SMU Photo 2 Fall 2019

I had not ever given the subject of this reading any thought. Most of the operating systems mentioned were before my time. However, I can relate to the commerciality of the medium. The continuous updates can be tiresome, especially when facing deadlines. I searched for a few of the websites mentioned. It was disappointing to find that these websites no longer existed and could not be accessed.

I found it interesting that Laura Marks separated five levels of materiality that online artworks index. The five levels are the Quantum level, the Electronic level, the Hardware level, the Software level, and the Social level. The quantum level brings up how digital images are even linked to subatomic particles. The electronic level says that there is unpredictability in relationships and online artworks. The hardware level brings up the idea that there are virtual images but a physical being. The software level says that materiality software asserts itself through viruses, obsoleteness, etc. While the social level brings up examples like amazon direct messages the person on the computer by saying "Hi Laura, how can we help you?"

bodily distance Jimmy DeSana Suburban Both in a sort of voyeur way of being distant and being distant from even being a body, looking almost alien. embodied intimacy me, i took this of a friend This embodies intimacy only in the sense that they are physically close. Using a mannequin as a proxy for another human makes this more of a simulation of in

This first image represents how I view embodied intimacy. They seem to be extremely close, and opening themselves to each other. Even though one persons back is to the other person, they is leaning towards him. This second image represents how I view bodily distance because they are physically turned away from each other. They are not close but rather farther away. They are not touching each other anf they are not facing each other.

Embodied Intimacy: Bodily Distance:

The space online comes down to, "interconnected bodies" relating to our "shared fragility, corporeality, and mortality." Marks talks about the space being a place of connection of different bodies that our desires are within that we see and experience, and finding out if it is part of reality or just part of the virtual experience. Virtual being part of materialism, Immanence: all that exists or could exist, money being the true source of the web, technologies age and die like people too -Aubrey

Bodily Distance Embodied Intimacy Both (?)

Embodied Intimacy: an expression of closeness to others, oneself, or things Photographer/Artist: @ziqianqian  (Ziquian Liu) __________________________________________________________________ Bodily Distance: Withdrawing the body forcefully away from a position of intimacy Title: Space Between Photographer/Artist: @kylejthompson (Kyle Thompson) - Aubrey

I enjoy the analysis of visual art, therefor, the commentary surrounding “Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation,” bores and exhausts me. Although, critique is inevitable and necessary, the critiques and arguments contained within Goh’s article do not persuade or change my original response. 

The group Laboria Cuboniks points a damning finger at the status quo. Intolerant white men working the capitalist system being the primary culprits for oppressing and exploiting the female and queer. However, she balances the status quo by placing responsibility on the oppressed and exploited to recognize that it is up to them to construct change.  XF considers and encompasses everything. It is big and consuming. For all to approach the world and every situation in it with transcendence, utopia would have been achieved.  The Cuboniks’ ideas can be boiled down and found in current religious beliefs but it is man’s pride and/or greed that skew the original meanings or has caused complete memory loss.  Love one another; do not judge yet you shall be judged; live and let live; and worry about yourself all come to mind yet all of these messages go ignored. The culprits are mostly unaware and clueless; always defensive, jockeying for first position. The only thing ...

I think that xenofeminism's main goal is so interesting. The climate of contemporary social media has swung forcefully in the other direction. We notice that in past generations gender was either a boy or a girl and this movement in wanting to completely abolish that "normalization". To break barriers and let anyone be anyone without a label. 

To be honest I find the abolition of class, gender, and race extremely interesting as to xenofeminism's main goal. If they find a way to do it I think it will aid in many different aspects across the world. People wouldn't view gender as a factor to someone's salary, stereotypes would cease to exist, etc. I also find it interesting that the writer tries to tie xenofeminism with alienness. She brings up how some of us are queer, trans, mothers, etc. We are all different and face some sort of alienation in our lives.

The article "Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation," written by Laboria Cuboniks, emphasizes the use of collective theoretical and political thinking through technology to give a voice to the marginalized (women, queers, and the gender-nonconforming) within society. The author stresses the use of rationalism within the manifesto of Xenofeminism in order to emphasize that reason, like information, has no gender because they both want "to be free, and patriarchy cannot give it freedom." Cuboniks links feminism with technology in order to, not only, be able to adequately address the complexities associated with the marginalization and discrimination of women within our contemporary society, but also provide an answer to their search for freedom from societal, patriarchal constraints. In other words, Xenofeminists aim to co-opt the structure facilitating their marginalization (technology) by rejecting the power dynamics of capitalism through their use of it. The aut...

