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- Volume 5, Issue 1, 2016
Ubiquity: The Journal of Pervasive Media - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2016
Volume 5, Issue 1, 2016
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Untimely ripped (against the mass image)
By Sean CubittAbstractI take the Aristotelean view that the question for ethics is ‘How should I live?’ and the question for politics is ‘How are we supposed to live?’ Aristotle’s next step was to argue that in both instances, these are questions about the good life. These are fundamentally aesthetic questions. So let me advance as a hypothesis that the reason for doing any of the art, science and critique we undertake is happiness. The world we have is unhappy, so happiness depends on negating what is given to us as the world. That is what images do: they negate the world in order to produce pictures that are more startling, richer, surer, more filled with meaning and more desirable than what we have to inhabit. Even images of unhappy events attempt to heal them. An image aspires to happiness. The proliferation of images is a different matter.
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Atemporality, art, quantum phenomena and the jester
By Paul ThomasAbstractContemporary physics, with its use of probability and uncertainty, has affected the way artists perceive and interpret the world. The impact of probability and uncertainty were initially challenged and explored by the Futurists and Dadaists at the beginning of the twentieth century. This article explores the analogous relationship between art and quantum phenomena such as the delayed choice quantum eraser (DCQE) and multiworlds. How artist when observing the world, translates it in to marks that measure the world and in that act, alter what they really see.
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Image as chemical atemporality
By Tobias KleinAbstractThis article analyses today’s perception, production and consumption of the digital image in the context of historical mechanization, photographic development and the prototypical design of a chemical reactive hypertemporal setting. Digital materiality is explicitly designed through a time-based performative image transiimage transition from the static image to the image as palimpsest in a post-digital era. First, it introduces the topic by providing a historical overview of devices that allowed the generation, construction and the change in perception of the image. Starting from the invention of the Camera Obscura as a device of image projection, the article highlights a change of representation from as early as fifteenth-century drawing machines to today’s plethora of image-generating devices. The article investigates in more detail the transition of the image through mechanical production and the change of medium in the form of photographic image development and its consequences. Furthermore, it presents research into the hyper-temporality of a chemical image in relation to the digitalization and computer numeric controlled drawing machines. Each chapter of the article is related to one of my artistic works – Virtual Sunset, Urban Scan, Slow Selfie and the ongoing project titled Liquid Light. Each of the works is associated with an image production and perception property, gradually articulating the current state of the images as a hybrid. The research concludes with a focus on the hybrid image combining computer-controlled construction through sensorial data and vector-based input with photo-chromic reactions stimulated by multiple overlaying light emitters. The result is a chemical animated image – a piece de resistance and transformation of the a-temporality of digital data.
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Living backwards: The (artificially) augmented mental image
By Birgitte AgaAbstractThe desire to predict the future is central to human evolution and behaviour. From ancient beliefs in prophetic foresight, spirituality and mystical forces to today’s scientific and algorithmic data-driven forecasting, humans have continued to augment their mental ability to predict what the future may bring. Without an imagined picture of the future our civilization would not exist. Predictive human thought and behaviour is increasingly being influenced by the tide of artificial augmentation through a conflux of sophisticated personal, wearable and interconnected technologies, big (and small) data and powerful computational and analytical algorithms. From these hyper-connected environments, new intimate and symbiotic relationships between the ‘dry world of virtuality and the wet world of biology’ are emerging. Here artificially enhanced and data-driven mental constructions of past, present and imagined futures emerge as artificially amplified cognition. Instead of living forwards through imagined futures conjured from existing memories, this article speculates whether one will be living backwards from data-driven and artificially predicted futures.
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Time flies: Visualizing aerial technologies
More LessAbstractThe world’s largest environmental disaster was felt by no one. When the Chinese military recently demonstrated their anti-satellite missiles, deadly debris was scattered across our heavens further than any other manmade event in history. Our increasingly crowded skies are creating safety hazards that are proliferating without public awareness partially due to our inability to visualize and display the massive, transscalar real estate and activity of aerial technologies. Each industry has become adept at tracking its own assets yet none has succeeded in finding a model that represents the entire evolving techno-system in one visual strategy.
