From image to data: a historiography tracer

Instant Media: Cargo Workshop

September 2005 | Oostende, Belgium

Historiography Tracer was launched with an intensive three-day lab. Participants made presentations and generally mapped out potential areas of exploration. If you want to read about some of the issues addressed, view a tour of the workshop here. This thread was developed in the context of Cargo Instant Media workshops and was made possible by financial support of the Vlaams Audiovisueel Fonds.

Virtual tour through lab one

Historiography Tracer: Lab 01, Beau Site, Oostende, Belgium, Sept. 23-25, 2005

Here you will find a follow-up report in the form of a virtual tour through the workshops and accompanying bios of participants.

Take a virtual tour and read about contributions to the workshop

Presentation proposals

Nadia Palliser
I would like to present my ideas for the development of the ISEA archive - an archiblog of memories perhaps but maybe this sounds too sentimental for the Intersociety for the Electronic Arts? I am interested in discussing ideas concerning the (visual) design of the past tense, of nostalgia and (google-wise guy) histories on the Internet. What examples are there already? In which way could online archiving find a snappier status, one through which the traces of the archived data are visible and knowledgeable? Since most of ISEA's activities have been digitalised by the Daniel Langlois Foundation, it seems not so much a question of data but of access. I am looking for a way to develop a community based pool of exchange in historical facts and on-going practice. In what way could themes, issues and oldtimers in electronic art find a contemporary and vivacious context? Since the owners of the information are not organising the information anymore, what kind of structures are we looking for to define this kind of data exchange based on dialogue?

Nanette Hoogslag
Nanette will present Oog, a project she is currently developing for http://www.volkskrant.nl/oog
In this project a new context for visual thinking is created through inviting artists and designers to comment on news. Nanette is interested in how news images are formed by new media such as mobile phones and the Internet. Magazines and newspapers online need images to behave differently. Is there space for reflective illustration and photography? Do we need to reinvent these spaces?

Todd Matsumoto
I would like to present / re-examine my project, "Media Bomb". This project began with the publicized images of torture occurring at Abu Ghraib prison. With image as starting point, they were soon embedded into a flood of media types. This project used a database to track the ongoing story of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal through the New York Times online edition. For a period of ten days I registered each story from the New York Times that contained the search term "abu ghraib". The aim of the research was to find out how software media can aid in seeing events in a wider (time) context. And to visually see how the media supports events such as torture and conflict, and how that is internalized into history or for that matter the future. In all apects of this study digital images played a role in either activating past images, or producing new images, and also creating a variety of graphics. Though not a focal point of this study, the event is grounded or one could say hardwired into physical structures of different sorts which mediated its occurrence."

Margit Tamass

Marjolein Vermeulen + Myrthe Veeneman
Infiltration in mental blindness
Possible forms of mental blindness: the boundary between image and reality fades;
a lack of sensibility for images as a result of overexposure and/or the making public of the private domain. We want to search for examples of mental blindness on the internet and try to infiltrate these examples or the environment they are in, to see if it is possible to create small spaces or cracks in the way we see and experience those images. For the workshop we would like to use the term 'mental blindness' as a starting point for discussion, and discover together if infiltration creates possibilities to look at images in a different way.

Marieke Rodenburg + Dirk Janssen

Liesbeth Levy
Liesbeth will use her yet unpublished book Competing images, to think about the necessity and possibility of representation. She is looking for ways to increase our 'power of discernment', to tell apart those things that are nearly the same but entirely different.

Bart Lans
Bart will report on his reading of Photography: a critical introduction / edited by Liz Wells. (London: Routledge, 1997, 2002). In his presentation he will make a connection between the book and his own observations on 'taking' images as he is currently developing a practice as documentary photographer himself.

Tsila Hassine
Tsila has started working on a tool that will enable tracking the appearance, dispapearance and degree of proliferation of an image on the net. She will go over the script, and present her motivation for this tool, and also discuss further possible directions for this tool to evolve.

De Geuzen: Femke Snelting
How to address images? What are the various language systems surrounding images on the net? Understanding that networked images are embedded in many layers of words, I started to look at the accidently or purposefully written narratives that are formed as a result; how labeling, scripting, coding and search terms define the many lives of a networked digital image file. Through the close reading of day-to-day on line activities such as 'searching for an image' or 'embedding an image in html' I would like to think out loud about how this wordy habitat is of influence on the nature of networked images and what this could mean for the development of a tool such as the Historiography Tracer.

De Geuzen: Riek Sijbring
With an immense speed I am able to plunge myself in to one or another reality, a personal tragedy, a national cause, a political disaster. Surfing around, the digital images illustrating those events become part of my reality but what is it that I have downloaded in to my system?
Visibility is not a given, I should worry about what is not shown. In trying to make something of what I see and to reflect upon what I consequently think, makes me seriously doubt wether the tools I have got available, are sufficient. The set of norms and frame of reference that I apply as a European citizen have shown more and more proof that it's primacy is under attack.
Could a historiography tracer be a form of annotation; keeping track of the contexts in which the images are circulated, in order to increase the chance of gaining reference close to the image and what it is representing?

De Geuzen: Renee Turner
I am going to talk about a chance encounter with an image, that of Iman Darweesh Al Hams, a Palestinian school girl who was killed by Israeli Defense Forces in Rafah.  For me, the encounter was moving in a fundamentally human and political sense. It also exposed what happens when bodies are reduced to pixels and circulated across the world wide web. This experience marked a radical shift in my own thinking about the witnessing of media images and brought me to work on historiography tracer.

Seeing her photograph appear and disappear from search results, watching how it was being contextualized for a variety of different and even conflictual agendas, raised numerous questions both ethical and technical.  I would like to think together about how to trace these contexts in order to understand how various narrative shifts impact the representational currency of an image. Related to this, I ask myself, whether a geography of the net could be considered which might situate an image.  Also, if the web can be seen as a rhizomatic archive of images, something which is a departure from conventional analog repositories, how can it be mapped.  To me, what is at stake is how history and its events will be constructed, forgotten or memorialized.

Participants

Nadia Palliser, Nanette Hoogslag, Todd Matsumoto, Margit Tamass, Marjolein Vermeulen, Myrthe Veeneman, Marieke Rodenburg, Liesbeth Levy, Dirk Janssen, Tsila Hassine, De Geuzen: a foundation for multi-visual research (Renée Turner, Riek Sijbring and Femke Snelting)