See the unseen

I remember a visual artifact, "Viewer (1996, see more)," which I saw in The Museum of Modern Art in NYC. The artifact made by Gary Hill, a American video artist, represents a set of people wearing different cloths, looking different social background and ethnicity via a projector. It is not a picture but a video, although it is almost motionless. There, I took a picture of it below. 

What I felt when seeing that was kind of post-modernistic ideas. While I was watching people projected on the screen and confronting them, I was confused whether I was seeing them or they were seeing me. I thought it is possible that not only I as a subject recognize the video art just as an object, but also, conversely, I might be showed as an object to people on the screen. That is, it seemed that the artist tried to break down technical relationship between a subject and a object - between viewing and viewed.

Technological developments and increasing non-textualized contexts have helped build new paradigm between subjects and objects; between viewers and the visual (described in Sturken and Cartwright's article) and between writers and readers/publishers (described in Sullivan's article).

As Sturken and Cartwright said, we are living in a flood of the visual. Also, there are a number of means representing it thank to digital media. But, visualized contexts can also cause any ambiguosness that people might feel when they look at images, try to interpret them. So, we need to know how to look images, and, at the same line of logic, "Practice of Looking" emphasizes how people have to receive the visual. The authors siad "studying visual culture is about seeing not only what is shown, but also how things are shown and what we are not shown, what we do not see."(6) See the unseen!

Active viewers tries to see the unseen while passive viewers tend to see just the seen superficially. Regardless of how viewers read images, however, meanings intended by producers creating them independently exist and affect viewer's interpretation. And then, they are again affected by another like authority and power. To explain it, Sturkent and Cartwright adapt Foucault's concept, "author function as a means of thinking about the producer function, and take an example of Nike advertising.
"We attribute the producer function to  Nicke because the corporation and not the actual creative director of the ad, is the entity that owns and appears to speak through the work."(53)

Such meanings created by any power can be deconstructed, reinterpreted, reconstructed by new media. "The new modes embraced by youth culture consumers are about networks, connections, and aggregation - using websites and social networking to link to their interests and friends, and blogs to create networks about their style choices and social concerns."(89) Sullivan also argues that electronic writing would overcome dominant controling of the page by publishers, suggesting some alternative models of the writer-text-reader relationship shifted from traditional writing to electronic writing. Some of models even implies the concept of hypertext.This article is so predictable when we consider that was published in 1991.