User:Emily/20151203

Introduction

One question or issue

To investigating not a subject but a question -> how we produce semiotic objects(specific as below) and how they function in mediated discourse.

Right now my project boilded down on two parts; The first is that, how could I use personal belongings representing in visual language to penetrate the machanism of MacGuffin/Objet petit a, the guise of the “Other“. The second is bassed on existed linkage between cameras and firearms to create a group of hypothetic object and footage. Both the objects and moving images are hybrid of reality and fiction. In this case the objects I create will be the MacGuffins to reflect on misrecognised senarios, and I am more favor on this part.

Method of analysis

Semiotic concepts on MacGuffin/Objet petit a

History linkage of cameras and firearms both technically and culturally.

Contemporary examples and the emergence of this social semiotic.

The thesis will be a project report walking through the stories via objects.

Bibliography & Articles:

Simulacra and Simulation (Jean Baudrillard, 1981)

The Sublime Object of Ideology (Slavoj Žižek, 1989)

Semiotics for Beginners (Daniel Chandler, 1994)

Enjoy your symptom! (Slavoj Žižek, 1992)

The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (George Kubler, 1962)?

"Being – A MaGuffin: How to Preserve the Desire to Think", Salmagundi No. 90/91 (Spring-Summer 1991), pp. 191–193. Trans. David Adams.

Seminar on The Purloined Letter

Truffaut/Hichcock, Hichcock/Truffaut, and the Big Reveal

Tom McCarthy on realism and the real

The Symptom 9 editorial by J. A. (retreived from http://www.lacan.com/symptom/?p=38)

Art Works:

Pierre Huyghe, A Journey That Wasn’t, 2005, 16 mm film, 21:43 minutes

Shadow World: Johan Grimonprez & a talk in Witte de With given by Johan Grimonprez and Adam Kleinman

Materials:

The link between the camera and gun is evident in a shared metaphor, but also historically close as well.

1. In the 1860s the development of breech loading guns, using chemicals enclosed in a cartridge with an interior firing pin, gave the hunter a mobile weapon with ammunition that did not explode in the users face. At the same time dry-plate photography replaced plates hand coated with collodion, thereby solving some of the chemical restraints on mobile photography. 2. Although some dry plate cameras were explicitly modelled on Colt revolver mechanisms, and cinema cameras looked to machine guns for design elements, there was still a lot of camera equipment to be carried while travelling if one wanted to make images. 3. Eastman partnered with William Walker, the first camera maker to use manufacturing methods pioneered by gun makers to permit interchangeable parts. But it was their use of chemistry that provided both the greatest breakthrough and the clearest link with gun technology. 4. Eastman and Walker developed a paper negative that used guncotton. A French inventor extended that by creating a gelatinized guncotton that could be cut into strips, thereby also permitting the first modern smokeless gun powder. When the first Kodak was released in 1888 it took 100 exposures on sheets of dry, etherized, guncotton backed up paper. 5. The next development involved Eastman Kodak’s chief chemist adding amyl acetate to guncotton, creating a stable “celluloid”. A year later two English chemists made the explosive cordite by adding nitroglycerine and acetone to guncotton. As Landau concludes, “breech-loading guns and the Kodak camera not only drew on the same language; they both sealed the same sort of chemicals in their cartridges.”

digital

Misrecognised situations

In 2014(taken around 2012) a four-year-old Syrian girl(boy), Adi Hudea ‘surrendered’ when a photographer, Osman Sagirli(Turkish) pointed his camera at her and she assumed it was a gun (BBC investigated)

2009 Iraq Collateral Murder(released classifed documents by Wikileak)

2004 battle for Fallujah in Iraq and the flowing catoon made by Jon Kudelka

1968 Saigon Execution photographed by Eddie Adams, he writed "Two people died in that photograph: the recipient of the bullet and GENERAL NGUYEN NGOC LOAN. The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapons in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. ... What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American people?'.... This picture really messed up his life. He never blamed me. He told me if I hadn't taken the picture, someone else would have, but I've felt bad for him and his family for a long time. ... I sent flowers when I heard that he had died and wrote, "I'm sorry. There are tears in my eyes."