Bent Fausing Self-Reflection

1. Bent FausingSelf-Reflection To Bend Back, to Mirror, and to Think in the Digital, Visual Media. Lecture at the seminar Reflecting Ourselves Through Digital Media, Digi-Comm, INSS, UCPH, 3.11.2016.

3. Self-Reflection • Perception and reflection. • Presence, intimacy and materiality. • In the perception, there is a pre-reflection (M. Merleau-Ponty). • The klick. • Extension.

4. See Ourselves, Reflect Ourselves • See ourselves – something uniquely human. • Reflection means: bend back, mirror, consider and think, • Evaluate ourselves. • Reflections are everywhere: between mother and baby, parents and infants…(D. W. Winnicott). • Traces of internal, mental extensions. • Reflect ourselves in the mirror. • We literally become unique.

5. Theodor W. Adorno getting ready for self- image, his selfie, with mirror and timer.

6. Mirror Consciousness • We have a look at ourselves from outside, at yet it is inside of ourselves – from ourselves. • A self-doubling: We look at ourselves with our own, not other’s eyes. • Self-awareness and identity. • Reflect each other. • Vagabonds and homeless do not see themselves.

7. Mirror Consciousness • "In Auschwitz a young prisoner sees two women who look at themselves in a puddle. There are no mirrors in the camp, to prevent suicide [!]. They turn their backs on him; they have scarfs on their heads, and their clothes hanging in tatters. He looks carefully at the muddy water and recognizes some features. It is his cousins, who bring him news from the family ". (Primo Levi). • In a place where all humanity seemed ended, the mirror image gave the essential humanity, the face, back. • Mirror’s democratization was also self-democratization. • The Self-Media:

8. The development of the self-media

9. My Self, My Selfie. The Selfie at the Elephant’s Foot The selfie at the Elephant’sFoot. Reactor 4, Cher- byl 1986.

10. The Selfie at the Elephant’s Foot • The Chernobyl Disaster. • Something undeniably uncanny about the scene. • The blurred surface, the fire stripes,the strange dark and yet illuminated huge foot, the indication of slow motions… • An extreme selfie. • Disaster Selfie. • Dare Devil Selfie. • Homeless Selfie. • Sell tape Selfie.

11. The Extreme Selfie. Disaster Selfie Disaster Selfie: after the plane crash

12. Disaster Selfie

13. Dare Devil Selfie

14. Homeless Selfie

15. Sell Tape Selfie

16. I am still a subject and self-reflect myself • I am still a subject despite the disaster. • Even after a disaster, you are still a Self, a subject and a survivor, not fragmented or dissolved (like the homeless in the background). • The sell tape selfie play with the fragmented self: how long can I still be ‘me’, ‘myself’ with the deformations fro the sell tape (cf. Francis Bacon, Renée Zellweger change in appearance…). • I am…still…me.

17. Imagine Finding Me • The globalized world seem to give rise to a vital desire for a personal self, a selfie. • Photo as a loss (Roland Barthes Camera Lucida 1980) connoted to death; photo as a gain, connoted to life (Paul Auster The Invention of Solitude 1982). • Chinos Otsuka’s in-between images. • In-between in the sense that she superimpose herself as an adult to old photos of herself as a young child. • She brings new life to the old photos. • Imagine Finding Me, she calls her work (2009-2014).

18. Imagine Finding Me

19. Imagine Finding Me

20. Imagine Finding Me

21. Imagine Finding Me

22. Imagine Finding Me

23. Imagine Finding Me • Moments gone and moments lived now blend and reflect each other. • Digitally collaged photos. • Guardian angel or chaperone. • Reflecting herself in a then and a now. • A new selfie-form, which merge the present with previous. • Video work: Memoriography I and II, 2009-2012. • In the videos time itself forms a part of the work, as the image of the younger Otsuka gradually fade to give way to her older self (an turned around ‘serial selfie’, see Jill Rettberg’s chapter on this subject in Seeing Ourselves Through Technology 2014:33ff). • “I’m creating a new image, a new memory” (Otsuko)…a new self-reflection.

24. Digital Presence. Skype • A recapitulation: Human experience relies on everything that surrounds us. Not the physical reality, but our perception of it. This perception - of presence, intimacy and materiality - is being transformed by telematics: Separate spaces are allowed to interweave, and the borders between our virtual and physical bodies and phenomenon are constantly disrupted by technology. The old screen dichotomy in a here and a there has found third screen. • Skype, Sky Eye, Sky Net, Sky News, iCloud, the Cloud… • Skype becomes a requirement that no one should do without, like a desk, a plate, a sink – or other everyday item with one syllable name.

25. Sky Net, iCloud…alot fibres and servers Important brands, terms and meta- phorsconnected to digital media are related to the sky and its everywhere, like in Skype, Sky News…Even though we have a secularized society and have had it for many years, our concepts and images are still deeply influenced by religious conceptions - also in the digital age.

26. Telepresence. Skype • A third screen is created via this reflecting of ourselves and observing the other at the same time through the screens. • Skype is only shared among few people. • Still it is to seen among the visual technologies that also produced the selfie form: creating the self, the subject, the self-reflection. • And you can take a photo of yourself on the screen, a selfie.

27. A Perspective. Sore Society • ‘Sore Society’ (Bent Fausing) • Orlan and Nancy Burson, the two first to use digital technology to show a displacement from representation towards presentation of chock and the trauma. • The pixelation of the image, is a pixelation of the mind and the body. • Points towards some tendensies in the selfies – the dark selfie, the disaster selfie, the sello sefie –where the trauma or chok seems to be assimilated og ‘grapped’ (Theresa Senft). • I am still a subject, I can still make self-reflections, the performance of the trauma in the selfie is my proof of my subjectivity.

28. Perspective. Sore Society Orlan at the seventh performance surgery, 1993. The photo Wouldbe part of the next performance.

29. Perspective. Sore Society Nancy Burson Beauty Composite 1984 (Jane Fonda, Jacqueline Bisset, Diane Keaton, Brooke Shields, Meryl Streep). Nancy Burson, digital image, 1989.

30. A Perspective. Sore Society • Accept me. • See what I have to prove to be me…here…in Aleppo…in… • The pre-reflective mind and the pre-reflective body may through the images become reflective minds and bodies. • A selfie is a sign that like all other self-portraits are uploaded in the hope that it will be understood, accepted and embraced.

31. Digital portrait, the person does not exits. The portrait is made from the procentage of ethnic people in USA, ‘The New Face of America’. Many feel in love or had many emo- tions invested in the digital Portrait. Time 1993. Composite made by Nancy Burson.