optics, creates a type of non-visual consumption and fuses time ("the touch of an object can travel through time...")

She tries to demonstrate the paradox of haptics in visual arts through examples of artworks. Doubting Thomas by Caravaggio portrays touching and the want to know. Various versions of Noli me tangere show Mary's desire to believe. [1] Piplotti Rist's works depicts touch, skin and pressure. Yet neither the painting nor the photograph is an object meant for touch. between believing and knowing. Although the examples of art pieces evoke a sense of touch, it is the eyes that see the touch, think and try to understand the touch. Faust is aware of the privilege of the sight and writes that art history has "legitimised, certified and ratified" optics. The phrase visual arts indicates the (untouchable) art object.

Even though she claims "the haptic is a kind of bastard uprising against the regime of the visual," as long as she uses visual art examples, it is unclear how haptics create a type of non-visual consumption. Her mention of Duchamp shows the questioning of the (visual) boundary, but she does not go further. And when it comes to the relationship between touch and time, Faust's arguments are even weaker.

She brings up the touch screen as the artifice that reduces the distance between touch and thought. This contradicts her previous paragraphs which argues seeing as the process that represents thinking. With no clear relationship between touching and thinking, the contemplation on touch screen falls hollow. She uses the example of Idris Kahn's Homage to Bernd Becher to illustrate the condensing of images, which, again, has little to do with haptics (at least from what she includes in the paper).

This is a paper with nice quotes, but not enough substance to sustain its own arguments.

//

Takeaway. Read more Laura U Marks and perhaps Goethe:

"Haptic images do not invite identification with a figure so much as they encourage a bodily relationship between the viewer and the image. Thus it is less appropriate to speak of the object of a haptic look than to speak of a dynamic subjectivity between looker and image."

"The hands want to see, the eyes want to caress" - Goethe

Haptical Cinema

Antonia Lant, 1995

The author looks at early cinema and analyzes the development of the spatial language of the image: "a cinema of frontal presentation to a cinema of articulated depth."

Lant uses egyptian relief as a reference point of somewhat flat space. She also intends to chart the different approaches of spaces through films with Egypt as a subject. "Egyptiana...cue[s] both cinema's actual flatness (the screen and film stock) and the moving human body somehow contained within it." (63)

She includes one analysis on objectivity via Aloïs Riegl. "[H]aptic work could be almost fully understood...through touch, because of its clear outline or boundary...and a separation of the object from the viewer." Visual work relied on "the spectator's recognition of shared realities."

Aesthetics of haptics: an experience approach to haptic interaction design

Wendy Dassen & Miguel Bruns Alonso

Although this paper is written for the discipline of interaction design, the topics mentioned by the researchers are relevant to haptic aesthetics in a broader context.

"Touch is the only sense that is reciprocal. Therefore, haptics has the potential to take full advantage of our perceptual-motor skills and fully enable embodied interaction with the digital domain." (255)

To arrive at the definition of haptic aesthetics, the researchers devised a design process. First, they turn experiential knowledge (how does a wooly blanket feel) into material sketches. Then they abstract the sensations and develop prototypes that mimic the "feeling." In the paper they detail their these sketches (e.g. constant force v. gradual force), but the focus is more on the implication of the method. The researchers state that "it seems impossible to think of aesthetics as an inherent quality of haptics, as experiences emerge in context and in use." (257)

It will be interesting to position this way of thinking along side theoretical framework rooted in phenomenology. When it comes to cinema, the question will be, how to transmit the feeling of wool through the film?

An audio-haptic aesthetic framework influenced by visual theory

Angela Chang and Conor O'Sullivan

Another paper for the design field (interface design), but with useful implications for other contexts.

The paper is motivated by the mapping of information to a vibrotectile interface. The researchers use the Munsell color wheel as an analogy, and develops a matrix that measures different combinations of audio-haptic interfaces.

