Movatterモバイル変換

William Coperthwaite is a teacher, builder, designer, and writer who for many years has explored the possibilities of true simplicity on a homestead on the north coast of Maine. In the spirit of Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, and Helen and Scott Nearing, Coperthwaite has fashioned a livelihood of integrity and completeness—buying almost nothing, providing for his own needs, and serving as a guide and companion to hundreds of apprentices drawn to his unique way of being. AHandmade Life (...) carries Coperthwaite’s ongoing experiments with hand tools, hand-grown and gathered food, andhandmade shelter, clothing, and furnishings out into the world to challenge and inspire. His writing is both philosophical and practical, exploring themes of beauty, work, education, and design while giving instruction on the hand-crafting of the necessities of life. Richly illustrated with luminous color photographs by Peter Forbes, the book is a moving and inspirational testament to a new practice of old ways of life. (shrink)

No categories

Direct download   Export citation   Bookmark  

The essay is an analysis of John of Damascus’ justification for venerating the icons. Under the subtitle ‘reasoning for venerating the icons’ the essay conducts the analysis in three parts. First, John's definition of ‘veneration’ is presented and examined. Second, the OT ‘veneration’ passages he cites are critically evaluated. Third, the apparent incoherence of John's case is demonstrated from the Eastern Orthodox notion of scripture. This is a follow-up study to a previous essay (i.e., ‘Handmade: a critical analysis of (...) John of Damascus’ reasoning for making icons’) which analyzes a problem in Orthodox aesthetics closely related to the one I examine here. (shrink)

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

Drawing on digital sensory ethnographic research with potters during the Covid-19 pandemic in Britain, along with the literature on clay therapy, this paper explores how engagements with clay afford hedonic psychological wellbeing impacts. Adopting an embodied-enactive-ecological approach, we utilise Material Engagement Theory (MET) and the concept of therapeutic affordances to challenge internalist cognitive approaches and to argue for the active role of material engagements in shaping our affective states. We argue that clay’s materiality is central to such impacts and that (...) wellbeing arises relationally through interactions between specific individuals, materials, and their environment. This paper discusses how the tactile, cohesive, and malleable materiality of clay, as well as the variability in how it can be engaged, allows for mindful, immersive and relaxing experiences, that positively contributed to the hedonic wellbeing of our participants. Additionally, we examine how interactions between potter and clay evolve through the development of skill, as their affordance space changes. Particularly, we highlight the complex nature of control with respect to the volatility of clay and pottery; we explore the tension between the desire for and the pressures of skilful production, we analyse the enjoyment of the processes of making, and discuss the permeability of distinctions between hedonic and eudemonic wellbeing. (shrink)

Direct download(3 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

The digital era in which we live has led to countless online social movements, all driven by emotions. This paper builds on fieldwork that stretched over 2 years, starting March 2020 as Norway went into lockdown due to COVID‐19. Emotions as experienced online seem to differ from those that are materially embodied or physically present among the studies' 25 young adults. Through two young women, this paper explores reflections on slow writing, holding a letter in their hands, in juxtaposition to (...) fast scrolling on their phones, receiving and sending messages and pictures. In the meetings between their hands and paper, their hands, and their phone screens, they sense time and experience emotions through touch and imaginaries. Amelia and Embla connect mind, body, and senses, as they share their understanding of touching what others have made by hand, imagining the thought behind the embodied materiality. (shrink)

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   1 citation  

No categories

Export citation   Bookmark  

Direct download(3 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

Direct download(3 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

Direct download(3 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

Pictures are a quintessential source of aesthetic pleasure. This makes it easy to forget that they are epistemically valuable no less than they are aesthetically so. Pictures are representations. As such, they may furnish us with knowledge of the objects they represent. In this article I provide an account of why photographs are of greater epistemic utility thanhandmade pictures. To do so, I use a novel approach: I seek to illuminate the epistemic utility of photographs by situating both (...) photographs andhandmade pictures among the sources of knowledge. This method yields an account of photography's epistemic utility that better connects the issue with related issues in epistemology and is relatively superior to other accounts. Moreover, it answers a foundational issue in the epistemology of pictorial representation: I argue that photographs have greater epistemic utility thanhandmade pictures because photographs are sources of perceptual knowledge, whilehandmade pictures are sources of testimonial knowledge. (shrink)

Direct download(7 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   19 citations  

