Pictures and Photography

As I was writing my last blog post, I came up with another idea that I wanted to write about.  This has to do with pictures and photography, which ties in closely with the idea of video taping at concerts.  We all take pictures of important things in our lives.  Some of us take thousands of pictures while others take just a few here and there, but almost all of us take them.  But here again, we get caught up in documenting the moments instead of actually living them.  When we take pictures, we are looking at something through a lens, not directly looking at it.  Chances are, we miss the details of something and won’t be able to appreciate it for what it really is.  Pictures never do things justice.  We all know that, but yet we continue to photograph everything in our lives.

But it is more complicated than that.  Photography is a hobby.  Growing up I loved photography and I became very passionate about it in high school.  I took a few classes and it become one of the things I loved to do in my free time.  Occasionally I would go out somewhere solely to take pictures.  But other times, I just snapped them whenever we went somewhere interesting.  That was all fine and dandy, until my family realized that I enjoyed doing it, so I then became the official photographer of the family.  At every event we went to or every party we hosted, I was in charge of bringing the camera and getting good shots, candid and formal.  It got to a point were it was just assumed I would take all the photos at all the events.  It didn’t bother me for awhile, but there came a point when I realized that I was always missing the event because I was so worried about trying to capture every moment on camera.  For example, my little sister played basketball all throughout high school and we went to almost all her games, and I took pictures at every one.  But by the end of the season, they all started to look the same, and it seemed pointless to keep taking the “same” pictures.  Meanwhile, I was missing half of these games because I wasn’t able to focus on what was actually going on because my eye was glued to the camera for half of it.  I was no longer enjoying events that we went to and it soon became more of a chore to take the pictures instead of a hobby that I previously enjoyed.

Photography strictly as a hobby is a little different I think.  When I specifically went out to take pictures of something, the goal was to take pictures.  That’s what I wanted to be doing at that time.  However, when the hobby turns into documenting events, it becomes different.  The events are supposed to be enjoyed and experienced, not necessarily documented.  I’m not saying taking pictures at events and locations is bad, it’s the amount we take that should be considered.  Today people take pictures of literally everything, like their food.  This is largely due to the accessibility of using our phones to snap away.  But again, like using Snapchat at concerts, if we do it in moderation, we will still be able to experience what we were meant to be experiencing.

A Crow Looked at Me and Voyeurism

Recently, I've been listening to the new Mount Eerie album, A Crow Looked at Me, and reading various reviews and think pieces that have been written in response to it. Common amongst these articles is a reluctance to engage the album critically because reviewers feel the subject matter doesn't warrant it. For those unaware, the album details the emotions of singer-songwriter Phil Elverum following the death of his wife last year from pancreatic cancer. It's an extremely sobering and harrowing listen, and no detail is spared in Elverum's personal depiction of his struggle with the fact that his wife is gone, leaving behind him and their newborn daughter. Many have described their own experience listening to the album as "voyeuristic", insofar as listeners are somehow reaping some enjoyment out of this man's cathartic depiction of loss. It's an interesting point, and strikes at the heart of why this album is such an uncomfortable listen.

This concept of voyeurism, and how it's mediated through technology, reminds me of our in-class discussion of the Jennicam. The mere fact that individuals could have uninhibited access to Jenni's life through a webcam installed in her bedroom certainly inspires a similar degree of discomfort. This discomfort is interesting precisely because I'm unsure it's warranted. Just as Elverum chose to promote and release his album, Jenni set up and marketed her website. Perhaps this discomfort is really a general anxiety towards the ways in which we feel technology is slowly dissolving our own sense of privacy. Relevant to this is the fact that Elverum reluctantly set up a GoFundMe page last year to seek donations for the health expenses related to his wife's cancer treatment. This transformed their struggle, and her untimely death, from a very personal and intimate one into something more public. Maybe this is why he felt compelled to release the album, as a sort of public statement for an event that - at that point - had clearly come to involve more than him and his family.

I've attached the first track from the album. One only need to look at some of the Youtube comments to get a sense of some of the discomfort I mentioned earlier.

Show and Tell Presentation- Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a great example of how complicated the idea of aura is. This documentary displays the cave art work of neanderthals. The artwork demonstrates the viewpoint and documentation system that they had. The cave is so highly protected that no average citizen could ever see the cave. The cave must have the least amount of people entering in case of any disruption to the preserved artwork. The researchers who work in the cave explain how delicate everything is within the cave. There are numerous skulls and animal tracks that could potentially be ruined.