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Special effects and uncanny affect: CGI and the post-cinematic uncanny
By William CardAbstractThis article introduces, presents and discusses the author’s practice-based artistic research. It situates the work, an investigation into the post-cinematic uncanny and the affective potential of visual effects technologies in art practice, within a theoretical context and moves towards the illumination of aspects of our relationship with certain types of digitally augmented moving imagery. The practice explores the post-cinematic uncanny as an intersection of visual arts, moving image, animation, cinema, television and visual effects linking it to theories of affect and post-cinema. It questions the nature and qualities of moving image in the twenty-first century, especially the pervasive and ubiquitous nature of computer-generated imagery (CGI) that supplements and augments digitally captured footage. In doing so it creates, explores and situates the post-cinematic uncanny within contemporary arts practice. The work employs technologies that were, until relatively recently, the preserve of high-end visual effects productions and aims to engender uncanny affect in its audience. It thus falls under the purview of Steven Shaviro’s speculations on post-cinematic affect. Shaviro’s ‘post-cinematic’ refers to the transformation of moving image practice and culture driven in part by the move to digital acquisition, manipulation, distribution, display and networked consumption. It provides a conceptual framework for this practice in relation to the wider context of cinema and moving image production. In the practice, visual effects technologies are employed site-specifically to create the impression of unknown yet familiar forms within the screen-space, creating new associations, fantastic implied narratives and extra-dimensional implications in otherwise mundane spaces. Still further removed from the profilmic event, these computer-generated images have no connection to the profilmic beyond an urge towards the ‘paradox of perceptual realism’. In this respect, CGI visual effects imagery may be analogous to Freud’s uncanny ‘double’.
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Playing the networked image of the city: Ghosts, glitches, traces
More LessAbstractBeing ‘in play’ evokes another way of being, an alternate reality, a different set of spatial relations. While play exists in time, it is atemporal, having its own rules of time and space. Play can be pervasive, embedded in day-to-day life, blending and bleeding into reality occupying a multitude of micromoments. Images of play present multiple meanings – diagrams of logic and rules, millisecond game state updates, assemblages of iconic game objects, spatial and cartographical information – and are distributed across screens big and small connected by digital networks. Within the framework of a fictional state – the Micronation of Ludea – these themes were explored via public artworks blending street art, formal abstraction, Augmented Reality (AR) and game design. The works play with the conventions of behaviour and construction of public space via their augmentation with the code and logic of game worlds. These games generate new images of the city from the combined viewpoints of the individual and the collective, micro and macro, monumental and intimate, transient and permanent, and the personal and public.
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The moment of unmoving
By Dane WatkinsAbstractMovies never wait they live in perpetual motion, locked in an illusion that merges a succession of static pictures into a new temporal image. If a movie stops because the projector breaks or the tape is stuck then the illusion is lost and the image collapses into its separate parts. Movies move in one direction and cannot respond to anything but themselves; they are governed by their own internal logic and remain unmoved by their external context. As more screens become embedded into our physical spaces there is an opportunity for the movie to take pause and through sensors respond to its environment. Yet schedulers are stuffing the big screens with old content, movies designed for TV and cinemas. Adverts tightly cut into 30-second slots are screened repeatedly into a space where they have all day, they could take their time. This article will discuss examples of how a movie might pause while it waits for something to happen. Animators have used loops to bridge moments of dramatic action. The onlookers in Popeye the Sailor by Fleischer (1933) quiver with anticipation as they prepare for the action to unfold around them. Roobarb and Custard by Godfrey (1974) waits in a shimmering tree, a looping construct that lives in between the edges of its drawings, an approximation of its constituent parts. The animated loop is a fixed temporal object waiting perhaps to cross over into the physical world and interact with the environment and passersby.
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Image or to image?
More LessAbstractThe proliferation of images towards an iconic communication in the hypermediacy of social media, of locative media, of Internet of Things (IoT) on one side and the visualization of real-time data, the deep learning algorithm on the other, question the essence of how reality is perceived, created and the nature and role of images itself. The common understanding of what constitutes an image is related to the representation of things and people. In the context of instant messaging, social media and Big Data, distributed and networked IoT, this seems not to be the case anymore. IoT extends the idea of social media to embrace ‘things’ into the equation, to form something that the author defines as the ‘Thingbook’. The Thingbook generates images of us from the perspective of things and data based on a heterogeneous system of technologies that sense, capture, analysis and learn about the world in real-time. Through this real-time dimension reality oscillates from a representational paradigm to a performative one and to certain extent towards a paradoxical condition. This article will collect evidence of how IoT hypermediacy is increasingly changing communication from linguistic to iconic, and how data visualization and Artificial Neural Networks are changing ways of learning from text to images at the level of the Google Cat Algorithm where Facebook and Thingbook converge. This will look into practices that make extensive use of the image in the immediacy of communication, into evidence of how information derived from sensors is recomposed into images, and, to a certain extent, how the discourse around image and IoT or Big Data questions our concept of image and reality.
