Media In Our Image

Women's Studies Quarterly: VIRAL

Tue, 15 May 2012 12:44:00 -0400

Volume 40, Numbers 1&2
Spring/Summer 2012
Edited by Patricia Clough & Jasbir Puar

Four photographs of the artist’s and models used in the...

Tue, 15 May 2012 11:53:00 -0400

Four photographs of the artist’s and models used in the “Viral” edition of Women’s Studies Quarterly. Model Krystal Garner, Kate Feldman, Jasmine Lord (Photographer), and Veronica Jauriqui. It is interesting to see the juxtaposition of the models physical profiles and their descriptive word clouds aggregated from their collective experiences and projected onto each unique profile.

When we think of something as “viral,” we often think of the transit of electronic information at an intensified speed and reach. Viral also refers to indiscriminate exchanges, often linked with notions of bodily contamination, uncontainability, and unwelcome transgression of border and boundaries. In this issue of WSQ, the editors invite a rethinking of institutions of education, family, religion, health, military, media, and law to inaugurate an inventive cultural criticism on topics ranging from social media, hacking, clouding, and financial markets to pollution, genetics, and robotics.

View more portraits here.

Viral:

WSQ Volume 40, Numbers 1&2 Spring/Summer 2012

Edited by Patricia Clough & Jasbir Puar

JOHANNA: Of course I wasn’t yet posing for the “real” portrait...

Tue, 15 May 2012 11:40:00 -0400

JOHANNA:

Of course I wasn’t yet posing for the “real” portrait yet when this shot was taken: I was yapping away while Jasmine took some sample shots. But I liked this one best – even though I was hell-bent on creating a strict profile portrait in the Renaissance vein. I was surprised at how my background as an English PhD came through, and it was hilarious to see that my proclivity for tongue in cheek horror and my high school obsession with Led Zepplin registered as well. So much of what makes me feel like who I am is the culture that I greedily consume, and this portrait certainly reflects that.

MEDIA IN OUR IMAGE

Tue, 15 May 2012 11:39:00 -0400

Women’s Studies Quarterly asked Johanna Blakley to provide a multimedia piece for the “Alerts & Provocations” section of the June 2012 issue. The theme? VIRAL. The editors asked Blakley to expand upon a TED talk she’d given on Social Media & the End of Gender. In both, Blakley explores the implications of women’s demographic dominance of social media platforms all around the world. The multimedia component of the WSQ piece lives here on Tumblr and on Pinterest and was conceived by Johanna Blakley, Veronica Jauriqui, Sarah Ledesma and photographer Jasmine Lord.

The “Media in Our Image” portraits meld together Renaissance conventions of portrait painting with contemporary visual data mining. The goal was to create augmented portraits of ourselves that tell people more about our taste, values and beliefs than about our demographic coordinates. We used word clouds, which reflect the relative frequency of words within a data set, to summarize social media preferences and profile data from each of the portrait subjects. Inspired by lace veils that both reveal and obscure the subject, we projected each sitters’ own metadata on their physical bodies, creating a veil of revealing data.

Thanks to Kate Feldman and Krystal Garner for revealing themselves to us. You can find the WSQ article here.

JASMINE: The words you see on Jasmine’s portrait...

Mon, 14 May 2012 14:40:00 -0400

JASMINE:

The words you see on Jasmine’s portrait represent a progression of her life experiences from childhood to young adulthood. From her home town of South-Western Sydney, to her work on the Eastern Beaches before she left her home city, to her time working on the Great Barrier Reef leading up to her current residency here in Los Angeles. Her passion for her craft & the tools involved are reflected in various words whiles the dominant and most important word; family still stands bold and clear. No matter where in the world you are, how hard you are working & how much you give to the universe, your family is your core & keeps you centered.

SARAH: Viral Veils Choosing information for the word cloud...

Mon, 14 May 2012 14:00:00 -0400

SARAH:

Viral Veils

Choosing information for the word cloud projected as a “Viral Veil” over my portrait proved quite the challenging prospect. When given the opportunity to compose a self portrait often the self can get in the way of a comprehensive representation. However, collaborating with Johanna, Veronica and Jasmine really helped flush out ideas about how one chooses to project oneself and how society absorbs that reflection and creates a panoptic view of self representation.

Delving deeper into creating a “Viral Veil” for myself, I first used services such as Wordle and Tagxedo to aggregate words from my social media profiles and RSS feeds. As you start to examine what is trending in your personal social media dialogues it is important to note the content is a mix bag of insights both flattering and unbecoming to your personal profile. In the true fashion of Narcissus. it’s like looking in a mirror of how you represent yourself using the meta data world and that data does not lie because it is based off the content you choose to post.

Like any self-reflection and examination there are things we love and accept about ourselves and there are things we would rather forget and bury deep within. The brilliance of this project is its ability to highlight social media as a means to re-imagine ourselves in the world as well as a means to understand the concrete truth to who we are whether we like that projection or not.

VERONICA: So often as women we’re defined by such...

Sun, 13 May 2012 14:44:00 -0400

VERONICA:

So often as women we’re defined by such superficialities — how we look, how we dress. It was so refreshing to be able to strip away the physicalities and define myself on my own terms, by my interests and passions. This experiment and — in a larger sense — social media itself creates this new wonderful lens through which we can project ourselves onto the world. I can love French cooking and Jane Austen novels and still be down with 90s Hip Hop and Andre Ethier. In what other realm of life is that possible?

Barcelona-based DJ and pop culture scholar Eduard Minobis sent...