All of these qualities are what make the cave impossible to be viewed as "original." Since a replica is going to made of the cave that will be the "original" cave in many people's eyes because no one has ever seen the "original" cave. There can not be any comparison to make. Not even the people who are in charge of making the model of the cave can get everything to be exactly right. No one can pick up the skulls, examine the animal tracks, or feel the texture of the paintings on the walls. The replica of the cave will have a great distance in aura because there can not be a replica made of cave if we want to preserve the original cave.

This brings up the question will the replica still have meaning to it? Will visitors be satisfied with the replica or will the replica leave them to wonder what it is missing from the original cave? That is what I would ask myself if I went to visit the replica cave. I would wonder how much of the original cave is actually represented in the replica. The distance of aura is however shortened with having a replica cave. If there was no replica cave made we would still have only photographs and this documentary. We are brought "closer" to the original cave with the replica.

This documentary also reminded me of the John Berger's Ways of Seeing. I connected it to this television show because of the camera angles and how the camera can be manipulated to make us think or feel a certain way. This documentary was dependent upon the camera view. We only were able to see parts of the cave that the camera showed the viewers. Ways of Seeing described how the director chooses what the audience will see and the order that they see it in. The director of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog, was extremely conscious of the order in which he showed the cave, interviews with researchers, and silence throughout the movie. There were two parts in the movie that I did not show because they are long portions of complete silence. Herzog allowed there to be only the sounds of water dripping from the cave and the natural sounds the cave makes. I believe he did these two pauses in order for the audience to feel as if they are in the cave. He wanted us to feel what he felt in that moment just standing in the cave. They were powerful moments in silence. When a film has a silent scene it usual is one of the most important scenes in the movie.

Final Project idea

     For my final project I want to do a sort of spin off on remix/remake culture. Throughout this semester I have been using some of the telescopes around Tucson and on campus to take pictures of Messier objects with a charged coupled device (CCD) camera. Messier objects is a catalog of 110 objects that Charles Messier made when he was trying to track comets. He kept finding these fuzzy objects that he did not want to waste his time observing so he cataloged them. These objects consist of galaxies, nebulae and star clusters. My projects is to use the CCD camera to take a series of 30-60 second exposures in red, blue, green and luminance filters. I take multiple pictures in each filters so I have plenty of data. I then take all the red filter images and align them so all the stars match up. Next, I stack all the red images to create one ideal red picture. I repeat the process with the other three filters. Once this is done, I take the one ideal red, blue, green and luminance images and align them. Finally, I can do a color stack. This then creates what we call a true color image, which is what most people will find if they google a Messier object. Of course, mine are not as good as the ones on google because Hubble took most of those.

     This is related to remix and remake culture because my taking different filters is like taking different sounds from multiple songs to create a whole new song, which is equivalent to the true color image. I have attached images of red, blue, green and red images as well as a true color image. These pictures are of M42, which is the Orion Nebula located just below the bottom left star in Orion’s belt. The only problem with these pictures is that they had to be compressed from a 16 bit image to an 8 bit image.

     Attached is the color image of M42 along with the luminance (no filter) image. For my actual final project I'll attach pictures with the red, green and blue images so the differences among them all can be seen. I might also attach other Messier objects.

Nonage

               In his essay What is Enlightenment?, Immanuel Kant discusses the concept of “nonage.” Nonage is the inability to think for oneself. As Kant argues, we subject ourselves to nonage because it’s easy and convenient; nonage is comfortable. Because this way of living requires minimal exertion, we have even grown to like it, and we have lost the ability to expand our own understanding.

               In college, our teachers and advisors convince us to follow a particular path that will lead to success. They tell us that it’s dangerous to stray too far from this path; we might not achieve success if we do. Due to our self-imposed nonage and narrow-mindedness, we agree out of intimidation. We drive ourselves into panic trying to get straight A’s, find an internship, be involved in “x” number of clubs and complete “x” number of volunteer hours. We conform to this predetermined path and get into a rhythm, forcing ourselves out of any notions that we might be able to try something new or different. We revert to what our advisors said. They’re our superiors, they know better. This is nonage at its finest.

               It is unclear why we choose to submit to this one path to success that has been laid out before us. It is easy to see that the people we recognize to be the most successful are the ones that completely skew from the generally understood “path to success”. These are the people that cast off nonage and decide to think for themselves. I have an example in mind. My roommates are in the Alpha Epsilon Delta fraternity and hear various health professionals speak at their weekly meetings. My roommates have never come home and shared a speaker’s story about getting a 4.0 in college, going straight into medical school and then residency, and then working in the same hospital for 20 years; although they hear these stories all the time, they’re not interested in them. Yet these stories are the ones we are working so hard to create for ourselves.

