Commercial Studios Research Articles

A Piano for Visuals: Affordances of Scan Processing Instruments

Abstract The analog technology of scan processing was developed and used during the 1970s as a method of electronic image animation. Because their real time modes of operation strongly resemble those of electronic musical instruments, scan processors can be considered instruments with which to compose and play moving images. Although cheaper digital tools replaced them in commercial studios during the 1980s, scan processing has a distinctive aesthetic that continues to inspire both visual artists and instrument designers. This article examines the way that scan processing instruments’ affordances arise from specific combinations of the user, technology, and situation by surveying a number of technical and artistic use cases involving two different instruments: the VP-8 Image Analyzer and the Rutt/Etra Video Synthesizer. The article also demonstrates how reenacting an instrument works through its historical affordances using current technological means to address present-day contexts.

Theater without Borders: To Raise the Question of Blurring the Line between Professional and Amateur Creativity

Recently, the amateur theater movement, which seemed to have lost its significance three decades ago, is reviving and, moreover, transforming, now qualitatively different from the socio-cultural phenomenon that it was in the past. This paper examines the development of amateur creativity at the present stage. We will talk about private commercial theaters, amateur studios and laboratories, which over the past decade have not only gained wide popularity, but also, in the context of postmodern transformations, have become direct competitors to professional art, thereby blurring the boundaries between professional and amateur creativity. The functions of professional theaters, the tasks and problems that arise before them, have also affected the amateur art to the same extent. The author comes to the conclusion that the boundaries between professional and amateur theater are gradually blurring, which, in the near future, may lead to new global transformations in the field of theater culture.

Henry Adams in Tahiti

While touring Tahiti in 1891, the American historian Henry Adams compiled an album of large-scale photographic prints that he purchased from commercial studios in Papeete. Souvenir album making was a popular pursuit amongst nineteenth-century Euro-American travellers who used the opportunity to project, validate and narrate desired travel experiences. Unlike others, Adams’s album is seemingly random and banal and lacks any clear narrative. This article attempts to make sense of Adams’s album. It asks to what extent the photographs performed their common function and validated Adams’s experience and expectations of Tahiti. It questions what the album reflects of Adams’s background, tastes and position in the islands as an elite traveller. It considers what was available for Adams to purchase from Papeete’s commercial studios, businesses that traded at a key moment in Tahiti’s complex colonial history. This article suggests that the album is a site where Adams’s desires and despair in colonial Tahiti overlap and contradict. Ultimately, it is a sign of his disappointment in photography as a medium incapable of capturing his island experiences.

Reading an “Album” from Qajar Iran

In the late nineteenth century, westerners traveling and living in the Middle East frequently purchased photographs from commercial studios that they used as memory aids and visual corroboration of their travel tales. The Getty Research Institute recently acquired such a collection of mounted albumen photographs recording late nineteenth-century Iran, which were likely purchased by a European and bound together as an album, now dispersed. This article conducts a close reading and historical contextualization of the photographs to analyze the purchaser’s interests and reconstruct a potential partial narrative for the album. It also analyzes the commercial practice of one of Iran’s most prolific photographers, Antoin Sevruguin (ca. 1851–1933), and suggests a new framework for reading photographs attributed to his studio.

Land as Natural Resource: Representations of Mining in Contemporary South African Landscape Photography

Photographic explorations of mining have an extensive history within South Africa. Late nineteenth-century postcards produced by commercial studios celebrated views of industrial sites. In his 1973 social documentary project On the Mines, David Goldblatt challenged the positive narrative of mining in South Africa. Recently, contemporary photographers have explored the industry through landscape images that present multiple narratives, encourage diverse interpretations, and highlight the complexities of modern-day mining. These visual examinations emerge out of a widespread interest among young artists in exploring South African spaces and the uneven social relations that condition their production. This article discusses work from three South African photographers – Ilan Godfrey, Thabiso Sekgala, and Jerry Gaegane – who created projects in the past seven years about mining and its social and environmental impacts. It argues that their work shows how contemporary South African photographers are using landscape images to look at environments in a Lefebvrian manner: not as fixed places defined by their components, but as fluid social spaces that emerge from an ongoing set of interactions between social forces. In doing so, these three artists show how landscape photography can be an effective means of exploring structural inequities in the post-apartheid era.

