labor view as a function of media development

Frank C. Lewis

L.J.M. Daguerre, Parisian Boulevard, 1839

Frank Lewis, an instructor in Art History, director of exhibitions and curator of the Wriston Art Gallery, gave a lecture yesterday (10/29/10) opening for the show, Wisconsin Labor: A Contemporary Portrait. His lecture revolved around the change in media towards labor through time. He started with a photograph taken in 1839, Parisan Boulevard. He pointed out that since the camera takes a long exposure time, even the busy street (Parisan) looked empty. The only one that stood out was the person who stopped to get his shoes polished. From there, he pointed out that the shoes polisher was not photograph, and that symbolized how the labor in those days were ignored.

Power House Mechanic by Lewis Hine 1910

Kingfisher by David Octavius Hill & Robert Adamson, 1845

Through time, he said, the labor got recognized as individual. Before, it was all about the landscape and individuals that expressed their love for the land. Right around 1845, labor took on a different turn where individuals are getting recognized (photographed) for what they do. Then the age of machines started. In 1900, machines started to gain significance. Picture by Hine depicted a true sense of man becoming one with the machines. At this stage, one can say that the machine and man works together. That was true until the study of Frederick Taylor, Movement Analysis. He changed labor from individual with specialized skills to a replaceable machine cog. He researched on what each individual can do to optimize the efficiency. As a by-product, man became a part of a machine and lost their individuality, as portray in the picture by Edward Burtynsky.

Manufacturing #17, by Edward Burtynsky

And here is the "future" depiction played by Charlie Chaplin.

It is not a one way ticket, but a round trip

Who comes first???

After reading "The Technology and the Society" by Raymond Williams, it hits me; the society depends on technology and likewise technology depends on society. There is no clear cut answer to which what influence one another first. It is like asking which came first the chicken or the egg? As far as human history goes, we always have some sort of technology and culture. For example, the expansion of knowledge causes one to implement television. The television phenomena causes people know more. And so on.

William Wegman

One of the big influence of technology to society is the making of cameras. The ability to capture a moment in time and store it forever the way it looks and sounds changes a lot of things in society. William Wegman, an artist, took advantage of this and made many artistic/comical videos. One of his video shows him putting on his deodorants onto his armpit. For the whole video which lasted 49 seconds, he talked about why he liked the deodorants and sprays unstopped stream of the deodorants onto his armpit. It is funny and artistic in a way.

5 semi-naked Anthony(s)

Another artist, Anthony Goicolea, also made use of this technological change. He photographed himself and multiplied his image to portray his artistic ideas. His work is very strange. It is very sexual but not in a normal way. Most of the picture, like the one on the left, contains only semi-naked multiple of himself. This strangely reminded me of something I saw a year ago. It was Megan Fox making out with a dummy which made to look exactly like her. Maybe her producer is a secret fan of Goicolea? Below is an early video made by Wegman which I found to be pretty cool.

Snip snip snap snap.. Here is my master picece!

"Everything worth discovering, has been discovered" is a quotation taken from a movie Around the world in 80 days. Reading through William S. Burroughs' article on The Cut-Up method of Brion Gysin reminded me of the above quote. He strongly believed that we are not bringing anything new to this world as an artist. We only "cut-up" the existing materiel(i.e. articles, art and etc.), put it together and publish it as our own. While that might be somewhat true, it disturbs me how much he over generalized it. What about Mathematicians and Scientists? They are artists in a way. They do research using other people's work, but they build new things on top of it. As a result, we enjoy our advancements in knowledge and technology.

A still image taken from Decasia

Sure, cut-up can generate a different point of view of the existing materials, but it can not be an excuse for the lack originality. Sometime cut-up can transform the meaning of the existing material into something new. Sound interesting? For what I have seen, this "transformation" does not quite meet my expectation. I am referring to Decasia, a film produced by Bill Morrison. I can only describe my feeling towards the film as painful, both physically and mentally. In my highly opinion, (and that is to say, I am not suggesting that everyone feels the same) I think watching the film is equivalent to listening to this squeaking noise made by scratching a chalkboard with a fingernail. Imagine the sound repeatedly played over and over again for the duration of 67 minutes. Having fun yet? If you are not convinced that cut-up might not be the best method around, take a look at the following.

One of the many photos Levine steals from Evans

Let us change our angle to something we are familiar with, plagiarism. When a student take an excerpt from the internet and say that it is his own, the student gets punished for it. But why do I see the "artist" like Sherrie Levine who re-photograph Walker Evans' photos, gets recognized? Isn't it the same concept as plagiarism? To me, it is. Burroughs would probably argue otherwise. I think it is only fair when other people's materials are used as a reference, or when a small part of their materials is incorporate into a big picture.



One of the type of plagiarism is called the Remix (3:12). I think it is the most similar to the Levine case.

The world is watching!

Let us imagine a situation where you are walking down a busy street. How likely would a person stop you? Stare at you? Examine you? Follow you? ... Not likely, unless it was your unlucky day and a swamp of creepers happen to be next to you. But guess what? It is not as unlikely as you might think. Every hour of your life outside your own space, you are probably captured and recorded in one of the millions of surveillance cameras around the world. On top of that, your picture could as well be distributed over the internet and currently viewed by millions of people without your knowledge.

