Abstract

The plethora of cameras in our digital media devices today is a science fiction vision writ large, such as that of Bertrand Tavernier’s film, Death Watch (1980), whose protagonist Roddy (played by Harvey Keitel) records everything he sees via camera lenses installed in his eyes. Armed with our mobile cameras, events from the Arab revolutions to the University of California protests are now not only seen and witnessed through the camera’s eye, but also recorded, edited, archived, uploaded and circulated. Our understanding of the world via the mobile camera is thus not merely the mediation of realities, but an extended ecology connecting image, technology, media, reality and event which in turn inflects concepts of seeing, self, place, visuality and interactivity. This talk will explore why and how that is done.