This is the world now, logged on, plugged in, all the time.
—John Conner (from the movie, Terminator Genisys)
Less than 17 Minutes…This image includes all of the satellites captured by my camera during less than 17 minutes of shooting.
I originally planned to include all of the satellites from a 3-hour timelapse, but after painstakingly masking satellites into images for about 6 hours, I had gotten through less than 17 minutes’ worth of images.
Each image in the timelapse series was 2.5 seconds, iso 5000, f/1.4, and I was shooting with a 3 second interval. I processed 326 frames from the series, totaling 878 seconds or 16.3 minutes.
This image is supposed to be a bit shocking, if not downright terrifying. The impact of our species goes far beyond the surface of our planet or its inner atmosphere. We have filled the space surrounding our planet with an army of machines. While these machines generally serve to provide services believed to improve life on our planet, they are also constantly monitoring us. In addition, we are becoming increasingly dependent on them to maintain the world we know.
There are clear risks associated with our dependence on technology, but beyond that, we are losing our connection with our planet, our home, Earth. For most of us, we are somehow connected to the internet almost all the time. We use GPS and other satellite networks repeatedly throughout each day. At times it seems that our cell phones and other devices are part of our physical beings, an extra appendage if you will.
I wanted this image to bring on a feeling of dystopia, with the old building representing a time before now, and the vast network of satellites representing our future as dependents on technology. But I also wanted to include a glimmer of hope for a better future, symbolized by the small flowers growing in the foreground.
“The future has not been written. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves. I wish I could believe that.”
-John Conner (from the movie, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines)
The Filmomat is made out of laser-engraved acrylic glass. The process chemistry (500mL for each step) is stored in three acrylic tubes, which are surrounded by a waterbath. A powerful 650W heater brings the waterbath to the correct temperature. Throughout the whole developing process, the waterbath is kept at the desired temperature with 0.1° accuracy. Two digital temperature sensors inside the waterbath and the chemistry tanks ensure accurate temperature measurement.
Separated from the heated waterbath is an additional 7-liter containing compartment, which is used for rinsing steps. Just fill it with fresh water and the Filmomat will draw from it for rinsing and presoaking. No water connection is required for using the Filmomat! The water in this rinsing-reservoir is not heated - you have to fill it with pre-warmed water beforehand. Used water is drained through a waste-water-exit, which can be connected to a discharge or a collection tank by a hose. Used chemicals are always pumped back into their storage tubes. Once you are finished, you can drain them by the drain valves on the right of the machine.
The film is loaded into a processing tank, which can be connected to the Filmomat by a spill-free quick coupling.
“Every photograph is an act amid a complex structure of choices. These choices, which extend beyond the time of the photograph, influence the photograph before, during and after its instant. Reading photographs in context is a participation in this complex”
–Between The Eyes. Essays on Photography and Politics. David Levi Strauss
“Brief summary of how it works: When the player takes a photo I duplicate the environment, make it greyscale and slice the meshes to remove anything outside the photo. When they place it into the world I slice the environment’s meshes to make a hole for the photo.“
ART + SCIENCE features photographs by artists who address a genre of photography that lives at the intersection of art and science. This movement is not new, yet its reach is currently building momentum. More than producing aesthetic images derived from scientific data, science-inspired artists find connections that reflect a common purpose – one that integrates the authenticity of science and the communicative power of art. The sci-art movement promotes dialogue and offers a platform in hopes of improving the world in which we live.
“I used to believe that storytelling was the most powerful tool for expression and was therefore frustrated with photography’s limited narrative capacity. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gradually become less enamored with storytelling. These days, I’m not even sure I care that much about expression. Mostly I’m interested in simply paying attention.”
Hang’s photographs carried the tags of nude, youth, sexuality, social norms, gay?, even in China!, and seemed enough for a story. That’s what I went with; the significance of Ren Hang would not become clear to me until a few years later. This interview was originally conducted in Mandarin. It has been translated and edited for length and clarity. Interview by Erik Bernhardsson. Translation by Dier Zhang.
Hong Kong’s socially conscious photography isn’t considered “as charming” as Chinese photography in the market. Yet, that is also the reason why Hong Kong photography is so uniquely crucial to the Chinese-speaking community.Hong Kongers are not unfamiliar with the name Liu Xiaobo. The Chinese human rights activist who called for political reforms of the communist party was detained after his participation in Charter 08 in 2008, and was later sentenced to 11 years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power”. China is notorious for imprisoning activists and anyone whose speech are considered a threat to the communist single-party rule. Liu’s misfortune is certainly not a rare event in China, in fact he is one along the line of political prisoners, from human right lawyers investigating the school collapse during the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 to more recently Lee Bo, the staff of Causeway Bay Bookstore in Hong Kong selling party-banned political books, who reportedly was arrested in Hong Kong by Chinese authority to help with an “ongoing investigation”.