Deepfakes are fake recordings generated by machine learning algorithms. Various philosophical explanations have been proposed to account for their epistemic harmfulness. In this paper, I argue that deepfakes are epistemically harmful because they undermine trust in recording technology. As a result, we are no longer entitled to our default doxastic attitude of believing that P on the basis of a recording that supports the truth of P. Distrust engendered by deepfakes changes the epistemic status of recordings to resemble that of (...)handmade images. Their credibility, like that of testimony, depends partly on the credibility of the source. I consider some proposed technical solutions from a philosophical perspective to show the practical relevance of these suggestions. (shrink)

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   3 citations  

This article surveys some of the ways in which early modern scholars responded to what they perceived as an overabundance of books. In addition to owning more books and applying selective judgment as well as renewed diligence to their reading and note-taking, scholars devised shortcuts, sometimes based on medieval antecedents. These shortcuts included the use of the alphabetical index, whether printed orhandmade, to read a book in parts, and the use of reference books, amanuenses, abbreviations, or the cutting (...) and pasting from printed or manuscript sources to save time and effort in note-taking. (shrink)

Direct download(10 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   11 citations  

What is special about photographs? Traditional photography is, I argue, a system that sustains factive pictorial experience. Photographs sustain pictorial experience: we see things in them. Further, that experience is factive: if suchandsuch is seen in a photograph, then suchandsuch obtained when the photo was taken. More precisely, photographs are designed to sustain factive pictorial experience, and that experience is what we have when, in the photographic system as a whole, everything works as it is supposed to. In this respect (...) photographs differ fromhandmade pictures, and from other information-preserving tools, such as the readings on a geiger counter. This distinctive feature can be used to explain what is epistemically special about photographs, and also to give an account of the distinctive phenomenology of looking at a photograph rather than ahandmade picture. All this provides the background against which to assess claims that digital photography differs from traditional in certain key ways. (shrink)

Direct download(4 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   34 citations  

Kendall Walton says that photographs are “transparent” . By this he means that “we see the world through them” . That is,With the assistance of the camera, we can see not only around corners and what is distant or small; we can also see into the past. We see long deceased ancestors when we look at dusty snapshots of them…. We see, quite literally, our dead relatives themselves when we look at photographs of them. [Pp. 251, 252]Walton is explicit on (...) one point: he does not mean merely that we have the impression of seeing ancestors, or that photographs supplement vision, or that they are duplicates or reproductions or substitutes or surrogates. Rather, “the viewer of a photograph sees, literally, the scene that was photographed” . In what follows I will urge that Walton’s argument for this view is insufficient.Walton is led to his conclusion by an account of the nature of seeing. He claims that “part of what it is to see something is to have visual experiences which are cause by it in a purely mechanical manner” . The mechanical connection is important here. For “to perceive things is to be in contact with them in a certain way. A mechanical connection with something, like that of photography, counts as contact” . Paintings and other “handmade” representations fail to have the required mechanical connection; they are humanly mediated rather than mechanically produced. Consequently, Walton thinks, paintings are not transparent. On the other hand, “objects cause their photographs and the visual experiences of viewers mechanically.” And “so we see the objects through the photographs” . Edwin Martin is associate professor of philosophy at Indiana University. He is currently completing a photographic portrait of American tent circus life. (shrink)

Direct download(5 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   6 citations  

According to the causal theory of photography (CTP), photographs acquire their depictive content from the world, whereashandmade pictures acquire their depictive content from their makers’ intentional states about the world. CTP suffers from what I call the Problem of the Missing Agent: it seemingly leaves no room for the photographer to occupy a causal role in the production of their pictures and so is inconsistent with an aesthetics of photography. In this paper, I do three things. First, I (...) amend CTP with Fred Dretske’s distinction between triggering and structuring causes, thereby overcoming the Problem of the Missing Agent. Second, I argue that CTP so amended in fact illuminates two aesthetic interests that we may take in photographs, focussing on photographic portraiture and street photography. Third, I show how reflection on the aesthetics of photography serves to support aesthetic anti-empiricism: the view that the aesthetic value of artworks consists, at least in part, in achievement rather than sensory pleasure. (shrink)

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   2 citations  

If people believe that some property is true of all members of a class such as sofas, then they should also believe that the same property is true of all members of a conjunctively defined subset of that class such as uncomfortablehandmade sofas. A series of experiments demonstrated a failure to observe this constraint, leading to what is termed the inverse conjunction fallacy. Not only did people often express a belief in the more general statement but not in (...) the more specific, but also when they accepted both beliefs, they were inclined to give greater confidence to the more general. It is argued that this effect underlies a number of other demonstrations of fallacious reasoning, particularly in category-based induction. Alternative accounts of the phenomenon are evaluated, and it is concluded that the effect is best interpreted in terms of intensional reasoning [Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D.. Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: the conjunction fallacy in probability judgment. Psychological Review, 90, 293-315.]. (shrink)

