neonascent

Garden Birthday Party - just add party goers

Originally uploaded by joshharle

Flickr set from something nice I made recently. Woooooee

Moblogging harrah!

Originally uploaded by joshharle

I’ve finally set up flickr for blogging, so much fun to be had by all. This is the detail on a harry potter magic wand. I love the french: “agitate the magic baguette”

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Josh on the road. X

Chaps! Happy new year!

Lots has happened, but I must first apologise for the state of Neonascent over the last few days. Unfortunately the site was hacked and I’ve spent a day repairing the damage.

Who can say that credit card companies don’t have the best interests of Human Civilization at heart. Early last century they transformed America and much of the Western world into the consumer paradise it is today. Now they have put their heads together to ponder the world’s problems, and come up with the solution…

Valentine’s day is the second largest card-sending holiday of the year behind Christmas, and is conceivably in the same position with regards to consumer spending. Indeed in my brief foray into retail work, (the run up to) Christmas and Valentine’s were the two busiest periods of the year. Now, with the dreaded day itself fast approaching, Mastercard is pushing it’s newest service; The Mastercard Girftcard. This is touted as a fantastic improvement over conventional giftcards, as it does not tie your loved one to one particular store. I’m tempted to take a sarcastic tone and wax on about the expression of intimate knowledge of your loved-ones likes and interests expressed by such a gift. I won’t. I’ll just say that this is a very poor state of affairs, that seems on a par with your pimp cramming a few dirty $50s down your top, and smacking your ass in the direction of the mall/McDonalds/crack dealer.

With the exception of essential living conditions (somehow I don’t see someone running off to pay their gas bill or buy groceries with these), I’d be happy to say that what you get from this card is hardly equal to a relationship not divorce from personal interest via anonymous payments.

On another note, it has occurred to me that these cards are circumventing an important security aspect of credit cards - identifiability. A lot of services will not accept cash, as this is a way to avoid leaving a papertrail. These cards can be used similarly to pre-pay phone-cards to operate incognito.

Regardless: Love and $$$ to you all!

Well, finally after moving I’ve bitten the bullet and forked out to get my broadband connected. Unbelievably, it’s been nearly four months with nothing but a collection of jury-rigged equipment providing just a trickle of that sweet sweet honey.

The main impetus for the final push has been that I’m currently IT consulting from home, and the time overhead associated with waiting for things to upload and download has has been more significant that the time spent working.

Irony being what it is, having now committed to a fixed line and a significant contract, I will be getting itchy feet and wanting to flit about the world.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s metamedia program Mediawatch is a fantastic check on the flagorant inaccuracies, bias, and scaremongering in Australian media. “Jihad Jack”, the first Australian convicted under the recently introduced Anti-Terror laws (which included anti-sedition censorship), has recently been released after a confession he made in Pakistan was found to have been made under threat of tourure. Mediawatch examines the new sources reactions to this, as well as implications of News is the age of Terror, Fear, and protection of Democracy by self-destruction. It refers exlicitly to Australian news sources and their positions, but these will be familiar enough in your own country’s media to find interesting.

The article is a transcript of video available on the Mediawatch site, but unfortunately it cannot be linked to directly.

I’d like to direct your attention to the extraordinary dancing going on in this music video (Armi ja Danny’s “I wanna love you tender”):

Learning for learning’s sake?

“Men have entered into the desire of learning and knowledge,… seldom sincerely to give a true account of their gift of reason, to the benifit and use of men, but as if they sought in knowledge a couch whereon to rest a searching and wandering spirit; or a terrace for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect…” Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning

But then again, even Bacon was keen of the advancements to the world that the Arts produced, and of course I would neither have appreciated nor even come across this quote if I hadn’t been studying Philosophy.

(Illustration image is from a night shoot with Tegan on Bridge St…)

Well this is the end of an incredibly long day. Today I got up at 4am and rode down from Paddington, Sydney to Central Melbourne. That’s about 900kms, which is roughly the entire length of britain tip-to-toe.

It all would have been great except for the freezing my ass off. It took about 12 hours in the end, having to stop 6 times for feeding, fuelling and hot cups of tea to help thaw out and brace for some more chill. Other than than eveything went pretty well. Riding into Melbourne was like riding into a different country - the difference in driving styles and road layouts really compound together, along with their hook-right-turn system which just makes it surreal!

Ironically at the same time as freezing, I also managed to get my face sunburned! :S

Anyway, Melbourne seems nice and interesting (and welcomingly different in a way), and I’ve got a few days of swish hotel to enjoy.

