Tag Archives: selfies

about Selfies

[Reblogging] About Those Callous Selfies — by Michael Shaw, BagNews Notes

photo: Manu Fernandez/AP

You’ve seen them before. You’ve seen them in war zones and funerals, even. More often than not, they result in disdain — or head scratching, at least —  for the apparent soullessness and narcissism. This is just the latest I’ve seen. It appeared, in all it’s blasphemy, as the leadoff photo in The Atlantic “In Focus” Photos of the Week slideshow on Friday.  Documenting the perceived insensitivity, the caption reads:

Tourists take a “selfie” as demonstrators burn a trash container during a May Day rally in Barcelona, Spain, on May 1, 2014. Tens of thousands of workers marked May Day in European cities with a mix of anger and gloom over austerity measures imposed by leaders trying to contain the eurozone’s intractable debt crisis.

How dare these tourists (ugly Americans, perhaps?) denigrate the anger and gloom of tens of thousands of European workers?

Well, I’m not prepared to say that this photo or its innumerable cousins have any moral implications at all.  What is clear is that these types of photos need to be understood on two completely independent levels. [read rest of article]

 

selfiecity

selfiecity.

Selfiecity investigates selfies using a mix of theoretic, artistic and quantitative methods:

  • findings about the demographics of people taking selfies, their poses and expressions.
  • Rich media visualizations (imageplots) assemble thousands of photos to reveal interesting patterns.
  • The interactive selfiexploratory allows you to navigate the whole set of 3200 photos.
  • Finally, theoretical essays discuss selfies in the history of photography, the functions of images in social media, and methods and dataset.

The project is part of Lev Manovich’s Software Studies Initiative  that covers two directions:
1) Study of software and cyberinfrastructure and their deployment in modern societies using approaches from humanities, cultural criticism, and social sciences.
2) Use software-based research methods and next generation cyberinfrastructrure tools and resources for the study of massive sets of visual cultural data, asking theoretical questions which are important for humanities.

I Dream of Selfies – article on project in Hyperallergic

 

This Tumblr User Shows Her Horrific Anonymous Messages In A Powerful Art Project

This Tumblr User Shows Her Horrific Anonymous Messages In A Powerful Art Project.

Bottos, a photography major and gender studies minor, runs a Tumblr page where she often uploads selfies as well as pictures of her work.

Since starting the Tumblr in 2010, she has received hundreds of cruel anonymous messages. Last week, she turned the words of hate into a feminist art project; Bottos screencapped some of the messages and posted them over pictures of herself. [link to project]