21. Between graphic arrangement and film: Thom Andersen’s FlickerPolonyi Eszter, 2021, published scientific conference contribution abstract Abstract: When the California-based filmmaker Thom Andersen made his documentary Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer in 1973-4, he recovered an aspect of Muybridge’s work that most viewers had not seen before. Projected on the screen at the top of the theater, these iconic nineteenth-century chronophotographs were allegedly first seen in movement. Viewers could watch as his half-clad and nude subjects lifted water buckets, walked up and down stairs, ran, stood, heaved, threw, jumped, crawled and kicked. Throughout the film, Andersen shows each action multiple times, so that an athlete, for instance, leaps his hurdle firstly slowly, then at increasing speeds. Almost none of the sequences appear in the tempo in which they might have taken place in front of the camera. And, despite this being omitted from reviews, many of the passages drop to frame rates below the minimum necessary to sustain the illusion of motion, dissolving Muybridge’s images in a pulsing, jagged flicker. If Andersen’s recovery of Muybridge’s image sequences continue to appear spectacular, this is because watching the motion studies suddenly lurch into moving images proves just how little their “movement” can be explained by a history of the “movies.” This paper examines Andersen’s film as a way into an alternate genealogy of the moving image provided through the phenomenon of the flicker.
As has become increasingly clear with the publication of a recent anthology of his critical writings (Visible Press, 2017), Andersen was part of a generation of North American filmmaker whose practice and writing resonated with the academic critique of the film apparatus as it began to emerge from France in the 1960s and 1970s. The fixed temporal parameters of film consumption constituted a recurring consideration for Andersen, for whom “clocked” time literalized the destructiveness of capitalism’s “eternal present” (review of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, 2011). His recovery of Muybridge, for which a frame-by-frame projector allows Andersen to reconstruct what were this pre-cinematic recording systems’s famously arbitrary time intervals, is read within the context of such a critique but also of an emerging tradition of expanded cinema practice. To this effect, comparison is made between Andersen’s process and the efforts of Tony Conrad in the 1960s to research the frequencies at which human vision registers photocelluloid film’s flicker. Conrad’s ability to produce the flicker is ensured not by modification of the projector’s microtemporalities, which would have restricted the number of projectors on which he could show his flicker film, but through alterations at the level of the photocelluloid. Both Andersen and Conrad are shown to turn the basic apparatus into a rhythmic instrument by accessing its frame rates through what I argue is a graphic rather than filmic method.
Keywords: History of American cinema, avant-garde art, media archaeology, Eadweard Muybridge, Thom Andersen
Published in RUNG: 13.01.2023; Views: 1403; Downloads: 0
This document has many files! More... |
22. The ‘Physiognomic Fallacy:’ An Archaeology of the Photographic Identity DocumentPolonyi Eszter, unpublished conference contribution Abstract: In an era of allegedly total surveillance (Goh, Galloway), possession of a biometric identity document can still result in being denied one’s identity or being mistaken for someone else. States have been outsourcing the processes of civic management and local governance to artificial intelligence corporations with increasing intensity since the pandemic despite awareness of systematic errors committed by facial recognition software, a “coded” bias (Kantayya, Buolamwini) that risks the further effacing an already marginalized population of non-white and non-gender conforming subjects. The project this paper is based on returns to the time it first became standard practice to validate state-issued ID documents using facial analysis in Europe of the 1920s and 1930s. While at this time images derived from human heads in photographic albums, personality tests and facial atlases purportedly aimed to record personality and character, they nonetheless often instructed their readers to locate these in parts of images that remain disconnected from the head, such as hands and feet, hair, clothing or in the subject’s immediate environment. Drawing on the concept of conjectural knowledge (Ginzburg), embodiment or tact (Balazs) and the optical unconscious (Benjamin), the project seeks to locate the “physiognomic fallacy” (Gray) in early attempts at humanizing machine vision.
Keywords: History of art, critical theory, surveillance studies
Published in RUNG: 13.01.2023; Views: 1307; Downloads: 0
This document has many files! More... |
23. |
24. Agnes and Dora Bulwer's Photographs of Everyday ItaliansMartina Caruso, 2022, independent scientific component part or a chapter in a monograph Abstract: In the photographs of British sisters Agnes and Dora Bulwer taken at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, I argue for an early humanist vision of the peasants, children and workers that they photographed on their travels around Italy.
Keywords: History of photography, protohumanism, modernity, Italy, Roman Campagna, Abruzzo, archaeology, peasants, workers, Victorian, gender, women
Published in RUNG: 13.01.2023; Views: 1303; Downloads: 0
This document has many files! More... |
25. Mobility Media: an Archaeology of Identity Photography through Science, Art and Visual CultureEszter Polonyi, invited lecture at foreign university Abstract: In an era of total surveillance, being in possession of a biometric ID document can still result in denial of one’s basic civil protections and human rights. The discovery of systematic errors in state-implemented facial recognition programs—such as in recognizing faces of color (Joy Buolamwini)—suggests the failure of current practices of global intelligence and mobility. This paper offers an archaeological investigation of the contemporary photo ID document. Returning to its invention in the 1920s, it examines the issues of conjectural knowledge (Carl Ginzburg), embodiment or tact (Béla Balázs) and the optical unconscious (Walter Benjamin) behind early “physiognomic” media.