“The caption is made to constrain the photograph into a single state rather than open it up to amplification. If a photograph is said to be a worth a thousand words, very few of those words generally come to mind after a caption tells the reader what the photo is supposed to be about.”
As humanity continues to excel in going beyond human abilities through technology, the victory comes with a price: American photographer Roland Miller travels to abandoned places once found useful by the space exploration organization NASA and the U.S. Army and collects their remnants as memories.
Facebook’s Mission Statement states that your objective is to “make the world more open and connected”. In reality you are doing this in a totally superficial sense.
If you will not distinguish between child pornography and documentary photographs from a war, this will simply promote stupidity and fail to bring human beings closer to each other.
To pretend that it is possible to create common, global rules for what may and what may not be published, only throws dust into peoples’ eyes.
Building and maintaining a n-to-n communications platform for over a billion *daily* active users across multiple access platforms *is* difficult and *is* hard and you’ve done it and congratulations, that was lots of work and effort. You - and your Valley compatriots - talk excitedly and breathlessly about solving Hard Problems and Disrupting Things, but in other areas - other areas that are *also* legitimate hard problems like content moderation and community moderation and abuse (which isn’t even a new thing!) - do not appear to interest you. They appear to interest you to such a little degree that it looks like you’ve given up *compared to* the effort that’s put into other hard problems.
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t use rhetoric to say that your people - not just engineers - are the best and the brightest working to solve humanity’s problems without also including the asterisk that says “Actually, *not all hard problems*. Not all difficult problems. Just some. Just the engineering ones, for example."
What you’re doing right now - with your inflexible process that’s designed to be efficient and work at scale without critically being able to deal *at scale* with nuance and context (which, I’d say, is your difficult problem and a challenge you should *relish* - how do you deal with nuance at scale in a positive manner?!) smacks of algorithmic and system-reductionism.
It is tempting to make every fiasco at Facebook about the power (and the abuse of power) of the algorithm. The "napalm girl” controversy does not neatly fit that storyline. A little-known team of humans at Facebook decided to remove the iconic photo from the site this week.
That move revealed, in a klutzy way, just how much the company is struggling internally to exercise the most basic editorial judgment, despite claims by senior leadership that the system is working.
As in the case of Ut’s picture, the decision over whether or not to publicly share photographs like the two East Liverpool ones ought to be in the hands of highly trained photo editors, people who not only have the knowledge to understand the “news value” of the photographs, but who have also wrestled with the different underlying ethical problems.
However much any editor’s decisions might be flawed at times, at the very least we can be certain that they have thought about the underlying problems, that, in other words, we’re looking at the end result of an educated process (regardless of whether or not we end up agreeing with it or not). The world of Facebook does away with this.
“The spatial implications of chronophotography—which visually shatters the passage of time into a series of discrete moments extracted from an event-sequence of otherwise unfixed length and duration—leads to a reference, in a text on Chard’s website, to the fact that criminologists, physicists, and even paranormal investigators all also began to use “the emerging potential of photography to further their research.” In the process, those researchers “developed new sorts of architecture particular to the demands and opportunities of the medium and the way they were using [them]. There are many research institutions that display the emergence of a new architecture with very little typological precedent.””
“investigations, experiments, theories of colour and light, abstract displays of light-images — as yet far too fragmentary and isolated — point towards the future, though they cannot as yet provide a precise picture of anything like the future’s scope.”
unless you grow your own or are friends with a farmer with a sense of humor, you never see a potato or a carrot like these beauts. that’s unfortunate. in our modern mediated globelife we decry fakery in all it’s forms. no matter the field – consuming, political or social – we demand a semblance of honesty. and yet we also require the best, from everything and from everyone. no matter the nature of things, we believe it’s natural that some things won’t make the cut. at some point fairness, candor, probity, bluntness, and integrity take a back seat to whatever we deem fine, fitting and just. easier on the eyes and all that. there are times though when it’s just plain considerate to pull back the veil to see a bit of what goes on when we aren’t looking.
Andreas Feininger. Slinky-like light pattern in the blackness of a moonlit sky produced by a time-exposure of the light-tipped rotor blades of a grounded helicopter as it takes off, 1949.
Left to right: Virginia on a 1990 cover of Aperture. A response to the image on The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page. Virginia’s letter to The Wall Street Journal.
Light micrograph of a tiny parasitoid wasp (Wallaceaphytis kikiae) viewed from above. Parasitoid wasps lay their eggs inside other insects. After hatching, the larvae feed on their host, eating it alive from the inside out. This is a new genus of parasitoid wasp recently discovered in the rainforests of Borneo, where a single female wasp was found mixed in with thousands of other insects. It measures only 0.75 mm in length and has unusual antennae, legs and wings. It’s named after Alfred Russel Wallace, who coauthored the first ever publication on evolution by natural selection with Charles Darwin and who himself identified new insects while in Borneo in the mid-19th century. Even today, Borneo is still known to be rich with other undiscovered species. — Andrew Polaszek, Natural History Museum
