Hello Patrick good morning thanks for your suggestions and yes, we would be excited to host your essay in the new upcoming Digimag Journal: the abstract here is totally focused on the subject and it would be also the chance to finally publish a text of you...a wonderful pleasure for us
I would simply need to ask you to write us at [email protected], just because there are other people involved from the staff to be officially updated Looking forward Marco Mancuso DIGICULT Marco Mancuso | Founder & Director Curator, Critic and Lecturer Largo Murani 4, 20133 Milano *E* [email protected] *W* http://www.digicult.it *W* http://www.marcomancuso.net *T* +39.340.8371816 <http://www.digicult.it/digimag> 2017-04-18 13:07 GMT+02:00 Patrick Lichty <[email protected]>: > Is this papers or abstracts? > > > In February 2017, I began a project called The Horror of the Gaze, in > which I used the Chinses selfie program Meitu to “cutify” nearly 100 > artists, scholars and curators from around the world. These “Cute” versions > of my community began to circulate, and questions of privacy, control of > personal images, colonialism, and the politics of “whiteness” arose. In Our > Aesthetic Categories, Sianne Ngai discusses the mediation of the “Zany” and > “Cute” and “Interesting” as obfuscating affective issues of > hypercommodification, colonialization, and stereotyping. Each obscures > hidden agendas of objectification and hidden anger. As with the Japanese > artist Takeshi Murakami whose smiling “Mr DOB” is a post-nuclear > nationalistic reappropriation of Mickey Mouse, “cuteness” is often a scrim > for other, darker agendas. In the case of Meitu, it is a double signifier > for the Asian perception of paleness, and cuteness, which are distinctly > different from the Western perceptions of the aesthetics used in the app > (paleness, large, watering eyes, pronounced lips). It is important to > consider the conflation of racial and cultural tropes in play by the use of > these apps. How does one culture’s digital selfie filters map onto > others? Gayatri Spivak, in the Translation Studies Reader, states that > accuracy in translation requires affect for the subject, and do these modes > of production have these qualities? Grusin and Bolter in their seminal book > reMediation, describe the agendas that are imposed by passing through the > computer. And lastly, if McLuhan’s adage of the medium being the message is > true, what can we ascertain is being said by Meitu remediations of cultural > identity? > > > In this talk, I wish to deconstruct the affect of cuteness in the > augmentation of selfie apps for cell phones like Meitu (China) and Snapchat > (USA). Examples under consideration will include notable augmented > Snapchat selfies, and my project, Horror of the Gaze, which includes nearly > 100 New Media art celebrities, detournements of famous despots and > remediations of glamour models to test aesthetic amplification. Also, if > implemented, I will discuss the installation of “Make Karachi Cute Again”, > a Facebook-based installation in which I will ask members of the Karachi > community to submit their portraits for “cutification” by Chinese workers > using the Meitu app and placing it back online. What is most interesting > in all these cases is the remapping of affect through these transformation > and their amplification or draining of meaning. > > > > _______________________________________________ > NetBehaviour mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour >
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