Ann Bartges: Thesis Outline

  I’m Here: Conjuring Presence and Connection through Mediatized Images

1. Using Technology to Bridge Distance:

A. My work is focused on the role of media (photographs, home videos, video chat) in close relationships.

1. Issues at Play:

a. the separation between the human being, and their image

b. the attempt to conjure the essence of someone in their absence

c. the dangers in psychologically allowing the image to become a substitution or replacement for the absent person

B. Sarah Maslin Nir, “You May Now Kiss the Computer Screen,” New Your Times, 3/5/2013

            1. Discusses the rising trend of online intimacy and marriages performed through video chat. The article focused on this practice among immigrants living in the US—which makes sense, as immigrants are, inevitably, dealing with the challenges of distance           

            2. Article speaks to my own observations: advances in telecommunication technology builds the hope that one can maintain an emotional closeness even at a physical distance.

C. Video Chat

1. Limitations of technology to mediate intimacy

2. the real-time web-cam absorbs your visual senses —you see your companion’s face, their real time expressions. . ..you have access to their eyes, the image on your laptop doesn’t just mediate their image, it becomes them---you also have access to the space behind them, and there is a visual promise in this that you might actually be able to join spaces.. .. .but you can’t.

D. Looking Inward

1. Exploring culture via personal experience

a. Janine Antoni

2. Personal Experience with Long Distance

            a. As a nomadic artist, I have been living my family life through my computer for years

                        b. Via Satellite

E. Video Mom

            1. Whether through live video chat or family photos, we increasingly rely on mediated versions of loved ones when locational distance prevents physical presence

           

2. Siren Song

2. Cultural Response to Contemporary Modes of Telepresence

A. Video chat as Answer to Long-Lived Desire for Access over Distance

            1. Victorian Video Chat image

                        a. my intention with this work is not to disrespect the technological triumph of telepresence via video chat, but I am sensitive to the cultural anxieties that come with swift advances in technology

B. Historical Context: Cultural Anxieties of the Digital Age in relation to Cultural Anxieties of the Electric Age (1840s-1900)

1. Linda Simon, Dark Light: Electricity and Anxiety fron the Telegraph to the X-Ray

C. Studies on the social effects of technology:

                        1. my work meditates on the stakes of our redefined virtual social structures and projects the resulting feelings of vulnerability and fears of becoming less human.

2. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together

3. William Gibson: “No Maps for these Territories,” science fiction writer who coined the term ‘cyberspace’, concerned with “making the conditions of the present accessible to people” through fiction.

             D. Practice

1. Until Then Now

            a. I ask my performers to wear photographic masks of their eyes to present the physical self and the mediated self together in real time

            b. eye-masks give each performer a fixed gaze. There is an outward promise of attention—eyes wide open, but in fact, the mask itself blinds the person wearing it

3. “Liveness”: Mediatized vs. the Real Thing

A. Theory

1. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture

2. Philip Auslander, “Live from Cyberspce”

3. Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories

                        4. Susan Sontag, On Photography

5. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

6. something from Marshall McLuhan?

           

            B. Creating Presence via Video Projections

                        1. Tony Oursler

                       

2. Paul Serman

C. The Loop

1. The Loop and Live Performance

                        a. Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Relation Works

2. The Loop as Replay: A Defining Characteristic of Recorded Media

b. Paul Pfeiffer, Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon)

3. Remote Connection

a. using face projections to address the conflict between the physical and mediated selves.

b. through this performance, I play out the failures of mediated communication and visualize breeched emotional connection.

D. Ann & Video Ann: working to visualize the complex relationship between the self and mediated self

1. Through theses short performances, I explore my relationship to my mediated image

            a. psychologically

            b. what is material vs. immaterial

            c. pointing to both the strength and the fragility of the immaterial image

2. Developing Video Ann’s character

a. a colder version of myself

b. media is a mere shadow of a person—image is present, but this presence is fragile.

                        3. My Relationship to the Other Me

a. through social media, my image, my profile, is my public face.

b. love for the ability to curate only my best self into the world

c. hate for the inevitable dishonesty,

d. jealousy for the immortality of my image

4. Ann & Video Ann: Passing Notes

4. Desire: Conjuring Presence

           

A. The rise of Spiritualism in response to advances the technologies of electricity and telecommunications

                        1. Iwan Rhys Morus, Bodies/Machines

B. Distance, through location or through loss, fuels a longing and desire that

complicates my relationship to images of my absent family

1. my relationships with my father, grandmother, grandfather, and mother in law, all who have passed away in the last 5 years

C. Re-experiencing the Loss of a Person through the Loss of Their Image (photograph, video)

1. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

2. Images as “negotiations between the living and the dead”

            a. Kristin Hass, Carried to the Wall

3. Ann & Video Ann: Eating Dad

D. The Emotional Presence of Shadows

            1. Roberto Casati, The Shadow Club

            2. Ann & Video Ann: Shadow You

5. Exploring Multiple Selves

           

A. Video Chat and Mediatization as metaphor for interpreting the multiple sides of myself   

1. NEED SOME SOURCES HERE

B. Elizabeth King: Pupil

C. Laurie Anderson, Home of the Brave

1. Philip Auslander “[Anderson’s] multiple images make her LESS present”

6. Breaking the Fourth Wall

A. Using Live Performance, Video and Sculptural Installation to Blur the Relationship between Performer and Audience

B. Failure as Tool for Audience Engagement

1. Andy Kauffman

2. Philip Auslander, “The Comedy of the Failure of Comedy”