Media Art Net | Search

Search results

absolute film: 1 Text passage

Hits

1. Kathrin Peters «Instant Images»
[13] A German version of Dogme 95 can be viewed on the Web site of the magazine Revolver. An English version is also available. The cinema of illusion and genre cinema were as much objects of hate as auteur cinema, because the establishment and imposition of a personal style leads, the pamphlet sums up, to a master discourse that favors art. The fact that today, labels like «art» and «authorship» are attached to Lars von Trier may lie in the logic of the film industry and film reviews as well as in the myth of the genius, which he not least of all celebrates himself. However, what is interesting and definitely comparable with the lomographers’ concerns is the rejection of individuality and efforts towards authenticity, which are to be achieved by adhering to purist technological guidelines. Low technology and non-staging guarantee true-to-lifeness, truthfulness and authenticity, without these means themselves [newpage] developing into an aesthetic style. Consumption The lomographers reacted less puristically to the development of an antiaesthetics into a style, nor did they withdraw into ever new concepts, but instead responded in a commercial and consumptive way. In 1998 the «most interactive, vivid, blurred and crazy» lomography.com Web site was launched [LI], and in 2001 a Lomography Shop was opened in «the new and sparkling» Vienna Kunsthalle, offering «unique and subtly insane design products from around the world, in addition to our full line of Lomographic items.» Situating the shop within an art institution, although immediately next to the exit, is a striking indication of an intention of aesthetic stylization that at the same time wants to obstruct what is regarded as an elitist claim to art. The economic orientation of the project would then appear to be obvious. The use of multi-lens cameras or fish-eye lenses—which have been patented and, like the Lomo camera, are being manufactured by the Lomographic Society—no longer corresponds with aesthetic purism, but more with an ideology of having [newcolum] fun. It appears that the project with a world-wide photographic mission as an egalitarian exchange of ways of life, reminiscent of international understanding, can be effortlessly transferred into a globalized company structure. Consumption is already written into a constant holding-on to one's own everyday world by taking pictures, not solely at the level of the film material, but because in the course of their constantly being outdone, the snapshots—and the moments they record—wear out. Even more than in staged events—for example, mass exhibitions in subway stations—this effect becomes evident on the Web site Lomography.com: Because the images are not presented temporarily or site-specific, but are instead inserted into a constantly growing online archive that can be retrieved with any computer with access to the Internet, the fusion of production and consumption is all too obvious. «Work on the image» as an attempt at creative-artistic productivity (a topic Anette Hüsch deals with in her contribution Artistic Concepts Linked to the Transition From Analog to Digital Photography is turned into an impartial «love of every image,» which finds expression in the general and immediate [newpage] availability of the photographs. The Lomographic Project, with its contingent accumulation of images, is thus realized on the distribution level. The motto is «think analog, act digital,» which means that from the point of view of the lomographers, the method of taking photographs should be analog, but the images should be distributed digitally via the WWW or by their being sent directly to cell phones. The system of branches on the Website is complicated: There are «Public Folders,» «LomoHomes» (10,000 user Web pages), and finally a superordinate «LomographicWorldArchive,» in which 27,000 images can be searched online via a keyword or via «fun diving.» The «WorldBrowser» offers «the ever expanding snapshot portrait of our planet» in nearly 50,000 «city shots» and their corresponding «city tips,» emphasizing the lifestyle of playful travelling so prevalent elsewhere. The accumulation of snapshots in the various categories on the Web site are retrievable according to city name, keywords or the mostly humorous user names of the community members. On a map of the world, the areas are marked from which the photographs originate (typically, Africa and the Near [newcolum] East are not a part of the world community), and it shows the current status of the photographic portrait of the world [also refer to the contribution by Jens Schröter, in particular the Section on the history of world photographic image archives: Form divorced from matter]. High-Tech, Low-Tech The motif of travelling and communicating over long distances can be found in a variety of Internet projects and even works of Net art. In the travellogs «Arctic Circle,» «Tropic of Cancer» and A description of the Equator and Some Other Lands, produced between 1995 and 1997, in cooperation with other artists, the artists Felix Stephan Huber und Philip Pocock, for example, daily uploaded photographs, videos, sounds and texts, on and in which they had recorded their travels to places far away from Europe where Internet access was limited, onto their Web site. Unlike Huber/Pocock, who wrote about being thrown back upon themselves, («Contact, natural or virtual, is purely loneliness, or at least a reminder that we end in ourselves.»), today’s vast amount of [newpage] photoblogs, Photoblogs are weblogs, special Web applications that allow entries by several users in chronological order; for photographs see, e.g., Photoblog or Photofriday. [more]