The paper also takes inspiration from audio-visual theories for cinematography, in particular, Michel Chion's theories about the relation of audio to vision. "Synchronization (when audio happens at the same time as visual event), temporal linearization (using audio to create a sense of time for visual effects), masking (using audio to hide or draw attention away from visual information) and the synchresis (use of sound and vision for suggesting or giving illusion to add value onto the moviegoing experience)" interested the researchers.

The audio-haptic media design process consists of choosing the interface and the vibration frequencies. The interface used in this study are multifunction transducers (MFTs) in the form of a puff or a Motorola A1000 phone; the frequencies are 20Hz-20kHz, aka the audio-haptic spectrum. The researchers chose 75 audio-haptic sounds from available sound libraries but find them difficult to categorize.

After comparing prior frameworks, such as plotting amplitude over duration, and classifying sounds as "warm" or "cool" (based on user's qualitative feedback),the researchers tried to map audio-haptic information to the color wheel. They organised the stimuli with the ADSR (attack-decay-sustain-release) envelope and observed several aesthetic trends:

Amplitude corresponds to saturation. The higher the amplitude, the more noticeable it is.

Attack/decay corresponds to intensity or haptic attention. Faster (sharper) attack.decays are more noticeable than smoother attack/decays.

Longer events, such as rhythmic or sustained stimuli, are also more noticeable (audibly "warmer").

The researchers further inferred two main compositional effects regarding balance and textural variation.

TBC TBC TBC

The cinematic

Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda, response to "3 Questions sur: Photo et Cinéma', in Photogénies, no.5, ed. Raymond Bellour, Sylain Roumette, Catherine Sentis (Paris: Centre National de la Photographic, April 1984) n.p. Translated by Ian Farr, 2006

Photography never ceases to instruct me when making films. And cinema reminds me at every instant that it films motion for nothing, since every image becomes a memory, and all memories congeal and set. In all photography there's the suspension of movement, which in the end is the refusal of movement. There motion is in vain. In all film there's the desire to capture the motion of life, to refuse immobility. But in film the still image is in vain, like the foreboding of a car breakdown, like watching out for death.

Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze, Beyond the Movement-Image//1985. Cinema 2: The Time-Image (london: Athlone Press, 1989) 16-18

The vase in Late Spring is interposed between the daughter's half smile and the beginning of her tears. There is becoming, change, passage. But the form of what changes does not itself change, does not pass on. This is time, time itself, 'a little time in its pure state': a direct time-image, which gives what changes the unchanging form in which the change is produced. The night that changes into day, or the reverse, recalls a still life on which light falls, either fading or getting strong (That Night's Wife, Passing Fancy, 1930). The still life is time, for everything that changes is in time, but time does not itself change, it could itself change only in another time, indefinitely. At the point where the cinematographic image most directly confronts the photo, it also becomes most radically distinct from it. Ozu's still lifes endure, have a duration, over ten seconds of the vase: this duration of the vase is precisely the representation of that which endures, through the succession of changing states... It is in this way that nature or stasis was defined, according to Schrader, as the form that links the everyday in 'something unified and permanent'. There is no need at all to call on a transcendence. In everyday banality, the action-image and even the movement-image tend to disappear in favour of pure optical situations, but these reveal connections of a new type, which are no longer sensory-motor and which bring the emancipated senses into direct ration with time and thought. This is the very special extension of the opsign [pure optical image]: to make time and thought perceptible, to make them visible and of sound... <----- still image here directly contrasts that in Varda's view, but it makes sense, how still life (shots of objects) can convey a passage of time, though not always

Peter Wollen

Peter Wollen, 'Fire and Ice', in Photographies, no.4 (Paris, April 1984) 118-20.

The lover of photography is fascinated both by the instant and by the past. The moment captured in the image is of near-zero duration and location in an ever-receding 'then'. At the same time, the spectator's 'now', the moment of looking at the image , has no fixed duration. It can be extended as long as fascination lasts and endlessly reiterated as long as curiosity returns. This contrasts sharply with film, where the sequence of images is presented to the spectator with a predetermined duration and, in general, is only available at a fixed programme time.

