Nadia Palliser
I would like to present my ideas for the
development of the ISEA archive - an archiblog of memories perhaps but
maybe this sounds too sentimental for the Intersociety for the
Electronic Arts? I am interested in discussing ideas concerning the
(visual) design of the past tense, of nostalgia and (google-wise guy)
histories on the Internet. What examples are there already? In which
way could online archiving find a snappier status, one through which
the traces of the archived data are visible and knowledgeable? Since
most of ISEA's activities have been digitalised by the Daniel Langlois
Foundation, it seems not so much a question of data but of access. I am
looking for a way to develop a community based pool of exchange in
historical facts and on-going practice. In what way could themes,
issues and oldtimers in electronic art find a contemporary and
vivacious context? Since the owners of the information are not
organising the information anymore, what kind of structures are we
looking for to define this kind of data exchange based on dialogue?
Nanette Hoogslag
Nanette will present Oog, a project she is currently developing for http://www.volkskrant.nl/oog
In
this project a new context for visual thinking is created through
inviting artists and designers to comment on news. Nanette is
interested in how news images are formed by new media such as mobile
phones and the Internet. Magazines and newspapers online need images to
behave differently. Is there space for reflective illustration and
photography? Do we need to reinvent these spaces?
Todd Matsumoto
I would like to present / re-examine my
project, "Media Bomb". This project began with the publicized images of
torture occurring at Abu Ghraib prison. With image as starting point,
they were soon embedded into a flood of media types. This project used
a database to track the ongoing story of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal
through the New York Times online edition. For a period of ten days I
registered each story from the New York Times that contained the search
term "abu ghraib". The aim of the research was to find out how software
media can aid in seeing events in a wider (time) context. And to
visually see how the media supports events such as torture and
conflict, and how that is internalized into history or for that matter
the future. In all apects of this study digital images played a role in
either activating past images, or producing new images, and also
creating a variety of graphics. Though not a focal point of this study,
the event is grounded or one could say hardwired into physical
structures of different sorts which mediated its occurrence."
Margit Tamass
Marjolein Vermeulen + Myrthe Veeneman
Infiltration in mental blindness
Possible forms of mental blindness: the boundary between image and reality fades;
a
lack of sensibility for images as a result of overexposure and/or the
making public of the private domain. We want to search for examples of
mental blindness on the internet and try to infiltrate these examples
or the environment they are in, to see if it is possible to create
small spaces or cracks in the way we see and experience those images.
For the workshop we would like to use the term 'mental blindness' as a
starting point for discussion, and discover together if infiltration
creates possibilities to look at images in a different way.
Marieke Rodenburg + Dirk Janssen
Liesbeth Levy
Liesbeth will use her yet unpublished book
Competing images, to think about the necessity and possibility of
representation. She is looking for ways to increase our 'power of
discernment', to tell apart those things that are nearly the same but
entirely different.
Bart Lans
Bart will report on his reading of Photography:
a critical introduction / edited by Liz Wells. (London: Routledge,
1997, 2002). In his presentation he will make a connection between the
book and his own observations on 'taking' images as he is currently
developing a practice as documentary photographer himself.
Tsila Hassine
Tsila has started working on a tool that
will enable tracking the appearance, dispapearance and degree of
proliferation of an image on the net. She will go over the script, and
present her motivation for this tool, and also discuss further possible
directions for this tool to evolve.
De Geuzen: Femke Snelting
How
to address images? What are the various language systems surrounding
images on the net? Understanding that networked images are embedded in
many layers of words, I started to look at the accidently or
purposefully written narratives that are formed as a result; how
labeling, scripting, coding and search terms define the many lives of a
networked digital image file. Through the close reading of day-to-day
on line activities such as 'searching for an image' or 'embedding an
image in html' I would like to think out loud about how this wordy
habitat is of influence on the nature of networked images and what this
could mean for the development of a tool such as the Historiography
Tracer.
De Geuzen: Riek Sijbring
With an immense speed I am
able to plunge myself in to one or another reality, a personal tragedy,
a national cause, a political disaster. Surfing around, the digital
images illustrating those events become part of my reality but what is
it that I have downloaded in to my system?
Visibility is not a
given, I should worry about what is not shown. In trying to make
something of what I see and to reflect upon what I consequently think,
makes me seriously doubt wether the tools I have got available, are
sufficient. The set of norms and frame of reference that I apply as a
European citizen have shown more and more proof that it's primacy is
under attack.
Could a historiography tracer be a form of annotation;
keeping track of the contexts in which the images are circulated, in
order to increase the chance of gaining reference close to the image
and what it is representing?
De Geuzen: Renee Turner
I am going to talk about a
chance encounter with an image, that of Iman Darweesh Al Hams, a
Palestinian school girl who was killed by Israeli Defense Forces in
Rafah. For me, the encounter was moving in a fundamentally human and
political sense. It also exposed what happens when bodies are reduced
to pixels and circulated across the world wide web. This experience
marked a radical shift in my own thinking about the witnessing of media
images and brought me to work on historiography tracer.
Seeing her photograph appear and disappear from search results, watching how it was being contextualized for a variety of different and even conflictual agendas, raised numerous questions both ethical and technical. I would like to think together about how to trace these contexts in order to understand how various narrative shifts impact the representational currency of an image. Related to this, I ask myself, whether a geography of the net could be considered which might situate an image. Also, if the web can be seen as a rhizomatic archive of images, something which is a departure from conventional analog repositories, how can it be mapped. To me, what is at stake is how history and its events will be constructed, forgotten or memorialized.
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