support@essaywritingexpert.orgThis is the assignment brief:
A2: Written Assignment (with Images)
For your written assignment, you are asked to take, make or select 3 still images (no moving images, please) that engage with one of the themes explored during the module. You are asked to write a critical reflection on the images of up to 2,000 words. References and bibliography are included in this wordcount.
This should explain your rationale for taking/making or selecting the images, and how you see the images addressing or responding to the theme from the module. It may be that the images challenge or ‘problematize’ the theme they address, rather than simply ‘illustrate’ it.
Your critical commentary should also ideally point to the relation between the images.
Below are some of themes that we covered in class as mentioned in the assignment brief
Week 1: Introduction: Image culture, medium and media
Week 1: Introduction: Image culture, medium and media
This week will introduce the key concerns and requirements of the module, starting with some reflections on the pervasiveness of images in contemporary culture and the definition of and difference between the terms ‘medium’ and ‘media’.
Week 2: Visuality in the Age of Image (Re)production
Week 2: Visuality in the Age of Image (Re)production
This week we focus on the concepts of technological production and reproduction. What are technologies of image production and reproduction? Can you think of examples, both current and past? When have such technologies of image production and reproduction emerged and how have they changed throughout history? What kind of cultural changes might take place once it is possible to reproduce images technologically?
Bring an image (or two) that addresses or engages with the notion of technologies of image production and/or reproduction. What have you chosen, why?
or you can bring an image that addresses the concept of ‘aura’. What does this term make you think of?
Week 3: Visit to the V&A Photography Centre
Week 3: Visit to the V&A Photography Centre
This week we meet directly in front of the main entrance of the V&A Museum, in South Kensington, to visit their new Photography Centre.
Their galleries cover ‘photography’ from its emergence in the early 19th C to the present (so, yes, digital images and videos, including synthetic media and algorythm-produced images). This will be an excellent opportunity to look at and discover a range of materials that you can use as inspiration for your audiovisual artefact (A1) and photoessay (A2).
Week 4: Machine Vision 1: The Camera Eye
Week 4: Machine Vision 1: The Camera Eye
This week focuses on the way in which visual media technologies (such as photography and video) can be seen as tools to improve on, or even replace, human vision. In what ways is the ‘camera’ an ‘eye’? And what might it mean to see through a machine?
For the session, bring an image that responds to this idea of ‘camera eye’ or ‘machine eye’.
Week 5: Machine Vision 2: The View from Above
Week 5: Machine Vision 2: The View from Above
This week, we continue to explore the concept of ‘machine vision’ and ‘camera eye’ we started to look at last week, but we expand the scope to look at the emergence and diffusion of visual technologies (such as satellites and drones) that enabled ‘views from above’.
Bring an image that engages with the idea of the ‘view from above’.
Week 6: Machine Vision 3: Synthetic-Media Images and ‘Deepfakes’
Week 6: Machine Vision 3: Synthetic-Media Images and ‘Deepfakes’
This week will introduce the relatively recent phenomenon of so-called ‘deepfakes’, part of the wider and rapidly growing category of ‘synthetic’ or AI [artificial-intelligence] aided or generated media. We will consider how deepfakes and synthetic images are newer articulations of ‘machine vision’.
We will reflect on the very definition of ‘deepfakes’, and consider their socio-cultural and technological origins and some of their actual, imagined and feared uses.
Bring an image that engages with the concept of ‘synthetic media’ and/or ‘deepfake’.
Week 7: Social Photography and the Self(ie)
Week 7: Social Photography and the Self(ie)
This week we consider the emergence and concept of ‘social photography’. What is ‘social photography’? What kinds of media technologies does it rely on? How does it differ from ‘photography’? We also consider how the self — and, indeed, the phenomenon of the selfie — relates to the emergence of ‘social photography’ in the 21st century?
Bring an image that addresses the concept of ‘social photography’. If you decide to bring a ‘selfie’ — can you think of an example that is unusual and might help to think about the category in a different way?
Week 8: Extractions: Images and/as Data
Week 8: Extractions: Images and/as Data
This week offers an introduction to the concept of ‘big data’.
We do this through a consideration of the concept of ‘extraction’ and by thinking about digital images and the fact that they not only contain and put in circulation visual – and visible – information and data, but also non-visual data.
What does ‘extraction’ make you think of in relation to digital images? Bring an image.
Week 9: (Im)materialities 1 — from Celluloid to Clouds
Week 9: (Im)materialities 1 — from Celluloid to Clouds
This week we begin to wrap up and look back at the module as a whole by thinking about the matter/materiality of media — as we did in the first session.
In particular, we think about the perceived or flaunted ‘immateriality’ of digital media, and compare it with the materiality of pre-digital media, such as painting, and film-based photography and cinema. Digital media and its infrastructure are often talked about in terms of virtuality, immediacy and, indeed, immateriality. Think of ‘the Cloud’. What problems or biases might the perceived immateriality of digital media present us with?
Can you bring an image that addresses the notion of the (im)materiality of digital media?