wepod

WEEK 04: Tuesday 17 october 2006
Photo-participatory communities as gaming/ performative practice
browsing for class and to view on your own:
Lomographie, participatory photo-project in which photographs made with a lomo were presented as book projects, in event-like group shows, and posted since 1998 on their website
Arctic Circle,Tropic of Cancer and A description of the Equator and Some Other Lands [1995 – 1997] Felix Stephan Huber und Philip Pocock, in cooperation with other artists
parole - a project of gruppo A12(I), Udo Noll(D) and Peter Scupelli(USA/I).
Photo Friday Each week Photo Friday posts a photo assignment. Your mission is the creative interpretation of the week’s theme. When you’re done, post the picture you took to your website and submit your link to Photo Friday.
photoblog
CyborgLog/glog
The Glogger Community
blipfoto -website that lets you publish a daily photo journal
flickr user-generated tags (metadata), allowing users to mark the chosen images with catchwords/tags thus generating a collective cataloging (folksonomy).

http://myspace.com
global resource for MySpace.com member obituaries http://mydeathspace.com/

Field of Vision: Beijing. Curators: Gao Brothers, China; Marcel Hager, Germany; Stephan Hausmeister, UK. Wall-based installation constructed from a assemblage of uncensored ‘visual blogs’ collected worldwide over the Internet following a call for submissions.
http://www.field-of-vision.net/NewYork/

assignments to be read PRIOR to class meeting and be prepared to discuss them in class:
Instant Images: The Recording, Distribution and Consumption of Reality Predestined by Digital Photography [1]
Kathrin Peters
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/photo_byte/instant_images/print/
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/photo_byte/instant_images/
Describe a photo community or other photo-participatory projects (such as lomo or flicker) or a community that uses photography for its purposes// Discuss the term trash and the concept of performativity and repitition applied to photography snapshot // Choose an artistic work devoted to the sorting aspects of photographic ‹trash› and discuss the strategy used and how this shifts authorship to the assemblage of found photography // Compare offline image archives with the sort of archiving happenning online in photo sites like flicker and discuss t«[T]he twenty-first century will be the century beyond the archives.» // Refer to the role of tagging and folksonomy// Discuss the notion that lifestyle and performativity more than famililiaty govern photo communiies like flickr that use snapshot aesthetics
Web 2.0

DUE on class 5 | POST ON blog
Brief 4 – strategy
research: think in terms of the images you have selected and choose a strategy to sort it. Discuss it in terms of authorship, editing, curating and what it means for you to work with found material. Continue to document /discuss this process your blog.

OUTLINE SESSION 4

1. DISCUSS EVERYONE’S WEEKLY POSTINGS AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO DEBATE ON “INSTANT IMAGES”

1.1. Describe a photo community or other photo-participatory projects (such as lomo or flicker) or a community that uses photography for its purposes

http://www.lomography.com/

http://www.lomography.com/about/

lomography rules http://www.lomography.com/about/index_rules.php

ten/twentyfour – year five http://www.lomography.com/blog/?id=278&referer=cover

about ten/twentyfour http://www.wrkshy.net/1024/1024abt.htm

what is a photo-participatory project? what is mean by participatory?

http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/photo_byte/instant_images/4/

http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/photo_byte/instant_images/5/

1.2. Discuss the term trash and the concept of performativity and repitition applied to photography snapshot

Rainald Goetz , novel Abfall für alle (Trash for everyone) was an Internet project in which every day over the course of an entire year (1998), the author noted bits and pieces of his life and published them online: thoughts, encounters, conversations, telephone conversations, shopping lists, etc. In this sense trash should not be taken literally, but as that which is left over at the end of a day’s work. In the process, neither interpretations nor justifications are attached to the snapshots—as records of material momentarily available or found—rather they are sampled and mass-produced in order to cross out any similarity with inwardness.

The snapshot stands for a process of developing writing and that to be written out of everyday occurrences, and a radical reference to the present. The issue is the performativity of writing itself

What is of interest is less the image as a subject or even the individual image, rather more the act of the permanent reference to the present, the production of photographs.
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/photo_byte/instant_images/6/

it is not about originality—even contrary to claims made by the photographer him- or herself— but about repetitions; it is not about creativity, but about taking pictures of everything and everyone for everyone.

