Looking Up, Looking Down

The smartphone’s digital snapshot provides a visual dimension in online sociality. These interactions take place on networks like Instagram, which enable users to instantly publish photos of their daily life. Everyday movements are captured using the smartphone as a pedestrian medium and mapped by the snapshot’s digital geotag, which refers back to the photographer’s physical trajectory through space. The digital snapshot, taken by a corporal agent, is a vital building block in the creation of another social environment online. The mobile photograph can therefore be approached in three different ways: (1) as an expression of mobility, (2) a digital testimony to embodied experience, and (3) a socially shared expression. Online interaction eliminates the necessity of a physical gallery space by allowing immediate exposure to a global audience. This screen-based interaction occurs through the photographer’s instantly mediated presence. Considering these changes in experiential and communicative dimensions, this research project examines how digital snapshots on image-based social media platforms reshape traditional notions of time and space in photography. This is explored through an analysis of elements of mobility, embodiment, and sociality in three Instagram posts by three different users. The result of this analysis reveals how the mobile nature of everyday snapshots within the digital stream allows past, present, and future to flexibly connect in a state of flux. Mobile photographs communicate temporary moments in-between departure and destination, but are also meaningful as autonomous moments of active creativity within an entangled locale of both offline and online dimensions. Here, photographer and audience temporally share online space, though never occupying the same physical space. Whereas the photograph was traditionally viewed from posterior perspective as a frozen moment from the past, the mobile photograph imbedded within the stream should always be understood as part of a dynamic flow.

As a contemporary video artist and photographer, I am interested in how slowness of analogue technology and speed of digital technology impact the experience and process of recording images. By extension, I am further interested in how the body becomes the conduit of this experience, which forms new relationships to time and space. Working with antiquated technology, my practice explores the influence of space and time upon the body, while revisiting key concepts such as the representation of time, space and the body in art, time and spatiality of movement. Expanding this exploration is the fact that lens-less photography mimics the physiology of the human eye, i.e. a dark container (as the eyeball) and a pinhole (as the iris of the eye). By using pinhole cameras to record movement I have a direct comparative relationship with how I perceive light (while shooting and developing). Perception of time relative to light tests out intuition given that some light is unreadable by the human eye or light meters. Without the interference of lenses or binary codes, the act of taking the image is an exploration of time. The image is strictly a recording of the subject relative to that unique moment in time defined by intuiting the angle and strength of the light that creates form. By using lens-less photography, strong connections are in turn forged between time, space and movement, all of which relies upon the maker's bodily awareness to interpret light and space. Pinhole images are then direct representations of light recorded over a period of time. 'Drawing' a moment, the unknown becomes an important focus in the process, bringing the artist and viewer closer to a point of reflection.

Proceedings of Isea 2008 the 14th International Symposium on Electronic Art, 2008

Meanwhile/Becoming: A Postphenomenological Position Exploring Vision and Visuality in Landscape Photography, 2017

Meanwhile/Becoming is a practice-led research project that includes a written thesis and a final exhibition of work investigating methods of creating photographs that do not conform to the Cartesian perspective prevalent in photographs taken with a standard format camera. The research explores the opportunity of examining a visual space other than that offered by the standard single lens reflex camera through manipulation of the pinhole camera. The photographic series that constitutes Meanwhile/Becoming uses processes that produce what the research describes as a reinterpretation of phenomenology, postphenomenology and posthumanism through photographic practice; where the photographs are expressive of the what and how humans see and the lived experience of the situated perspectives of a specific space. The research question reflects and critiques this position asking, if multiple viewpoints are presented within a single photograph, does the resulting photograph incorporate the human experience of, relation to and presence in, the world? Once expressed within this framework, the research questions if these multiple viewpoints more closely represent the physiology of how humans see. The concept of the meanwhile is taken as the timespace between events, examining the “meanwhile” through the landscape of the domestic garden. “Becoming” refers to “the movement between events”, an interval between events that allows the processes of creativity and change through differentiation and duration, identified by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2004) and Henri Bergson (1911). Together, my practice and thesis interrogate the restricted boundaries of the Cartesian model of constructed visual space through the apparatus of a unique purpose-built multiple pinhole camera. This apparatus mediates between me and the world, enabling me to develop a new method of making photographs that considers space/place and how we respond to it both physically and perceptually.

2015

This thesis accompanies a practice as research doctoral project that investigates the perceptual mechanisms and conceptions of land as a site of constant change. It utilises photographic practice as a form of visual communication. The aim is to examine the roles of movement and memory in the perceptual experiences of the environment through a phenomenological framework that involves the consideration of the concepts of place and space from a temporal perspective. The principal theme is how the moving and changing environment can be interpreted through the stasis of photography and what this implies about the individual's relationship to it. The research methodology is a Rhizomatic multi-site and multi-process approach, utilising various methods and investigating site types appropriately as an interwoven practice. This has resulted in five separate bodies of work that deal with different forms of movement. The work employs close range photogrammetry techniques liberated from the empirical traditions of archaeological photography and time-lapse to investigate the human-scaled aerial view and visually interpret embodiment in the environment. An exhibition, titled Continuum derived from this practice was also shown at Avenue Gallery, Northampton University, UK, from 27 th October 2014-7 th November 2014. A catalogue of works, titled In Flux; Land, Photography and Temporality accompanies this thesis as a PDF on the disc provided (appendix # 1). The research concludes that a consideration of time and space as durational and flowing can be interpreted through the stasis of photography. Through this the changing nature of the environment can be investigated. This is achieved by extending the duration of photographic processes and making them evident in the resulting works. It is also enhanced through curatorial sequencing in a body of work that mimics environmental temporal experience as perceived by the mobile individual.

Speculative visual consummation of our environment as human need in which polemic visions of the future meet the romanticizing versions of the past, tends to furnish spaces while constantly slipping between the real and the virtual. Late 18th century optical devices, such as panorama, acted as proto-cinematic devices by their unique capacity to provide travels to the remote worlds in both their spatial and temporal displacements. Particular attention is dedicated to the role that panorama played in offering distant views in form of a 360-degree continuous viewing experience, to reflect on the modifying perception of space. Today moving images took over the role of the panorama in supplementing the real world with the virtual, and became part of our everyday urban environment offering a continuous experience of our reality. These problematic zones of simultaneous co-existing processes of temporal displacement of the spectator along the past, present and fictive times eschew any principle of linear temporality and have capacity to track their space-time relations. The illusions provided by such non-linear time flow read in its kairos dimension in comparison to the linear time of history read in its chronos dimension, were detected in the function of panorama to assemble 'views' from different contexts and places. Yet Bergson used the term virtual to describe the past and its relation to memory as we place ourselves within it. Given that it is then expanding into a present image, the panoramic experience will finally be stimulated. This said, the purpose of this research is to revisit Bergson's term dureé in order to discuss the modifying perception of space today through the panoramic experience. Katarina will conclude that the panoramic experience pays homage to the development of a visual language that constantly reexamines spatial relationships, objects, protagonists and physical constructions, only to approach the real-world situations in which external standards of time no longer apply and where 'the past' is sold in the manner of panoramic experience available at any time.

On the Verge of Photography, 2013