Direct download(5 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   26 citations  

The scope of this research is to study the zine, which is ahandmade booklet. The purpose is to reflect on what the zine is, discussing its format, reflecting on where it is inserted in the publishing market and what its cultural relevance is. This study is a theoretical and bibliographic research with a qualitative approach. We analyze three zines – Geração Beat, by Renato Alessandro dos Santos, O Ceifador de Privilégios, by Arthus Mehanna, and Libertemo-nos, by Melina Bassoli (...) – in order to understand their format, the ways of production, where they are inserted, and their themes. Afterwards, we notice characteristics that contribute to the dissemination of culture and democratic values, thus becoming an object of great cultural relevance.Keywords: Zine. Marginal Literature. Publishing market. (shrink)

No categories

Direct download(3 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

There is a sustained phenomenological tradition of describing the character of photographic pictorial experience to consist in part of a feeling of contact with the subject of the photograph. Philosophers disagree, however, about the exact cause of the ‘contact phenomenon’ and whether there is a difference in the phenomenal character between the pictorial experiences of photographs andhandmade pictures so that, if a viewer mistakes the type that a token image belongs to, their sense of contact can alter. I (...) argue that the contact phenomenon is contingent upon, and triggered by, the viewer’s perceptual experience of the image, which may be subject to change depending upon how a viewer attends to an image. I develop a hybrid account to resolve how the perceptual and cognitive aspects of a viewer’s experience interact and produce the complex phenomenology, including conflicting mental states, that a viewer can undergo during the described experiences. (shrink)

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

ABSTRACT Drawing on limited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2009 and 2010, this article analyzes how the idioms of “craft” and “handmaking” are being evoked and imagined in Detroit. Because of a recent flurry of journalistic accounts of artists, makers, and entrepreneurs flocking to the city’s industrial ruins, Detroit has reemerged in the public imaginary as a utopic “blank canvas”: an empty space waiting to be inscribed and transformed by the arrival of a new creative class. In this narrative of transforming (...) the “Motor City” into “Maker City,” the future of the not-quite-postindustrial city rests in the hands of those willing and able to do-it-themselves. While urban farming, artist collectives, hackerspaces, and business start-ups are all part of this narrative, here I focus primarily on the gendered domestic arts, craft fairs, and in particular the work of an all-female grassroots collective of makers calledHandmade Detroit. Interrogating the intersections between postfeminist and post-Fordist subjectivities that emerge in and through the narratives, spaces, and practices of the “indie” crafting community in Detroit, I argue that pleasure and self-fulfillment are often exchanged for what might otherwise be felt to be unstable, precarious, and even exploitive work. Finally, this article explores how the transformative rhetoric of DIY often espouses values of pleasure, autonomy, and choice, reproducing neoliberalist rationalities and limiting the political potential of craft and community activism in Detroit. (shrink)

Direct download(4 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   1 citation  

The work of Jalisco architect Luis Barragán Morfín is one of the highest expressions of Mexican architecture of the 20th century. Born from a thoughtful creative process, it combines tradition and modernity in a unique way. From the work bequeathed by Barragán, there are some masterpieces of enormous importance and some significant reflections on the creative act of conceiving architecture that we recover in this book-folder of engravings stamped as a tribute to this singular character. Accompanying the reflections presented as (...) plates, Nacho Gómez Arriola produced numerous printed engravings of the original plates on Fabriano Murillohandmade cotton paper and a book with an essay on his work and reflections. (shrink)

No categories

Export citation   Bookmark  

This article discusses the image of the ghost as adapted by and to photography. It focuses on the evolution of the photographic ghost in relation to a distinctive manifestation of psychic photography (or spirit photography) prevalent during the early twentieth century. Psychic investigators observed that in some photographs the faces of spirits that developed on the glass-plate negatives appeared to have beenhandmade.1 More specifically, they looked like collages, composed of fragments of existing portrait photographs and prints, and of (...) everyday materials, re-photographed, and superimposed on the plate in the manner of a double-exposure (Fig. 1). Several notable investigators advocated that this phenomenon need not be construed as evidence of fakery. There was another explanation: that psychic photographs contained portraits not of but by disincarnate souls, made from images drawn from the Spiritualist medium’s or the spirit’s visual memories of photographs of themselves, others, and objects, which were assembled, reproduced, and imprinted upon the photographic plate. Thus, psychic photographs were interpreted as being fabricated artefacts, born of an interactive collaboration between disincarnate and embodied consciousness, created (somehow) in the ether or a psychic aura, mediated via the camera (in some cases), and made tangible on the sensitized emulsion. This paper examines the unique and overlooked interaction between science and spirit, apparatus and appearances, and matter and minds, involving and connecting attendant and (purportedly) remote psyches. (shrink)

