Kris Belden-Adams

In the 1840s, nude stereographic daguerreotype pornography (newly illegal to make or sell) simulated the natural world with impeccable detail to reproduce the visual stimuli of texture and tactility. Such images enabled viewers to be physically engaged with a representation of a woman, as their act of looking simulates engrossed peeping through a keyhole – only without the risk of getting caught by the subject of their voyeuristic gaze. Despite eforts to create a convincing representation of reality using stereography and hand-painted color, they do not allow a viewer to feel truly transported to another actual reality, nor do they bring about the real-world consequences of such an act. Poses are awkward, high-art props are drained of their connotations, and the experience of viewing a stereograph appeals only to the sense of sight. Yet there is great safety in channeling sexual urges into an illusory, imaginative private realm. Tensions between the representation and the real, the actual and the ideal, subject and object, temporal and material, and between nature and artifice, are essential for a stereographic nude photograph to meet customers’ needs: a safe, private fantasy which will not destabilize marriages. This paper takes a closer look at the way two mid-19th-Century French stereoscopic daguerreotypes embody the necessary tensions between “the real” and “the represented” though their content and form.

Rod Bantjes

The idea that stereoscopy can be a mimetic invocation of the real, an immediate re-presentation of visual truth, is ideological. In this paper I am interested in the ways in which the myth of stereoscopic realism has been enlisted in ideological constructions of social and political “realities.” I use the 1914 Underwood & Underwood boxed set of 100 views of the United States as an exemplar of a new American paradigm of mass- produced, mass-marketed “world narratives.” The images conform to a standardized, anonymous aesthetic by which a particular vision claims universality and cold objectivity. The text on each card offers a tightly controlled ideological gloss on each depicted scene. The bound set, with its impressive tally of 100 views claims a completeness for a story that is remarkable for its suppressions and silences. Text and image offer a triumphal celebration of modernization – industrial homogenization, labour rationalization, large-scale industrial organization and monopoly ownership, and the systematic machine- exploitation of nature. Meaning is reduced to utility, represented in numbers and dollar figures: a bridge worth “$10,000,000,” a dis-assembly line of pig carcasses extending for “1⁄4 mile.” There is no hint of the abuses of monopoly power, oppressive labour conditions or the popular counter-movements of the time – Progressivism and the labour movement. The treatment of nature is remarkable for its contrast with European stereoscopy where nature is “pastoralized” and the industrialization of agriculture is framed out of view or where the machine intrudes, as it does in many tissue views, as a dark, menacing presence. The Underwoods celebrate machine domination, and when they depict wilderness, it is not with the humility of vision of contemporaries like John Muir or other members of the conservation movement, but always through the motif of the conquering gaze. Realism in the American genre of the boxed set is deployed, as realism often is, in a project of making reality according to a particular set of values and for the benefit of particular power interests in society.

Hugo Canossa

O videomapping tem-se constituído como uma nova corrente de projeção de conteúdos visuais. O presente estudo pretende fazer uma análise histórica da origem desta manifestação artística. A secção de patentes do Google indica a The Walt Disney Company como criadora de um apparatus e método que permite a projeção de conteúdos vídeo em objetos tridimensionais. Os primeiros registos datam da casa assombrada do parque de diversões Disneyland, onde foram projetados conteúdos vídeo em superfícies não lisas, até outras efetuadas nos anos 1980, onde é possível verificar diferentes aplicações desta forma de arte. Outro debate constante prende-se com a utilização do termo “spatial augmented reality” ou “videomapping” e a data de criação / surgimento desta linguagem. James Carter (2013) indica o nome de Ricardo Rivera como detentor, desde 2008, da patente do termo “projection mapping”. O estudo por nós apresentado demonstra como esta decisão se revela controversa, com a comunidade de artistas visuais a questionar como alguém se pode apresentar ‘detentor’ dos direitos de uma forma de arte com uma utilização recorrente desde há uns anos.

A utilização do vídeo como arte por parte de nomes como Nam June Paik desencadeou a fusão entre instalação, performance ao vivo e broadcast num intervalo cada vez mais largo de áreas de intervenção (Meigh-Andrews, 2014: 11). O videomapping é atualmente alavancado, como a maior parte das manifestações artísticas de mediação tecnológica, pelos avanços de capacidade e funcionalidades de hardware e software.