Part One Project

My final image results in three stages: the whimsical images I took, the images of books that I took, and the images of nature that I took. These are three genres of subjects that I am drawn to photograph and all represent different times of my life in Gainesville.

Lights

Like Jake, I also am fascinated by capturing images of lights. One of my tours throughout campus at night produced these haunting/inviting images. Can you spot where on campus these are?

Multiplicity of Smells

I was interested in what Ulmer said in our last meeting that orality is aural, literacy is visual, and electracy is haptic. As I was going back to my ArKive of Smells in Gainesville, I stumbled across the book I made for that class. I took it upon myself for my project to snap a picture as soon as I smelled something new. My olfactory bulbs fatigued throughout the day, so the images were frontloaded from the day where I smelled something new every minute and by the end, once every few hours. As I go back and read my short descriptions next to the photos, much like Wenders' approach, I can recall some of the smells very clearly, (ones that I encountered not just on that day but for two years), and ones that I cannot "smicture" (that is to say picture the smell, recall it, remember it). 

www.esneeden.com/photobooksmellsfinale.pdf

Krispy Kreme

In order to photo local, I had to go back and remember what drew me in the first place: I came to Gainesville to be a photography major and work with Jerry Uelsmann. He had retired even before I got here in 2008 but I still thought I loved Black and White Photography. My graduate instructor told me to go out into Gainesville and really notice what affected me. The Hot Now Sign of course. Krispy Kreme was a reminder of family road trips to North Carolina (we have no Krispy Kreme in SW Florida). The smell, the touch, the taste of Hot Now Krispy Kreme doughnuts is part of my Proustian madeline. I suppose this might seem sad or silly, but the Krispy Kreme doughnut for me is a time machine: it takes me back to simpler times when I didn't pay bills or worry about driving. I was content to be in the backseat and consume. Krispy Kreme itself is a time machine; not much has changed since the company started decades ago. The images above that I took in 2009 could just as easily be from much longer ago.

Visit to Michael's Arts and Crafts Store

These are the results of l'objet trouvé becoming commercialized and commodified and mass produced. The aura of what makes the found object special is ruined by the proliferation of identical factory made replicas.

Baldwin Library Visit

Smile

Scary Showers

 

As I was finishing my last blog post, I inadvertently unearthed another horrible memory that I often repress. Why must terrible things happen in the shower? (A close friend of mine has had several scary epileptic seizures from hot showers which have knocked her unconscious and required hospitalization.) One time when I was a pre-teen, about 11 or 12, my family and my brother's friend went on a short trip to a hotel nearby for my dad's work. Most of the details are foggy; I recall my brother's friend vomiting in the car ride from being car sick, and I remember us getting to the hotel. I don't remember what it looked like, what it smelled like, anything. All that I remember is that the next morning I went to take a shower and the hotel lighting and the hot shower affected me so much that as I stumbled out of the shower, my eyes could not focus, and then suddenly I couldn't see. I couldn't see anything and I knew my eyes were open and I started shouting for help and my mom came and I yelled that I was blind and she started screaming for my dad in a panic. It was incredibly terrifying to have known exactly what it was like to see and then believe that in a flash I would be blind forever. I remembered that it wasn't black as I would have expected being blind to be like, but rather a pinkish grey of nothingness. As my parents started making plans to go to the nearest hospital and they led me out of the bathroom, my vision came to. I could not have been more relieved. Perhaps that is subconsciously why I am so drawn to visual arts. Because I know that I am privileged to still have my sight and to still be able to experience the miracle of light and color. This seems like an incredible revelation to me. I hope I can use this newly reacquired positioning of my life to tell a compelling narrative and create an enticing Allegory of Prudence.

What Are You Afraid Of?

What started off as an innocent trip to the library to try and simultaneously keep up with French class, study for the GRE Subject Test in Literature, and read Derrida's Psyche: Inventions de l'autre became a terrifying view into the abyss. The pictures I took reflect me. As I stood in the section specifically looking for B2430 .D483 P781 1998, I had this haunting feelings as I looked around. There were so so many books on or by Derrida that I could never hope to read them all. Good God! Deleuze was above him. Horrified, transfixed I moved to my right and who was there to taunt me but Foucault! Mon Dieu! Not to mention Lacan staring there pointing out my holes, my inadequacies. Merleau-Ponty and Sartre scoffed at me. All I knew was their names! Their names! Like a parrot, I felt hopelessly inadequate only able to recognize and repeat their names yet here was all this information that I could take, but I couldn't. I can't just call the section my own and forbid anyone from taking those rows of shelves. It was like a new Moment, quite like the one I had already identified as my moment from High School with my first C in Calculus. It was a feeling of shame and embarrassment and hopelessness, yet this seemed much worse. Certainly I could give up Math, and move onto something I enjoyed. But here is a part of English, something I should know. I tore myself away with only Derrida, Barthes, my Norton Anthology, and Robert Wick's Modern French Philosophy, which already completely filled out my backpack and took to the elevator. So wrapped up in the French, when I got on the elevator, I asked to go to floor one, the floor above the one I was on, assuming that there was a ground level as there is in France. The girl just stared at me and said, you were just on level 1. I said excuse me I'm sorry level 2. Why did there have to be so many people in that damn elevator? As we got to floor 2 and they were trying to get up to floor 6 I murmured my apologies with my backpack and rushed to the self-checkout, terrified to have to talk to any librarians: I felt like I was dropping my IQ every second, I didn't want witnesses. As I left the library, I calmed down, felt more accomplished and got over it. But I expect this Moment to be one of my recurring living nightmares, the same overwhelming feeling as the sublime or claustrophobia or becoming deaf.

