Sitting in the darkened gallery, I spent a long time trying to discern if the back-projected image I was looking at was moving. The fact that the image of a snow-capped mountain surrounded by trees was accompanied by a field recording of wind and other sounds familiar from the outdoors seemed to suggest that it should move, as in a film. Yet, as I peered at the screen I could see no evidence of trees blowing in the wind, or of a bird flying across the sky. At one point during my visit, the screen suddenly went blank, the image reappearing a few seconds later, only, I think, lit slightly differently: the shadows shorter. Continue reading
Ingrid Hölzl
Indexicality between Sensors and Social Media
In a previous post, [1] I finished with a quote from a New Yorker article by Craig Mod, in which he suggested some different types of data that might be gathered and ‘pinned’ to the ‘back’ of a digital photograph. Amongst the data he suggested we might collect were “location, weather, even radiation levels […] social status and state of mind”, in other words data drawn from sensors and from social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. [2] I made the point then that there is a huge difference between data taken from a sensor and data from taken from Facebook, the first is reliant on measuring some kind of physical quality; the second, the expressions of people. I stand by that point, but now I want to examine the two in a little more detail. Continue reading
_IMG01
Some remarks on Mishka Henner’s _IMG01
Expansion/Reduction
Let us, just for a moment, put aside all issues of digital manipulation, staged and synthetic photographs; and assume that the photograph, analogue or digital, is a photograph of something in the world. If the photograph shows us, to borrow a phrase from Barthes, the necessarily real thing that was placed before the lens, [1] then it follows that there must have been some other necessarily real things just beyond the camera’s view. If the photograph shows us an embalmed moment in time, then it follows that time continues to pass after the camera’s shutter closed. In short the photograph shows us a small slice of space and time, both of which extend well beyond its frame. Continue reading