Category Archives: New Media

Lev Manovich – Instagram and Contemporary Image

Lev Manovich: photos, bio, complete CV.

Lev Manovich – Instagram and Contemporary Image

Instagram and Contemporary Image (2016) is a free new downloadable book by Lev Manovich.

The book methods combine traditional qualitative approaches of humanities and computational analysis of 16 millions of Instagram photos in 17 global cities carried out in Manovich’s lab (softwarestudies.com) since 2012.

The book chapters arebeing released online under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Creative Commons license. The chapters are posted online as they are completed. (Three chapters have already been published, and two more will be added during summer 2016.)

The Real Bias Built In at Facebook 

What you see on the social media giant is based on an algorithm. It’s anything but neutral.

The Real Bias Built In at Facebook – The New York Times

The first step forward is for Facebook, and anyone who uses algorithms in subjective decision making, to drop the pretense that they are neutral. Even Google, whose powerful ranking algorithm can decide the fate of companies, or politicians, by changing search results, defines its search algorithms as “computer programs that look for clues to give you back exactly what you want.”

But this is not just about what we want. What we are shown is shaped by these algorithms, which are shaped by what the companies want from us, and there is nothing neutral about that.

Makes me think of the witch in Snow White: “Magic mirror, on the wall – who is the fairest one of all?” Read full article for a good explanation how the algorithms on Facebook (and google) are controlling what we say while pretending to be neutral

Exposing the Invisible

 
Exposing the invisible > A  series of case studies, interviews and tools that explore the far reaches of metadata in its capacity to protect, investigate and expose abuses of power.

EXCERPT: Interesting interview and important essay on metadata  Harlo Holmes: Metadata or it Didn’t Happen | Exposing the Invisible (much more on the site)

How would you describe metadata?
Metadata is data about data. Primarily it’s the site that portrays the actual, what one would call the “Ur event”, i.e. how a particular digital property came into existence. So going back to your previous question of why I find it so interesting, it all goes back to Walter Benjamin’s idea of the replicability of art, how art in the modern age loses some of its luster because it’s so immediately accessible and is infinitely replicable. But metadata, I find, is a site that actually preserves that uniqueness even though things might be on their surface copied and filmed all over the place continuously, metadata is that site of originality.

What is CameraV?
CameraV begun its life as a mobile app named InformaCam created by The Guardian Project and WITNESS. It’s a way of adding a whole lot of extra metadata to a photograph or video in order to verify its authenticity. It’s a piece of software that does two things. Firstly it describes the who, what, when, where, why and how of images and video and secondly it establishes a chain of custody that could be pointed to in a court of law. The app captures a lot of metadata at the time of the image is shot including not only geo-location information (which has always been standard), but corroborating data such as visible wifi networks, cell tower IDs and bluetooth signals from others in the area. It has additional information such as light meter values, that can go towards corroborating a story where you might want to tell what time of the day it is. [read more]

 

Readings on Future of Photography

SOME GOOD READS

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In the future, there will be no such thing as a “straight photograph”

The Next Revolution in Photography Is Coming
TIME Lightbox
by Stephen Mayes

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> The Case for Never Banning a Photograph By Jordan G. Teicher

> What is 21st Century Photography by Daniel Rubinstein

> Meet the Artists who play with the rules of Documentary Photography by Laurence Butet-Roch

LAURA POITRAS and HITO STEYERL [together]

A conversation between two brilliant minds,  LAURA POITRAS and  HITO STEYERL, in the pages of Art Forum May 2015
 A few excerpts:

LP: The limits of my imagination are much less interesting than what I encounter going into the field and filming. So yes, it obviously changed the narrative. But part of vérité filmmaking, and documenting in the present tense as things unfold, is going where the story leads. It’s uncertain and scary at times, but that is why there is drama.

HS: What kind of storytelling can adapt to the technological novelty and also to the vastness of the database as an archive?

….how does the editor work in the twenty-first century? Especially if, as in your case, the editor is also the person with the movie camera and the Soundbeam and the encrypted hard drive; she is a writer who designs a whole infrastructure of communication.

HS on Editing:
… And I think that editing, not only in filmmaking but in a lot of different activities, is a crucial activity. Postproduction is not working on content in retrospect but creating the content. Editing is where the meaning is created.

Godard said an edit could be an “and” or an “or.” That is how traditional film or video editing works. But now editing, with newer media and with physical reality becoming mediatized to a large extent, becomes a much more expanded activity, being able to channel and process information and to put together meaning in a much more expanded field.

Now instead of expanded cinema, it’s expanded editing, expanded postproduction, and circulation across different platforms and formats. I think it’s one of the crucial lenses through which to analyze contemporary activities.

LP: I think in the art world, duration is often seen as transgressive because it’s somehow forcing the audience to go beyond their comfort level, to subject them to an endurance test. And yet duration is absolutely accepted within mainstream cinema. So duration is perceived very differently in those two domains. Warhol, of course, was the supreme example of really pushing that in beautiful ways.

[read entire article]

“Hito Steyerl” is on view at Artists Space, New York, through May 24. “Laura Poitras” will be on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Feb. 5–May 15, 2016.

Hito Steyerl, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013more links:
Hito Steryl in e-flux and more articles in Art ForumLaura Poitrais Praxis Films

Un Chien Andalou – THE GAME!!

Slicing Up Eyeballs in a Surrealist Game

The startling 1929 surrealist silent film Un Chien Andalou made by Luis Buñuel in collaboration with Salvador Dalí is now a deeply unsettling video game. If the infamous eye slicing scene makes you recoil at its memory, wait until a digital moon soundtracked by hideous stretching noises morphs into a gaping oculus, and your only release from its revolting gaze is to slash it down the pupil.

via Hyperallergic

[interesting to think of this project in relation to Perry Bard’s Man with a Movie Camera: A Global Remake.]

Photogrammar

Photogrammar
Photogrammar is a web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United State’s Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI).

Tree Map Visualization of 1942 Classification System

story about the project on NPR

More information on the project