Thesis outline

Thesis outline

Intro

For my thesis, I would like to write about my video project and my process until the graduation show. I am planning to make it like a documentation of my former project and its background. My graduation project is about the Syrian civil war, refugee crisis and immigration problems through the objects that I had collected from destroyed houses in Syria in 2013.

In my thesis there will be two parts. The first part is about our response to images of horror. How do we get used to see this type of images? What is the role of mainstream media? Do we get pleasure out of images of horror?

The second part is about, what is an object? What it does? What can we trace trough objects?

In order to explain my graduation project better I will deeply clarify about these two subjects. And it will also be helpful for me to elaborate the graduation project.

I.

I was reading on this subject from the American photographer and writer Susan Sontag’s 'Regarding the pain of others'. In her book she tries to explain what we experience when we see violent photographs.

Do we feel the same when we look at same images? We do have same responses ‘despite of different education and traditions behind us'. These may effect our feelings but same feelings. We call them horror and disgust. " War you say, is an abomination, barbarity, war must be stopped at whether cost. And we echo your words. War is an abomination, a barbarity, war must be stopped,” says Sontag at the beginning of her book. She adds later on, that this is the common idea about war. When we look at images of war we say, this is what it's like. This is what war does. And that, that is what is does, too. War tears. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.

In her book she is also explaining about how violent images use as a part of propaganda. All images of war were taken during wars wait to be explained or falsified by their captions. For example during the Bosnian war, the same photograph of the children killed in the shelling of a village were passed around Serb and Croat propaganda by changing its caption. The children's death could be used and reused. Because war photography or violence brings this propaganda. It scares people. Of course it is an image and shows how war looks when it is seen from far. We see the violent images in the morning in the newspaper at breakfast but dismiss its recollection with the coffee.

War aesthete Ernst Junger observed, in 1930, the identification of the camera and the gun, ' shooting' a subject and says these are congruent activities: It is the same intelligence, whose weapons of annihilation can locate the enemy to exact second and meter.

In fact, there many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding at a distance, through medium of photography other people's pain. Photography of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information that terrible things happen. Who can forget a photograph of man standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square in China.

II.

In the second part of my video project, I am planning to use the objects that I collected. And in the second chapter of my thesis, I would like to investigate this topic through these questions; what is an object? What it does? What can we trace trough objects?

Recently, I have been reading a number of post-humanist philosophers –such as Bruno Latour, Tristan Garcia, Heidegger, Lefebvre, Bachelard, Imam Ghazali, Graham Harman all of whom counter the humanist tradition from Kant. This approach is in opposition to Idealism, which emphasizes presence and is human-mind centered.

The word Anthropocentric means that human privilege in the world, the human oriented world where the human is regarded as supreme species. But we are not the only ones who live in this world where everything is connected. I believe we shape our environment (habitat, objects around us, nature) and at the same time our environment shapes us.

"To balance our accounts of society, we simply have to turn our exclusive attention away from humans and look also at non-humans" (objects in my case) says Bruno Latour. And I believe we need to find a place for non-human masses in order to develop a social theory in our time. Previous years, I was making work about my origin and telling my story through objects (stones, minerals, soil, mirrors). I believe everything is relational that’s why I have picked these type of objects in order to talk about myself. I want to proceed this research by trying to find answers and turning my answers to art projects.

In the book of Graham Harman, 'The Third Table' that was written for Documenta 13. He talks about finding the third table. Sir Arthur Eddington says, "There are two type of tables in our room". The first table is physical that we can touch and see which has four legs and wood. The second one is the scientific table, which consisted of atoms and electrons. But Harman says there is a third table, the real table that is not reducible and is not accessible.

Object oriented ontology is looking for the third table. Objects cannot be paraphrase according to Harman. For example a poem cannot be paraphrased like a poet means, all these descriptions will not fully express what initially is expressed in the poem. Poem is more than a description. There is no direct possible knowledge of objects and we can never translate objects perfectly to another language. There are two kinds of objects, Real objects and Sensual objects and their qualities. Real objects cannot be reducible and accessible, real qualities are also hidden from us. Sensual objects, sensual qualities are accessible and reducible by other objects. For instance, when a fire burns cotton it does not make contact to all properties of cotton. When we hold the cotton we aren’t touching whole cotton. Fire may not be alive and consciousness, however fire is just touching the certain features of the cotton just to its qualities. So, the fire is just touching the Sensual object and its qualities, fire cannot damage, reduce the Real object and its qualities. In art context there is an attempt to establish objects deeper than the features they are announced.

References

Sontag, Susan. (2003) Regarding the pain of others. Penguin Books

Harman, Graham. (2010) The quadruple object. Zero Books

Harman, Graham. (2010). Towards to speculative realism. Zero Books

Harman, Graham. (2011). The third table. Hatje Cantz