As an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in an interdisciplinary humanities department, my rese... more As an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in an interdisciplinary humanities department, my research explores the relationships between visual media, visualizing technologies, and community in order to better understand how the visual constitutes and is constitutive of historical, political, and cultural processes.https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/techtalks/1014/thumbnail.jp
Luigi Fiorillo's Album Souvenir d'Alexandrie: Ruines 1882 documented the bombardment and ... more Luigi Fiorillo's Album Souvenir d'Alexandrie: Ruines 1882 documented the bombardment and looting of Alexandria, Egypt on July 11-13, 1882. The album is preoccupied with the architectural, rather than the human face of devastation: buildings were ruined rather than lives. Its images bring in focus the destruction caused to the modern buildings by the fires of the Arab looters and blur out the death toll the British invasion has had on the residents of the city. While the album focused predominantly on the wrecked buildings, it also included images of dead Egyptians. In a photograph titled Les batteries de Ras-el-Tin démantelées we see the bodies of three dead Egyptian men-one of these bodies has been intentionally blurred out during the photographic development process. Depictions of human death complicate the idea of ruin. Building upon the articulation of rubble by Walter Benjamin and the concept of necropolitcs as theorized by Achille Mbembe, I posit here that visual repre...
Abstract: This paper explores the role of visual memes as neutralizers of contested past and pres... more Abstract: This paper explores the role of visual memes as neutralizers of contested past and present narratives of occupation and dissent by focusing both on the memetic structure of Occupy as well as on the digital visual memes associated with this movement. It examines the emergence of the term “occupy ” as a meme in and of itself – Occupy Wall Street spurred Occupy Chicago, Occupy Oakland and even Occupy Sesame Street and Occupy North Pole as well as the “We are the 99% ” meme that has come to define Occupy. Through the trope of the meme, this paper further conceptualizes revolu-tion as both return and rupture made possible by viral civil and political dissent. It argues that there is a notable distinction between physical participation in the Occupy Movement and virtual participation through the reworking of Occupy’s memes. Whereas the first modality serves as an active disruptor of the political normative imaginary, the second works in precisely the opposite fashion, in its rec...
In this paper, by extending the methodology of media archaeology to the praxis of Cultural Analyt... more In this paper, by extending the methodology of media archaeology to the praxis of Cultural Analytics/Media Visualization I ask how have we compared multitude of diverse images and what can we learn about the narratives that these comparisons allow? I turn to the work of Aby Warburg who attempted to organize close to two thousand images in his Mnemosyne Atlas. In comparing contemporary methods of image data visualization through cultural analytics method of remapping and the turn of the century methodology developed by Warburg under the working title of the “iconology of intervals,” I examine the shifts and continuities that have shaped informational aesthetics as well as data-driven narratives. Furthermore, in drawing parallels between contemporary Cultural Analytics/Media Visualization techniques, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas, I argue that contextual and image color data knowledge should continue to be important for digital art history. More specifically, I take the case study of Warbur...
Life is waiting’ is the main premise behind Steven Spielberg’s 2004 film The Terminal . The tempo... more Life is waiting’ is the main premise behind Steven Spielberg’s 2004 film The Terminal . The temporality of waiting however can be experienced as delay or detention respectively depending on one’s nationality. This article analyzes four stalled journeys in the contexts of immigration and tourism. More specifically, it engages the politics of distinction and displacement of friends and foes at the architecture of the border through a comparative analysis of Spielberg’s film The Terminal , Hamid Rahmanian and Melissa Hibbard’s 2001 film Sir Alfred of Charles de Gaulle Airport , Lily Keber’s 2007 film Hutto: America’s Family Prison , and Christian Simeonov’s 1992 film Granitzata (The Border).
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2018
I analyze the 2007 mapping and walling of Baghdad’s neighborhoods into ‘gated communities’ and ‘g... more I analyze the 2007 mapping and walling of Baghdad’s neighborhoods into ‘gated communities’ and ‘ghettos’ as a way of distinguishing and segregating Sunni and Shia ‘friends and ‘foes’. This walling was part of the Iraq War (2003-2010) in which a US-led military coalition invaded the state and framed its occupation as a project aimed to reconstruct Iraq into a modern democratic state. I situate this walling project within Foucault’s notion of gridding space, and argue that it exemplifies the materialization of the cell technique, and Carl Schmitt’s articulation of three modes of empty space in relation to territory. I argue that the walling process was an attempt to produce what I call a “continuous security”, predicated upon the assumption of a population ́s characterized belonging to the circumnavigated territory. On the outskirts of the walls, however, the security measures remained to be discontinuous – risk here was high as the space was inhabited by a heterogeneous milieu. The o...
Felix von Luschan, a German anthropologist (1854–1924), faced with the ambiguity of verbal skin d... more Felix von Luschan, a German anthropologist (1854–1924), faced with the ambiguity of verbal skin description, introduced a colour tile system in which each skin shade was given a numerical digit (number) from 1 to 36. von Luschan’s skin colour tiles, which reduced colour to a number, became part of a standard anthropometric toolkit, influencing the field of forensics in the early twentieth century, as practitioners and theorists debated their use to augment the chromatic data gathered by the dominant Bertillon system. This chapter traces the impact of von Luschan’s anthropometric work as well as his biometric skin colour measurement technology to the contemporary dialogues about race in the context of global forensics and security. Further, it investigates the possibility of resisting dominant discourses on race via the articulation of skin colour as biodata.
