Tag Archives: media/visual literacy

The Radical Legacy of Hannah Höch

The Radical Legacy of Hannah Höch, One of the Only Female Dadaists
by Alina Cohen, artsy.net

Photomontages were the original remix. In the early 20th century, a group of European artists spliced together images they’d found in popular media, creating singular artworks via a strategy of sampling. The results show both individual statements by their makers and cross-sections of visual culture from a particular historical moment. While these creators called their movement by the nonsense word “Dada” (“DADA, as for it, it smells of nothing, it is nothing, nothing, nothing,” said artist Francis Picabia), their strange new artworks offered significant polemical ideas about gender, politics, and creativity during a particularly tumultuous era in Western history. 
….

Hannah Höch, one of the few female members recognized by the movement, offered a refreshing antithesis to such macho constructions. Her own photomontages offer kaleidoscopic visions of German culture during the interwar era, often from a distinctly queer, feminist perspective.
READ entire article.

On Portraiture by Teju Cole

There’s Less to Portraits Than Meets the Eye, and More

By Teju Cole

Portraiture existed long before photography was invented. And for more than a dozen years after photography’s invention, it was practically impossible to make a photographic portrait: the required exposure times were too long. But the two eventually came together, and now their pairing seems so natural that it’s as though photography was invented for making portraits…. read more

Carte de visite of Sojourner Truth, around 1864.CreditFrom the American Antiquarian Society

Making a website accessible

12 ways your website is inaccessible to those with chronic illness

Too often as we put our blogs together we think about what we like personally but don’t really give a lot of thought to how others may view the same pages. In the end, the goal is to have others to be able to read our blogs and enjoy them, but are we making small mistakes that could be making it difficult for others to enjoy our blogs? Here are a few thoughts from some of our bloggers on things that often make it difficult for them to access blogs and websites.

link to article

I will be adding underlines to my links.

 

Regarding the Pain of Trump

Regarding the Pain of Trump – Los Angeles Review of Books

by Rebecca Chace

A brilliant reflection on re-reading Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others and the power and danger of images and need to be more than passive witnesses.

Images of suffering and atrocity now have unparalleled access to our most intimate spaces. Most of us keep that connection open in our pockets or in the palm of our hands….

We are vulnerable to images just as we are vulnerable to propaganda. Our visceral experience of violent and disturbing images has changed not only because of the unprecedented speed of their transmission but also because there is no longer any mediation between these images and the viewer. Media outlets used to edit what images were permissible to share with the public. Now, if we have access to the technology, we can share directly with each other in real time. There is true political power in the removal of the mediator, but as there is more to respond to, there is proportionally more emotional instability.

Read entire essay >

 

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

Frederick Douglass’s Faith in Photography

Frederick Douglass’s Faith in Photography
How the former slave and abolitionist became the most photographed man in America.
By Matthew Pratt Guterl, New Republic

“New, cheaper techniques of reproduction, Douglass believed, allowed for a truer, more precise impression of the person on display. They also made it possible for the subject of the photograph to determine, to some extent, how people read and understood the image. Frame by frame, the authors of the volume show how carefully Douglass tried—in an age where, for so many people of color, this was simply unimaginable—to control meaning.” [read complete article]

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]