Collectivity in (Stop-)Motion: Lift Animation, Lantern Software, and the Making of Community

This article positions the work of the feminist animation studio Lift Animation as a corrective to the industrialized processes and gendered hierarchies of traditional commercial animation studios. It examines Lift's unique place in the world of contemporary animation as a studio concerned especially with questions of alterity, subjecthood, and community formation in its work. A self-described “socially conscious animation studio,” Lift is structured roughly along the lines of an artistic collective in which many animators freely contribute their skills and time in support of stop-motion animated films that explicitly consider questions of disability, gender, and political action. This article considers in particular the short films The Toll Collector (US, 2003), made by Lift founder Rachel Johnson, and Henrietta Bulkowski, currently in production at Lift. It argues that both films seek to establish empathy with characters ostracized from the boundaries of community by their physical disabilities and draws a connection between these efforts and the studio's recent animated public service announcement for Lantern Software, a program designed to circumvent government Internet censorship efforts around the world through the formation of peer-sharing networks. Each of these animated works speaks in turn to the power of community and collective action grounded in a willed identification with the distant other.

Photographic Propaganda under Peronism, 1946–55: Selections from the Archivo General de la Nación Argentina

This article analyses a representative selection of photographs from the Archivo General de la Nación Argentina produced by an army of photographers who assiduously chronicled Eva and Juan Domingo Perón’s public engagements. These images were shrewdly informed by an array of popular forms (tango lyrics, the storylines of photo–romances, movies, and radio serials), and by a set of visual models borrowed from the nineteenth-century photography tradition, commercial photography studios of celebrities, Hollywood fashion codes, Soviet-related paradigms anchored in the legacy of the socialist and anarchist movements of early twentieth-century Argentina, and from royal and religious iconography. Through their careful staging before the camera, Perón and Eva amalgamated these visual traditions with their political content in order to reach and unify the multiple socio-political constituencies of Argentina at the time. The conventional aesthetic – in terms of view angles, lighting, and composition – of such images granted their movement a patina of legitimacy and the sense of an enduring legacy.

OregonScape

FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS the Columbia River has supplied people with fish, especially salmon. Fishing has taken many forms, including Native Americans fishing from platforms at Celilo Falls and Willamette Falls and fish wheels operating twenty-four hours a day. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Astoria’s canneries were supplied by fishermen using seine nets pulled through the water of the Columbia River by horse teams. The Oregon Historical Society (OHS) library collections have many photographs of this horse-drawn fishing method. The OHS film archive includes 1920s newsreel footage of the horses in action and of the salmon being gaffed from the nets into small boats for transport. During the fishing season, these fishermen and their horses often lived in a small village, much like the one in this photo, on Sand Island, pictured in the background of this photograph. The island has been involved in controversy since the first maps were made of the mouth of the Columbia River. Formed by silt washing down the river until it meets the sands being pushed by the tides of the Pacific Ocean, the island’s location, size, and shape have often changed. In the 1930s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers attempted to correct the hazards created by the island’s shifting into the navigation channels across the Columbia River bar by building several dikes, or wing dams, on the ocean side of the island. This succeeded in stabilizing it in its current location, but the horse-seining areas were no more, and scenes like this one passed into history. — Mikki Tint, former special collections librarian, OHS Research Library Learn more about the photograph at www.ohs.org/research/quarterly/oregonscape.cfm. HORSES AID SALMON FISHING efforts in the Columbia River. The Photo-Art Commercial Studios photograph was taken in about 1930. OREGONSCAPE OHS digital no. bb008054 ...