Direct download(4 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

continent. 2.1 (2012): 2–5 To begin with, as we understand from a remote place like Seoul, there have been two different conceptions of materiality in the Western experimental ?lm history: materiality of cinema and of ?lm. The former has been represented by the practitioners of the so-called the “Expanded Cinema” and the latter by the tradition of the “Hand-made” ?lm. Whereas for the Expanded Cinema, the materiality or the “medium-speci?city” includes not only the ?lm material but also the entire condition (...) and environment in which the cinematic experience is situated (i.e.: screen, projector, audience and theatre); for the Hand-made ?lm, it is the whole ?lmic process prior to the screening in front of the audience (i.e.: hand-processing and optical-printing). The two practices share in the materialist turn that opens up the radical possibilities of aesthetic (and even political) interventions into a process previously considered seamless and transparent. What can be called to attention through the materialist turn includes the aesthetic-institutional process in the projection-spectator relation and the (non-) representational process in ?lm-making. Moreover, these interventions bring their own temporalities back to those processes, and this returning emancipates the temporalities from their subordination to the cinema-as-commodity. Hangjun Lee is a ?lm-based artist whose practice is concerned with Hand-made Film and Experimental Cinema. Given these interests, Lee questions the linkage between materiality and temporality. This was his preoccupation around 2006, the time at which he started to collaborate with Chulki Hong, the noise improviser. The improvisational nature of their audio-visual performances opened means of detouring from the conventional editing techniques. Their collaboration also afforded critical investigations into the performativity of the practices in both the darkroom and the screening room, as well as in the private recording/practicing studio, and public performance spaces for the improvising musician. In fact, it was a kind of common interest shared by both us from the outset. In our collaboration, we avoid sacri?cing/concealing/minimizing one form of performativity (the performative nature and temporality of compositional process) for the sake of the other (i.e. those in improvisational and executional process). In the ?eld of experimental music and sound, this kind of approach has been comprehensively called “cracking” or “hacking”. The concepts are ?nely formulated in the coinage of “Cracked Everyday Electronics” (by Voice Crack) or more generally “Handmade Electronic Music” (by Nicolas Collins). 1 And this was a pure but perhaps necessary coincidence. the original title of the work of our collaboration and, retrospectively, of the set of our working principles at the same time, “The Cracked Share” was named by Lee after Georges Bataille’s masterwork, The Accursed Share , with the substitution of the adjective with “Cracked” as a synonym for ‘reticulated’ in the photographic image. We think the ascetic and subtractive aesthetic turn of the contemporary non-idiomatic improvised (and even somewhat non-improvised) music 2 pushed us further towards more radical dissociation with the empty temporality of commodi?ed audio-visual experience. It can be called the aesthetics of “without,” and exemplars include Yoshihide Otomo’s Turntable Without Records , Sachiko M’s Sampler without Samples . There are also other radical experiments even with the (non-)improvised music without noise and sounds that neatly meet the rules and idioms of the existing/established experimental music. For us, this thread among the experimental music currents weighs in its emphasis on subtractive and dissociational power unique to improvisational action. Surely, the tradition of the Cracked andHandmade improvised music teaches us the crucial lesson that “[m]edia and mediation are never transparent” and that “[m]ediation actively transforms data from one form to another and is never passive.” 3 We couldn’t agree to this statement more. However, without the removal and withdrawal power of improvisation that poses and keeps both subjects (performer and audience) and objects (projector and instrument) in “inferiority,” 4 generalized cracking and hacking practices—or simply “glitch”—in music and visuals would be either sublimated into the mystical and ritualistic forms of “Film Alchemy” and “Noise Music” (to which both of us still strongly feel a belonging but also, more or less, ambivalent sentiments), or else assimilated into the logic of the commodi?ed audio-visual communication. Today in music, this principle of improvisational performativity should be formulated as the dis-organization of sound against the associational de?nition of (electronic) music and it needs to be translated into audio-visual experiences. In other words, cracking practices of free improvisation need not be limited in artistic creativity, in a darkroom, in a studio, or on the stage; the principle of the dis-organization of sound should be the principle of dis-organization (or cracked organization) of audio-visual performance space itself. NOTES 1) Norbert Möslang, “How Does a Bicycle Light Sound?: Cracked Everyday Electronics,” Leonardo Music Journal 14 (2004): 83; Nicolas Collins,Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking (New York: Rutledge, 2006). 2) We refer this not to the historical style or genre but rather the idea and practice that ?free improvisation? stands for. On the distinction between idiomatic and non-idiomatic improvisation, see Derek Bailey, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 1993). On radically politico-histrorical interpretations of free improvisation and noise music from various present viewpoints, see Noise and Capitalism , (eds.) Mattin & Anthony Iles (Arteleku Audiolab, 2009). 3) Caleb Kelly, Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), p. 29. 4) I borrow the term from my long-time collaborator, Choi Joonyong. See Ryu Hankil, Hong Chulki & Choi Joonyong, Inferior Sounds (Balloon and Needle, CD, 2011). (shrink)

