The Camera and The Perspective, as Tool and Metaphor
Paper by Nadine Wanono presented within the context of the workshop-seminar Interactivos?'08: Juegos de la visión, celebrated in Medialab-Prado from May 30 through June 14, 2008.
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- Interactivos?'08: Vision Play: Call for Papers (Closed)
- Workshop Interactivos?08: Vision Play
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- Illusion and Illusionism: How to Fool the Brain with Magic and Other Tricks
- Interactivos? @ Eyebeam (NYC): Better Than the Real Thing
Abstract:
It’s probably on the rocky path of the Dogon country that I started to realize how poorly my camera was the appropriate tool to express the creative vitatility of people’s culture with whom I shared daily life during a long period of time.
Trained as visual anthropologist, I spend several years back and forth between France and Mali to conceive visual testimony of the women daily life in the Dogon country.
Workshops held by Marcos Novak at the Media Art and Technology Lab at UCSB gave me the insight to conceive new form of representation of my anthropological data with computer
design shapes.
During my 20 mn presentation, I would like to explain how the camera is based on a preconception of space structure by imposing for example the horizon as a cultural vision of life. I refer to the work of B. Latour, Iconaclast-Iconoclash, and Irwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form. This underlying value of space constructed around a religious approach- Heaven and Hell is not shared by all the cultures. It’s an obvious European centrism point view, shaped since the Renaissance and the Camera obscura. My research is also based on the notion proposed by Gilbert Simondon in Du monde d’existence des objets techniques.
On second hand I could explain more precisely how space is perceived in the Dogon country and show examples of a first algorithm I conceived with Andrea Sclegel based on a film presenting the birth ritual in Dogon country. I can present also a first experiment conceived with Ayoub Sarouphim on the notion of translation.