Designers in the Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fancy Textile Industry: Education, Employment and Exhibition

According to report in the 1930s, the textile industry was a bigger consumer of design input than any other manufacturing sector, with the largest number of designs originating in studios attached to individual works (42%), followed by a similar percentage from overseas commercial studios, and only a relatively small proportion generated by either English commercial studios (13%) or freelance designers (3%). Pevsner, at much the same time, identified variations in practice according to the type of textile produced, with designs for woven fabrics mostly generated in-house and designs for prints, which was the bigger area of production, more likely to be purchased from elsewhere. 1 Certain developments distinct to the early twentieth century differentiated the experience of textile design in the 1930s from what had prevailed in the century before, in particular the growing importance of named designers in textile marketing, which gave better career prospects to in-house employees. 2 But these contemporary observations on inter-war design offer useful insights that help us to understand the complexities of the earlier industry. Examining the character of design employment, education and exhibition in Glasgow and Dunfermline, which were major centres of printed cotton and woven linen production, provides an insight into a complex provincial engagement with the processes of textile design at the height of the industry’s commercial success, and adds a Scottish perspective to a subject that has hitherto been examined mainly with reference to Manchester. 3 Almost no direct information survives in business records for the names of the designers who worked in the Scottish printed cotton industry. Where information does exist

Royals, Royalties and Remuneration: American and British women photographers in the Victorian era

During the Victorian era, American and British women from divergent social backgrounds and circumstances took up photography. For English noblewomen photography became a popular leisure pursuit promoted by the Court. Lacking a counterpart to royal patronage, American women ran commercial studios independently or in partnerships with family members. By the 1880s, with easier to use processes and equipment, women on both sides of the Atlantic entered the field as amateur art photographers participating in photographic societies and exhibitions. Contrasting the experiences and strategies of these transatlantic pioneers, this article demonstrates the accomplishments they attained in the public sphere.

Proposal of a System Architecture for Digital Film Archives Using JPEG 2000 and MXF

Moving image film archives can store their original films in their original image and sound quality for hundreds of years without decay, provided the temperature and humidity is controlled. However, film is inconvenient as a universal access medium and expected to be replaced even in the cinema, whereas digital versions are widely and increasingly accepted. This article introduces the concept of a digital film archive system that uses JPEG 2000 together with the Material eXchange Format (MXF). A highly scalable two-tier architecture provides a platform for long-term preservation of digital movie data in the highest possible quality and for automated access and dissemination of the stored material. All these technologies are based on open standards and therefore provide a strong foundation for this concept in which future accessibility is one of the main concerns. The different and highly customizable parameters of the two encoding and storage tiers make it possible to store the digital film images together with audio and metadata in their full original quality and to simultaneously allow for easy and automated access. The stored content can be automatically converted to all currently used professional and consumer formats for dissemination, such as digital cinema playback systems (DCPS), other projectable cinema packages, Blu-ray disks, internet streaming, etc. The concept addresses non-commercial archives, as well as commercial organizations and studios.

Finding your way in computer graphics

The SIGGRAPH conference is a truly educational experience, and so it is again this week in Boston.Though my first time here, I love Boston. I love my hotel room overlooking the harbor, I love the water taxi that took me from Logan International Airport to the Boston World Trade Center and I love the family of educators, researchers, artists and vendors that collect for this yearly event celebrating the digital collaboration between art and science. Reflecting more closely, computer graphics is dependant on this collaboration as are the players that see computer graphics as both a part of their lives as well as a part of their identities.The longer one is involved in this community, the more clearly it is apparent how interdependent the different tribes are. Commercial studios need the technology as well as the talent to produce the quality and competitive products their customers expect. Vendors providing the solutions are dependent on the end users that both implement and promote the technology, just as schools need a reason to provide both the research and education that will support their for-profit brothers and sisters.More than ever, education has become the resource from which the other groups can draw. I refer to education in the institutional sense, which provides an organized forum for students, teachers and researchers to contribute to the whole in support of the computer graphics industry. The feature articles for this issue submitted by authors affiliated with three Pittsburgh educational centers would reflect just that, each one of them finding their own way in the field of computer graphics.University of Pittsburgh intern Matt Duncan with the help of Matthew Kelley and Jeffrey Jacobson has written about his experience learning the Unreal Editor as it relates to further development of Virtual Reality technologies.Eric Sloss has organized an article about the research that Ben Fry, the newly appointed Nierenberg Chair of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, intends to do in his new position.Students Thomas Netzband and Patrick Bannan from The Art Institute of Pittsburgh write about their experience in producing a 3D animated short as a group project during production classes.