Export citation   Bookmark  

Numerous writers on photography and motion pictures have claimed that photographically originated pictures are essentially different fromhandmade pictures. Arguments made on behalf of the essential difference of photographs from other kinds of pictures generally depend upon one or another of two models of the photographic process: the visual model claims that photographs are closely allied to vision and show what we would have seen from the standpoint of the camera at the time of exposure; the mechanical or automatic (...) model claims that irrespective of what a photograph looks like, it is a reliable index of what was the case at the moment of exposure. Each of these models is examined and shown to be faulty on either or both factual and/or conceptual grounds. Stanley Cavell's assertions about the "automatic" nature of photography are examined in some detail and shown to be either equivocal or false. It is suggested, in closing, that sharp, categorial differences between photographs andhandmade pictures do not exist and that questions about the differences between photographs and, say, paintings, can be solved only within the context of viewing particular photographs and particular paintings. In sum, claims about the ontological distinctions between photographs andhandmade pictures cannot be warranted. (shrink)

Direct download(4 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

Numerous writers on photography and motion pictures have claimed that photographically originated pictures are essentially different fromhandmade pictures. Arguments made on behalf of the essential difference of photographs from other kinds of pictures generally depend upon one or another of two models of the photographic process: the visual model claims that photographs are closely allied to vision and show what we would have seen from the standpoint of the camera at the time of exposure; the mechanical or automatic (...) model claims that irrespective of what a photograph looks like, it is a reliable index of what was the case at the moment of exposure. Each of these models is examined and shown to be faulty on either or both factual and/or conceptual grounds. Stanley Cavell's assertions about the "automatic" nature of photography are examined in some detail and shown to be either equivocal or false. It is suggested, in closing, that sharp, categorial differences between photographs andhandmade pictures do not exist and that questions about the differences between photographs and, say, paintings, can be solved only within the context of viewing particular photographs and particular paintings. In sum, claims about the ontological distinctions between photographs andhandmade pictures cannot be warranted. (shrink)

Direct download(4 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

This article reflects on the conceptual and aesthetic practices engaged in the development of a performance work by Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi and Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum titled DISRUPTERS, THIS IS DISRUPTER X. Nkosi/Sunstrum liberally describe this multimedia performance work as an ‘anti-opera’. In 2014, the Iwalewahaus African Art Archive at the University of Bayreuth invited Nkosi and Sunstrum to make further developments to an anti-opera they had been conceiving since 2013. The invitation formed part of ‘Mashup The Archive’, an artist residency (...) encouraging contemporary artists from Africa to engage with the Iwalewahaus Archive. The resulting performance was presented at the Schokofabrik, Bayreuth and was a tour through a ‘maquette’ of the anti-opera. It was a ‘living maquette’ in which audiences (termed ‘Safarists’) travelled through stations illustrating sketches of scenes, histories of characters, and other fragments of narrative exposition. The artists illustrated these stations using both ‘relics’ from the Iwalewahaus Archive, and newly generated digital and analogue content. Using a common tactic found in electronic music known as ‘sampling’, Nkosi/Sunstrum recontextualized and reinvented these artefacts to form part of the anti-opera narrative. The world of the anti-opera was created by video projections, sound streamed live to Bayreuth from Johannesburg,handmade replicas of archival objects, original music created from archival instruments, live performers and a professional opera singer. South African literary theorists Delphi Carstens and Mer Roberts suggest that the sci-fi genre ‘offers a potential vehicle for expressing the African oral mythical mode and a (re)writing of the continent’s marginalized oral histories in the mythopoeic mode’.1 Nkosi/Sunstrum are interested in the radical implications of this view and are using sci-fi as a tactic for imagining and ‘occupying’ new African futures. (shrink)