Standing out

Leaving our trace

Austin Cary State Forest

Last Spring in Advanced Experiments, my group in our class mapped the Austin Cary Memorial Forest with photography. We chose to create a narrative pitting natural fire against man-made fire. Controlled burning has been a long-time practice in maintaining forests. But Austin Cary Memorial Forest, as a learning forest, has a special area of the forest that is left untouched by man. They use it to see what happens without human intervention. This place has lightning marked scorched trees and the tree growth is sporadic. The characters we invented were kind of like Daimons that represented natural fire and manmade fire. Their wakes are delineated by ribbons

Huaca Huaca

We seemed to have stated that we've made our instructions clearer: first, create an Allegory of Prudence, second, take the tropes already available to us through tourism, and re-purpose them for well-being, third, concern ourselves with our own singular experiences. This has only made it more difficult for me. Hopefully Wenders will help me tie it back together. I am comfortable with the photographic medium and the camera apparatus (l'appareil photo), yet I'm not sure how I am going to represent something like a moment of Prudence with my photography. I could digitally manipulate the photos but I am not sure if that breaks the purpose of taking the photo in the Now and instantly uploading it. Also, I am not sure how relevant my Moment that I wrote about in the previous blog post is with this further understanding of the assignment. I've been wracking my brain to figure out any moment of any virtue that has impacted my life in the same way that Titian and Ulmer's lives were affected. Or even a time when I have been struck by beauty and aesthetics. Until I figure it out, I want to revisit a small note that I wrote about in my Universal Experience Notes. One of my favorite classes was Colonial Andean Art History. It was my first encounter with a world outside of North America and Europe. Up until that point I had been sheltered and uneducated about anything south of Florida. The Quechuan language, the quipu recording system, the huacas were all fascinating subjects of study. The huacas in particular were sacred sites of both myth and history declared by men. If these were sites of pilgrimage for the Quechua people and a type of tourism, perhaps I can use the tropes of the huacas and identify my own sacred sites in my local space of Alachua County. The huacas were not only sites but spirits, (daimons perhaps?)

Gazes, memes, and tourism

Universal Experience as Contrast has given me so many new ways of seeing. The gaze was a notable subject of discussion in one of my art history courses, Gender, Representation and Visual Arts. How does the viewer’s gaze interact with the art? How does gender and sexuality play a role in the gaze? Often the gaze is a form of consumption. The viewer can look at an oil painting, a photograph, a video, and the bodies cannot look back. Yet the tourist gaze can be confronted by eyes, either painted or photographed. What does it mean when the eyes look back at you, though not real? In James Elkins The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing Elkins points out human tendency to find eyes and faces in everything we see. We desire the familiarity of the face and yet we can often be confronted by the uncanny instead of the familiar.

 Yet most often the gaze is all-consuming. We take and give nothing back. Could this problem be solved with electracy? How can we produce something that is not meant to be consumed but is meant to be thought-provoking and for the benefit of well-being? Perhaps those are our instructions. Recreate tourism, not for capitalism, but for well-being. What is tourism? I see tourism as a purposeful temporary displacement meant to glean something from outside the everyday. Yet as my group discussed it, it seems that most “tourist attractions” are based on hype and fictions perpetuated by capitalists. We discussed again the idea of whether it is necessary to travel to the authentic location to gain the full experience. Is the Mona Lisa authentic if it’s highly guarded inside a museum where you cannot get up close? Does defining authenticity belong to the author of the original work? The Sistine Chapel seems authentic in that case since it’s never been moved. But what if geologists prove that due to plate tectonic activity, the Sistine chapel is three inches west of where it originally stood? Does that change how the light hit the painting at a certain time of day? Does it make the viewing less authentic? We know for certain that many paintings have crackled and lost their original vibrant hue, but we’ve only known them in their reverent sepia form. Certainly restoration is it’s own problem, Ecce Homo a chief example.

http://www.jest.com/article/197627/11-best-remixes-of-the-botched-ecce-homo-painting

Walter Benjamin calls “aura” what is subtracted when the original is reproduced. Many remain skeptical of the concept of aura. Does originality and authenticity constitute an aura that cannot be reproduced? Electracy almost necessarily demands something that can replicated, reproduced, re-experienced. With the internet as the institution for electracy, only projects like the Wayback Machine would be able to prove authenticity of a webpage. An exciting aspect of the internet is the lack of established authorship. When one starts a meme, it does not bear signature. It is passed around and its authenticity bears no relation to its potency. I believe the internet is our greatest resource and asset in reconfiguring tourism to benefit well-being and each work of art, whether in a Museum of Contemporary art or as a meme on the internet, can serve as a baseline to build up our own.