This is my Final script for my Symposium. I plan to Paraphrase a lot of this and have it sectioned out into small paragraph which will be on prompt cards rather than a large chunk of text on A4 paper. I want to try and not be too attatched to the script and be free to try and engage with the audience a little.

Introduction.
So what is Instagram? For those who don’t know and for those who do let’s take ourselves through its process.
Instagram is a smart phone application which is currently limited to Iphone and Android but it allows the user(me) to take a Photograph and instantly upload and share it online with their network of followers. The Sharing of these images is very much based on the design of social networks where there is a constant ‘stream’ or ‘feed’ of information. With Instagram this information is Images.

SO why do we want these Images in our Hands, Shoeboxes, Pockets, Wallets.
If you all take a moment to look under your seat you should find blu-tac’d, a print. take a moment to look at it and feel it in your hands, get to know it. Understand it as a fixed image. For this Symposium i have been an active user of Instagram for 4 months and the image you hold will be one of the ones i have taken over this period. These Images are now forgotten, they’re in the stream and some of them have been for months now. This Image is yours to keep and for you to do what you want with it. The reason why this Physical Artefact is so Special is down to the Provenance of it. the meaning. You can see that it is Handmade with Handwriting. This is shared from a Human and not a Cyborg. When you look at the photograph you are holding in the future you will remember today, and that I shared it with you and the manner that i shared it in. Its unique. I can’t share this  in the same way with you on the Internet because on the internet there is a lack of provenance and a wealth of information. You now have control over this Photograph unlike it’s Fluid form on the Internet. This Photograph will now have a place negotiated by time and space and will become mnemonic to memory, making it harder to forget it. I believe the reason why the Artefact is so Attractive In the Fluid Digital World and the reason why we want to start holding our Images again is simply because we’ve experienced the Fluid. We experience it Everyday and as humans we feel there is something missing in that world through the screens. Marshall Mcluhan Once Said: ‘One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water’ Meaning they haven’t experienced the Dry so how can they know that they are in Water. We have experienced the Fluid, we have experienced the Water, the stream, the news feeds, the digital. But we have also experienced the Dry. The Analog, the Artefact, The Photographic Print, and i believe that the Fluid Digital Environment has given us the alternative to realise the importance of the Fixed Image.
Thank you, and if you have a twitter account and would like to drop some feedback on your thoughts on the Fixed Image and the print you have just received please #hastag rawfmt and start a conversation
Thank you.

Instagram – Fixing the Fluid Image

Here is the Pdf of my final Presentation. I have chosen to go with a plain white background to give a clean and simple look. I have tired to make a few pages work with some nice transitions so there is movement on the creen which i can talk over. I have used a lot of Imagery and mainly Imagery that i have produced with my time using Instagram. I have chose the ‘courier new’ text to try and reference the electronic age with a generic nostalgic typing font.

‘One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water’

I have taken this quote from Fred Ritchin’s After Photography but i know that it is a Marshall Mcluhan Quote. I have found tha it has come from this book:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_and_Peace_in_the_Global_Village

Now this is a book i donthave time to go into too much depth. I have read a little bit from it but i only really need that Quote to solidify my conclusion at the end of my symposium.

I can use it to state that we have experienced both the Fluid and Fixed Environment and thats the reason why we want to start holding our images again, is becasue something is missing from just interacting with Images Online. We are Fixing the Fluid Image becasue we are starting to learn and understand that the Analog and the Digital are beneficial for Photography working and Co-exisiting together rather than being seperate. By experiencing the Fixed we can learn how to optimise the benefits of the Fluid and by expereincing the Fluid we can understand and learn to optimise the importance of the Fixed Image in our practice.

W made recordings of our practice Symposium run throughs and this has given me the opportunity to hear myself back and make any adjustments i need to make. I can hear that i speak quite slow and it is obvious that i am a little unconfident with my script. I also feel that even though it is already over 10 minutes long i need to put more information into it. I think i need a little bit of definition on Nostalgia to clear that section up and form a good stance for the audience to follow. If i speed up in my talking and the delivering of nformation hopefully i will have enough room to add an extra minute of information.

I have selected a few quotes which i have found ineresting from Camera Lucida. I have tried to relate them to Instagram and the direction i am taking with my research but i have found this very hard to do. I appreciate the way in which Barthes Talks of the photograph but he is focused on the fixed image. There are certain aspects which do cross over and appeal to me when thinking about the fixed image being defined in reference and in co-existence to the fluid image but i havent gained anything i can directly put into my symposium. It has benefitted me though and has informed the way i shall talk about the fixed image. The Photographic Print.

“What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.”

”When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not (i)emerge(i), do not (i)leave(i): they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.”

“The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence … The Photograph then becomes a bizarre (i)medium(i), a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest (o)shared(i) hallucination (on the one hand ‘it is not there,’ on the other ‘but it has indeed been’): a mad image, chafed by reality.

“In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The ‘anything whatever’ then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.”

“A paradox: the same century invented History and Photography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything which denies ripening.”

”but by shifting this reality to the past (‘this-has-been’), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.”

”Usually the amateur is defines as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot — or will not — achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional: for it is he who stands closer to the (i)noeme(i) of Photography.”

I have decided that it would be a good idea to Print my Instagram Images that i have taken over the past 3-4months. This is something i could then share with the Audience in my Symposium. I could somehow give them each a unique print which would tie in nicely for me to make a conclusion on what i have found from my research and also finish off my Symposium. I have decide to print them off in a way to reference a Polaroid Photograph so that it will hold some esemblence an dprove feelings of Nostalgia and similarity to the Polaroid. I have also chosen to provide the date on the Image in an extra attempt to fix it by a time and a place to affirm it’s idea as a fixed Image. Now it is in Print form it is no longer fluid and therefore the date becomes relevant.

Here is a selection of 24 images from 57 that i have printed.

I decided to research more into the Idea of Nostalgia and where the Nostalgia of photographs has come from. I find that Instagram is using the filters and Analog edits to the digital images as a marketing ploy, something which gets us using Instagram more. Which gave me an idea to look into how Kodak as an example marketed themselves throughout the 20th century. I came across this book Kodak and the lens of Nostalgia by Nancy Martha West, and it througouly explains how kodak used deas of Nostalgia in their Advertising Campaigns as far back as World War I.

‘So it is astonishing when somehow the mnemonic potential of the objects fndamental to an entire social formation turns up raidcally disrupted or disabled. Then the Object in it’s ‘metaphysically’ enigmatic commodity form mutates into a privalaged icon symbolizing the whole crisis of memory and the sudden opacity of the past’

‘As Spitzer so poignantly demonstrates, the nostalgia exemplified by the uses of photography does not neccessarily entail retreat; it can equally function as retrieval, as a means of reclaiming the past and even shaping the future.

‘Kodak Advertising insisted on a nostalgic view of the world. Kodaks accent on memory intensified.’

‘photography then about it’s capacity for mnemonic labour’

‘kodak systematically urged it’s consumers to view photography and the world it recorded through the lens of Nostalgia’

Here is another example i have found of a polaroid instant Digital Camera. http://www.petapixel.com/2012/12/02/carbon-one-mini-is-a-polaroid-one-step-look-alike-digital-camera/