The speakers my roommates come home eager to tell me about are the non-traditional ones; they are the speakers who did not oblige to nonage and did not follow society’s traditional path to success. My roommates’ favorite speaker grew up in Harlem, did not graduate high school, had awful grades, and was not involved in any clubs. This speaker didn’t follow a laid-out agenda. He taught himself everything rather than learning what teachers told him to learn. He volunteered in areas that interested him, such as nursing and fire-fighting. Due to his own hard work and true passion, he made it to medical school, graduated in three years, and eventually became Surgeon General of the United States. People like this are the people my roommates see as being truly successful. Yet I am sure that even after hearing these stories, we will all continue to stress about grades, plan how to get into medical school right after college, plan the year we will be done with our residencies, and live in fear of branching out of our comfortable path that society has laid out for us. We have imposed nonage on ourselves, and are too scared to dispose of it even though we have witnessed the benefits of casting off this narrow-minded view of the world.

               Kant is optimistic, though; he states that “the hindrances against general enlightenment or the emergence from self-imposed nonage are gradually diminishing.” While that may have been true during Kant’s time, technology may now be returning us to this self-imposed nonage. We are again losing the ability to think for ourselves because we allow our computers to do the thinking for us. One might think that technology should help us to widen our world view. The internet allows us to learn about anything and social media allows us to connect with and engage in conversation with anybody. Technology should be making it easier to cultivate our own minds. But I argue that technology also makes it easier to be narrowly-minded.

               We are no longer forced to confront other opinions. We can pick and choose our media and select who we want to interact with online. It has become easy to let the computer think for us; as Kant says, “I have no need to think, if only I can pay.” We also feel the need to “obey” to society’s norms of participation in social media. In these ways, technology may actually impose nonage upon us. In our discussion in class, I thought about the 2016 election. I had no doubt about who would win the election because every post that reached my feed was leaning one way; when the election didn’t turn out how I expected, I was shocked. I had allowed myself to believe that the narrow view I got from my social media was the truth. I didn’t bother to investigate other sources because I was comfortable with what I was seeing and was too lazy to live outside of the reality that my media had created for me.

               Nonage is indeed comfortable. It’s easy. Nonage has become second nature for us. We do what our superiors tell us to do without a second thought. We participate in the technology that society tells us to; we fear missing out if we do not. We allow computers to decide our world view. Nonage allows us to be narrow-minded and prevents us from cultivating our own understanding. Yet, as Kant argues, we must find ways to cast off nonage and stop living in fear of thinking for ourselves. This will allow us to expand our viewpoints and allow us to better relate to the world and each other. As Kant says, “A man may postpone his own enlightenment, but only for a limited time.” Eventually we will have no choice but to confront reality and expand our own understanding.

In Response to Anime Show and Tell

Though our class is transitioning into another unit and away from technology as a way of taking over, the last show and tell made me rethink another anime I had once seen. An anime called Psycho-Pass focuses on the law enforcement system. They have a system called the sibyl system where police officers are helped by enforcers. They use guns that determine the level of violence a person is exhibiting or can exhibit. The determining value is on a likert scale. If the person is seen to be violent, they are wasted and the world is made “a better place”. A new officer begins to work in the force and finds a flaw in the system when a woman that is raped is determined to be a criminal because of the violence associated with her. Akane Tsunemori, the rookie officer, decides to fight against the sibyl system and take things into her own hands when she realizes the system is flawed due to the technology.

This relates to our class because it relates to the anxieties of the present being shown in the assumptions of the future. The anxiety shows that our government can become more powerful than it needs to be with the aide of technology, especially within law enforcement. Even further this relates to the flaws of technology.

Technology cannot always be correct and Psycho Pass shows that flaws in technology can actually make the world worse off than it already is. Since we are becoming more reliant on technology, it is seen that the reliance can be detrimental to our society. Death can become elevated because of our idea that technology cannot be flawed. This anxiety is seen throughout our unit as we fear what technology can do to our society. Our society is being controlled by technology and this control is becoming even stronger. Psycho Pass exemplifies how technology improvements can be a negative step in the future direction. This can be related to technology not having the judgment that people have as technology cannot assess situations with human emotions like humans so rightly can.

Telemedicine Show and Tell

Telemedicine is not necessarily something brand new, but it is becoming a lot more prominent in this age with the increase in technology overall. During my show-and-tell, I presented a telemedicine website and app called Amwell. Amwell is a telemedicine app where you simply put in your personal information, insurance information, and concerns, and then a doctor will video call you when it's your turn. It's basically like a normal doctor's visit, but it can happen wherever you want! There are some obvious pros and cons to this app.