...

Photography appeared as a spatial rather than temporal art, vertical rather than horizontal (simultaneity of features rather than consecutiveness) and one which allowed the spectator time to veer away on a train of thought, circle back, traverse and criss-cross the image. Time, for Barthes, should be the prerogative of the reader/spectator: a free rewriting time rather than an imposed reading time.

Memory

Margaret Iversen: Resistance to Replication (description of Rodney Graham's work)

A wider reading on Benjamin reveals the motivation of resistance to replication. The auratic lies in the reciprocity of the gaze, "bound up with...memory and present experience." Iversen suggests that the fear that the "intersubjectivity, memory, the unconsious and exposure to the other" would disappear is the reason for the resistance.

The example of Rodney Graham's work ('An Aside', part of Tacita Dean, a show curated in 2005): a large 35mm cinema projector, a series of static b&w images of a sleek 1930s German typewriter, slowlly buried by a silent fall of snow-like sifted flour. "These just-obsolete technologies seem to condense both a promise for the future and a melancholic acknowledgement of the fading of those hopes. As 'found objects' they weave together past and future, memory, anticipation, and create a fabric of associations."

from Tate Papers (Autumn 2007)

Peggy Phelan: The Ontology of Performance: Representation without Reproduction (description of Sophie Calle's work)

Sophie Calle photographed the galleries of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

"Calle interviewed various visitors and members of the museum staff, asking them to describe the stolen paintings. She then transcribed these texts and placed them next to the photographs of the galleries. Her work suggests that the descriptions and memories of the paintings constitute their continuing 'presence'... The fact these descriptions vary considerably - even at times wildly - only lends credence to the fact that the interaction between the art object and the spectator is, essentially, performative = and therefore, resistant to the claims of validity and accuracy endemic to the discourse of reproduction... Calle asks where seeing and memory forget the object itself and enter the subject's own set of personal meanings and associations."

from Unmarked: The Politics of Performance

Contemporary art (writing)

International Art English

article [2] by Alix Rule & David Levine

In International Art English (acronym IAE), the authors present a linguistic study of the anglophone language surrounding contemporary art, and illustrate the discourse development of contemporary art through the adoption of this language. For this purpose, the authors analyze 13 years of e-flux announcements, the most widely-read listserv by an increasingly global contemporary art field through algorithms from Sketch Engine, a linguistic analysis tool.

They investigate the vocabulary, syntax, semantics and genealogy of the text (referred to as the corpus). They suggest that IAE originates from the highbrow criticism journal October from 1976, where editors changed the discourse of art criticism and translated French post-structuralist texts from Barthes, Baudrillard and Deleuze as well as the Germany's Frankfurt School. This editorial bias gave the language lexical peculiarities from French (e.g. the suffixes -ion, -ity, -ality, and -ization) and German (e.g. the prefixes para-, proto-, post-, hyper-).

The authors thus summarize the traits of IAE, such as: the acquisition of alien functions by ordinary words, the emphasis of otherwise redundant pairings and the fondness towards using more words instead of fewer. They thus demonstrate IAE as a distinctive language circulated in contemporary art, proliferated by the spread of biennials and the enabling of the internet.

The authors place the IAE in its own categories similar to that of a technical language (such as that shared among academics or car mechanics). They observe that although old users of the IAE came from academia and formal art criticism, new users are from increasingly diverse origin: notably, gallerists, curators and the artists themselves (for writing press releases, grant proposals and artist statements). These new users perpetuate the language and stylize the discourse with ever-changing trend.

The authors conclude that art criticism is in crisis and the future of IAE will be an implosion.

How to write about contemporary art

Williams, G. (2014)

In this opinionated manual of art-writing, Gilda Williams brings insights to contemporary art. She is well aware of the fallacies of International Art English, and offers readers well-selected examples to illustrate good art-writing.

