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I feel deeply connected to the performance of Samantha. I posed for nude portraits several times for friends and was quite confused about my role at that time. I like posing and being photographed but since they are all straight men, I wondered if I just enjoyed this male gaze. But I couldn't deny that I like everything about posing. Samantha’s reading and performing encouraged me to celebrate the gaze, and to reverse the role.

I really wanted to imitate her. There came a good chance. Alexandra, a girl from photography department wanted to photograph me and I said yes. I asked her to write a text about me and I read it out in front of a camera and a audience, and tried to re-create and perform the portrait.

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I started my wandering in google street view and I captured hundreds of screenshots and made a selection. That is the moment that i realized i am able to frame a story to machine-generated stuff, and enjoy the role of an observer and a narrator. This interactive publication allows the reader to view the original image and connect them to each other, in a playful way.

[kexinhao]

I started my wandering in google street view and I captured hundreds of screenshots and made a selection. That is the moment that i realized I am able to frame a story to machine-generated stuff, and enjoy the role of an observer and a narrator. This interactive publication allows the reader to view the original image and connect them to each other, in a playful way.

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I thought of what I can do with my camera and how invasive it can be. I scanned the name list with classmates’ portrait photos on it, took photos of the screen showing the zoomed in scanned black-and-white portrait. Pixels fascinated me — when I zoom in on the photos I took with my camera, every single transistor shows the strength of red, green or blue light — they are so pure, solid and vibrant. They are there for a reason — a subtle difference of the vibrancy suggests how the image look like, and millions of them under a certain arrangement construct the whole image. My camera brings this into my eyes. When I saw the fascinating pixels, I realised I am looking at another RGB screen of my laptop. These tripled layers, that I didn't plan for, amazed me. I chose the ID photos to scan, photograph and zoom in because I wanted to represent my closely looking at people’s faces, my invasion of personal data and privacy, and, the failure that not figuring the image either identity with my invasion. Music: Ryoji Ikeda - data.matrix

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My Making and Thinking

Walking into the chamber in the gallery, you saw the work, you realised then it is YOU who had made everything happen, everything on canvases and screens were there because of you, because you had chosen to stand there and to see. You thought you came to the gallery because you expected something, but now you knew that the gallery came to you because you are what it expected. Someone behind the wall had somehow gotten to know your presence right now right here and planned this for you. You are hooked.

This is what I felt when I saw the works of Rineke Dijkstra and Michael Wolf.

Rineke Dijkstra’s work is a four-minutes video called Annemiek. Annemiek is the girl who was singing in this video. She was asked to sing her favourite song of Backstreet Boys, Number. In front of the camera, she was very nervous in the beginning but tried to lose herself with the music, but nervous, still. You can see this back-and-forth between her absorption in the music and her awareness that people are watching. As normal as this situation is, the video shows nothing but a daily-life scene. However, it was that moment when I realised it was ME, the viewer who caused all the discomfort from this little girl and shown on the screen, that I started to think about the being of the audience. It influences, and links everything together.

Michael Wolf has a series of google street view. I have seen people doing this a lot: capturing google street view exhibiting captured screenshots. I agree that google really allows tons of happening and brings spontaneity and machine-thinking into photography, but this is just nothing new. But what Wolf did intrigues me a lot, which is far more than capturing screenshots. He has the street views on his computer screen, and he took photos of the screen, with details of every single pixel of the RGB screen. When you get closer to the huge light box which exhibits the photos, you see nothing but vibrant RGB cells. When you step further you see the photo. It shows me the presence of the camera to its maximum, as well as the uneasiness from people that got observed: Even though people’s faces got blurred in the street view, they were caught by camera, exposed and being viewed. There is a camera, a pair of eyes that watches a person who never would expect this.

Another work of Fiona Banner also brings me to the thinking of watching and being watched, the being of a viewer. Banner once photographed the actress Samantha Morton for nude portrait. She wrote a description of her which Morton did not read. The next day, still never having read the text, Morton read out the portrait in front of an audience. Someone filmed her reading without permission. What impressed me is that, Morton, the one that was being portrayed, described and gazed, was performing a kind of striptease in words, which suggests a reversed role: portraying instead of being portrayed, and enjoying herself in it.

I started with my camera, thinking what I can do with it and how invasive it can be. I scanned the name list with classmates’ portrait photos on it, took photos of the screen showing the zoomed in scanned black-and-white portrait. Pixels fascinated me — when I zoom in on the photos I took with my camera, every single transistor shows the strength of red, green or blue light — they are so pure, solid and vibrant. They are there for a reason — a subtle difference of the vibrancy suggests how the image look like, and millions of them under a certain arrangement construct the whole image. My camera brings this into my eyes. When I saw the fascinating pixels, I realised I am looking at another RGB screen of my laptop. These tripled layers, that I didn't plan for, amazed me.

I chose the ID photos to scan, photograph and zoom in because I wanted to represent my closely looking at people’s faces, my invasion of personal data and privacy, and, the failure that not figuring the image either identity with my invasion.

And I recalled another moment that amazed me, in a way that I couldn’t explain. One day I was playing with google street view, dragged and dropped the little person on a random spot on the world map. It was a small town in Minnesota. I followed a road in a woods and it led me to a broader one, with some houses and nature but few people. I wandered more and saw a lady, she directed me to a lawn where a old guy on a mower was looking back at her. He looked at her and she was for sure looking at him. I wrote this description of my “trip" and was somehow moved by either this image or my words. I realised I am able to frame a story to machine-generated street view, and enjoy the role as an observer and narrator.

