Autobiographical Narratives and Body Art in Digital Media

Digital Media Foundations - MD4004

Autobiographical documentaries

2011. A personal crisis Kim went through, sparked by an incident during the filming of his previous film, Dream, where the lead actress nearly died by hanging.

A 2008 British documentary film directed by Chris Waitt who also starred as the main character and composed some of the music

2010, by Chico Colvard, exploring a history of abuse that had gone on inside his family, as a child

Selfies: A brief history

2005: The term "selfie" is first used by Richard Krause in a "how-to" photography guide.

Feb 2007: A user of the photo-sharing site Flickr creates a group called "selfie shots", defining selfie as: "A photograph of oneself in an arm-extended posture.”

June 2010: Apple releases the iPhone 4 featuring a front-facing camera, allows users to frame their self-portraits.

Oct 2010: Instagram is launched, reaching more than 100 million active users by April 2012.

June 2012 : Selfie joins the OED's watchlist of words for possible inclusion.

Dec 2012: Selfie appears in Time magazine's top buzzwords of 2012. "Selfies are often snapped at odd angles with smartphones and include part of the photographer's arm,"

Jan 2013: Obamas' daughters, Malia and Sasha, are pictured taking a selfie at their father's presidential inauguration.

March 2013: The Daily Mail publishes its first moral panic piece about selfies, headlined: "The craze for pouting pictures I fear my daughters will end up regretting." The writer adds: "It's as though a whole generation has lost the ability to smile naturally.”

June 2013: Instagram launches the fourth version of its software, the app's new 15-second video feature, Introducing the age of the selfie …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IX6aGvPTZ8I

Personal/autobiographical narratives in digital art

Individualisation = me-centrednessinstrumentalisation of social relationships to personal gain

• Worrying flow of private interests (oikos) into public space (ecclesia) and public space of discussion/negotiation (agora). Trivialisation of public space and reduction of citizens to consumers (Bauman 2000).

• From close-knit communal forms to me-centred networks (Castells 2001).

• Andrew Keen (2007): Uninformed citizenships and narcissistic culture.

Caravaggio, Narcissus1597–1599Oil on canvas

NarcissusGeorg Pencz,

Superbia (Pride) (1539)

Woman holding a mirror. Attic red-figure pyxis, ca. 430 BC.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1860) How They Met Themselves.

“when this stage [Primary Narcissism] has been surmounted,

the ‘double’ reverses its aspect. From having once been an

assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinder of

death.”(Ibid., p. 142)

Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, 1919

“From that moment our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze at its trivial image on a scrap of metal. A mad ness, an extraordinary fanaticism took possession of all these new sun-worshippers.” (Baudelaire, 1859, p. 123-124)

A society characterised by a very weak sense of self requiring constant external validation.

Cultural Narcissisms

Untitled (Blood Sign #1) - Ana MendietaPerformance, 1974

Lyle Ashton Harris (1987-8) Americas (Triptych) [Miss Girl; Kym, Lyle & Crinoline; Miss America], 1987-88

Hannah Wilke (1978-9)

Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna uses a mirror and a Kodak Brownie box camera to take a self-portrait on October 1914

Self-reflexivity

New technologies and exploration of new languages Challenging existing languages

E.g. postmodernism/post-structuralism and challenging reality, objectivity/ objective truths, linearity, authorship, etc…

‘Your attention, as reader, is now completely concentrated on the woman, already for several pages you have been circling around her, I have – no, the author has – been circling around the feminine presence, …’

Calvino, 1979, p. 21.

Rosalind Kraus on self-reflexivity: ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’

“[Most] of the video work produced over the very short span of video art’s existence has used the human body as its central instrument. In the case of work on tape this has most often been the body of the artist-practitioner. In the case of video installations it has usually been the body of the responding viewer. And no matter whose body has been selected for the occasion, there is a further condition that is always present. Unlike the other visual arts, video is capable of recording and transmitting at the same time – producing instant feedback”. (Krauss, 1978, p. 181)

E.g. Vito Acconci (1971) Centres

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIZOIoklszI

Vito Acconci (1973) Air Time

Stelarc (1996) Ping Body

During the Ping Body performances, the body's muscles are stimulated not by its internal nervous system but by flow of data.

http:/www.artelectronicmedia.com/document/stelarc-ping-body

Sousveilance

Hasan Elahi says the US government mistakenly listed him on its terrorist watch list. To convince of his innocence, Elahi has made his life an open book.

http://elahi.umd.edu/

Works encouraging self-reference…

‘Telepresence’Telepresence is a key area for young people living and working in the 21st century connecting daily through the use of online chat, skype, video conferencing and other virtual interfaces. People can now transmit, receive and respond through gesture communication, and they can play, dance and chat with friends and colleagues who are thousands of miles away, using these full body/voice interfaces.

http://www.bodydataspace.net/what-we-do/telepresenc/

Guy Ben-Ner Stealing Beauty

- New activities crossing boundaries between public and private, indicating tastes and practices of users, and deeper structures and dynamics of everyday life

-Suggests suspension of traditional forms of government and control, both in the way it is made, and the subject it deals with.

- The internet and places like UBU web constitute potential sites for “new virtual communities and […] an ‘electronic agora’” (Gane and Beer, 2008, p. 78)

Bibliography Baudelaire, C. (1981 [1859]) ‘The Salon of 1859’. Photography in Print. Vicky

Goldberg (ed.). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, pp. 123-7. Bauman, Z. (2001) The Individualised Society. Cambridge: Polity. Calvino, I. (1979) If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. London: Picador. Castells, M. (2001) The Internet Galaxy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Freud, Sigmund (1919) ‘The Uncanny’, in The Uncanny, Adam Phillips (ed.), David

McLintock (trans.), London: Penguin Classics, 2003. Gane, N and Beer, D. (2008) New Media: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Berg. Krauss, R. (1978) ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, in Video Culture: a Critical

Investigation, John Hanhardt (ed.). New York: Visual Studies Workshop Press. Lasch, C. (1979) Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing

Expectations, New York: WW Norton and Co. Keen, A. (2007) The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture

and Assaulting Our Economy. Boston and London; Nicholas Brealey.