Elevator operator taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson

How is that possible you asked? Let us go back to Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom I have mentioned earlier in my post on Friday, October 1. He was one of the most well-known street photographer back in the late 50's. He traveled around the world taking pictures of people and displayed it at his museum. Without knowing, an elevator operator's picture was taken and viewed by millions of people before she was made aware of it. Back then, it was one person with one camera. Now, things are different. 

Samsung Seek cell phone

Majority of people carry at least one cell phone with them all the time. Since 97, cell phones started to have embedded camera in them. Now, it has become uncommon for a phone to not have one. These cameras used to be of bad quality, but now, may can take as equal quality picture as a point-and-shoot camera, if not better. Imagine 10% of those like to shoot pictures like Henri. Do you still think, your pictures has not already been circling around the internet?

Security camera at Lawrence university building

If you are still convinced, then the next time you walked down a busy street, take a look around you. From a bank to a convenient store, there are surveillance cameras everywhere. It is impossible to walk into a building without being recorded by one of the cameras. It is also impossible to know whether that footage of you is going to stay inside that building or has already been uploaded to the internet. We are constantly being watched, without even knowing it. Below is the footage captured by a surveillance camera at a convenient store, and it was uploaded on to Youtube.

So my project revolves around the idea of the world is watching. The project is divided into 3 sets. The first set contains 10 pictures of camera phones. The set shows different varieties of phones which varies in size and shape yet shared a common aspect, camera. The second set contains pictures of stationary surveillance cameras from wall-mount to webcam and laptop cameras. They shows different types of visible cameras around you. The third set was inspired by Henri and the combination of first two sets. They are pictures that could have been taken from any of the cameras in the first two sets. Below are some examples.

1.0, 2.0 and 3.0? when does it stop?

Netscape Navigator mid 90's

Hearing Rachel Crow mentioning "Netscape" brought back my old memory when I was about 12 years old. I remember the first time I learned about this thing called "internet". I was intrigued by how much I can do sitting in front of a little screen with a keyboard and a mouse. The first web browser I knew about was this "Netscape Navigator," approximately in mid 90's. That time, there was no Google, All I had was a website called sanook, which translated to "fun" in Thai language. I remembered I was just sitting and waiting for at least 5 minutes for the page to load and there would be mostly text with hyperlinks on them. The content were just news and entertainment. If one wanted to make a website like that, s/he has to be a professional. Only thing I could do was to post a comment feedback to the website. (maybe because I was twelve and does not know a word in English). Even just knowing that, I thought I was a hot stuff, know it all 12 years old boy.

But now it is all different. If I walk around my primary school, I am sure at least half of the students are comfortable with the idea of internet and probably have their own Facebook and Hi5 (Social networking site popular in Thailand) profiles. I will even go as far as placing a bet that more than half of you reading this blog, just pressed the facebook hyperlink above and signed on to your profile, or already have the page up while reading this! (Well, I do). Things have changed and we are responsible to keep up with it. This is the age of Web 2.0!

Some well-known websites of web 2.0

So what exactly is Web 2.0? According to the article written by Lev Monovich, Web 2.0 refers to enabling website platforms that allow end-users to publish their own content without any expertise in computer programming. The main difference between web 1.0 (my childhood) and web 2.0 is that end-users could not publish their ideas in the way professionals could. Taking this website for example, there are underlying ten of thousands of computer codes that one has to write in order to present this look. But since web 2.0, this look is just a click away. Web 2.0 sounds really good, but is it? At the end of the day, I realized all these Facebook and twitter that came with the web 2.0 package is not always good for us. We forgot what it was like to actually hang out with people just to keep in touch, a birthday wishes reduced to a merely 20 characters "happy birthday man!!" on Facebook. The question is, what's next?

Just this last 10 years, things have changed so much, I could only hope that it stops right here. My prediction is that there will be no more face to face contact. Things that needed to be said can be said through twitter and text. Just the thought of that gives me a chill down my spine. Let this lady explain to you in a simple words.

From the Streets



Sample picture of Medieval Architecture

  

Dan Leers, a Lawrence graduate, gives a talk about his career path today at Lawrence University. He has been changing his interests from medieval era architecture to Greek & roman coins to photo journalism and ended at Museum of Modern Art. One person Leers believes has inspired him into the photojournalism is Henri Cartier-Bresson. Henri was a French photographer who had been actively searching and capturing a magic moment in time and space around the world. Below are couple of pictures that Henri captured.  

Henri Cartier-Bresson and his favorite camera



A silver Roman coin of Tiberius

The technique Henri used to take the pictures is called street photography. Nobody knew at a time that their pictures were taken. They presented their natural habitat. there was no pose, no act, just a reality.

As we can see in any of these pictures, the people were not at all aware of the present of the camera. They act as they feel and we can feel what they feel. It is inspiring to something real once a while in photos these days. In the modern society, every picture we see on the magazine, Internet and billboard, are acted and retouched. I think these pictures by Henri is just brilliant. I am inspired by his work and hope that one day I can have a good collection like that too.