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Refracted gaze of the quantified self
More LessAbstractThe quantified-self movement advocates the use of measurements obtained from a variety of sensors around them and storing these digitally for further analysis and as a log of their lives. Their aim is to discover patterns in their lives that they have not previously been aware of or they strive to achieve certain goals. Their motto is ’self-knowledge through numbers’. I would like to put the image of oneself created by quantified-self methods into the perspective of the refracted gaze, a term used by Lutz and Collins to describe a hidden curriculum of anthropologists using Polaroid photographs to observe natives as they receive self-knowledge by observing their own portraits. They point out that mirrors and cameras are tools of self-reflection and surveillance as each creates a double of the self, a second figure who can be examined more closely than the original – a double that can also be alienated from the self, taken away, as a photograph can be, to another place. The deconstructed image that is created through the quantified-self experience is supposed to create an objective and impartial picture of the self. Yet, at the same time, the interpretations and visualizations of such data are strongly influenced by the designers of the different apps with which it is tracked and displayed. Not only does the digitalization alienate the action from the experience, but it can be seen as a further step towards an abstraction of ourselves and the opposite of what the quantified-self is supposed to be about, bringing us closer to our bodies.
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Dust Image Fragments Ghosts
By Regina DürigAbstract‘Dust Image Fragments Ghosts’ is an artistic exploration of my view of heterotopia from a writer’s perspective, the dimension of the fragmental, and the space in between the text and the reader. The starting point are 3D micrographs of dust samples from mobile and immobile cultural artefacts, which were part of a research project which investigated the aesthetic potential of dust and its information content from the perspective of the conservation and restoration. Dust has the power to make visible the absent, to show what must have been there. Fragments as a literary form show what might be there, in between or around. ‘Dust Image Fragments Ghosts’ follows the traces of seemingly empty space. It is a reflexive literary expedition into the landscapes of dust, a ghostly universe between micro and macro, reader and writer, image and imagination.
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The atemporal mirror
More LessAbstractAs a museological genre proliferating in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the posthumously reconstructed artist’s studio is synonymous with the information age’s impulse to store and retrieve data. Accordingly, historic studios presented as museum artefacts might be thought of as symptoms of ‘a new breed of temporality whereby nothing ever dies’. This article examines the coalescence of present and historical contexts operating within the reconstructed studio of Francis Bacon, relocated from its original location at 7 Reece Mews in London to Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. Bacon’s blemished, circular mirror is conspicuous amid the detritus in the artist’s chaotic studio. From a sleek object originating in Bacon’s early design career, to its apparent role as a prop in the Reece Mews studio, and its current status as a museum artefact, this mirror has borne witness to the shifting contexts of Bacon’s studio. It can be understood as a portal through which spatial, material and temporal phenomena appear reconfigured. As such, Bacon’s studio mirror will be considered in terms of its potential to exert posthumous influence, and provoke contemporary art practice predicated on atemporality.
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Finding prana: Sonic experiments in search of atemporal being
Authors: Helen Collard and Philippa JacksonAbstractAn entire life is encompassed between a first inhale and a final exhale: breath could be said to be our physical counter of time. In Yogic philosophy, prana is a concept meaning both breath and life and pranayama is the psycho-physical practice of regulating breath. It is here, in these liminal, atemporal moments of regulation that yogic practice considers key to controlling and mastering the mind. This article outlines an interdisciplinary research collaboration between an artist/pranayama practitioner and the Brain, Performance and Nutrition Research Center at Northumbria University. This bio-art project employs the use of functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to take real-time brain-state data during a live pranayama performance. fNIRS records the relative concentration change in oxygenated and deoxygenated haemoglobin levels in each hemisphere of the brain. This is sonified in real-time. fNIRS is now a re-appropriated control system for sound controlled by the artist’s moving breath (present and temporal) and the artist’s suspended breath (absent and atemporal). This correlative sonic biofeedback installation offers auditions that explore the possibility of perhaps another perceptual modality and another kind of being in the realm of the atemporal.
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The work of art in the time of technogenesis
More LessAbstractIn our current environment the digital screen has become part of the daily rhythm of work and play. Yet as those digital screens become more refined and flatter they also approach the form and presence of a painted surface. A painting is also a screen, an image bounded by an edge, portable and primarily visual. Both kinds of screens have native temporal designs that are in productive tension with each other. By fracking into their differential relationship images are shown to metabolize time, arriving out of time for the sake of an unsustainable time, concealing an end of time, hidden beneath a fantastic time beyond time. This article will develop an alternative ontology of the image through interlocked notions of time, temporality, colour and presence based on contemporary painting, the plastic arts and an uncertain relation to the visual, brought on by information communication technologies. Using the ideas of Martin Heidegger, Richard Dienst and Bernard Stiegler it will be shown that by deconstructing everyday notions of time there is a fractal proliferation of temporal modes that releases an explosive plasticity of visual presence with a hue and density held somewhere between the agency of light and the plastic materiality of the screen.
