Screens in bed: visual art, sleep and handheld screen devices
Visual Studies Volume 34 Issue 1 2019
Visual Studies Volume 34 Issue 1 2019
ABSTRACT
This article seeks an understanding of sleeping and waking life in bed in relation to the use of handheld screen devices. The bedtime use of these devices has come to public attention through the involvement of this practice in the construction of two contemporary crises of sleep: Sleep science’s crisis of chronic sleep deprivation and the wider cultural crisis of the invasion of sleep by fast capitalism, as proposed by Jonathan Crary. Visual art is employed to gain insights into the two related understandings of sleep: One concerned with individual sleep self-regulation and the other with the corporeal commonality of sleep. The sociology of sleep, based on Michele Foucault’s concept of ‘biopower’, is augmented by philosophical insights from Jean-Luc Nancy and Gilles Deleuze to reconfigure the sleeping body beyond the bounds of disciplinary regimes and permit a reassessment of the affective potential of sleep. Works of digital media art, together with ethnographic and cultural studies on the use of mobile devices, are employed to tease out the entanglement of these screen devices with waking and sleeping bedroom life. An ontology of sleep as a pre-individual affective state is proposed as an alternative basis for resisting the appropriation of sleep by the always-waking world accessed through the use of smartphones and tablets
This Face, Here, Now: Moving Image Portraiture
Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture Volume 2 Issue 1 2017
Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture Volume 2 Issue 1 2017
DOI: 10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.2.1.0073
Read on Academica View article at Sydney eScholarship Repository
Link to article on Kudos
ABSTRACT
This article investigates the qualities of moving image portraiture that also illuminate the wider genre of photographic portraiture. The performance of portrait subjects over time brings attention to the triangulation of demand generated through the interaction of artist, subject and viewer. Serial and group moving image portraiture engages with the power of global culture industries by imbricating these regimes with individual expression and personal desire.
Read on Academica View article at Sydney eScholarship Repository
Link to article on Kudos
ABSTRACT
This article investigates the qualities of moving image portraiture that also illuminate the wider genre of photographic portraiture. The performance of portrait subjects over time brings attention to the triangulation of demand generated through the interaction of artist, subject and viewer. Serial and group moving image portraiture engages with the power of global culture industries by imbricating these regimes with individual expression and personal desire.
The article considers work by Candice Breitz, Rineke Dijkstra, Feng Feng and Thomas Struth. This recent portraiture is framed by two reference points: Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests from the mid-1960s and a series of television station identifications that show the faces of viewers, the SBS Face IDs. The Screen Tests have been chosen as seminal works that continue to have significant impact on the genre. The SBS Face IDs, by contrast, have been selected as they operate at the limit of duration and subject presence.
The Carte de Visite and Domestic Digital Photography
Photographies Volume 9 Issue 3 2016 DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2016.1202309
View article at Taylor & Frances Online View article at Sydney eScholarship Repository
ABSTRACT
This article reconsiders the carte de visite through an awareness of twenty-first-century domestic digital photography. Employing recent scholarship, nineteenth-century commentary and a study of forty carte de visite albums, the article questions a widely held perception of carte de visite portraiture as privileging memory over the other social functions of domestic photography. This perspective on memory and the carte de visite is then used to interrogate the relationship of memory to twenty-first-century domestic digital photography.
The Handheld Image: Art, History and Embodiment
PhD Thesis, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, 2018.
ABSTRACT
This thesis investigates how images become present through movement and bodily performance. Inspiring this investigation are the contemporary practices of viewers engaging with still and moving images of people on their handheld screen devices. These practices are not only central to contemporary visuality, they also provide a focus for two wider themes relating to images of people: first, the dynamic tension between image control and circulation; and second, the mutual contestation of the physical and the virtual.
To explore the struggle between image control and circulation, this thesis compares the dissemination of the twenty-first-century digital image with two historical instances of the handheld image: the sixteenth-century portrait miniature and the nineteenth-century carte de visite photographic portrait. While the physical control of the portrait miniature was paramount, the carte de visite, as the first form of mass-produced photograph, betrays the social benefits and perils of the shift from control to circulation. These historical forms are augmented through a consideration of contemporary moving-image portraiture that reveals the portrait as an interface for the interrelated demands and desires of artists, portrait subjects, and viewers.
Having tracked handheld images through the sixteenth-century bedchamber and the nineteenth-century parlour, this thesis then follows handheld devices into the twenty-first-century bed to witness the contest between the somatic and the virtual: between the vulnerable, fatigued body and the seductions of online screen engagement. This thesis challenges the view that an image becomes more powerful through unfettered circulation. Rather it proposes that the potency of an image is powered by the contestation of meaning and memory, through the struggle between circulation and control. It is through these moments of struggle, and the unstable fluctuations between the actual and the virtual, that the image becomes present.
Having tracked handheld images through the sixteenth-century bedchamber and the nineteenth-century parlour, this thesis then follows handheld devices into the twenty-first-century bed to witness the contest between the somatic and the virtual: between the vulnerable, fatigued body and the seductions of online screen engagement. This thesis challenges the view that an image becomes more powerful through unfettered circulation. Rather it proposes that the potency of an image is powered by the contestation of meaning and memory, through the struggle between circulation and control. It is through these moments of struggle, and the unstable fluctuations between the actual and the virtual, that the image becomes present.