In an attempt to clarify the scope of the Dirty Suzie project, I have been reading around photographic theory. I have just finished reading a paper by sociologist Howard S. Becker entitled Visual Sociology, Documentary Photography, and Photojournalism: It’s (Almost) All a Matter of Context on the theme of genre distinctions. Becker is well-known for the clarity of his writings, and has been active in varied areas of sociology such as criminology and sociology of art.

Initially I though the paper would be helpful in examining issues of intent and attempted objectivity in photography, but ended up being shocked by many of his statements.* His conception of art is one shared by a fair few academics, and so hopefully my critique of it will have a larger scope than just this paper.

He claims that the differences between photographs of different genres do not really lie in the photographs themselves, but in the way they are presented. To a certain degree it is reasonable to believe this, especially as a sociologist, as these genres are social constructs. However, it is my opinion that these photographs are not neutral within the context of linguistic structuring - the contents of the image itself forms meanings through a constructed visual language.

He goes on to state that the context-based difference between otherwise identical “art” and visual sociology is that art photographs

…[Withhold] the minimal social data we ordinarily use to orient ourselves to others, leaving viewers to interpret the images as best they can from the clues of clothing, stance, demeanour and household furnishings they contain. What might seem to be artistic mystery is only ignorance created by the photographer’s refusal to give us basic information (which, it is likely, the photographer doesn’t have).(Becker)

This is a brazen and spiteful claim that seems to stem from intellectual elitism and misunderstanding of the aim of the artist. The real power of the image in art is that it leaves an interpretive window that the viewer can negotiate within. A picture of a street child by a visual sociologist may tell the viewer exactly the circumstances it was shot in. We can immediately position the demonstrative intent of the image and categorise it neatly. However, it is the ambiguousness of the under-determined art photograph that forces the audience to position the street child simultaneously in a 3rd world country and a western ghetto, as protagonist and victim, and to form their own significance out of the images unique relationship to their life-experiences. The artistic photograph manages to come in under the ideological radar – not didactically spoon-feeding the viewer – while hopefully making the viewer aware of the operation of their own assumptions.

Finally, Becker seems to think that sociology’s reluctance to use photography as a tool just stems from its aping of more “scientific” subjects who shun photographs, and a methodological purism. He points to visual anthropology and a few recent visual sociologists as signs that it can be effectively wielded by the savvy sociologist to pass information about society. He does not argue against sociologists who claim photography only provide a framed, subjective perspective on an event, but claims these same sociologists fail to

…Take the next step, which would be to see that every form of social science data has exactly these problems, and that none of the commonly accepted and widely-used sociological methods solves them very well either.(Becker)

While it may be true that there are inherent problems with attempting objective exposition of a society, these sociological methodologies go as far as possible towards engaging with them, while acknowledging their weaknesses. The photographic image involves a level of emotive charge that is as much its strength in art as it is its weakness in sociology. The ease of reading of a photography speaks of the operation of deeply conditioned assumptions. In pointing to the similar weaknesses in accepted sociological methodology Becker seems to be saying “It’s already broken, so photography won’t do any harm.”

It is the problem of attempted objectivity within any fundamentally fictional project that has urged me to disclaim the documentary intent of Dirty Suzie:

…The documentary style is just a normative convention: Like the white-painted walls of a gallery, we attempt to create a emotively/ideologically/contextually neutral space which actually doesn’t exist. Use of such conventions in effect just brushes evidence of a subjective photographer under the carpet. Likewise, the whole Anthropological endeavour has not really survived in the light of post-modern theories (I.e. Anthropology as construction of Fiction), and seems oh so anachronistic.

As artists we are creators, and producers of meanings and new signifier-signified configurations. Unlike tottering, safari-hat-wearing Victorian gentlemen, we do not have to try and pretend we are objective, but can actively engage in our so-called “subjects”. We must not be afraid to get stuck in and leave our mark!

After all, “it is always the instantaneous reactions to [the photographer] that produces a photograph”1 in the same way that our recording of a subculture will no doubt have an effect on its constituent community.

* After a brief explore of Wikipedia, I realised that my surprise at Becker’s opinions was perhaps less warranted. It turns out that Sociology of Art is in no way engaged with the discursive body of art theory, but concerns itself with describing what society calls art.

1 Reprint from U.S. Camera Annual 1958, U.S. Camera Publishing Corp., New York, 1967, p. 115, in Tucker and Brookman, p. 31

• Link to Becker’s paper