Sat, 12 May 2012 16:57:00 -0400

Barcelona-based DJ and pop culture scholar Eduard Minobis sent me a link to Kate Wax’s latest album, Dust Collision. I loved the music, but I was also immediately struck by the way she used typography and portrait photography on the album cover. According to art director Niels Wehrspann, “The idea behind the whole typographic layout is a literal transcription of Dust Collision. These «whirling letters» will be on all releases related to the album.”

KATE: When I had the opportunity to sit down and come up with a...

Sat, 12 May 2012 14:33:00 -0400

KATE:

When I had the opportunity to sit down and come up with a list of words that would somehow define me, it was more difficult than I thought it would be. I focused on my desires - starting with the physical, and building to the more abstract. As you can see, I have a strong affinity for cheese. I grew up traveling the world. I have an enduring desire to be a badass. And yes, I love shoes. So where does that leave me? At the moment, it leaves me as a twenty-six year old writer based out of Los Angeles, but living in Morocco. C’est la vie.

Kate Ryan is an independent freelance writer living abroad in Morocco. Read all about her Journey on her travel blog Girl Meets Morocco. Kate is a creative fiction writer with works published with Take 180 studios.

hahamagartconnect: DISSECTED PORTRAITS New York-based Artist,...

Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

hahamagartconnect:

DISSECTED PORTRAITS

New York-based Artist, Michael Mapes takes portraits, dissects them and then places them into specimen boxes, creating this curiously scientific approach to beauty & preservation. You can see this one and others like it at his virtual lab at room62.com.

Irene Belknap: Dressed in Words

Thu, 10 May 2012 14:31:00 -0400

When I mentioned the Media In Our Image project to German-born artist Irene Belknap, she said that I must take a look at a series of her paintings that she calls “Dressed in Words.” She mentioned being bemused by the profound difference between her perception of people and the stories they would tell about themselves. These portraits interweave text and image in order to create a “simultaneity of meaning,” as she puts it. She explains:

“In my work there can be no final ‘this means that.’ It is my belief that which sustains in painting is the evocative; that which calls to mind both the artist and the viewer. My aim is to evoke a sense of the unknown where final meaning is withheld, thus the mind is incited to allow a journey beyond ourselves toward that which we sense but cannot explain; that which we know but cannot prove.”

FLICKR: Media In Our Image

Thu, 10 May 2012 12:31:00 -0400

South African artist Gabrielle LeRoux combines the convention of...

Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

South African artist Gabrielle LeRoux combines the convention of portrait painting with visual data descriptors beautifully in her series of 10 “Proudly African and Transgender” portraits. Each piece allows a different story of identity to be told through art and words.

Famed Brazilian Supermodel Lea T has often posed under veils and...

Wed, 09 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Famed Brazilian Supermodel Lea T has often posed under veils and she has used the power of the veil to both reveal and obscure. In the beginning of her modeling career, she kept her transgender identity a secret. Now that she is out in the open, the veils reveal a lot about her, while also maintaining the desired level of mystery.

Musician Kate Wax and art director Nills Wehrspann use light...

Sat, 05 May 2012 17:11:00 -0400

Musician Kate Wax and art director Nills Wehrspann use light projection techniques that appear to dematerialize the bodies of the performers on stage. I kept thinking that this might be what a concert by cyborgs would look like on a stage in a low-res virtual world.

If the shoe doesn’t fit, must we change the shoe? The...

Sat, 05 May 2012 10:50:00 -0400

If the shoe doesn’t fit, must we change the shoe?

The truth will set you free, but first, it will piss you off.

-Gloria Steinem

Capturing Character in Renaissance Portraiture

Thu, 03 May 2012 17:46:00 -0400

The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini, a recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, was very influential in my thinking about the Media In Our Image project. I was a bit overwhelmed by the first gallery, which was filled with stark side profiles of wealthy men and women. I learned that, in the early stages of secular portraiture, painters were constrained by the belief that strict side profiles were the only way to reveal the true character of the subject. By accurately representing the slope of the forehead, the shape of the nose and the jut of the chin, a painter could communicate the ethical and moral attributes of the sitter. Any deviation from the strictest of profiles was perceived as an attempt to hide all manner of sins.

Of course this restriction eventually disappeared (the Dutch, apparently, would have none of it), but in the age of the “social media profile,” we have an unprecedented opportunity to invent new rules for the way we capture, define, and represent ourselves to the world.

How do you picture yourself? Share your inventions with us!

Veils of Protest

Wed, 02 May 2012 22:37:00 -0400

Once we settled on creating a “veil of words” in order to express a portrait subject’s interests and beliefs, we started looking around for some good examples. It turns out, you can’t do a Google image search that mentions “veils” and “words” without turning up some fascinating portraits of veiled women protesters. This one (above) was particularly striking because the words appear to be written in blood: they say, “Why are my rights half of your rights?”

In the example above, a protester against Egypt’s ruling military council wears a headband that reads “no god except Allah and Prophet Mohammed is a messenger of Allah” in Arabic. (photo credit: Amr Nabil/AP Photo)

This is a terrific piece of graphic design, turning a niqāb into...

Wed, 02 May 2012 21:59:00 -0400

This is a terrific piece of graphic design, turning a niqāb into a veil of words about personal opinion. Since we, too, were trying to find a way to express a person’s identity by partially obscuring their physical features with words, this piece really resonated for us. More info »

As we tried to figure out how to create a portrait of a person...

Tue, 01 May 2012 21:59:00 -0400

As we tried to figure out how to create a portrait of a person that expressed their interests and beliefs, we kept returning to examples that included veils. This striking portrait of the actress Gloria Swanson was particularly intriguing: usually the veil is being worn by the subject, but here the camera lens itself is veiled. The result? Swanson appears to be staring through our shroud rather than vice versa.