Playing against the camera
(2020)
author(s): Erik Friis Reitan
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
In this essay I describe two projects within the field of visual art. Both works are examples of how the workflow techniques of digital photography can be modified in order to produce artworks that take on a distinct physicality and objecthood, and, as such, may form a spatial and/or haptic relation with the viewer. I discuss how such an approach relates to the ability of photography to point beyond the physical situation of viewing due to the particular virtuality of the photograph. By relating my work to the ideas of Vilém Flusser and Roland Barthes, recent theory on photography and photographic indexicality, as well as contemporary artistic work, I speculate here on how my own work illuminates perceptions of the photograph and understandings of the role of photography in today’s media culture and economy.
Self-portraiture: on photography’s reflexive surface
(2016)
author(s): Elisavet Kalpaxi
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
This exposition deals with narcissism, narrativity, self-portraiture, and photography. It illustrates a practice-based research project instigated in 2007 that aims to decode and recover narcissism as a useful sense-making scenario or system. This approach can help make sense of photography and self-portraiture in the present, and can be employed in the development of visual strategies in photographic self-portraiture.
Here I present the practical work that was produced and the theory that influenced my practice: namely, the revaluation of the relationship between self-portraiture and narcissism, and ideas from the semiotics of photography and narrative theory. The three main sections of the exposition illustrate the chronological development of my work, and each section is divided into two parts.
The first part of each section presents the practical work, whereas the second part illustrates the theoretical aspect of this project, which stems from a wish to reflect on my own art practice and increase my understanding of self-portraiture, while also interrogating narrative codes and devices in photography, such as the double, mise en abyme, and mirroring structures, and their association with narcissism. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, semiotics, and narratology, I argue that narcissism in self-portraiture can simultaneously represent an imaginary withdrawal of the artist, a structure within the work, and a vehicle for narrativity. By eluding structured language systems, narcissism provides a vocabulary for narrativising procedures, as well as meeting the artist’s/viewer’s modes of engagement.
These ideas informed the practical component of the research project and provided the basis for a number of visual strategies employed in the development of the photographic self-portraits that are presented in the second part of each section. In these sections, I also explain the different strategies adopted in producing my images: the role of codes, narrative devices, layering, and reframing for understanding the density of an image and its inherent narcissism. In the process I propose that narcissism should receive a much more central role in the consideration of images and the way they communicate with a contemporary audience.
O≡Cyan – for a dark holism to matter
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): TM
connected to: Konstfack - University of Arts, Crafts and Design
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Cyan and cyanides and their connected substances, organisms, and processes, constitute subject matter and material subject for the practice-based inquiry of O≡Cyan. Cyan emerges in photochemical and photosynthetic processes imaging us: the CMYK colour space, cyanide poison, cyanobacteria, and cyanotype. Cyanide capsules, cyanobacterial algal bloom and cyanide leaching in gold mining mark their outermost horizon.
Researched with a dark holistic approach, matter, method and medium are conceptually integrated and intrinsic to each other and can give rise to a critical mass of dark holistic and cyanotopic worlding – a network of narratives, phenomena, and matter. methods on the basis of dark materiality surrounding us planetary and concerning us personally, directed towards a History of Darkness - a slowly growing ABC, or material essay for Cyan and cyanides and its dark effects.