Photo 2 at SMU Spring 2020

This video was interesting. I felt like she really drew you into the story. I feel like the beginning with the music didn't set the scene very well and took a long time, but once you got into the room and space and she begins talking, I felt like even though it was a different language I could place my own personal experiences onto her story. She talks about someone who she invisions being with, how she would wait for him anywhere. But that every time they meet, it will be somewhere different but always the last time she will see him. When the speaker says no, it sounds like a different voice. Like she is contemplating everything in her head and there are two separate versions. One which is an optimist, hopeless romantic envisioning a future, and the other more realistic, saying no, these things won't happen. Claiming her love for him is more than his will ever be. Through both of these at the beginning I wondered which would end up becoming true. but then it goes on to say t...

Some quotes that were interesting: "Technology isn’t inherently progressive. Its uses are fused with culture in a positive feedback loop that makes linear sequencing, prediction, and absolute caution impossible" ‘The universal must be grasped as generic, which is to say, intersectional, built from the bottom up – or, better, laterally, opening new lines of transit across an uneven landscape’ "The task of collective self-mastery requires a hyperstitional manipulation of desire’s puppet-strings, and deployment of semiotic operators over a terrain of highly networked cultural systems."  ‘we, as women, have long been excluded from fully participating in a patriarchal society. Let us seize this exclusion as a productive asset’. The univocal ‘we’, deployed without a convincing account of difference, is addressed further below. Thirdly, as a ‘creature on the offensive’, serving ‘all of our alien kin’ and ‘constructing an alien future’, we find the figure of a ‘sci-fi a...

Some Quotes that stood out to me "Technology isn’t inherently progressive. Its uses are fused with culture in a positive feedback loop that makes linear sequencing, prediction, and absolute cau-tion impossible" "There are incessantly proliferating tools to be annexed, and although no one can claim their comprehensive accessibility, digital tools have never been more widely available or more sensitive to appropriation than they are today." Reminds me of the Marks Reading and the capitalistic outputs of technology come with detriment, while the accessibility of technology can aid in a socialist vision (in this case feminism) "If ‘cyberspace’ once offered the promise of escaping the strictures of essentialist identity categories, the climate of contemporary social me-dia has swung forcefully in the other direction, and has become a theatre where these prostrations to identity are performed." Reminds me of the bit in the hyperrealism documentary when t...

Not within a virtual space but rather a physical space Everything needs to be immediate now a days Tech companies can't promise a future, they can just say something will happen Something is actual if it has an effect that leads to an action.

"The truth is that technologies age and die just as people do-they even remind us of our common mortality-and this is another fact that the myth of virtuality would like to elide. Digital aesthetics thus invites a phenomenological understanding, in which we can understand media in terms of our shared corporeality." Expressions of art are extensions of our own shared experienced, a shedding of something unifying through various mediums. With the advent of the internet, we alter these modes of communication, both in their virtual structure, and their delivery.

I found the article interesting, I myself had never seen the photo of the hooded man or heard of Abu Ghraib. It is pretty disturbing how the army took picture of prisoners that they were doing illegal stuff to, even if they didn't know they'd later end up incriminating themselves. The fact that the one guy thought he was the guy in the famous photo also brings up the question of how many people were subject to the same kind of torture.

"With the advent of photography images are torn from reality and exist as separate entities" The impossibility of providing full context for an image creates flexibility in what we see in the image, and what we want the image to be, in our own eyes and from the eye behind the lens. "photography provides evidence but no shortcut to reality" We tend to respect photographic evidence, especially in this context with a certain tinge of credibility. Especially in the case with the hooded man, it seemed more natural to follow the evidence and lines of logic that signified it was the correct person. We innately, subliminally enact trust, upon the context, the photo, and the evidence. There is a rational logic that is born out of innate credibility of what we want the story to be, for photography, and the journalistic process. Sometimes this line of thought can clash with the truth, and shows the processes of trust that take place in our media transmission.

I found this article really interesting -- disturbing, but interesting. I hadn't heard of Abu Ghraib before and hadn't seen the photo of the hooded man. It's strange to think that the Americans documented themselves abusing prisoners at the camp, and somehow shared them to the point that it became a worldwide scandal. Either they didn't know or didn't believe what they were doing to the prisoners was very wrong. But without their documentation, the uproar around the situation never would have happened. I think that Frederick's photo became the more famous one out of all the ones taken because of the anonymity that you don't see as well in Harman's photograph that includes Frederick. The situation is a bit harder to decipher without Frederick standing in the corner of the photograph. I also found it really interesting that the photo of the hooded man wasn't as much of a symbol of outrage as it is in the US compared to the Arab world, where the photo o...