As an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in an interdisciplinary humanities department, my rese... more As an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in an interdisciplinary humanities department, my research explores the relationships between visual media, visualizing technologies, and community in order to better understand how the visual constitutes and is constitutive of historical, political, and cultural processes.https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/techtalks/1014/thumbnail.jp
Luigi Fiorillo's Album Souvenir d'Alexandrie: Ruines 1882 documented the bombardment and ... more Luigi Fiorillo's Album Souvenir d'Alexandrie: Ruines 1882 documented the bombardment and looting of Alexandria, Egypt on July 11-13, 1882. The album is preoccupied with the architectural, rather than the human face of devastation: buildings were ruined rather than lives. Its images bring in focus the destruction caused to the modern buildings by the fires of the Arab looters and blur out the death toll the British invasion has had on the residents of the city. While the album focused predominantly on the wrecked buildings, it also included images of dead Egyptians. In a photograph titled Les batteries de Ras-el-Tin démantelées we see the bodies of three dead Egyptian men-one of these bodies has been intentionally blurred out during the photographic development process. Depictions of human death complicate the idea of ruin. Building upon the articulation of rubble by Walter Benjamin and the concept of necropolitcs as theorized by Achille Mbembe, I posit here that visual repre...
Abstract: This paper explores the role of visual memes as neutralizers of contested past and pres... more Abstract: This paper explores the role of visual memes as neutralizers of contested past and present narratives of occupation and dissent by focusing both on the memetic structure of Occupy as well as on the digital visual memes associated with this movement. It examines the emergence of the term “occupy ” as a meme in and of itself – Occupy Wall Street spurred Occupy Chicago, Occupy Oakland and even Occupy Sesame Street and Occupy North Pole as well as the “We are the 99% ” meme that has come to define Occupy. Through the trope of the meme, this paper further conceptualizes revolu-tion as both return and rupture made possible by viral civil and political dissent. It argues that there is a notable distinction between physical participation in the Occupy Movement and virtual participation through the reworking of Occupy’s memes. Whereas the first modality serves as an active disruptor of the political normative imaginary, the second works in precisely the opposite fashion, in its rec...
In this paper, by extending the methodology of media archaeology to the praxis of Cultural Analyt... more In this paper, by extending the methodology of media archaeology to the praxis of Cultural Analytics/Media Visualization I ask how have we compared multitude of diverse images and what can we learn about the narratives that these comparisons allow? I turn to the work of Aby Warburg who attempted to organize close to two thousand images in his Mnemosyne Atlas. In comparing contemporary methods of image data visualization through cultural analytics method of remapping and the turn of the century methodology developed by Warburg under the working title of the “iconology of intervals,” I examine the shifts and continuities that have shaped informational aesthetics as well as data-driven narratives. Furthermore, in drawing parallels between contemporary Cultural Analytics/Media Visualization techniques, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas, I argue that contextual and image color data knowledge should continue to be important for digital art history. More specifically, I take the case study of Warbur...
Life is waiting’ is the main premise behind Steven Spielberg’s 2004 film The Terminal . The tempo... more Life is waiting’ is the main premise behind Steven Spielberg’s 2004 film The Terminal . The temporality of waiting however can be experienced as delay or detention respectively depending on one’s nationality. This article analyzes four stalled journeys in the contexts of immigration and tourism. More specifically, it engages the politics of distinction and displacement of friends and foes at the architecture of the border through a comparative analysis of Spielberg’s film The Terminal , Hamid Rahmanian and Melissa Hibbard’s 2001 film Sir Alfred of Charles de Gaulle Airport , Lily Keber’s 2007 film Hutto: America’s Family Prison , and Christian Simeonov’s 1992 film Granitzata (The Border).
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2018
I analyze the 2007 mapping and walling of Baghdad’s neighborhoods into ‘gated communities’ and ‘g... more I analyze the 2007 mapping and walling of Baghdad’s neighborhoods into ‘gated communities’ and ‘ghettos’ as a way of distinguishing and segregating Sunni and Shia ‘friends and ‘foes’. This walling was part of the Iraq War (2003-2010) in which a US-led military coalition invaded the state and framed its occupation as a project aimed to reconstruct Iraq into a modern democratic state. I situate this walling project within Foucault’s notion of gridding space, and argue that it exemplifies the materialization of the cell technique, and Carl Schmitt’s articulation of three modes of empty space in relation to territory. I argue that the walling process was an attempt to produce what I call a “continuous security”, predicated upon the assumption of a population ́s characterized belonging to the circumnavigated territory. On the outskirts of the walls, however, the security measures remained to be discontinuous – risk here was high as the space was inhabited by a heterogeneous milieu. The o...
Felix von Luschan, a German anthropologist (1854–1924), faced with the ambiguity of verbal skin d... more Felix von Luschan, a German anthropologist (1854–1924), faced with the ambiguity of verbal skin description, introduced a colour tile system in which each skin shade was given a numerical digit (number) from 1 to 36. von Luschan’s skin colour tiles, which reduced colour to a number, became part of a standard anthropometric toolkit, influencing the field of forensics in the early twentieth century, as practitioners and theorists debated their use to augment the chromatic data gathered by the dominant Bertillon system. This chapter traces the impact of von Luschan’s anthropometric work as well as his biometric skin colour measurement technology to the contemporary dialogues about race in the context of global forensics and security. Further, it investigates the possibility of resisting dominant discourses on race via the articulation of skin colour as biodata.
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