Seeing Anew?
Photography closes the gap between perception and a representation of reality but widens it in terms of representation of truth.
On the use of mounted cameras:
Police Body Cameras: What Do You See?
We expect too much truth from cameras, when they are nothing more than multi-purpose light recorders, that most people use to make art. The "ordinariness" of the technology, is in stark contrast to its use forensically, and so can make it more unserious.
"Deceptive intensity" is something cameras are very good a producing: we see a representation of what the photographer saw, but might not have been the reality at the time of the capture; there were other things at the scene and on the periphery. Even if there was a camera everywhere, their lenses are not like the human eye (and in some cases better than the human eye).
It must be very difficult to stage these kinds of events, as the decisive moment is missing. Cameras "prioritize" the act of seeing and perspective (camera perspective bias). Moreover, one's memory of what was really there is fragmented like a dream and evaporates from the subconscious. But everyday snapshot photography is not (necessarily) forensic until it is used as evidence, such as some background element trawled (metaphor: camera as a net) at the time that becomes the subject, such as a person that was thought to be missing is seen on a street.
The final takeaway from body cameras, or other mounted cameras (sousveillance as opposed to surveillance), is ultimately McLuhanesque: The medium is making this all possible, and in this case making the world scarier, and is not like pre-internet era when it didn't affect the world at large by being replicated millions of times and remixed or reimagined. Cameras make these kinds of events more possible, as a weird kind of pursuit for celebrity through a slippage between art and reality, something baked in the cake of western culture.
Then there's the aspect of individual perceptive bias, sometimes from the POV of one's beliefs: There is a conforming effect that takes place in the brain's visual processing area, where there can be different pictures of reality (which is interesting in that it sort of works like photography whereby subjects are selected, framed and exhibited, to targeted (metaphor: hunting-snapshot) audiences that may resonate with those world views
The use of ubiquitous cameras as a deterrent, which in many analyses of camera footage, isn't effective given the amount of ambiguity that is still there. And if we take it from the McLuhan-Medium standpoint, the messages produced are one of blurry uncertainty. The various deterrents we've had since the 1980s ("MAD", "wars on terror", drone warfare, the "1% solution", the "arms race", surveillance cameras), ultimately are not that effective, as we are not learning anything new about cognition.
On the use of mounted cameras:
Police Body Cameras: What Do You See?
We expect too much truth from cameras, when they are nothing more than multi-purpose light recorders, that most people use to make art. The "ordinariness" of the technology, is in stark contrast to its use forensically, and so can make it more unserious.
"Deceptive intensity" is something cameras are very good a producing: we see a representation of what the photographer saw, but might not have been the reality at the time of the capture; there were other things at the scene and on the periphery. Even if there was a camera everywhere, their lenses are not like the human eye (and in some cases better than the human eye).
It must be very difficult to stage these kinds of events, as the decisive moment is missing. Cameras "prioritize" the act of seeing and perspective (camera perspective bias). Moreover, one's memory of what was really there is fragmented like a dream and evaporates from the subconscious. But everyday snapshot photography is not (necessarily) forensic until it is used as evidence, such as some background element trawled (metaphor: camera as a net) at the time that becomes the subject, such as a person that was thought to be missing is seen on a street.
The final takeaway from body cameras, or other mounted cameras (sousveillance as opposed to surveillance), is ultimately McLuhanesque: The medium is making this all possible, and in this case making the world scarier, and is not like pre-internet era when it didn't affect the world at large by being replicated millions of times and remixed or reimagined. Cameras make these kinds of events more possible, as a weird kind of pursuit for celebrity through a slippage between art and reality, something baked in the cake of western culture.
Then there's the aspect of individual perceptive bias, sometimes from the POV of one's beliefs: There is a conforming effect that takes place in the brain's visual processing area, where there can be different pictures of reality (which is interesting in that it sort of works like photography whereby subjects are selected, framed and exhibited, to targeted (metaphor: hunting-snapshot) audiences that may resonate with those world views
The use of ubiquitous cameras as a deterrent, which in many analyses of camera footage, isn't effective given the amount of ambiguity that is still there. And if we take it from the McLuhan-Medium standpoint, the messages produced are one of blurry uncertainty. The various deterrents we've had since the 1980s ("MAD", "wars on terror", drone warfare, the "1% solution", the "arms race", surveillance cameras), ultimately are not that effective, as we are not learning anything new about cognition.
