Module 4 Lecture Content: first-half catch-up + additions

This week I will not be introducing any new concepts or ideas, and will instead go a little more in depth on a few areas we’ve already covered in the first half of the course. All of the sections below could fit into the lecture content from that past 4 weeks. Most of it is posted here (and not in these previous modules) because something about the topic or content has become more relevant in that past few weeks, and/or it is an artist / artwork that I just discovered or thought to include.

Time + Photography: Colorization Apps / AI

Below are several short articles - and one very interesting Twitter thread - about apps that add color to photos that only physically exist in black and white formats. Since color film is a newer technology, older photographs and film were in black and white. Because of this, it can be very difficult to imagine a certain segment of history in color.

For example - if you close your eyes and try to imagine scenes from the US Civil War or the Civil Rights movement - they will most likely be in black and white. Now try to imagine scenes from Italy during the Renaissance, Ancient Rome, or the Jurassic period. Most likely those images are constructed in color, (and are also probably less photographic), since photographic technology did not exist in those time period, and, therefore, we do not have a visual aesthetic - informed by an extensive black and white archive - to assign to them.

Most colorization apps state that their main goal is to help inform a more “accurate” visual construction of the timeframe when photographs and films were limited to black and white. Some historians, media scholars, artists and photographers, however, argue that this process is problematic in that the “colorized” photos are also often times not accurate. They are concerned that, while people know that the world was not “black and white”, and therefore know these constructions are not “real”, they might begin to think that the colorized photos are, in fact, real-life. These issues might not seem like the most pressing things to be concerned about right now, but I do think they are interesting to consider. As we build more apps to make old photographs and films “look new” and new photographs and films “look old”, what is this going to do to our perceptions of time and history?

Articles - read and review media in all

Time, Location + Digital Photography - Photo Metadata

After folks started submitting images for the first Studio Project, Rolando (one of the TAs for the course) noticed that Canvas does not remove photo Metadata. Metadata is information attached to digital photos as non-visual data, and can be very detailed. If taken with a smartphone, it can include time, location, camera settings, original thumbnails (pre-editing), subject identities, and more. This is something that we think is important to be aware of - most social apps remove or “scrub” this data before posting, however, it still sometimes exists in other places (or is retained by the app company).

Below are a few articles that discuss what type of info can be gleaned from accessing metadata, and some different privacy issues to consider. There is also information about how to remove this data before sharing - or submitting - photos. Finally, I just want to be sure to assure folks that any images submitted for this course are private, since none of them are posted anywhere outside of Canvas.

Articles below

https://usa.kaspersky.com/blog/exif-privacy/7957/

https://digitalprivacy.news/2020/10/23/photo-apps-convenient-but-rife-with-privacy-security-risks/

https://citizenevidence.org/2020/04/20/sending-encrypted-photos-while-preserving-metadata/

Time, Landscape + Image - photos by Sol Exposure

I just came across these photos on social media, and thought that they demonstrated some interesting aspects of time and environmental / landscape photography. Just wanted to share, as I would have probably included a few in the first lecture.