I had the honor to speak on behalf of the jury of the AHL 2016 Visual Art Award at the AHL Foundation's 13th Annual Benefit Gala & Awards Ceremony, New York City, October 22, 2016. The work of the jury was not easy because all submissions were of high quality. The prizes went to the artists whose work stood out the most - artists who had the most convincing voice and the most articulate vision.
Read moreThe Selfie: More and Less than a Self-Portrait, an invited talk at the New School
In the invited talk “The Selfie: More and Less than a Self-Portrait” I will argue that the selfie is neither a low-brow offspring of the noble tradition of self-portrait in art, nor a democratic and popular version of self-portraiture in general. Instead, I will emphasize the specific conditions of making and viewing selfies as part of a live stream of updates on platforms such as Instagram.
Read moreWhy every self-portrait is not a selfie, but every selfie is a photograph
This article, commissioned by Riga Photography Biennial 2016, focuses on the role of technologies in defining and understanding the selfie. I examine the difference between the way datasets of selfies are being constructed for research and comparison, and how selfies are consumed and experienced in their natural habitat, the live flow of images on Instagram.
Read moreJudging the #artdatathon at the Museum of Modern Art
On February 20, 2016, I was invited to serve as one of the judges of Untitled: Art Datathon at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Art Datathon was a two-day workshop dedicated to creating data analysis and visualization projects based on the dataset describing the collection of MoMA.
Read moreDefining competitive photography
In this article, I introduce a term competitive photography and define its historical emergence in the international juried exhibitions of photography in the 1950s. I believe that this term, competitive photography. brings into focus a large segment of photographic practices, contemporary and historical alike, which so far has escaped the attention of scholars.
Read moreClash of theories: New Objectivity versus Subjective Photography
In an interesting historical turn, what was meant to be non-art, became the very epitome of art (as exemplified by Albert Renger-Patzsch’s followers), whereas the most artistic photography of the 1950s (Otto Steinert’s Subjective Photography) turned out to be a dead end, at least from the perspective of today's art history.
Read moreMaking sense of the selfie
This article belongs to a series of related articles and book chapters that I have written since the late 2014 and early 2015 about photography in social media and selfies in particular. All these writings are based on research project Selfiecity that I co-authored with Lev Manovich, Moritz Stefaner, Mehrdad Yazdani, Dominikus Baur, Daniel Goddemeyer, Nadav Hochman, and Jay Chow.
Read moreArt of the masses: From Kodak Brownie to Instagram
This article touches upon some of the inherent complexities of understanding the selfie. Seeking for valid methods of theorizing and contextualizing the selfie, this article attempts to combine insights from the perspectives of history of photography and art history, digital humanities, and software studies.
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