60-461/761: Experimental Capture
CMU School of Art / IDeATe, Spring 2020 • Profs. Golan Levin & Nica Ross
The Art Surveillance Project has an ongoing online database that “catalogues artists, artworks, and exhibitions addressing surveillance within Canada post-9/11.” Founded by Dr. Susan Cahill at the University of Calgary, the directory was a response to the “War on Terror” in 2001. The artworks on the site range from glass engravings to huge googly eyes to mirrored domes.
Original Post:
Other Reviewed Articles:
Copper chain links arranged into a semispherical form
Original Image
Photogrammetry Results
Underside
The relationship between a user and cameras that make choices on their own, changes the task of the user from one who captures to someone who creates the situation for the camera to capture. Machine learning cameras turn photographers to curators or installation artists. Authorship would still lay with the user since without their input there would be no system. Although these cameras can “do” more, the expectations of these cameras would be no different than developing film. A captured situation is still present, yet the type of outcome can not be absolutely guaranteed. Cameras, like Google Clips, or systems, like Pinterest’s Lens, are sifters. They go through information to choose what may be wanted. Taking a hundred photos and choosing a couple manually is the same process. The camera is still a tool unless it can form or embed itself in the situations in which it captures. The tools presented just take a familiar process and put it in an unfamiliar vessel.
Marmalade Type is a typography photography series in which artist Rus Khasanov uses photographic interference to make a font that appears to pop off of the page. The letters were formed with gel from the surface of a CD and illuminated with a lamp. No paints or pigments are present to make the colorful gradient illusion. This process exhibited by Khasanov is known as birefringence. According to the Olympus Microscopy Research Center, “birefringence is the optical property of a material having a refractive index that depends on the polarization and propagation direction of light.” Therefore, double refraction occurs; double refraction is when a ray of light is split into two different rays of light that continue on separate paths. Depending on the paths speed and polarity, an index of colors begin to appear. Plastics, like the gel from the CDs, can cause birefringence and Rus Khasanov was able to capture the phenomenon on his camera.
I find it interesting how optical illusions are formed. In this case, the idea of using a photograph to capture a scientific construct as art is intriguing to me. The challenging of what we see and what is there are aspects that I want to bring out of my work in this class.