Xenofeminism is honestly quite idealistic because even if we wish to isolate ourselves from other things we will always be drawn to those things when outside survival mode. Marx does discuss the idea of 'alienation' which could be seeing ourselves or others as outsiders (but does it really mean that)? Race, gender, and other labels are being questioned a lot in this century due to people making the choice to name themselves as something else which points to isolated individuality. So does that not mean that we are alienating ourselves even more than ever? Also can we be completely free ourselves from identity categories? As humans, we need similarities to feel welcome within a group yet having differences that distinguish us is what makes us individuals, not aliens (outsiders). Let me be clear, the message, "If nature is unjust, then change nature," is also unclear to me. What is the nature that your changing? Is it cultural lines created by society? Male dominance?...

To be determined.......: Waiting for reading to be posted.

The photo from the article ‘Will the Real Hooded Man Please Stand Up?’ is one of the clear indications of what and how different the human mind thinks, as well as the difference in what they see, thereby leading to their different judgments. From the photo, one may think that the individual in the picture is being sentenced to death and undergoing torture. This alone is clear that the eyes see what it wants to see and the mind thinks what it wants to given the situation at hand. To prove this, the author uses a different photograph of the head of a duck-rabbit in that whoever sees it as a rabbit then believes that it is a rabbit, and whoever sees it like a duck then believes that it is a duck. From the article, it is evident that the different judgments of people give different results. For instance, the author of the New York Times published a false report on the real person featured in the picture. This is because lack of his lack of attentiveness and running to conclusions witho...

Right from the beginning, I was extremely surprised to see a man unveil himself in that light. His head is down in the photograph which gives me a feeling that he is not proud of being that hooded man who was tortured. The article starts to take a turn where Times finds out Qaissi has a disfigured hand from a wedding a few years ago and assumes he has it in the photo but the most distinguishable part of Qaissi's body is not shown. The main point of this article is to show how photography leads to the mistaken identification of this man.    *Qaissi knew the environment extremely well    *photograph was low res    *no one else came forward saying it was them    *finally admitted that it was not him "was he a hooded man but not The Hooded Man?"    *rabbit duck profile- you were there experiencing it, you could've been next in line not necessarily that one photo- do we see Clawman or hands are normal? The story has an interpretat...

The subject of this reading highlights human shortcomings on multiple levels. At first sight, the photo is shocking. However, the focus of the reading was how the journalist got the identity of the hooded man wrong. I would have been more interested in a study behind the behavior that created the photo and the human condition under such circumstances. There was obviously an eagerness to publish the photo because of the shock value boosting sales. Then, the photo was recycled just two years later on the front page of the New York Times. Everyone loves a spectacle, even at the expense of human dignity. The reasoning and excuses used to explain how the hooded man was wrongly identified did not resolve much for me. Whether or not Claw Man believed he was the hooded man and/or intentionally mislead the journalist becomes irrelevant when he uses the photo on his business card. Was this for sympathy or what? Maybe the title set me up to have a bad opinion. It sounds like a play on Eminem’...

Errol Morris, in his article "Will the Real Hooded Man Please Stand Up," reflects upon the power of our beliefs to shape what we see, regardless if it is true or not, through the misidentification in a New York Times article of the Hooded Man tortured at Abu Ghraib Prison.  After it was made clear that Qaissi was in fact not the Hooded Man in the photograph, but just a hooded man... Many felt that that invalidated the photograph. However, individuals such as Susan Burke, the attorney who represents many of the torture victims, argued that it made no difference whether Qaissi was really the Hooded Man, as it makes his testimony no less valid.  Morris states that although Qaissi was most likely subjected to abuse; however, whatever happened to him, it's not the same as being the man in the picture. Thus, the photograph of Qaissi holding the Hooded Man photograph serves as a constant reminder of how we, as the viewers, can make false inferences from a photograph. I liked ...

A picture of the "Hooded Man" a victim of torture and abuse inside a prison. When it was reported that they found the man that was in the picture and it turned out to be fake. The reporter themselves fact checked hard before reporting the story but in the end it turned out false. However the man was one of the tortured and abused prisoners meaning there was more than one. The idea of what you see is not all of it, only a part can be used in this situation. When digging into an image, there are more than one piece of evidence that leads back to the cause for taking it. Yet the reality can have lies attached to it. People wanted to know who the hooded man was, but got even more mystery from it. What we believe we see is not fact, it's individual truth. This includes the photograph of the man holding the infamous "Hooded Man" photo. The only piece that connects him to the hooded man is out of frame, he also does not look into the camera which could be a sign of...

The first sentence of this reading is quite forward saying that the duo Soda_Jerk believes we are in an occult time war. They believe that reality is composed of fiction which I found to be an interesting sentence. Also saying that images are all sensory- like smell, taste, etc, really push the idea that images aren't the way we actually view them. I like this topic as we have read it a couple of different ways every week and I think this read has been the most interesting.