I started my wandering on google street view. I had great fun with it. I captured hundreds of photos and made a selection. I am going to display them in a form of an interactive publication, which allows the reader to view the original image and connect them.

I feel deeply connected to the performance of Samantha. I posed for nude portraits several times for friends and was quite confused about my role at that time. I like posing and being photographed but since they are all straight men, I wondered if I just enjoyed this male gaze. But I couldn't deny that I like everything about posing. Samantha’s reading and performing encouraged me to celebrate the gaze, and to reverse the role.

I really wanted to imitate her. There came a good chance. Alexandra, a girl from photography department wanted to photograph me and I said yes. I asked her to write a text about me and I will read it out in front of a camera, and try to re-create and perform the portrait.

I am having great fun with this series. I put more effort on thinking the way of presenting than before, which is a part I ignored before.

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texts of my thoughts during nude modelling.

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I TOOK A SELFIE AT WHERE I WAS SUPPOSED TO PAINT

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connection of the 3 works:

They are all about seeing, being seen and the awareness of both:

The person in the google street view image don't know that they are watched,

Michael Wolf provoke the audience by capturing them and scaling the image, and introducing the invasion of camera. (camera outside of a screen captured by a camera, layers, medium, expose)

Samantha was portraying -- she is very clear of the presence of camera (but not of the camera when she performs) and the audience. She is  being seen.

Annemiek is very aware about the camera, too. That makes her uncomfortable but she tries to forget it.

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This is the artwork of Rineke Dijkstra, in the museum De Pont, Tilburg

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Annimiek, Renijk Dijkstra

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Mirror, Fiona Banner

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This is a video documentary of the performance work Mirror by Fiona Banner.  The person in the video is Samantha Morton.

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Michael Wolf Street View Works

http://photomichaelwolf.com/#asoue/1

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Micheal Wolf Interview

Born in Munich in 1954, you grew up in Europe, Canada and the United States. You studied under the great photographer Otto Steinert at the Folkwang Academy in Essen—from which Pina Bausch graduated too—and at Berkeley in California. As a press photographer, you won the World Press Photo Award twice, in 2005 and 2011, and for eight years you contributed to the German weekly Stern. Since 2001 you have chosen to devote yourself to your artistic projects. What did you dream of becoming as a child?

I didn’t have one particular dream when I was a child. The only thing I was interested in was the flea market. I was capable of spending hours there, with my mother, while my father fumed in the car. I used to collect stones; today, in a certain sense, I collect photos. Let’s say that I’m a compulsive collector who is afraid of getting bored. The series called Bastard Chairs, devoted to original seats I came across all over China, was nothing but a collection: I photographed one, then two, then a hundred of them. But the detail has a profound symbolism, because sitting in the Middle Kingdom is not the same as in the rest of the world, it has a metaphorical significance. Here their chairs have just one purpose: functionality. I always say: it is designing, but without design. That’s not all. After taking pictures of them, I take them home and keep them all. I hoard objects because they are able to tell stories.

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Michael Wolf Street View Review

Photojournalism was yet-again re-defined earlier this year when Michael Wolf was awarded an honorable mention in the World Press Photo competition for photographs he took of his computer screen. Wolf spent literally hundreds of hours at his computer, trolling virtually around the world, looking for anything weird or bizarre that had been captured by the ravenous cameras mounted on the top of Google’s special GPS-coordinated Street View camera vans.

When he found an image that fit his project, Wolf mounted his own camera in front of his computer screen, cropped the part of the Google image that he wanted, and made his own picture of that picture.

The final body of work, which he titled, A Series of Unfortunate Events, is completely composed of selected personal calamities (in progress, or about to happen) caught

by random chance

by the automatic cameras of Google Street View roving vans from around the world — and the results are often quite astonishing and amusing.

It’s an obsessively clever idea, like high-tech dumpster diving, or sorting through junk at a flea market to find a hidden gem. But the “legitimate” world of photojournalists took offense at his award, and it therefore created quite a bit of controversy.

Can this really be considered “daily life” documentary photography when it was captured first by chance, and then again by someone glued to a computer in a darkened room, sifting through thousands and thousands of random images in search of only the quirky ones?

The idea of documenting everything on every street in the world may have found its genesis in the cool, stunt-like art project initiated by Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), a book of continuous photographs of a two and one half mile stretch of the 24 mile boulevard. And certainly the discovery of evidence via closed-circuit surveillance cameras is even more commonplace today than it was darkly envisioned by George Orwell in his novel 1984.

Wolf’s project (as several of his other projects) creates a whiff of

voyeuristic uneasiness

similar to what one experiences when viewing movies like Antonioni’s Blow-Up or Hitchcock’s Rear Window. And without doubt, the art world is filled with appropriation of the work of others, self-reference, and hall-of-mirrors introspection.

So, is it art, appropriation, visual sociology, journalism

?Wolf’s series does provoke thought and discussion, with repercussions well beyond the whimsical notice of unfortunate events. The world (and our own lack of privacy) is changing whether we like it or not, and who better than an intelligent former-photojournalist to point it out?