Victor Regnault and the Advance of Photography: The Art of Avoiding Errors (review)

Reviewed by: Victor Regnault and the Advance of Photography: The Art of Avoiding Errors Helena E. Wright (bio) Victor Regnault and the Advance of Photography: The Art of Avoiding Errors. By Laurie Dahlberg. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005. Pp. 208. $75. Henri-Victor Regnault (1810–1878) managed to combine rigorous science with artistic sensitivity in a career that encompassed both industry and academe. Through extensive personal and professional engagement with photography, his experiences involved both imaginative and practical applications of the new medium, and he facilitated photography's acceptance among a number of important groups. During his tenure as director of the Sèvres porcelain works, Regnault tried to reconcile the tradition of deluxe handicraft with new industrial priorities, including photographic documentation of production. In his state-supported career, he conducted experiments related to steam power and coal gas as well as photographic chemistry, but he came to feel that his amateur photographic portraits and landscapes took too much time away from his more important research. Thus his role in early photography has been overshadowed by others who made it their professional priority. Now Laurie Dahlberg has restored the record of Regnault's contributions during the critical decades of photography's introduction in France. In an elegantly written introduction Dahlberg argues that Regnault represents a means to understand the complicated history of photography across different sectors of French society, and her book is organized thematically to reflect his involvement as scientist, industrialist, and photographer. The first chapter is devoted to Regnault's educational background and his interactions with photography. Elected to the Académie des sciences in chemistry, he also occupied the physics chair at the Collège de France, where he lectured on optics. He believed in the truth of empirical practice and was not given to imaginative or theoretical approaches. It was said that his lifetime endeavor was to master "the art of avoiding all errors" (p. 16), a phrase Dahlberg uses both as this chapter heading (where it seems appropriate) and as the subtitle for her book (where it makes less sense). Due to his professional and academic connections, Regnault was ideally suited to become the first president of the national photographic organization, the Société française de photographie. Dahlberg's second chapter discusses Regnault's 1852 appointment as director of the Sèvres porcelain works and his engagement with photography there, both as avid amateur making his own images and frustrated promoter of its practical applications. His suggestion of using photographs to document and publicize production was met with resistance due to the conflicted role of technology in the culture of this artistic domain and in French society at large. As Dahlberg demonstrates, this struggle at [End Page 650] Sèvres reflected wider issues in photography's reception as both art and commerce. In her third chapter Dahlberg depicts Regnault's portraits of family and colleagues as a new cultural activity, constructing identities in private settings rather than in commercial studios. In chapter four she relates with some irony how the landscape photographs of Regnault and his friends sensitively recorded nature even while these men were actively developing more and more land through their work in industry and commerce. The book is generously illustrated, and its horizontal layout facilitates the presentation of its high-quality images, though making it awkward to hold and read. The thematic organization omits a clear chronology of Regnault's life and career appointments that would have provided some continuity. For example, Dahlberg mentions his study with Justus von Liebig several times, but never states when or in what circumstances this occurred. Perhaps the reader is expected to find this information in the notes through references to Robert Fox's work on Regnault and the history of science. There are problems with some illustration captions and attributions, along with a few errors of fact. As an art historian, Dahlberg slights the specifics of Regnault's important contributions to photographic chemistry, but she synthesizes in beautifully concise prose contemporary theoretical discourses regarding nature and landscape as science and art, and the conflicted cultural and political forces that attended industrialization in Second Empire France. She successfully conveys the importance and relevance...

Use of a computerized digital camera in podiatric medical practice.

Multimedia technology was once rarely found outside the realm of commercial production studios or in elaborate computer games. However, with the addition of only a few simple accessories, recent advances have made this technology readily available to the podiatric medical practitioner on a desktop office computer. The role that the application of multimedia technology using a computerized digital camera can play in a podiatric medical practice--including in such areas as record keeping, outcome measurement, patient education, interdisciplinary communications, and practice-management tools--is discussed.