No categories

Direct download(4 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

On the Nature of Photographic Realism’ Kendall Walton argues that lack of mental-state involvement in the formation of photographic images is a quality that sets them apart fromhandmade images such as paintings or sketches. This paper defends and substantially develops this idea. It argues that viewers' knowledge of this objective character of the photographic process provides them with special warrant for the acceptance of first-order perceptual beliefs formed as a result of viewing photographic images. As well, it distinguishes (...) between two different ways in which mental states can be involved in the formation of photographic images, and uses this distinction to ward off the objection that decisions about film type, composition, moment of exposure, etc. undermine the objectivity of the photographic process. (shrink)

Direct download(7 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   17 citations  

. The author first engages the problem of defining the value of a photograph, not in terms of its commercial or monetary value but of its actual or potential use. Walter Benjamin's influential writings on photography are discussed, notably his complex metaphor of "aura" as applied to bothhandmade art and the photograph, with the author challenging Benjamin's contention that works of art do not require titles, whereas photographs do.

Direct download   Export citation   Bookmark   3 citations  

This article aims at defending the old theory of iconological dualism that opposes ‘handmade’ pictures to photographic pictures. I defend a new version of that theory, according to which photographs always enable viewers to have singular thoughts on the things photographed, whilehandmade pictures by themselves never enable viewers to have singular thoughts but only enable them to have what I call ‘thoughts by depiction’. To this end, I defend the old theory according to which singular thoughts require (...) a special relation—called ‘acquaintance’—between the thinker and the object thought about. I put this traditional view forward thanks to a new version of the classic spy argument for the acquaintance constraint on singular thoughts. (shrink)

Direct download(3 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

My great-grandfather died before I was born. He never saw me. But I see him occasionally—when I look at photographs of him. They are not great photographs, by any means, but like most photographs they are transparent. We see things through them.Edwin Martin objects. His response consists largely of citing examples of things which, he thinks, are obviously not transparent, and declaring that he finds no relevant difference between them and photographs: once we slide down the slippery slope as far (...) as photographs there will be not stopping short of absurdity. The examples fail in their purpose, but they will help to clarify the reasons for the transparency of photographs. Several of them can be disposed of by noting that they jeopardize the transparency of photographs only if they jeopardize the very possibility of perception. The others appear to reflect a misconception of the issue before us and the nature of my claim.To perceive something is, in part, to have perceptual experiences caused by the object in question. This is scarcely controversial. It is also uncontroversial that additional restrictions are needed—not all causes of one’s visual experiences are objects of sight—although exactly what the required restrictions are is a notoriously tricky question. One important restriction is that the causation must be appropriately independent of human action , in a sense which I explained . This, I argued, is what distinguishes photographs from “handmade” pictures, which are not transparent. Seismographs and footprints are caused just as “mechanically” as ordinary photographs are. So are photographs that are so badly exposed or focused that they fail to present images of the objects before the camera. So, also, are the visual experiences of those who look at seismograms, footprints, and such badly focused or exposed photographs. Yet we obviously do not see the causes of these things through them, Martin claims. How is it, then, that we see through ordinary photographs? Kendall L. Walton is professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan and author of a book on representation in the arts . His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism,” appeared in the December 1984 issue. (shrink)

