Literature
Recently I attended a talk by Rey Chow, who gave a provocative talk called "Postcolonial Visibilities: Foucault, Deleuze, and the New Media Technologies." Among other things, Chow discussed the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon by which images of the lowest resolution end up achieving the highest visibility. Consider, for instance, the way that camera phone snapshots can be captured nearly spontaneously and then disseminated at an exponential rate, causing the 'first images' that we often see of an event to be distinctly unframed, out of focus, pixelated?yet also the ones that tend to stick in our minds (and in Google image archives, as well).
As students seem increasingly to have ready-to-hand access to portable imaging technologies such as camera phones, I wonder how such 'writing tools' (if I can dare to call them that) could be put in the service of analysis and composition in the humanities classroom. In an American Studies course I am currently teaching, called "The Ecology of Beauty," I plan to experiment with this by having students capture two images, one of 'nature' and one not of 'nature' (how else to categorize it?). The goal will be to complicate not only the categories of nature and non-nature, but also to think about how tiny-screen image capturing is an ecology in its own right: our devices are a part of how we see, frame, and interact with the 'the world' as a viewable landscape, a space always just waiting to be imaged. What will students take pictures of? How will they describe their taking of these pictures? Are we able to be phenomenological about the visibilities that we can hold in our hands as 'objects'?
In her talk Chow posed challenging questions about a pictorial fluidity and mobility, i.e. about the immanent recyclability of new media images. Chow suggested that we need to develop a new flexibility for thinking about how humans are constituted as subjects through these technologies that from one perspective look like no more than little surveillance machines that we carry around on our bodies as we traipse through a heavily-monitored, hyper-individuated world.
- "report A Problem": Missing Planes
Consider these two images, both captured from Google Maps satellite view, the first one three years ago, and the second one just last week. You can compare the images by orienting your gaze by the triangular pattern at the bottom, to see how the spaces...
- Nature And Artifice
?The machine which at first blush seems a means of isolating man from the great problems of nature, actually plunges him more deeply into them.? ?Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des Hommes Last week I saw two films at the Traverse City Film Festival:...
- Interests Converge
Many of my current interests converge on the cover of this week's New Yorker: Air travel, ecology, post-apocalyptic imagery, book reading versus the new media technologies...this illustration serves as a cipher for a host of anxieties and consolations...
- Technologies R Us
The USA Today reports on The Dumbest Generation and presents a sort of counterargument. The basic concern is whether social networking sites like Facebook are making Generation Y students 'dumb', or whether such practices are simply (and complexly)...
- Questions Of Literature On Pause
I have not been updating "What is Literature?", as I am currently concentrating on my blog in support of the experimental advanced composition course I am teaching at UC Davis this summer; I call this project "Paperless Writing." I plan to return to questions...
Literature
Rey Chow on New Media
Recently I attended a talk by Rey Chow, who gave a provocative talk called "Postcolonial Visibilities: Foucault, Deleuze, and the New Media Technologies." Among other things, Chow discussed the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon by which images of the lowest resolution end up achieving the highest visibility. Consider, for instance, the way that camera phone snapshots can be captured nearly spontaneously and then disseminated at an exponential rate, causing the 'first images' that we often see of an event to be distinctly unframed, out of focus, pixelated?yet also the ones that tend to stick in our minds (and in Google image archives, as well).
As students seem increasingly to have ready-to-hand access to portable imaging technologies such as camera phones, I wonder how such 'writing tools' (if I can dare to call them that) could be put in the service of analysis and composition in the humanities classroom. In an American Studies course I am currently teaching, called "The Ecology of Beauty," I plan to experiment with this by having students capture two images, one of 'nature' and one not of 'nature' (how else to categorize it?). The goal will be to complicate not only the categories of nature and non-nature, but also to think about how tiny-screen image capturing is an ecology in its own right: our devices are a part of how we see, frame, and interact with the 'the world' as a viewable landscape, a space always just waiting to be imaged. What will students take pictures of? How will they describe their taking of these pictures? Are we able to be phenomenological about the visibilities that we can hold in our hands as 'objects'?
In her talk Chow posed challenging questions about a pictorial fluidity and mobility, i.e. about the immanent recyclability of new media images. Chow suggested that we need to develop a new flexibility for thinking about how humans are constituted as subjects through these technologies that from one perspective look like no more than little surveillance machines that we carry around on our bodies as we traipse through a heavily-monitored, hyper-individuated world.
- "report A Problem": Missing Planes
Consider these two images, both captured from Google Maps satellite view, the first one three years ago, and the second one just last week. You can compare the images by orienting your gaze by the triangular pattern at the bottom, to see how the spaces...
- Nature And Artifice
?The machine which at first blush seems a means of isolating man from the great problems of nature, actually plunges him more deeply into them.? ?Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des Hommes Last week I saw two films at the Traverse City Film Festival:...
- Interests Converge
Many of my current interests converge on the cover of this week's New Yorker: Air travel, ecology, post-apocalyptic imagery, book reading versus the new media technologies...this illustration serves as a cipher for a host of anxieties and consolations...
- Technologies R Us
The USA Today reports on The Dumbest Generation and presents a sort of counterargument. The basic concern is whether social networking sites like Facebook are making Generation Y students 'dumb', or whether such practices are simply (and complexly)...
- Questions Of Literature On Pause
I have not been updating "What is Literature?", as I am currently concentrating on my blog in support of the experimental advanced composition course I am teaching at UC Davis this summer; I call this project "Paperless Writing." I plan to return to questions...