The advice she offers is based on her argument: that both the viewer and the artwork need the art-words. The viewer needs a "steady framework" to under stand the work while the work is "completed by criticism." (P25) She believes art-writers should establish themselves as trustworthy, not only having impartial views (P26) but also possessing the knowledge about the work (scholarship in art history, ability to appraise artwork, technical knowledge of media, familiarity of the artist, "an instinctive sensibility for quality, code-name 'taste'") and the risk-taking ability to express original ideas . (P26, 33, 165)

She emphasizes the importance of choosing an idea well and communicating it "through unclichéd and thoughtful words,"(68) and advises against interpretation of the artist's psychology through the art work (89).

She distinguishes explaining (museum wall text, catalogue, extended captions) from evaluating (review) texts. While the former calls for concise expression, both explaining and evaluating texts follow a structure of: what are you seeing/what might it mean/why this might matter. The latter, rather than summarizing press releases or the curator's text, regards the art writer's own idea crucial for taking the readers through understanding the artwork (165).

What I find the most relevant are: reminders on vocabulary choices, how to write a brief about a moving image work, and how to write an artist statement.

The vocabularies should be grounded in solid nouns, singular and well-chosen adjectives, precise verbs and free from adverbs. Avoid piling up abstractions, lists, jargons (Ch4, 68) and tired metaphor ("seismic shift" and other geological types (102). To write an explaining brief about a moving image work is not to summarize the whole film but rather find a guiding idea from the work and express it clearly (135). To write an artist statement is to find a way to sincerely say who you are and what your work is. The statements also aids the artist in thinking, so the words must first ring true to the artist who writes it rather than a guess of what the reader wants to see.

~~

Specific advice/exercises on writing artist statements:

- Read statements from notable artists.

- Concreteness and specificity. Create images through words.

- Which decision (whether hard-won, accidental, or bearing unanticipated results) produced the most meaningful outcome, for you?

- Which moments changed everything? What were you really excited about as you worked? Edit out the rest.

- Ontology, epistemology, metaphysics carry specific technical meaning; use sparingly, only if essential.

- Ground your reader in media or images they can see/identify a key theme, idea or principle that holds your art together.

- Imagine you are writing directly to the one person who understands your work best.

Art and Artistic Research

Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (2010)

Throw the stones really hard at your target; or, rest in peace

Efva Lilja

As an artist, professor and vice chancellor, Lilja speaks about her personal strive, pedagogical exchange and visions for an infrastructure that supports curiosity-driven research. She believes artists have the ability to "possess a unique form of knowledge which is communicated through the finished work." A research environment such as a higher education institution provides space, time and resources for reflection and further development of practice, allowing insights to emerge. She criticizes market demands as it curtails artist needs, opting for "productivity" and "effectiveness." (However, she contradicts herself by writing "our graduates can go out and compete for work in a national and international labor market." This shows her struggle to bridge the vision of artistic research as a way of knowledge production and the lack/difficult of it carrying it through because of existing norms.) As a vice-chancellor, she advocates for a cultural infrastructure friendly to the growth of knowledge and ethics toward a democratic society. She is Swedish.

On the difference between artistic research and artistic practice

Germán Toro-Pérez

Toro-Pérez argues that art and research (mostly associated with science) are two ways of appropriating the world, and have respective relationship to truth. Using electroacoustic music practice as an example, the author traces the development of art music from "an aesthetics of expression" to that of "experience." He asks the readers: what makes a psychoacoustic experiment different from the investigations that lead to a specific art composition? Based on Heidegger's definition of research, research directs toward knowing. In the author's view, art practice directs toward experiencing (although done with rigor). Further, Heidegger attributes "character of constant activity" as part of research, marking institutions a necessary environment for it. The same cannot be said about artistic practice where knowledge is dealt with "selectively and methodically but not systemically." Thus, the author answers the question by pointing out that an experiment leads to a proof or disproof of hypothesis, whereas a composition (albeit through investigation) leads to sensory experiences.

