SelfReflection To Bend Back to Mirror and to Think in the Digital Visual Media Lecture at the seminar Reflecting Ourselves Through Digital Media DigiComm INSS UCPH 3112016 SelfReflection ID: 569641
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Slide1
Bent FausingSelf-Reflection
To Bend Back, to Mirror, and to Think in the Digital, Visual Media.
Lecture at the seminar
Reflecting Ourselves Through Digital Media,
Digi-Comm, INSS, UCPH, 3.11.2016.Slide2Slide3
Self-ReflectionPerception and reflection.Presence, intimacy and materiality.In the perception, there is a pre-reflection (M. Merleau-Ponty).The klick.
Extension.Slide4
See Ourselves, Reflect OurselvesSee ourselves – something uniquely human.Reflection means: bend back, mirror, consider and think,
Evaluate ourselves.
Reflections are everywhere: between mother and baby, parents and infants…(D. W. Winnicott).
Traces of internal, mental extensions.
Reflect ourselves in the mirror.
We literally become
unique.Slide5
Theodor W. Adorno getting ready for self-image, his selfie, with mirror and timer.Slide6
Mirror ConsciousnessWe have a look at ourselves from outside, at yet it is inside of ourselves – from ourselves. A self-doubling: We look at ourselves with our own, not other’s eyes.Self-awareness and identity.
Reflect each other.
Vagabonds and homeless do not see themselves.Slide7
Mirror Consciousness"In Auschwitz a young prisoner sees two women who look at themselves in a puddle. There are no mirrors in the camp, to prevent suicide [!]. They turn their backs on him; they have scarfs on their heads, and their clothes hanging in tatters. He looks carefully at the muddy water and recognizes some features. It is his cousins, who bring him news from the family ". (Primo Levi).
In a place where all humanity seemed ended, the mirror image gave the essential humanity, the face, back.
Mirror’s democratization was also self-democratization.
The Self-Media:Slide8
The development of the self-media
Renaissance, 1600
1839
1929
2006
2014
Mirror
Photography, reproduction
TV
You Tube
Selfies
Book (printing)
mechanical revolution
2.0, ‘You’,
(Miniature) painting
modernity
digital rev
late modernity
Focus on subject/individuality………….
-> Slide9
My Self, My Selfie. The Selfie at the Elephant’s Foot
The selfie at the
Elephant’s
Foot
.
Reactor
4, Cher-
b
yl
1986.Slide10
The Selfie at the Elephant’s FootThe Chernobyl Disaster.Something undeniably uncanny about the scene.The blurred surface, the fire stripes
,
t
he strange dark and yet illuminated huge foot, the indication of slow motions…
An extreme selfie.
Disaster Selfie.
Dare Devil Selfie.
Homeless Selfie.
Sell tape Selfie.Slide11
The Extreme Selfie. Disaster Selfie
Disaster Selfie: after the plane
crashSlide12
Disaster SelfieSlide13
Dare Devil SelfieSlide14
Homeless SelfieSlide15
Sell Tape SelfieSlide16
I am still a subject and self-reflect myselfI am still a subject despite the disaster.Even after a disaster, you are still a Self, a subject and a survivor, not fragmented or dissolved (like the homeless in the background).The sell tape selfie play with the fragmented self: how long can I still be ‘me’, ‘myself’ with the deformations fro the sell tape (cf. Francis Bacon, Renée Zellweger change in appearance…).
I am…still…me.Slide17
Imagine Finding Me The globalized world seem to give rise to a vital desire for a personal self, a selfie.Photo as a loss (Roland Barthes Camera Lucida
1980) connoted to death; photo as a gain, connoted to life (Paul Auster
The Invention of Solitude
1982).
Chinos Otsuka’s in-between images.
In-between in the sense that she superimpose herself as an adult to old photos of herself as a young child.
She brings new life to the old photos.
Imagine Finding Me
, she calls her work (2009-2014).Slide18
Imagine Finding MeSlide19
Imagine Finding MeSlide20
Imagine Finding MeSlide21
Imagine Finding MeSlide22
Imagine Finding MeSlide23
Imagine Finding MeMoments gone and moments lived now blend and reflect each other.Digitally collaged photos.
Guardian angel or chaperone.
Reflecting herself in a then and a now.
A new selfie-form, which merge the present with previous.
Video work:
Memoriography I and II
, 2009-2012.
In the videos time itself forms a part of the work, as the image of the younger Otsuka gradually fade to give way to her older self (an turned around ‘serial selfie’, see Jill Rettberg’s chapter on this subject in
Seeing Ourselves Through Technology
2014:33ff).
“I’m creating a new image, a new memory” (Otsuko)…a new self-reflection. Slide24
Digital Presence. SkypeA recapitulation: Human experience relies on everything that surrounds us. Not the physical reality, but our perception of it. This perception - of presence, intimacy and materiality - is being transformed by telematics: Separate spaces are allowed to interweave, and the borders between our virtual and physical bodies and phenomenon are constantly disrupted by technology.
The old screen dichotomy in a here and a there has found third screen
.
Skype, Sky Eye, Sky Net, Sky News, iCloud, the Cloud…
Skype becomes a requirement that no one should do without, like a desk, a plate, a sink – or other everyday item with one syllable name.Slide25
Sky Net,
iCloud…a
lot
fibres and
servers
Important
brands, terms and
meta-
phors
connected to digital media
are
related to the sky and its
everywhere,
like in Skype, Sky
News…Even
though we have a secularized
society
and have had it for many
years
, our concepts and images
are still
deeply influenced by
religious
conceptions - also in
the
digital age.Slide26
Telepresence. SkypeA third screen is created via this reflecting of ourselves and observing the other at the same time through the screens.Skype is only shared among few people.Still it is to seen among the visual technologies that also produced the selfie form: creating the self, the subject, the self-reflection.
And you can take a photo of yourself on the screen, a selfie.Slide27
A Perspective. Sore Society‘Sore Society’ (Bent Fausing)Orlan and Nancy Burson, the two first to use digital technology to show a displacement from representation towards presentation of chock and the trauma.
The pixelation of the image, is a pixelation of the mind and the body.
Points towards some tendensies in the selfies – the dark selfie, the disaster selfie, the sello sefie –where the trauma or chok seems to be assimilated og ‘grapped’ (Theresa Senft).
I am still a subject, I can still make self-reflections, the performance of the trauma in the selfie is my proof of my subjectivity.Slide28
Perspective. Sore Society
Orlan
at the
seventh
performance
surgery
, 1993. The
photo
Would
be
part of the
next
performance.Slide29
Perspective. Sore Society
Nancy Burson, digital image, 1989.
Nancy Burson Beauty Composite 1984 (Jane Fonda,
Jacqueline Bisset, Diane Keaton, Brooke Shields,
Meryl Streep).Slide30
A Perspective. Sore SocietyAccept me.See what I have to prove to be me…here…in Aleppo…in…The pre-reflective mind and the pre-reflective body may through
the images
become reflective
minds and bodies.
A selfie is a sign that like all other self-portraits are uploaded in the
hope that
it will be understood, accepted and embraced. Slide31
Digital portrait, the person
d
oes not exits. The portrait
is made from the procentage of
e
thnic people in USA, ‘The New
Face of America’. Many
f
eel in love or had
many
emo-
t
ions
invested in the digital
Portrait.
Time
1993. Composite made by
Nancy Burson.