Distance No Object

For this week, partly in response to the Kress article and ‘the landscape of communication’,  I decided on extending my  experiment which takes the features of internet communication and connectivenss as a starting point. How can an image turn into a story, and let the open sourcing and tagging appropriate an artefact (i.e. graffiti on an art college wall) and turn it  into a digital object which is digitally absorbed, let loose into a visual internet culture?

Similar to my thinking, the visual and textual are inter-looped, with the occasional rupture of communication setting off stray activity.

It was reassuring to read Gillian Rose’s chapter again of visual analysis (still to tackle the word with capital S: Semiotics) and the article on transliteracy, which is a very obvious concept for an activity we all seem to engage with:

Transliteracy is the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks. –  www.transliteracy.com

I had a first look at the MOOC, a somehow daunting prospect for next week’s task. It made me realise that the perceived close knit group on this module, is now extended to thousands of potential discussants.

 I thought I would continue with my story, if you remember, the  graffiti image of a heart.

In a previous comment, I let the story end (Page not Found). I felt this was a symbolic move, poetic almost reflecting the emotional tension in the artefact.

Today I was considering a link to another website, until I received an alert via my mailbox to inform me that my photo has now taken it’s own internet course, through Pinterest.

You can check the link here.

In my continuous attempt to link the image to a narrative, emerging from its online presence, I looked for further evidence, through Google maps and noticed, not surprisingly, that love sick is absent from the Google wall.

Internet spaces and real life spaces are in a continuous flux

(to be continued)

A wonderfully elegant definition of visuality by Hal Foster (1988) , referring to the way in which vision is constructed in various ways: how we see, how we are enabled, allowed or made to see, and how we see the seeing, and the unseeing therein.

Gillian’s chapter, which I was fortunately to have read before, and a diagram I produced that I thought helpful for some of the tasks ahead.

Anyone reading online has experienced the ‘Page not found’ moment.

It is accompanied by a computer message revealing the number  404 … is this the internet’s doomed number…?

It is a curious event both for the ‘visitor’ and the ‘visited’…. in this timeless and digitally spacious medium, we are confronted with a closed door policy, a change of mind, an out of date, a rupture in communications.

High expectations are abruptly stopped, sales lost, ideas re-routed…

All of a sudden, we enter the world of databases, tags gone wrong, categories lost, protocol AWOL…

Administrators are notified.

A narrative that drifted.

by Mike Wesch, see the reference in the Transliteracy article by Sue Thomas et al.

the video claims to be the final version… can there ever be a final version?

In 2001 MIT scholar Henry Jenkins wrote: “Part of the confusion about media convergence stems from the fact that when people talk about it, they’re actually describing at least five processes” (Jenkins, 2001). He lists these types of convergence as technological, economic, social or organic, cultural, and global, concluding that “these multiple forms of media convergence are leading us toward a digital renaissance — a period of transition and transformation that will affect all aspects of our lives” (Jenkins, 2001).

Going back to the Bresson article above, this image illustrates the idea of convergence: what used to be written, still looks like a written piece of text, but has not been keyed in .Instead digital technology, more akin originally to digitising photos, art works and graphics, has reproduced this text-image, it’s been ‘grabbed’ and I am now able to place it.Placing letters as such these, is almost like a digital typesetter’s box. So I guess not that odd after all.

For an illustration on convergence, check out Candace’s post, with the image of Jackson Pollock’s paining of the same title.