Pompeo Bondini:Della Via Appia(1853)

Abstract Italian photography in the nineteenth century is like a text cluttered with foreign authors and local commercial studios, all intent on reiterating a preconceived idea of the country. The discovery of a body of evidence in a photographically illustrated book published in papal Rome in 1853, now in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University in New York, far from its original context,1 Classics Cage F/ AA 326 B64. The book size is 46.3 × 31.5 em; 2.5 em wide. The number 29.52571 on the back cover seems to date the year of acqui>ition as 1929. The date Feb. 3/30 reveals that the book was restored in 1930. I could not find the record of the book's provenance, since it was lost after its cataloguing at the Avety Library. No visible traces of this record were found in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. I am grateful to Professor Carlo Pietrangeli, Director of Monumenti Musei e Gallerie Pontificie, for his help and support in this research. provides a series of clues about Italian photography's aims in attempting to provide a picture of a country comprising several states and almost smothered by its past. Bound in red leather, with gold-embossed margins, Pompeo Bondini's Della Via Appia e dei Sepolcri degli Antichi Romani (1853) represents the earliest successful attempt in Italy to create a discourse on Roman remains in words and pictures.

Calypso Calaloo: Early Carnival Music in Trinidad

Mathilda, she take me money and run Venezuela, may sound familiar, but how about From a scandal and hideous bacchanal/Today we got a glorious carnival, or anywhere you go you must meet people sad/They search for employment, none can be had. Classic calypso, one of greatest creations of Caribbean culture, is more than frivolous music played for tourists in pink hotels overlooking tropical beaches. Much traditional calypso is also social commentary and has reflected, sometimes not so subtly, Trinidad's difficult social and political evolution. This book is about people who made calypso, topical music of Trinidad's Carnival, and about society that spawned it. Hill follows calypso from its 18th-century origins in Carnival street music to Carnival tents and later to club circuit and recording sessions in United States and Britain, up to moment in 1950s when great pioneer calypsonians - The Growling Tiger, Lord Invader, The Roaring Lion, Attila Hun, and rest of first generation - had finally passed into what one of its members called the atmosphere. The participants' opinion of development of their art comprises a large part of book. Reading about music is not same as listening to it, so a compact disk accompanies this book. Hill has collected a sampling of history of Calypso on record, and result is a collector's dream - a compilation of largely rare tracks from Smithsonian, other archives and commercial studios. Hill has illustrated his book with 61 photographs of calypsonians and paraphernelia of recorded music, and with transcriptions of lyrics of over 30 of most important calypso songs, a glossary of calypso terms and an annotated discography of calypso recordings. This overview of development of calypso should appeal to students of Caribbean and ethnomusicology, to folklorists and record collectors and to anyone who has hummed along with Brown-skin Girl or Mary Ann (Down by seaside sifting sand).

Vanessa James: Designer

For the last 15 years Vanessa James has been creating her sumptuous stage environments out of materials such as garbage bags, plastic wrap, scrapped plastics, synthetic fabric, foam rubber, mirrors, corrugated cardboard and acrylic paint. She culls her “stuffs” from corporations like Mobile Oil and International Paper, as well as the waste bins of commercial studios where she works during the day. By night she creates her art works for the stage. They have been part of more than 50 productions in the United States and England, and have been exhibited at galleries in New York, Cambridge, Salt Lake City and Bristol, as well as Studio 54, the Port Authority Bus Terminal and the George Washington Bridge. Her creations combine the remote, formal beauty of previous centuries with the products of contemporary industry.

Teaching Tape Studio Techniques for Music Synthesis

The appearance of many electronic music installations at schools and commercial studios has necessitated introduction of instruction for these facilities. Teaching of musical composition with the new medium becomes linked with the teaching of techniques for the use of diverse audio equipment. One may have a conception of a particular objet sonore which is of little value unless its realization is as clear as the conception. The generation, routing, modification, mixing, and recording of a signal must be nearly automatic so that the composer is able to concentrate on the strictly musical problems. The author will primarily discuss the tape studio approach to electronic music generation, although live performance and all-digital synthesis are also important and interact with tape techniques. Here the student encounters synthesizing equipment and various audio processing devices as well as sophisticated tape-recording equipment. How much technical information must the student assimilate? How deep should his knowledge of acoustics be? How rapidly and in what sequence should he be introduced to the equipment? Are there any reliable indicators for predicting a student's success with the equipment? The paper will attempt to answer these questions and suggest specific instructional techniques.