FILM 5230 W

Please post reading comments and questions here for the Ranciere and Godard readings.

I just wanted to share something with you all, especially Ananya, in light of what was discussed in class this past week.

I was sitting on the bus, and two girls in front of me pulled out their phone cameras, and started taking pictures of themselves. I knew that somehow, my face could end up on these pictures because of the angle they were using, so I came up with some tactics to avoid being photographed, while trying not make this evident. I tried to bend down and pretend as if I was looking at something on the ground, or in my bag. 2) I pulled out a book from my bag, and put it right up to my face, so if something in the background was to be photographed, it would be Foucault’s face, and not mine.

The point of this story is that I was so aware of being watched. And so afraid of being a part of someone else’s picture, and therefore, someone else’s memory that I conjured up tricks to avert it. The things we discussed in seminar (in terms of surveillance) are not new concepts to me, yet I feel more aware of it now than I have before.

Thats all.

Poste by Sharlene

Please post your reading comments and questions here.

In the spirit of Peep TV Show and inverse surveillance, please have a look at the “sousveillance” entry on Wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance

Please post your comments and questions here

http://www.blackwoodgallery.ca/Exhibitions.html

Signals in the Dark: Art in the Shadow of War
Curated by Séamus Kealy

Opening: Wednesday January 16th; 5 to 7 pm, Justina M. Barnicke
Gallery; 7 to 9 pm, Blackwood Gallery

Exhibition Runs January 17th to March 2nd, 2008

Symposium and Catalogue Launch: Friday January 25th, 2:15 to 8 pm
Free shuttle buses from Toronto to Mississauga available for the
opening and symposium

Signals in the Dark: Art in the Shadow of War (January 17 ? March 2,
2008) is an inter-disciplinary project exploring contemporary art?s
relationship to war and its representations. A collaboration between
the Blackwood Gallery (University of Toronto at Mississauga) and the
Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (Hart House, University of Toronto), this
project includes an exhibition of seventeen international artists at
two university gallery locations, a forty-day film/video program, a
catalogue, and a public symposium.

Investigating the interstices between perpetual war, dominant
politics, and representation, this project confronts issues of global
warfare, how it is imaged, and how it is imagined. The exhibition
presents artists who are responding to representations of war through
informed critique. While a number of artists produce analyses or
outraged expressions arising from their own or others? experiences of
war, other artists challenge the spectacle of contemporary war, its
veracity and, ultimately, its intertwinement with a New World Order.

The Image Now will explore a variety of theoretical perspectives on today’s rapidly transforming world of visual culture. This year’s seminar, divided into three parts, will focus on contemporary film theory that engages with questions of ethics, postcolonialism, the politics of translation, embodied spectatorship and the function of the image in today’s landscape of global politics:

I. The Image: War and Surveillance
II. Histories of the Image
III. The Image in Translation

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