Media In Our Image Portraits : Women's Studies Quarterly : Viral
Images, all rights reserved: © 2011-2015 Jasmine Lord
"Media In Our Image Portraits" is a visual accompaniment to Johanna Blakley's article of Media In Our Image in the Women's Studies Quarterly for the Norman Lear Centre.
Words by: Johanna Blakley
Images by : Jasmine Lord.
Participants: Johanna, Sarah, Veronica, Krystal and Jasmine
"Digital media, and especially social media, allows audience members to talk among themselves, to critique, remix, and redistribute content on an unprecedented scale. Of course partici- pants in social networks belong to the same old demographic categories that media companies and advertisers have used to understand them, but now those categories mean even less than they did before. Geography and national boundaries are easily surmounted obstacles in our quest to net- work and converse with people who share our interests. And demographic categories often play no part in those conversations. In short, digital net- works allow us to opt out of our demographic categories, which are often virtually invisible online . . . and easily fudged as we go about constructing our own unique online identities." - Johanna Blakley, Media In Our Image
A note from the author :
"So, when WSQ asked me to come up with a visual component for the article, it seemed to me that we needed to develop a new mode of portraiture – one that would tell people more about our taste, values and beliefs than about our demographic coordinates. We used word clouds, which reflect the relative frequency of words within a data set, to summarize social media preferences and profile data from each of the portrait subjects. We were inspired by lace veils that both reveal and obscure the subject, and so we projected each sitters’ own metadata on their physical bodies, creating a veil of revealing data.
I had recently visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art and seen The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini. I was startled by the stark profile paintings that dominated the galleries devoted to the early stages of secular portraiture in Europe. I learned that painters were constrained by the belief that strict side profiles were the only way to reveal the true character of the subject. By accurately representing the slope of the forehead, the shape of the nose and the jut of the chin, a painter could communicate the ethical and moral attributes of the sitter. Any deviation from the strictest of profiles was perceived as an attempt to hide all manner of sins.
Of course this restriction eventually disappeared (the Dutch, apparently, would have none of it), but in the age of the “social media profile,” I realized that we have an unprecedented opportunity to invent new rules for the way we capture, define, and represent ourselves to the world. And our age, gender, race, and income bracket need not be the focus.
The Media in Our Image Portraits (as we ended up calling them) meld together Renaissance conventions of portrait painting with contemporary visual data mining. But we can imagine all kinds of ways that portraiture could be reinvented in the age of social media." - Johanna Blakley https://johannablakley.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/media-in-our-image/
For the full article http://learcenter.org/pdf/WSQViralAP.pdf
Read More"Media In Our Image Portraits" is a visual accompaniment to Johanna Blakley's article of Media In Our Image in the Women's Studies Quarterly for the Norman Lear Centre.
Words by: Johanna Blakley
Images by : Jasmine Lord.
Participants: Johanna, Sarah, Veronica, Krystal and Jasmine
"Digital media, and especially social media, allows audience members to talk among themselves, to critique, remix, and redistribute content on an unprecedented scale. Of course partici- pants in social networks belong to the same old demographic categories that media companies and advertisers have used to understand them, but now those categories mean even less than they did before. Geography and national boundaries are easily surmounted obstacles in our quest to net- work and converse with people who share our interests. And demographic categories often play no part in those conversations. In short, digital net- works allow us to opt out of our demographic categories, which are often virtually invisible online . . . and easily fudged as we go about constructing our own unique online identities." - Johanna Blakley, Media In Our Image
A note from the author :
"So, when WSQ asked me to come up with a visual component for the article, it seemed to me that we needed to develop a new mode of portraiture – one that would tell people more about our taste, values and beliefs than about our demographic coordinates. We used word clouds, which reflect the relative frequency of words within a data set, to summarize social media preferences and profile data from each of the portrait subjects. We were inspired by lace veils that both reveal and obscure the subject, and so we projected each sitters’ own metadata on their physical bodies, creating a veil of revealing data.
I had recently visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art and seen The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini. I was startled by the stark profile paintings that dominated the galleries devoted to the early stages of secular portraiture in Europe. I learned that painters were constrained by the belief that strict side profiles were the only way to reveal the true character of the subject. By accurately representing the slope of the forehead, the shape of the nose and the jut of the chin, a painter could communicate the ethical and moral attributes of the sitter. Any deviation from the strictest of profiles was perceived as an attempt to hide all manner of sins.
Of course this restriction eventually disappeared (the Dutch, apparently, would have none of it), but in the age of the “social media profile,” I realized that we have an unprecedented opportunity to invent new rules for the way we capture, define, and represent ourselves to the world. And our age, gender, race, and income bracket need not be the focus.
The Media in Our Image Portraits (as we ended up calling them) meld together Renaissance conventions of portrait painting with contemporary visual data mining. But we can imagine all kinds of ways that portraiture could be reinvented in the age of social media." - Johanna Blakley https://johannablakley.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/media-in-our-image/
For the full article http://learcenter.org/pdf/WSQViralAP.pdf