Some pros of this app is that it is much easier for those people who have common colds, rashes, and the flu to simply video call to confirm what they have and get a prescription filled. It also saves doctor offices time for other patients with more severe cases. Another pro that was brought up during my presentation was the fact that some people don't have physical access to a nearby doctor, so having the option to video call a doctor might be beneficial to them.
Obviously, doctors cannot diagnose big , like cancer, mono, etc. because those require scans, blood tests, and many other extensive procedures in order for a proper diagnosis. Additionally, a good doctor relies on his touch in order to diagnosis his patient with compassion and accuracy. Without touch, a doctor cannot feel lumps, swelling, temperature, etc., and they cannot diagnose a patient properly or give them the proper prognosis and treatment. Knowledge isn't everything in medicine!
Another con is the concern that technology may replace us as humans. Everybody always says that those in the health field will never have to worry about losing their jobs because of the high demand of them. However, if technology can develop to a point where it can sense what doctors normally sense with their touch and knowledge, then they can be almost more perfect than us as humans. Even doctors make mistakes, but, if technology is someday perfected, then doctors won't be needed because we could rely more on technology at that point. This goes back to our class discussions of RUR and robots. The replicants became so similar to humans that they had to test them in order to see which one they were. Also, I think it can be related to the idea of technology as feminizing in a way. There are both women and men in the field of medicine, so I don't think feminizing is the appropriate term; however, the technology overpowers human strengths and makes them less valuable, like machines did to men in the industrial revolution.
An example that I can think of that I briefly mentioned in my presentation was the movie Passengers. There was a couple scenes where Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt, and Laurence Fishburne used a machine that told them everything possible about a person: diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. It even treated the person right then and there, no matter how severe the injuries were! This may be an accurate portrayal of what part of the future of medicine could look like. If telemedicine advances from changing the access people have to medicine into trying to replicate humans, it could very well turn into the machine seen in passengers.

It's a stretch, but I think that telemedicine could be the beginning of the advance of medical technology. Someday, real doctors could potentially be replaced by robot doctors. The rich would have their own personal robot doctor, the middle class could go to see a robot doctor, and the poor would have to be their own doctor or suck it up. Or, there may not even be any social classes, who knows?

Concerts and Snapchat

While I was in Mexico during Spring Break this past week, I met some new friends who were from Oklahoma.  We all got to talking and somehow ended up talking about the best concerts we had gone to.  Being an avid concert goer, I listed several I had gone to and the ones I especially enjoyed.  But then I thought about all the videos and pictures I had taken on my phone, but were no longer on it because they were taking up too much room.  I had downloaded them all to my computer and deleted them off my phone fairly soon after each concert.  So that got me thinking of why I took them to start with.  This situation would have been the perfect opportunity to show them to other people, but I didn’t have access to them at the time when I needed them.  When else was I actually going to use them?  I haven’t personally ever gone back to re-watch them ever, and even if I did, they were taken on my phone while we were all singing along in seats that were not front row, so the quality of the videos isn’t even all that great.

This goes back to the discussions we had earlier this semester about how we can either live in the moment, or record it for a later time.  Without a doubt, if you are taking a Snapchat video or picture at any event, you are missing the experience that is right in front of you.  Watching something through a small screen in front of you is simply not the same as whatever event you are attending.  Yet, even knowing this, I and many others, continue to do it constantly.  And it can become exhausting, because you’re always holding your phone up to hopefully get the best view and best video you can.  But instead, we should really be trying to enjoy the current environment.  This is all easier said than done, but as technology continues to improve and social media becomes an even bigger part of everybody’s lives, it will continue to get worse.

Thinking back on all the concerts I’ve gone to, there is not one that I didn’t pull my phone out to take pictures or videos.  Of course everyone wants to “remember the event” and pictures and videos are a great way of doing that.  But sometimes it becomes excessive, and I know I’m just as guilty of it as anyone else.  But reflecting back on all these times, I kind of wish I hadn’t been watching it through my little screen.  I probably missed lots of details that I would have seen if I had been watching the performance directly.  So going forward, I hope to enjoy things in the moment, and not always through a camera lens.  It won’t be easy, but I think it will be a good goal to work towards.  I got a little taste of it while I was in Mexico.  I only had a wifi connection, and even that wasn’t very strong or good.  So none of my social media would load and Snapchat was so slow.  So I decided to not worry about social media for most of the trip and I felt so much more relaxed because I didn’t feel the need to respond to everyone right away.