list of plants that for some reason or another stir his
emotions."
- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
George Shiras III
George Shiras pioneered both the first flashlight photos and the first trip-wire photography of animals at night.
A box of photographs that Shiras brought to National Geographic in 1905 yielded the first nighttime wildlife photographs ever published. They appeared in the July 1906 issue of the magazine.
Albino and Normal White-Tailed Deer, Grand Island, Michigan, 1930
A swimming caribou with symmetrical horns, and white collar of a male, Newfoundland, Canada c. 1920s
Frigate birds soar overhead on motionless wings, Bahama Islands
A lynx photographed at night, Loon Lake, Ontario, Canada
A beaver is caught cutting down a black ash tree by flash photography, West of Marquette, Michigan, c. 1920s
A blind and deaf albino porcupine eats moss near the lake’s surface, Whitefish Lake, Minnesota
Two deer at night, Grand Island, Michigan, c. 1905
A timber wolf trapped on a deer runway in the forest, Near Lake Superior, Michigan, USA.
The carcass and wings of a false vampire bat are pinned to a board, Near Gatun Lake, Panama
Three deer run from the camera’s flash in the first ever trip-wire photograph of animals at night, c. 1880s
John Stezaker
Old Mask I-VIII, 2006
Collage, 24.5 x 19.5 cm each
Hello Hi There by Annie Dorsen
Designed as an iterable and improvisatory theatrical performance, Hello, Hi There stages a conversation between two natural language computer programs (chatbots) on the topic of the televised 1971 debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault. Beginning with the question of the “innateness” of human nature, the debate covered a range of subjects - from science, history, and behaviorism, to creativity, freedom, and the struggle for justice in the realm of politics.
Rooted in his own linguistic theory, Chomsky argues for the existence of a built-in biological, and therefore universal, basis for human subjectivity; while Foucault contends that external forces of power, culture, and history determine human cognition.
Despite the promise of bringing together two of the most important contemporary thinkers, the debate is generally considered to have failed to provide a clear presentation of contrasting ideas and/or productive synthesis of thought.
Originally developed in the 60s and early 70s, chatbots, or “natural language processors,” are designed to process and respond to human language. They use a set of logical and linguistic rules to choose from a programmed database of all possible responses. For this performance, Dorsen has provided the chatbots with a database capable of producing over 84 million different hour-long dialogs.
Credits:
Concept and direction: Annie Dorsen
Production design: Kate Howard
Systems design: Jeff Gray
Scenography/Lighting design: Edward Pierce
Chatbot software design: Robby Garner
— Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin (via conscientious)
(via photographsonthebrain)
Posted 1 week agoFree Garry Winogrand
The quotes by Garry Winogrand about the photograph and the surface of things could have been said by Andy Warhol. Winogrand actually became detached from his artistic output in ways that Warhol only pretended to be.
The straight photography crowd’s fantasy of Winogrand is that well-used romantic notion, the man with the Leica, the lone photographer who wandered through the streets with a small camera and a pocketful of 35mm film, finding moments of poetry and improvised art.
Winogrand may have lived this life; he was an empiricist that wanted to see what things looked like photographed. But he divorced himself from editing his work, so he never saw what many of those things looked like photographed. He did not believe in the power of the print or its meaning. He did not want the photographs to prove anything or say anything, except what light looked like on the surface of film at one particular time and place. Because of this detachment, an exhibit like “Garry Winogrand” could not be possible without a Curatorial Industrial Complex made up of many other people to process, archive, edit, print and display his work.
— Saul Leiter (via photographsonthebrain)
(via photographsonthebrain)
Posted 2 weeks ago
(Source: oscarmendoza, via photographsonthebrain)
THIS is an extremely interesting entry by Arden Sherman, a curator/writer focusing on the history of exhibition documentation photography.
Among other things, he talks about how, until as late as the 1980s, museums regularly incorporated potted plants into their gallery spaces:
“The infamous “white cube,” first articulated in the early years of MoMA, would regularly incorporate a plant (or three) into its cool geometry during its first few decades. Modern art museums only began to exile greenery in the late 1960s; by the mid-1980s it was as if they’d never been there.
Perhaps paradoxically, in the very moment of plants’ eviction, artists began to incorporate living matter into their work.”
Be sure also to check out Sherman’s blog MISE EN GREEN, which is probably my single favorite website at the moment.
http://blog.sfmoma.org/2013/01/proposal-for-a-museum-arden-sherman-mise-en-green-2
(via photographsonthebrain)