The author ends the essay with an observation that while research leads to knowledge, the knowledge can be uncertain; and while art creates specific experiences, the experiences are real, and thus "opens the possibility of experiencing the truth, but does not guarantee it." (In this context, I am not too concerned about making the schematic distinction of reality and truth.)

Whereas I agree with the author that art and research are ontologically different, I think the grey area in his argument is the "investigations" that lead to the production of an art work. If those investigations produce knowledge (and so happen to be done in an institutional environment and distributed for the public good), can the work of art be categorized as a work of research?

Javi's classes

The Glitch Moment(um)

Menkman, R. (2011) The glitch moment(um). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures (Network notebooks, 04).

The Glitch Moment(um): A Void in Techno-Culture (p.29-31)

The author argues that glitch disrupts the flow of the technology which delivers the content (eg. broadcast TV). Glitch reveals the involvement of the machine in front of the user/reader/viewer and raises the question of authorship. It encourages the audience to reflect on the medium/media.

(I question its effectiveness.)

The Glitch Art Genre: Between the Void and Commoditized Form (p.55-56) + The Genre Paradox (p.57-58)

Glitch art represents unstable processes and the associated conceptual thinking. Rather than inventing new terms for artworks that incorporate this representation (which does not differentiate between disruption and commodity) — it clarifies to theorize glitch art as a genre with thematic content, iconography and narrative structure. The genre fulfills the expectations to exploit the medium and question "the use and function of technologies, their conventions and expectations." Under a common genre the materiality of glitch can be studied closely.

The challenge (or paradox) of the genre framework is the difficulty to distinguish a deliberate, considered work involving glitch (and its process) from something that merely appropriates the retro-nostalgic aesthetics. Constant improvements in technology renders previous versions of it obsolete. Because of that, glitch exists anachronistically outside of the serious intention of a genre (eg. "faux vintage" filter on Instagram). It calls for the spectator's knowledge in "media technology texts, aesthetics and machinic processes" to recognize glitch art and the message within.

(See footnotes on p56 for literature on genre.)

The Emancipation of Dissonance Glitch (p.65-66)

Glitch questions authorship and technology used to convey that. It is a critical reflection on the medium and creates awareness among the spectators.

("Gentrified errors" is a good phrase.)

The work of art in the age of digital recombination

De Mul, Jos. “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Recombination.” Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology, edited by Marianne Van den Boomen et al., Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2009, pp. 95–106.

appearing on P95 Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology, Amsterdam University Press

Using the text from "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction," De Mul argues that digital recombination leads to a return to auratic qualities of objects. He summarizes the changes in the value of the work of art: from cult value to exhibition value (through mechanical reproduction) to manipulation value (through digital recombination.)

Computing and database — used somewhat synonymously in this paper — become the successor of the machine. The relational database (a development from the relational model of data by Edgar F. Codd, dating back to the 1970's) presents a procedure in structuring, re-structuring and partially re-creating information based on each copy of the previous database(s). Like the mechanical (re)production, this (re)production process of recombination and manipulation turns into "material metaphors."

The term "database aesthetics" refers to the user interface and the interactions it enables (or allows?) within the designed structures. De Mul emphasizes that manipulation holds, and creates, value. In this new aesthetics, art is no longer for the worshippers or spectators, but rather for users. The change in this vocabulary is indeed interesting. However, do users gain any agency through the new aesthetics. De Mul only makes clear the manipulation value to the politicians, but not to the users.

~~

This essay leaves a few questions:

• Benjamin theorizes that the value the work of art derives from its uniqueness and singularity in space and time (cult value.) For the work of art, why is exhibition value valuable? (The example used here is Paris Hilton, "famous for being famous", and the success of politicians such as Reagan.)

• Although De Mul discusses "political art," he does not clarify the relationship between politics and political art. Along this (lack of) logic, it is hard to justify why manipulation value is relevant for a work of art. Do I assume that manipulation value translates from politics to political art? Or do I abolish the distinction between politics and art all at once?