Social Media Images Form a New Language Online
From the Paleolithic drawings of the Lascaux Cave in France to the fleeting pictures of Snapchat, managed in an office near the beach in Venice, Calif., in 20,000 years or so we continue to express ourselves through images.
“However we analyze the difference between the regular and the irregular, we must ultimately be able to account for the most basic fact of aesthetic experience: the fact that delight lies somewhere between boredom and confusion.” EHG, 1978
“Regularity (in design) is a sign of intention.The fact that (lines) are repeated shows that they are repeatable and that they belong to culture rather than nature…They are formations echoing and stabilizing the activity of a constructive mind.” EHG, 1978
“Luckily it is a mistake to think that what cannot be defined cannot be discussed. If that were so, we could talk neither about life nor about art…The arrangements of elements according to similarity and difference and the enjoyment of repetition and symmetry extend from the stringing of beads to the layout of the page in front of the reader, and, of course, to the rhythms of movement, speech and music, not to mention the structures of society and the systems of thought.” ~EHG, 1978
How often do the words selected by user-curators to identify their image collections in Pinterest match Panofski’s three tiers of the pre-iconological (primary or natural), the iconographical (secondary or conventional) and the iconographical(intrinsic or contextual)?
How well does a system developed in 1939 to interpret symbols in Dutch oil paintings predict how online image collectors organize their collections in the 21st century?
This project examines how Panofski’s three strata of image meaning are applied by individual “user-curators” when creating naming conventions in the social image collection site Pinterest. This project is not concerned with retrieval issues, but focuses on user behavior when creating image collections.
[Notes from “What do pictures want? Interview with W. J. T. Mitchell” By Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes From the online magazine Image & Narrative, November 2006 – http://visual-studies.com/interviews/mitchell.html ]
” A picture that is framed, not inside another picture, but within a discourse that reflects on it as an exemplar of “picturality” as such is a meta image. This implies, of course, that any picture whatsoever (a simple line-drawing of a face, a multi-stable image like the Duck-Rabbit, Velasquez’s Las Meninas) can become a metapicture, a picture that is used to reflect on the nature of pictures.”
“Any picture is at least potentially a kind of vortex or “black hole” that can “suck in” the consciousness of a beholder, and at the same time (and for the same reason) “spew out” an infinite series of reflections.”
“.And the aim of the metapicture is to create a critical space in which images could function, not simply as illustrations or “examples” of the power of this or that method, but as “cases” that to some extent (generally unknown in advance) that might transform or deconstruct the method that is brought to them.”
By Michelle Kamhi
"Perhaps more important, the power of abstract motifs of this kind (e.g., the prehistoric abstractions, Native American motifs, mandalas, Asian calligraphy, and Aboriginal painting cited by Mr. Hughey) was always dependent on a repertoire of symbols whose meaning was culturally shared. Such is not the case with the modern Western tradition of "abstract art" – in which it's anybody's guess what the painter or sculptor intends."
Potential legal challenges to the application of the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) in public libraries: Strategies and issues by Paul T. Jaeger and Charles R. McClure
When the United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), the ruling was limited to issues of whether the statute, as written, was an unconstitutional limitation of freedom of speech. In holding that the wording of the law did not present an unconstitutional limitation on the exercise of free speech, the Supreme Court did not address the constitutionality of the application of the law. Two of the Justices who concurred that CIPA was legal on its face, in fact, suggested the possibility of future legal challenges to CIPA as it is applied in public libraries. This paper discusses potential problems related to the implementation of CIPA that could affect the exercise of free speech in public libraries. It also suggests possible legal challenges to the application of the law that could be made using established First Amendment jurisprudence. The legal issues that might be used to challenge the Court’s decision include least restrictive alternative, vagueness, overbreadth, request policies, prior restraints, public forum, and limitations on political speech. The discussion of each legal issue offers an approach that could be taken in formulating and raising a legal challenge to the application of CIPA.
2013 Proposal Data 