I had my first Thesis Monitoring meeting yesterday and it was very enlightening. Thesis Monitoring is where a couple of academics who aren't your supervisors sit down with you and go through your progress to date. The term "thesis" in this context can be a littel misleading becuase at my stage I've not started my thesis, and since my phd is art practce based, further downt he track it will be about the progress of what I am making as well.  It's supposed ot occur every 6 months during your phd. In my case somehow administratively I had fallen between the cracks, so I had to do a bit of jumping up and down to get mine done....

It was pointed out to me in thesis monitoring that my current title is really dense and there is alot in it. I don't mind people pullng my work apart critically. It needs to be done, and I have been craving ANY kind of critical feedback on my work, so this was great. Every word in my current title is loaded with its own set of concepts and yes, looking at it, it could be very difficult to work out the main focus.  I think possibly that semiotics is a theme underpinning what I do, but not neccessarily the main driver. Signs and symbols are definately important to what I am doing, not only how they are evidenced in images, but actually what a person's behviour or their environment may signify.

Its funny, the thesis and wirting up is still a long way off, but if one has a title then there is something to hang things off when talking to others.... even thoough the title will probably change a million times before the final hand-in. I guess, its a bit like a focal point, something solid in that shifting snowdome of ideas.

I was thinking the title s more along the lines of: Visual Dialogues: Convergent technologies and the remediation of photography but then again if I think about it properly, photography is just one area, even though it is one of my main areas. My work is about people too.. it's about how people act and respond to images and the spaces in which they view them. People are very important in what I do. I want to somehow make life a bit lighter, happier, interesting through my art. We're all too jaded these days. Perhaps a better title is something like:

Visual Dialogues: Convergent technologies and the remediation of image practices.
 

Imagine a snow dome that someone has shaken up. Each snowflake is a thought or idea relating to your work. They whirl around and sometimes settle in groups or create intricate patterns caused by storms of thought. Some melt away into nothing while others form crystalline shapes and structures that later  you work into sculptural forms. You show these to other people and this opens up a forum for discussion and debate… The snow dome has been turned again.

This is what it is like to be doing an art phd, one which is based on research through making things and being a practicing artist, rather than one based  on historical  or theoretical research. I’m not a sculptor, but this is the only way I can describe the process… and there are days, like today when the snowdome is such a flurry of inspiration and ideas I don’t know where to start when writing about them. Instead I have to go and make, for words are too slow and can't yet articulate what is going on in my head – I have to go and shape my snowflakes into forms that enable me to communicate with others.

The tagging workshop below has really been a source of ideas, and then yesterday we had “Who’s Afraid of Artistic Research” which was a student led symposium done through the Visual Research Centre located in Dundee Contemporary Arts and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design. I had a very minor role in helping get it organised, but most of the credit really goes to Lindsay Brown and Cornelia Solfrank. The discourse that came out of it was really thought provoking and when the snowflakes have settled in the snowdome I shall write a little more about it.  

I’m doing a presentation on the 1st of May about my work for the Signals in the City exhibition and its forced me to think about qr-codes on a deeper level than most people seem to engage with. I've come to the conclusion that  looking at qr-codes just by themselves or just in terms of their technical aspects is a rather superfical approach.

The thing about qr-codes that really interests me is that they are physical world hyperlinks: how does this affect people? what impact does this have on social activities mediated by computers/ handheld devices?  It is this linking between physical and virtual spaces that I find intriguing, not the advertising, or the idea that I could call a taxi just by taking a photo of it (with its qr-code emblazoned on its side), not the idea of buying a bottle of coke just by taking a photo of the vending machine that it is in. Although these are amazing ideas this is where most people stop because these ideas in themselves are money making and sometimes I think that this can limit people’s ability to push an idea to its limits.

We need to think about how a user interacts with a mobile phone, their expectations when they take a photograph, what it means to be “in the world” physically while interacting in virtual space. People multitask when they use mobile phones, their attention spans are short and usually data rates are an issue. How do these affect all affect the experience of the user?

Going back to the physical word hyperlinking, if we stop for a moment and question the semiotics of such an act there is so much in this it could be a book in itself. In the 3^rd year of my undergrad degree I did performance studies, and the most informative aspect of the whole year was a research project I did on the Semiotics of the Theatre Experience. I never thought such a project would be useful now, but it is – semiotics of space, breaking down of actor vs audience space could be related to breaking down of virtual vs physical space where the audience belongs to the physical world and the actors to the virtual….

The digital camera and mobile phone camera are the latest harbingers of democatising photography... or are they?
 
We know that photography democratised portraiture to some extent, where camera meant you no longer had to be rich enough to commission a painter to have your image immortalised.... And we know that 35mm created another shift in democracy where the photographer didn't have to cart around an unwieldy tripod.... and look how polaroid brought imaging truly into the homes of just about everyone in the western world....

So it would follow that the camera phone, one of the most ubiquitous pieces of technology in the world would seem to follow this trend, but in my opinion it doesn't. Ok, more people may be able to actually take photos, but can more people see them? With all other forms of photography where the output was a printed image, anyone could see it without the need for extra technology.

Now with the digital image, where distribution most often takes place via email, MMS messaging or social networking sites, surely we could see this as reveerting back to elitism? Unless the photographer chooses to print their image, actually viewing it, without extra kit is harder than ever before. What about people who do not have access to these technologies? What about people who live in rural or remote areas where mobile phone signals and broadband are but a whiff on the horizon? What about older people who just can't get their heads around the technology and just don't want to?

What about others like me, who are so immersed in technology day in and day out,  that when they want some low-fi down time, the joy of the printed photograph has become rare?

I've just spent a few exhausting days in the studio, which I haven't done for such a long time. I had forgotten how the printmaking process makes you slow down, be patient and have time to think. I'm so used to zipping impatiently round a computer screen with my mouse that being forced to stop and mull over ideas while waiting for screens to expose has been a good thing.

 t's given me time to collect my thoughts a little more and think about how photography is forging forward into the domain of the 2.0's. We have Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0, so why not Photography 2.0? Given the ubiquity of digital cameras,  social networking and the democratising of the photographic image (though I have my own ideas about this, more later when I have time) , it seens like a natural progression. Not may people yet have coined the term, though it has been used by one marketing company, and I suspect we are on the cusp of it infiltrating the mainstream.