art

Do cameras still make memories? Have we drunk the Kool-Aid by replacing cameras with phones?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I ask this only because I am a photographer, and I find myself not taking the same kind of pictures I used to. One reason is pretty obvious. I rarely use my Nikon now. I use my phone. I know. I know. I never thought that day would come!

I am on record saying that a smart phone is a very expensive camera that pretends to be a phone. The ratio of phone calls made to pictures taken is probably telling for some of us. But we have been complicit in this, not questioning how phones are marketed. And priced. They always stress the quality of the lens.

I didn’t realize that some phones have seven lenses. Seven!

Last June was the first vacation I took–to Sri Lanka and England–for which I didn’t lug my camera. My excuse: to travel light. I was almost regretting it, but I found that the pictures I took were coming out with better quality than if I used my trusted SLR. Which disappointed the photographer in me, but was ironically satisfying.

As you can see, the close ups as well as a low-light long shot worked well, with no tweaking of ISO settings or shutter speed on my part.

But having said that, I found myself taking too many pictures of ridiculous things. Like this protest sticker inside the Tube in London – just to show my daughter. And pictures in stores, and of plants. Not for ‘memories’ but because, well, I couldn’t resist. And in case you’re noticing, yes this picture quality is terrible, and it is so poorly framed. After all, I was just clicking, not caring about the photo part in photography.

This year too I did the same thing. No SLR–just the phone. Once again, too many pictures. Which makes me question if the technology has forced us to become documentarians, and takes of pictures’ rather than photographers. I (still) tell my students that photography is the ‘study of light.’ But as one clicks, barely looking at the scene (since there is no viewfinder, anyway), we have forgotten how to frame a shot, balance the subject, look for the best light source etc. Will these skills be lost forever? You tell me!

The other issue of where we store these memories. No longer do we want to print them out and carefully curate them in photo albums, so that we could share them on a later date. Now? We’re always connected, peering at each others’ screens. The small screen has become our album. Why did we take these steps?

You might say ‘convenience.’ I would disagree. I think we were sold on a lie, and we don’t like to address the cognitive dissonance that we are not ‘making memories’ with our fancy-schmancy devices, but overloading our neurons. All this while erasing important memories because we could only have so much space in our ‘hard drives’–meaning our heads.

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In case you’re wondering, the three images above from Sri Lanka are taken at: The Open University of Sri Lanka in Nawala (roots); St. Peter’s College Clubhouse, Colombo 4, taken from across the canal; Bentota beach at Temple Tree resort.

Visual Thinking Strategies

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

I didn’t realize there’s a whole territory called Visual Thinking Strategies or VTS!

Indeed, an image (often something we saw online) becomes a discussion trigger. You’ve probably indulged in VTS by asking people to comment on a photo. It’s something we use now and then in a classroom, to set up a topic, or draw students into a subject that might otherwise lack context.

I ran into VTS because of series in the New York Times called “What’s going on in this picture?” on Mondays. Readers comment and try to guess what was happening, and on Friday the paper reveals what it was about.

So here’s a bit of VTS for you:

What do you think is going on in this picture?

An unnamed company secretly testing drone delivery? Engineering students working on the next generation of medical drones. Or something else entirely?

You would be surprised at the real context!

An evening of “Crosstalk” reveals how people and text interact

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

No, this is not about Facebook, and how we seemingly interact with text that sometimes seems like a bunch of posturing and talking at cross purposes!

This is about a performance I went to last Saturday at ASU, brought by the School of Arts, Media and Engineering.

crosstalkThe key ‘performance — a semi-choreographed interaction of two women –was to demonstrate how conversations (and text) can ‘make’ people, and their reality. Meaning, how language doesn’t just represent us, but shapes who we are, even while we use it. Here’s how they describe it. The art form:

interrogates these questions (using) 3D infra-red motion tracking, voice acquisition, speech recognition, multi-screen video projection and multi-channel surround sound to create an immersive multimedia environment.

As the dancers move and speak, speech recognition software reveals sentences (and sentence fragments) on two screens at right angles to each other. Then these texts begin to intersect, and create some interesting visual ‘performances’ – dropping off, angling, growing, and interacting with the other person’s texts.

The event was the work of visual artist, Simon Biggs, and composer, Garth Paine, both of whom dabble in the algorithms that work behind the scenes.

Why I found this fascinating was that it is in an oblique way related to my work in Chat Republic, and how our conversations determine our realities. We are, whether we like it or not, immersed in a digital landscape, and what we say to each other lives in a textual sense out there.

One does not have to be steeped in social media to be part of this Web 2.0 world, where much of what we do is cross-referenced by algorithms –when we sign on to purchase something, do a Google search, or leave a comment –that build profiles of us, and builds identities of us.

Just check what Facebook appears to be doing, sneakily boosting your ‘Likes’ when you message someone.