Shakkei: the “here”, the “there” and the Selfie

Abstract

The term shakkei, in Japanese, literally means “borrowed landscape”. Used in Japanese gardening, it describes the incorporated surrounding nature into the design of a garden. The boundaries of a Japanese garden do not stop at the fence, or the end of the plot, but indeed go beyond, way beyond, to incorporate distant trees, hills, lakes or mountains. We can relate shakkei to different modern and post-modern philosophies in order to make a connection between this ancient inclusive process of gardening to the post-modern phenomena that we call ‘selfie’. In order to achieve this, we draw comparisons between the first photograph of Niépce, Edward Said’s view on orientalist and colonialism, Marc Augé’s study of the transitional places the he called non-places, Roland Barthes complete analysis of the photograph including “punctum-studium-spectrum” and “that has been” and finally Lev Manovich interpretation of the Augmented space. This paper discusses what is the space between the garden and the borrowed landscape and how that space relates to the ‘selfie’ with the help of the “Automatic Art Validating Machine” and the incorrect use of hashtags.

Contributors

Tarek Mourad

Conference

Publication date: June 2019

Publication date (Print): June 2019

Pages: 54-60

Affiliations

The International University of Beirut

Michel Abi Chahla street, Mousytbeh

Beirut-Lebanon

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/POM19.9

Copyright statement: © Mourad. Published by BCS Learning and Development Ltd. Proceedings of POM Beirut 2019

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Politics of the Machine Beirut 2019

Conference acronym: POM2019

Conference number: 2

Conference location: Beirut, Lebanon

Conference date: 11-14 June 2019

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Politics of the Machine

Product

Product Information: 1477-9358BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/POM19.9

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

Categories

Series title: Electronic Workshops in Computing