Direct download(4 more)   Export citation   Bookmark   8 citations  

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Images >> Good HopeCarla Liesching Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 111]Carla Liesching is an interdisciplinary artist working across photography, writing, collage, sculpture, bookmaking, and design. Grounded in experiences growing up in apartheid South Africa, she considers the intersections of representation, knowledge, and power, with a focus on colonial histories and enduring constructions of race and geography. Carla's ongoing project, Good Hope, was published by MACK in (...) 2021, and was shortlisted for the 2022 Aperture Paris Photo First Book Award, and the Arles 2022 Prix du Livre in the Photo-Text Category. An excerpt from Good Hope is also featured in On Whiteness, by SPBH Editions. Carla was a 2021 winner of the Open Walls Arles competition presented by The British Journal of Photography and exhibited work during Rencontres d'Arles Festival in 2021 and 2022. She is a 2021 Light Work Grant recipient and the 2022 recipient of the Silver Eye Fellowship, culminating in a photo-sculptural installation at Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh. Carla was recently named a Foam Talent, with exhibitions at Foam Museum in Amsterdam, the Deutsche Börse Foundation in Frankfurt, along with a solo exhibition of Good Hope through PhMuseum in Bologna. Carla lives between South Africa and Ithaca. In Ithaca, she works as Visiting Critic in Cornell University's Art Architecture and Planning Department; as Lecturer in the Art, Art History and Architecture Department at Ithaca College; as faculty at the International Center of Photography; and as coordinator of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell. As part of her socially engaged practice, Carla is also a youth educator focused on image-making, visual literacy, and self-publishing as vehicles for expression and empowerment. [End Page 112] Click for larger view View full resolution'As soon as you are in a proper stage of defence you shall search for the best place for gardens, the best and fattest ground in which everything planted or sown will thrive.' Click for larger view View full resolution—Instructions from the Dutch East India Company inscribed on a yellowing sheet of parchment, 1651.1[End Page 113] Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 114]iYes, there are facts and figures to account for, timelines to trace, but have I told you of today's newspapers? Headlines like: 'Land Justice', 'Expropriation without Compensation', 'Revolution or Reform?' Have I told you of the monuments removed in the 'riots'? Or the groundsmen in green overalls scrubbing graffiti, repairing broken fountains, collecting debris? Black men White bosses still call 'boys'? Have I told you of the doves cooing gently, perched atop the sleeping bodies of migrant families on the lawns? Have I told you of the White children from the Cape of Good Hope Seminary dressed in their afternoon 'civilian clothes'? Or of the more racially integrated group from Mseki High in their grey-and-turquoise uniforms surrounding me on the main steps leading to the garden? The cacophony of lunch-time chatter, chip packets crinkling, the flap-flap of wings as seagulls scavenge for tasty morsels? Have I told you of the signs pointing to the Scientific Pleasure Garden? Or of the gift store filled with locally sourced flower oils,handmade candles, Delft-blue china tea-sets and postcards depicting the early colony? And what of Cecil John Rhodes cast in greening bronze, flanked by a Madagascar Cycad and a Queen Palm, announcing: Your Hinterland is There? Have I told you of the small rock in the corner of the vegetable garden with a label hidden beneath weeds? The arrival of the Dutch to establish a refreshment station, providing fresh produce for the ships plying the spice route, marked the end of a free and independent existence for the native Gorinhaiqua Khoikhoi. And what of the large label at the stone-walled entrance? A story of how a garden in 1654 brought together continents and affected the course of history. A story of how plants in the form of pepper, nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon changed the world economy. Have I told you the garden is the cause of it all? [End... (shrink)

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

> この道や行く人なしに秋の暮れ Matsuo Basho 16941 The surface is asymmetrical, the pigment flecked and uneven. Looking close, what seems at a distance to be smooth is actually covered in tiny gentle indentations and irregularities. On one edge, there are a series of fine lines—evidence of past damage, and repair. It is obviously old. But its age is part of its specialness. It is simple, one of a kind, beautiful. The above is a description of a Japanese stoneware tea bowl, like the (...) one in figure 1, embodying an aesthetic dating back to at least the 16th century called wabi-sabi (侘び寂び). Figure 1 Wabi-sabi tea bowl. ottmarliebert.com from Santa Fe, Turtle Island, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Wabi-sabi is famously difficult to translate, but derives from the words wabi 侘– indicating austerity, simplicity, the quiet life and sabi 寂—indicating maturity, solitude, naturalness. Wabi-sabi refers to the aesthetic appreciation of natural imperfection and impermanence.2 It is embodied in a tradition ofhandmade pottery, sometimes including repair of past breaks with gold inlay (kintsugi). But it is also reflected in stone gardens, in bonsai, in haiku, and some forms of the Japanese tea ceremony. What, you might ask, does this have to do with medicine? Pottery and aesthetics seem a long way from pathology and medical ethics. First, some …. (shrink)

