photography – medieninitiative

Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America — Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, June 2

The Digital Aesthetics Workshop invites you to join us for one final event next Wednesday, June 2 (5-7PM Pacific), for a conversation with Mary Beth Meehan & Fred Turner.

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Join photographer Mary Beth Meehan and historian Fred Turner in a conversation about their new book, Seeing Silicon Valley — Life in a Fraying America, and about the power of analog aesthetics in a digital era.

Mary Beth Meehan is a photographer and writer known for her large-scale, community-based portraiture centered on questions of representation, visibility, and social equity. She lives in New England, where she has lectured at Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Fred Turner is Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. He is the author of the award-winning history From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism among other books.

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More information about the book can be found here: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo90479007.html

Who’s Really Running Things…

How did I miss this? Anyway, now that I’ve discovered this ingenious reworking of the photo taken May 1, 2011, as news of Osama bin Laden’s death came to the White House situation room, I thought I’d put it up here to continue the blog’s occasional focus on the points of contact between Photoshop, superheroes, and politics (and video games: look at their computer screens!).

Photoshop and the Phenomenology of Violence

With the continued proliferation of the Casual Pepper Spray Cop meme, which I posted on a few days back, we’ve seen Lt. Pike placed in the most far-flung fictional and real-world situations, from historical civil rights marches to the halls of Hogwarts, from the Death Star to Nazi Germany. In these images, he reaches new levels of cruelty, horror, (ambivalent) humor, sheer absurdity, and grotesqueness as he sprays his pepper spray in the eyes of men, women, monsters, cartoon characters, animals, and children. Among these, however, it is the above image which, for me, remains unsurpassed in its ability to reveal the deep, embodied reality of the officer’s brutality. With his pepper-spray canister replaced by a watering can, his posture — his total body comportment in relation to the world — is revealed to be perfectly consonant with the activity of watering flowers (rather than pepper-spraying peaceful protestors). He is relaxed, almost meditative, at peace with the world around him, in a Zen-like symbiotic harmony (wu wei) with the environment. This, I suggest, is the ultimate indictment of his violent act.

Ian Bogost: Seeing Things

Videogame researcher and developer Ian Bogost posted this video he made on the photography of Garry Winogrand, looked at through the lens of object-oriented ontology–a philosophical approach he shares with Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, and Timothy Morton. While my own metaphysical orientation is closer to the process-relational metaphysics put forward by people like Steven Shaviro and Adrian Ivakhiv (and following people like Whitehead and Deleuze), I agree with Adrian Ivakhiv that a significant middle ground can be found between the two positions. This is something that has been debated time and again in the speculative realism blogosphere, and I don’t want to get into that debate here; above all, I don’t want to suggest that there is no difference between these “schools” of thought, only that for some purposes these differences may be less important than the commonalities–above all, the common opposition to what Quentin Meillassoux has identified as “correlationism,” or the view that subjects and objects, humans and things, phenomenal appearances and substratal reality are always and inextricably tied to one another, that there can be no access to a realm outside human thought, and that there is no interaction that would breach this correlation. One can certainly question the claim that all of post-Kantian Western philosophy up until the advent of speculative realism (itself a contentious term that collects positions so various as to be outright opposed to one another) was beholden to the spell of correlationism, but whatever one decides about that, Meillassoux’s identification of this tendency is surely not without heuristic value. And thus speculative realisms, object-oriented ontologies, and process-relational philosophies can be seen to make common cause with posthumanistic positions that aim to decenter human perspectives and anthropocentrisms of all sorts. In my own work, I have tried to triangulate such philosophical efforts with a theory of media as (in Mark Hansen’s words) “the environment for life” or, as I prefer, media as the environment for agency (both living and nonliving). Anyway, this is all just a long way of saying that I recommend watching Ian Bogost’s nicely made video, which offers a thought-provoking contribution to this effort to think media beyond the frame of human intentionality, instrumentality, and sentimentality.