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Brass Art – Freud’s figure-ground in motion: Macabre, rare, banal, eerie and sentimental
Authors: Chara Lewis, Kristin Mojsiewicz and Anneke PetticanAbstractBrass Art’s intervention into Freud’s house attempted to grant its solid objects, furniture and rooms a light, apparitional quality. Their performances at Maresfield Gardens were recorded with three Kinect sensors, the undifferentiated laser’s touch rendering all objects – alive, dead, static, breathing – with the same white, shining, pixellated brilliance. Objects and places that formed the props and settings for performances assume an intense luminosity, appearing to hover and tilt in a horizonless figure-ground. The interplay of focus, proximity and perception returns to consideration of the atemporal image. As artist Susan Hiller in her own observations of the Freud Museum states, ‘Close consideration of its beautiful, utilitarian, tedious, scholarly, macabre, rare, banal, eerie, and sentimental objects produces a picture in which figure-ground relationships seem to constantly shift’. This article introduces the new, multi-screen sonic work On the Thread of One Desire in development by Brass Art. It examines the way in which their recorded performances draw attention to the unconscious, the atemporal and the uncanny, and how the work foregrounds the loop, the arc and the full 360º revolution, with the intention of amplifying and revealing some of the unfolding narratives embedded in Freud’s London home.
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Anachronicity
More LessAbstractDeep underground on the Finnish island of Olkiluoto, a corporation has been excavating the world’s largest nuclear waste repository. Once filled, the site will need to be sealed and left intact for 100,000 years to avoid contamination of the earth’s surface. The defences for this massive sarcophagus will need to survive and resist geological or meteorological interruptions, but also human curiosity or treasure hunting. This poses not only an engineering problem but a semiological one: how can a warning sign be written or depicted that will still be decodable for an almost unimaginably remote future? The problem is dramatized when one considers that it only took a generation for the human race to lose the ability to read Egyptian hieroglyphs, and for hieroglyphs to then remain a mystery for 1500 years until a fluke archaeological discovery of the code. Such a warning sign to stop the opening of radioactive tombs also suffers the likely indecipherability of those messages naively engraved on the plaques attached to Discovery spacecraft sent out of the solar system into deep space and deep time, with images of a naked Edenic couple etched into the metal, along with a recording of Bach’s third ‘Brandenburg Concerto’ (which is probably unplayable on even our own technology now). This article will address both the anomaly of these manufactured ‘future fossils’ and also the eclipse of meaning in pictograms or glyphs from a deep past.
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Of hooded men and buildings without pants: Negotiating the images of universal desire
More LessAbstractThis article explores images and their incipient conflicts in today’s global consumer monoculture. Fredric Jameson pointed out that today it would be easier to imagine the end of the world before an alternative to capitalism. As we have moved towards a globalized electronic capitalist economy, the hegemony of the image is concrete as signs and symbols appear to have become universal. Conflict follows in the representations of universality as definitions diverge between publicness, imageability, fear and desire. The global speed of universal representation of the signs and symbols of Euro-America-centric hegemony powers a binary phenomenon: the geographic dislocation of the consumers of our global consumer information society and the drive towards a global homogenized consumer monoculture.
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The privileges of the quasi-photographic image
More LessAbstractNumerical representation enables more than efficient processability and increased programmability. As it makes obsolete qualities that have previously been used to categorize individual media it also increasingly blurs the borders between them. Therefore it should be seen as no less than surprising that many contemporary systems still use images as their exclusive output channel. An associated conundrum is the fact that, of those many images, a baffling ratio appears in photographic form. Why this persistence on familiar pseudoverisimilitude? What are the privileges of the quasi-photographic aesthetic? Much wizardry is required to make data packages look recognizable. This decision, when taken by the creators of imaging algorithms, is of course ornamental but it is also much more. In acting as mere effect quasi-photographic images can function as sophisticated ‘go-betweens’ that weave together selected aspects of the physical world with the augmented world of data in ways that other media simply cannot. Thus, perhaps it is time to consider the possibility that the quasi-photographic need not be understood only as a form of interface but also as a concession required by and for our inferior human processing capabilities.
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Atemporal photography: Image making out of time
By Simon lockAbstractThis article introduces the concept of Anachronistic Intervention as a performative approach to public engagement experimentation at real-world events. The article presents an intervention involving formal portrait photography as a mechanism to explore the historic act of photography and shed light on the possible future evolution of digital image making.
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24 Frames 24 Hours
Authors: Max R. C. Schleser and Tim Turnidge
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