Goetz and Brinkmann have both combined their writing with their own and found photographs, e.g., Goetz in Celebration in 1999, and Brinkmann in Rom, Blicke in 1979. In both cases, the state of temporarily being in another place, a journey so to speak—nights in a techno club or a stay at the Villa Massimo— are compressed into image/text montages in order to make a momentary feeling available: «That was a snapshot of my environment, but which leaves part of me for myself.

browse online pages of Rom, Blicke

It is essential that the combinations of images and text do not present the material in a documentary fashion, but in sampled form. This means that the ‹snapshots› are transformed and assembled to make a larger text, built in to a larger text;
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/photo_byte/instant_images/7/

1.3. Choose an artistic work devoted to the sorting aspects of photographic ‹trash› and discuss the strategy used and how this shifts authorship to the assemblage of found photography

The two strategies that will be presented here are geared more towards bringing about an artistic posit solely by means of the serialization or sorting of photographs deemed useless or purely instrumental according to common criteria. This posit shifts authorship to the assemblage of found footage.
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/photo_byte/instant_images/9/

1-

ohio magazine

2-

Piller built up a comprehensive collection of found photographic footage. His «Peter Piller Archive» includes over 6,000 photographs. A large portion of these images originate from local newspapers, with aerial shots of family houses and historic photo-postcards also focal points of the collection. Only a peripheral importance is attached to where the images were found and what they depict: «Auto berühren» (Touch Car), «Stein des Anstoßes» (The Rock of Impact), «Durchsucht und Versiegelt (Tatorthäuser)»[Searched and Sealed-Off (Houses the Scenes of Crimes] are a few of the titles of his eight volumes to date, published by Revolver Verlag, each devoted a different collection.

http://www.peterpiller.de/Archiv/Bauerwartungsflaechen.htm

Piller also produces his own photo-series, originating from hikes on the urban periphery and «Bürozeichnungen» (office sketches).

http://www.peterpiller.de/Fotos/Ruhrwanderung/Ruhrwanderung1.htm

http://www.peterpiller.de/Fotos/Ruhrwanderung/Ruhrwanderung2.htm

http://www.peterpiller.de/Fotos/internetzugang/internetzugang.htm

Peter Pillar concerns himself with photographic trash, which often concerns itself, quasi self-referential, with trash—«car involved in an accident,» «trash as sculpture,» «falling towers»—without raising it to the status of drollery. Pillar does not search the Internet for pornographic photographs, which is also extremely popular among artists, but for «house+back» and «decoration+munitions,» in this way dissecting the value of residential property, idyll and defense out of both of them.
http://www.peterpiller.de/Archiv/InternetArchiv/HausundHinten/hausundhinten.htm

http://www.peterpiller.de/Archiv/InternetArchiv/MunitionundDeko/munitionunddeko.htm

1.4. Compare offline image archives with the sort of archiving happenning online in photo sites like flicker and discuss t«[T]he twenty-first century will be the century beyond the archives.»

Wolfgang Ernst has pointed out that for electronic databases, the term «archive» only functions in a purely metaphorical way: «[T]he twenty-first century will be the century beyond the archives.» [24] In the intensely advertised «twenty-first century,» dynamic or variable keyword lists for accessing digitally recorded images that do not existoutside electronic systems take the place of ‹still› images, which can be located in flat file cabinets by means of systematic catalogs. This means that the images do not necessarily have to be stored or maintained as an object; it is possible that they merely circulate within electronic devices and networks, where they can also disappear. However, the immateriality of digital image data is relative, because the data are based on a considerable arsenal of hardware, which generates the ‹live experience› in the first place.

http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/photo_byte/instant_images/8/

1.5 . Refer to the role of tagging and folksonomy

Tagging makes it possible to add keywords, or tags, to other users’ images. By means of these usergenerated tags, a collective taxonomy—or folksonomy, a neologism created out of «folk» and «taxonomy»—is produced which continuously generates new image-sorting criteria. This function is particularly useful for auditory and visual data, as these keywords, which are fixed and assigned only once, are difficult to find, and a full-text search string, which directly addresses the semantic units, cannot be adapted. Unlike in a traditional archive, here the classifications are neither consistent nor are they clearly assigned to the objects, rather they are expandable and, above all, variable.
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/photo_byte/instant_images/8/

1.6. Discuss the notion that lifestyle and performativity more than familiality govern photo communities like flickr that use snapshot aesthetics

Lomo’s message of practicing a photographic style of real life can also be understood as the production of a ‹real lifestyle.› According to the specific aspects of the Internet put forward by Lev Manovich, it is one of the basic principles of new, computer-based media to supply lifestyles through variability: «In a postindustrial society, every citizencan construct her own custom lifestyle and ‹select› her ideology from a large (but not infinite) number of choices.… Every visitor to a Web site automatically gets her own custom versions of the site created on the fly from a database.»

the vanishing point of the everyday practice of photography is not, or no longer, familiality, but the playful and fun-oriented negotiation of tags or labels that mark temporary membership in a group. A community online game does not predestine the aesthetization of the images, but of life. An aesthetization that is not carried out outside the realm of economic interests, by which the boundaries of sharing become visible: Both Lomography.com and Flickr offer the licensing of images placed on their sites. [36] In view of these shifts from the figure of the photographic image as a cause for memory activity

http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/photo_byte/instant_images/13/