Ubiquity: The Journal of Pervasive Media - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2016

Modern technology is pervading all aspects of our everyday lives. With its focus on optimization, and through the growing adoption of content personalization, these technologies – in their attempts for relevancy and efficiency – are decreasing the role of chance and luck in our interactions with the Digital Medium, leading to a reduced potential for serendipitous experiences. This is exemplified in the post-smartphone photography. With the growing popularity of camera-enabled devices, photography has become commonplace: a trivial, routinely and mindlessly engaged practice. The photography act, due to the ever-increasing capacity of these devices to accurately record an image of the real, has become a series of brief, predictable actions, without much thought or consideration on the whole interaction. Through the exploration of the concept of defamiliarization, we intend to restore a sense on uncertainty and randomness to the quotidian photographic moment. To this end, we created an experimental smartphone application that randomly, and without the interactor’s control, transforms and manipulates a given photograph – thus making it unfamiliar – and allowing for surprise to be once more part of the process while increasing the engagement between photographer, subject and created image. We have also begun preliminary evaluations which have showed a positive impact of the concepts of this experimental application in the creative process.

Avant-garde filmmaker and painter Hans Richter refers to visual rhythm as articulation of time, and film as articulation of time and movement: ‘Rhythm is the essence of filmmaking because it is conscious articulation of time. If anything is at the bottom of filmmaking it is the articulation of time, of movement. Film and pattern are both visual expressions based on multiple images. They relate to rhythm, continuity and time but somehow the approach is different. In my practice, I consider working with pattern as managing visual rhythm. I would like to use Richters’ statement to reflect on pattern as articulation of time. Could pattern be seen as articulation of time? How is the time aspect different depending if you work with film or pattern? This article will use the project ‘A horizon is not flat’ to propose how photographic pattern can be seen as representation of place but also representation of time. The patterns can be ‘read’ as experience of place but also as experience of time, not as information or measurement of time but in an abstract or a-temporal sense as visualization of the experience or perception of continuity. I will present the suggestion of how film and pattern relate differently to rhythm and articulation of time, illustrated in a visual model.