Date: Wednesday 15 October 2014
Time: 6.00-7.30pm
Venue: Centre for Contemporary Photography, 404 George Street, Fitzroy
$5, bookings essential. Book here.
This event is presented in partnership with the Centre for Contemporary Photography and The Melbourne Festival.
Image: Vivian Maier New York City, September 10, 1955, Gelatin silver print, 30.5 x 30.5cm,Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection, courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.
Self-portraiture is hardly novel, but what distinguishes the 'selfie' in a contemporary context? The 'selfie' is scrutinised from a range of temporal and cultural contexts and emotions.
Chair: Professor Stephanie Trigg, ARC Centre of Excellence for the Centre for the History of Emotions at The University of Melbourne
Speakers:
Dr Larissa Hjorth, Professor and Deputy Dean in Research & Innovation in the School of Media & Communication, RMIT University
Moving pictures: Camera phones in the field
From disasters to celebrations, camera phone practices play a key role in the abundance of shared images globally. As an integral part of everyday life, camera phone practice offers various lenses and frames into understanding contemporary visuality—especially in terms of the socio-cultural. In this talk I move away from the Western-centric models for contextualising selfies by focusing upon case studies in South Korea.
Larissa Hjorth is an artist, digital ethnographer and Professor in the School of Media & Communication, RMIT. Since 2000, Hjorth has been researching the gendered and socio-cultural dimensions of mobile media and gaming cultures in the Asia–Pacific—these studies are outlined in her books, Mobile Media in the Asia-Pacific (Routledge, 2009), Games — Gaming (Berg, 2010), Online@AsiaPacific (with Michael Arnold, Routledge, 2013), Understanding Social Media (with Sam Hinton, Sage, 2013) and Gaming in Locative, Social and Mobile Media (with Ingrid Richardson, Palgrave, 2014). Hjorth is currently first CI on two Australian Research Council grants—one discovery (Games of Being Mobile) and one linkage with Intel (Locating the Mobile).
Dr Adam Nash, Artist, Composer, Performer, Programmer, Writer. Lecturer in Virtual Environments and Digital Media at RMIT University.
Selfie Culture and Digital Affect
Nash will put the recent popularity of 'the selfie' in the context of the contemporary digital eras of globalised art and culture and their affective interaction. He will briefly describe the digital selfie's relationship with art history, its position within contemporary digital networked culture and will offer some ideas towards an aesthetics of digital networks.
Adam Nash is a Melbourne-based artist, composer, programmer, performer and writer in virtual environments, real time 3D and mixed-reality technology. He explores virtual environments as audiovisual performance spaces, data/motion capture sites and generative platforms. Nash has a PhD from the Centre for Animation and Interactive Media, RMIT University. He lectures in Virtual Environments in RMIT University's Game Design degree and is Program Manager of the Digital Media Design degree at RMIT. He is also Director of the Playable Media stream in the Centre for Game Design Research at RMIT.
Natalie Hendry, PhD Candidate, Digital Ethnographic Research Centre, RMIT University and the Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre.
Selfies as pedagogy: Young people x mental illness x social media
Young people are seen as OTT and TMI; 'over the top' and exposing 'too much information'. The dangers of exposure—too much skin or emotional posing—are assumed to exemplify a generation's narcissism. Young people themselves however perform a diversity of selfie practices that challenge the self-portrait as exposed narcissism. For young people experiencing mental illness, selfies often make visible the invisibility of their confusing, ambivalent and distressing life experiences.
Natalie Hendry's work explores visual representations of recovery and intimacy through young people's social media use. Working with young people experiencing mental illness, she uses visual, participatory and digital ethnographic methods to co-create understandings of identity, wellbeing and connection. Hendry has a particular interest in working with this cohort to respond to their experiences of incoherence and distress by creating meaning from their everyday representations of recovery and life.
Dr Fincina Hopgood, Sessional Lecturer and Researcher in Screen Studies in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne.
Seeing the other and/in the self: The possibilities and limitations of the selfie for empathetic understanding
What is our fascination with the stereotype of the eccentric artist and how do Vivian Maier's self-portraits differ from the selfies of our contemporary moment, given they were (seemingly) not intended for public viewing.
Fincina Hopgood's research interests include the portrayal of mental illness on screen, the emotion of empathy, and the role of film and television in human rights education. She is a freelance film writer and academic, currently writing a book on the portrayal of mental illness in Australian and New Zealand films, based on her PhD research.