Direct download(3 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

My great-grandfather died before I was born. He never saw me. But I see him occasionally—when I look at photographs of him. They are not great photographs, by any means, but like most photographs they are transparent. We see things through them.Edwin Martin objects. His response consists largely of citing examples of things which, he thinks, are obviously not transparent, and declaring that he finds no relevant difference between them and photographs: once we slide down the slippery slope as far (...) as photographs there will be not stopping short of absurdity. The examples fail in their purpose, but they will help to clarify the reasons for the transparency of photographs. Several of them can be disposed of by noting that they jeopardize the transparency of photographs only if they jeopardize the very possibility of perception. The others appear to reflect a misconception of the issue before us and the nature of my claim.To perceive something is, in part, to have perceptual experiences caused by the object in question. This is scarcely controversial. It is also uncontroversial that additional restrictions are needed—not all causes of one’s visual experiences are objects of sight—although exactly what the required restrictions are is a notoriously tricky question. One important restriction is that the causation must be appropriately independent of human action, in a sense which I explained. This, I argued, is what distinguishes photographs from “handmade” pictures, which are not transparent. Seismographs and footprints are caused just as “mechanically” as ordinary photographs are. So are photographs that are so badly exposed or focused that they fail to present images of the objects before the camera. So, also, are the visual experiences of those who look at seismograms, footprints, and such badly focused or exposed photographs. Yet we obviously do not see the causes of these things through them, Martin claims. How is it, then, that we see through ordinary photographs? Kendall L. Walton is professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan and author of a book on representation in the arts. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism,” appeared in the December 1984 issue. (shrink)

Direct download   Export citation   Bookmark   4 citations  

Today we are all familiar with the iconic pictures of the nebulae produced by the Hubble Space Telescope’s digital cameras. But there was a time, before the successful application of photography to the heavens, in which scientists had to rely onhandmade drawings of these mysterious phenomena. Observing by Hand sheds entirely new light on the ways in which the production and reception of handdrawn images of the nebulae in the nineteenth century contributed to astronomical observation. Omar W. Nasim (...) investigates hundreds of unpublished observing books and paper records from six nineteenth-century observers of the nebulae: Sir John Herschel; William Parsons, the third Earl of Rosse; William Lassell; Ebenezer Porter Mason; Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel; and George Phillips Bond. Nasim focuses on the ways in which these observers created and employed their drawings in data-driven procedures, from their choices of artistic materials and techniques to their practices and scientific observation. He examines the ways in which the act of drawing complemented the acts of seeing and knowing, as well as the ways that making pictures was connected to the production of scientific knowledge. An impeccably researched, carefully crafted, and beautifully illustrated piece of historical work, Observing by Hand will delight historians of science, art, and the book, as well as astronomers and philosophers. (shrink)

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

Kendall Walton famously argues that photographic images—in contrast withhandmade images—are transparent; we see through them to the persons or objects that were in front of the camera at the moment of exposure. Walton also argues, separately, that our philosophical investigations in the representational arts generally should adopt the methodology of theory construction. This article brings together these two strands of Walton's thought by rendering his argument for photographic transparency in the form of a theory consisting of a perceptual (...) natural kind and an underlying naturally dependent process, the former postulated in order to account for various photographic explananda. The surprising result is that Walton's theory, thus construed, yields at least one prediction that is in conflict with what we observe and that, because of this, he is forced to embellish his theory in ways that render it psychologically implausible and that raise the worry of ad hoc patching up. (shrink)

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark  

The way in which folklorists study their “scientific subject”, that is the creativity and the rich ways people attach meanings to their existence, has often been considered to be static and decontextualized. An interest in popular culture for propaganda purposes is associated with past regimes. Therefore, the notion of “folklore” still carries contradictory meanings and connotations. The author starts from a debate prompted in Italy by Alberto M. Cirese: in recent decades, Italian “native” ethnology has focused on endangered village traditions (...) rather than opening itself up to new instances of cultural change. The main risk was misrepresenting the methodology proposed by Antonio Gramsci in 1929. Today Italian research into folklore places the subject of “folklore” in its broadest context, investigating developments in society associated with the shift from a peasant to an industrial society, and embarking on additional research domains through transnational cultures. This research draws on the growing interest in cultural heritage in the public sphere, and, simultaneously, draws on recent advances in the study of uses of culture and memory. The paper studies two aspects of daily life: pure yarnhandmade clothes and ornaments, and long-life tomato sauce. The study concludes that contemporary everyday folklore takes on many free and unofficial forms that call for a renewed approach. To evaluate the multiplicity of folklore meanings and their capacity to integrate interactions between the traditional and the contemporary in specific contexts, the author explores the practicality of a new idea of folklore as sustainable, popular, domestic creativity using material and immaterial goods. This idea implies a rethink of the concept of heritage and of the complexity of its increasingly official, bombastic and rhetorical manifestations. (shrink)

No categories

Direct download(2 more)   Export citation   Bookmark