The vernacular of photobombing The aesthetics of transgression

This image taken in Wales in c.1853 is possibly the earliest example of a photobomb. By Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / The National Library of Wales from Wales/Cymru - Sally and Mrs Reed, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38812616

The banal imaging of ourselves and our environments has led to new aesthetic modes where the conventions of imaging, subject–object relationships and what is pleasurable or popular often draw on the ludic, the unexpected or the surprise element. One such image genre is photobombing, where a transgressive object or entity within a conventional image setting subverts it, adding popular appeal through its ability to reconfigure its aesthetic conventions, opening it up for public pleasure and consumption and inscribing it with a possibility of going viral. Photobombing as an image genre online reflects our aesthetic modes and the age of distraction, where the unexpected remains a mode of ocular appeal underscoring the convergence of popular culture and the fluidity of Web 2.0’s convergence architecture. As such, people’s aesthetic modes of the popular can be invented, renewed and subverted with new formats. The phenomenon of photobombing equally affirms the spectacular as a liminal site where pleasure is experienced with the breaking down of norms and the conjoining of a communal gaze through the aesthetics of transgression.

Convergence, https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856517743666

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1354856517743666?journalCode=cona

Self-Production through the Banal and the Fictive: Self and the Relationship with the Screen

 

 International Journal of E-Politics

 Volume 7 • Issue 2 • April-June-2016, pp 51-61

 

 

The self is performed through the banal of the everyday on social media. The banality of the everyday constitutes an integral part of our communication on digital platforms.Taking this as part of our performative lives in the digital economy, the paper looks at ways in which we co-produce the self through the banality of the everyday as wellas a wider imagination and engagement with the world. These wider engagements are termed as ‘fictive’ not because they are unreal but through a conceptual notion of how the self is performed and imagined through wider world events in digital platforms and screen cultures where convergence of technologies allow us to be constantly consumed through the screen as we live out our daily lives. The narration of our lives through the banal and the fictive constantly co-produces the self through a situated domesticity of the everyday and equally through the eventful. In the process it reveals our ongoing relationship with the screen as an orifice for the production of self and the construction of a social reality beyond our immediate domesticity.