Keywords: History of Science, History of Visual Culture, History of Art, History of Photography, Migration
Published in RUNG: 13.01.2023; Views: 1218; Downloads: 0
This document has many files! More... |
26. Women in Ruins: Agnes and Dora Bulwer's landscape photographs in Post-Risorgimento ItalyMartina Caruso, 2022, original scientific article Abstract: The British photographers Agnes Bulwer (1856– 1940) and her sister Dora Ellinor Bulwer (1864– 1948) left a legacy of circa 1300 photographs and 890 negatives, date from 1890 to 1913, to the British School at Rome. The photographs are principally of landscapes taken in Rome and the surrounding countryside (the Roman Campagna) but also further afield in Italy and abroad. Many include archaeological and natural sites as well as monuments, art works, and homes and gardens in urban or rural scenes. Their landscape photographs offer a perspective that challenged the existing masculine gaze as developed in landscape photography under the colonial project of the British Empire. Unfettered by the archaeologist’s need for ascetic facts, the Bulwers pioneered an unusual vision of landscape, inspired by the progressive international environment of post-Unification Italy. Agnes and Dora Bulwer often photographed women, whether Italian peasants or travelling companions, presenting a social and gendered gaze that helps to reconsider this period in the light of a dawning international humanitarianism. In spite of their photographic legacy, Agnes and Dora Bulwer remain relatively unknown in the growing field of rediscovered early female photographers connected to archaeology or travel photography. This article reveals their work within a cross-cultural, historical and phenomenological analysis, contributing a new chapter to women’s photographic history, to travel and landscape photography and to the history of British photographers working in Italy.
Keywords: history of photography, landscape photography, archive, gender, archaeology, cultural tourism, travel photography, Italy, Rome, Roman Campagna, Post-Unification, Post-Risorgimento, Britain, British Empire, United Kingdom, colonialism, Victorian, Edwardian, humanitarian socialism, nineteenth century, twentieth century
Published in RUNG: 11.01.2023; Views: 1954; Downloads: 0
This document has many files! More... |
27. Speckle interferometric investigation of argon pressure-induced surface roughness modifications in RF-sputtered MoO[sub]3 filmS. Soumya, R. Arun Kumar, S. Sreejyothi, Vimal Raj, Mohanachandran Nair Sindhu Swapna, Sankaranarayana Iyer Sankararaman, 2021, original scientific article Abstract: Film quality analysis is of more considerable signifcance due to its diversifed applications in various felds of technology.
The present work reports the speckle interferometric analysis of the argon pressure-induced surface roughness modifcations
of RF sputtered MoO3 flms. The paper suggests a new method of surface quality analysis of thin flms through a parameter
δ, which is the diference between the initial and fnal inertia moment values in the study of the thermal-induced dynamic
speckle pattern. The limitations of root mean square surface roughness analysis of the atomic force microscopic image of the
flms is also exemplifed. The research suggests that argon pressure plays a vital role in the surface property of RF sputtered
flms and also that the dynamic speckle analysis can give precise information about the quality of flms. The contour plot of
particle displacement vector under thermal stress, suggests the degree of uniformity in the distribution of particles in the flm.
Keywords: speckle pattern interferometry, time history of speckle pattern, cross correlation, inertia moment
Published in RUNG: 04.07.2022; Views: 1479; Downloads: 0
This document has many files! More... |
28. Red modernism : the films of Miklos Jansco2022, radio or television broadcast, podcast, interview, press conference Abstract: One of the most acclaimed Eastern European directors of the late 1960s, Miklos Jancsó became known for his abstract long-take style which explored the intersections of power, politics, history, and myth. (“Radical form in the service of radical content,” as the Village Voice film critic, James Hoberman, put it back then.) Now that the Beacon Cinema in Columbia City is hosting a retrospective of six of his films (including Red Psalm, which won him the best director prize at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival), Red May has invited three film scholars--Eszter Polonyi, Zoran Samardzija, and Steven Shaviro—to discuss Jancsó’s boldly stylized film language with Tommy Swenson, Film Curator of the Beacon Cinema
Keywords: Film history, East-Central cinemas, political cinema, art history
Published in RUNG: 31.05.2022; Views: 2105; Downloads: 8
 Link to full text
This document has many files! More... |
29. |
30. Mobility Media: an Archaeology of Identity Photography through Science, Art and Visual CultureEszter Polonyi, unpublished conference contribution Abstract: n an era of total surveillance, being in possession of a biometric ID document can still result in denial of one’s basic civil protections and human rights. The discovery of systematic errors in state-implemented facial recognition programs—such as in recognizing faces of color (Joy Buolamwini)—suggests the failure of current practices of global intelligence and mobility. This paper offers an archaeological investigation of the contemporary photo ID document. Returning to its invention in the 1920s, it examines the issues of conjectural knowledge (Carl Ginzburg), embodiment or tact (Béla Balázs) and the optical unconscious (Walter Benjamin) behind early “physiognomic” media.
Keywords: history of photography, surveillance studies, digital humanities, art history
Published in RUNG: 31.05.2022; Views: 1721; Downloads: 0
This document has many files! More... |
