Visual and Cultural Studies

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

Ever get the feeling that life's a game with changing rules and no clear sides, one you are compelled to play yet cannot win? Welcome to gamespace. Gamespace is where and how we live today. It is everywhere and nowhere: the main chance, the best shot, the big leagues, the only game in town. In a world thus configured, McKenzie Wark contends, digital computer games are the emergent cultural form of the times. Where others argue obsessively over violence in games, Wark approaches them as a utopian version of the world in which we actually live. Playing against the machine on a game console, we enjoy the only truly level playing field--where we get ahead on our strengths or not at all.

Gamer Theory uncovers the significance of games in the gap between the near-perfection of actual games and the highly imperfect gamespace of everyday life in the rat race of free-market society. The book depicts a world becoming an inescapable series of less and less perfect games. This world gives rise to a new persona. In place of the subject or citizen stands the gamer. As all previous such personae had their breviaries and manuals, Gamer Theory seeks to offer guidance for thinking within this new character. Neither a strategy guide nor a cheat sheet for improving one's score or skills, the book is instead a primer in thinking about a world made over as a gamespace, recast as an imperfect copy of the game.

Is it trivial, or perhaps even irresponsible, to explore aesthetic themes at a time when the world is engulfed by war, genocide, terrorism, poverty, climate change and financial turmoil? Why indulge in painting, poetry or music when lives and livelihoods are at stake? Can we really afford to entertain questions of taste while concrete political action is urgently required?

This book offers a passionate but systematically sustained defence of an aesthetic engagement with world politics. It argues that aesthetic sources can offer alternative insight: a type of reflective understanding that emerges not from applying the analytical skills that are central the social sciences, but from cultivating a more open-ended level of creativity and sensibility about the political. We then might be able to appreciate what we otherwise cannot even see: perspectives or people excluded from prevailing purviews, for instance, or the emotional nature and consequences of political events. Drawing on detailed case studies that range from Stalinist Russia to Cold War Germany and contemporary Korea, the author compellingly demonstrates how the poetic imagination can help us understand – and perhaps even shape - some of the most difficult political challenges.

The climate catastrophe to come is traumatically affecting, whether in its micro and macro manifestations, in the threat it poses to existing ways of life, in its upending of entrenched understandings of the workings of the world, or in the injury it is doing to particular lives and wider ecologies. It works on ecologies and bodies alike as a kind of wounding, one not simply or solely to the everyday stuff of biological life but to the very constitution of experience and expression. Critiquing and extending writing on climate, trauma, and aesthetic experience by E. Ann Kaplan (2016), Timothy Morton (2013), and others, this article argues that these affects of climate catastrophe are traumatically affecting without necessarily being traumatizing: they are jarring, rupturing, disjunctive experiences of future crisis in the now. This article traces these affects of apocalypse as they circulate traumatically in three texts: George Miller's film Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Marina Zurkow's animation Slurb (2009), and Briohny Doyle's novel The Island Will Sink (2016). Climate catastrophe, that most threatening yet elusive of hyperobjects, marks and emerges irresistibly from within these works, not simply as theme, setting, or symbol but as the form of their affectivity. This intensity presses into the present from the future, shaping how the catastrophe to come is felt today and exposing crucial tensions between aesthetic expression and lived experience.

This article describes the newest stage in the development of modern technological media. I call this stage “media analytics.” It follows the previous stages of massive reproduction (1500–), broadcasting (1920–), the use of computers for media creation workflows (1981–), the Web as global content creation and distribution network (1993–), and social media platforms (2004–), to name just a few such stages. Unlike other stages, the new stage is not focused on new mechanisms for creation, publishing, or distribution of media, although it also affects these operations. Instead, this new stage is about automatic computational analysis of the content of all online digital media, personal online behaviors and communication, and automatic actions based on this analysis.

Media analytics is the new stage of media technology that impacts everyday cultural experiences of significant percentages of populations in dozens of countries who use Internet and computing devices. (For figures about use of Internet and social media in the USA by different demographics groups, see latest Pew Research Center Internet & Tech reports.) (…)

While media analytics technologies and concepts are widely discussed in computer and data sciences in business publications, in conferences and trade shows, in leading science journals, and being taught to millions of students worldwide in computer science and data science classes, they are not discussed in either popular press or by academics outside of technology and science fields.

This lack of systematic knowledge on the part of many academics and journalists who write about digital cultures about the details of the computational processes that drive web services, apps, desktop applications, video games, search, image detection, voice recognition, recommendation systems, behavioral advertising, and so on, as well as contemporary software engineering and the field of data science in general often prevents them, in my view, from seeing the full picture. (Understanding of many of these details does require knowledge of computer science, and today very few people in academic humanists, social sciences or journalism have this background.)

A fresh history of the Situationist International by the author of A Hacker Manifesto.

Over fifty years after the Situationist International appeared, its legacy continues to inspire activists, artists and theorists around the world. Such a legend has accrued to this movement that the story of the SI now demands to be told in a contemporary voice capable of putting it into the context of twenty-first-century struggles.

McKenzie Wark delves into the Situationists' unacknowledged diversity, revealing a world as rich in practice as it is in theory. Tracing the group's development from the bohemian Paris of the '50s to the explosive days of May '68, Wark's take on the Situationists is biographically and historically rich, presenting the group as an ensemble creation, rather than the brainchild and dominion of its most famous member, Guy Debord. Roaming through Europe and the lives of those who made up the movement—including Constant, Asger Jorn, Michèle Bernstein, Alex Trocchi and Jacqueline De Jong—Wark uncovers an international movement riven with conflicting passions.

Accessible to those who have only just discovered the Situationists and filled with new insights, The Beach Beneath the Street rereads the group's history in the light of our contemporary experience of communications, architecture, and everyday life. The Situationists tried to escape the world of twentieth-century spectacle and failed in the attempt. Wark argues that they may still help us to escape the twenty-first century, while we still can ...

The book's jacket folds out into a poster, Totality for Beginners, a collaborative graphic essay employing text selected by McKenzie Wark with composition and drawings by Kevin C. Pyle.

The increasing interest in media history within the academic world has not yet resulted in an intensive examination of the relationship between photography and communications media. This article seeks to begin to address this lacuna by examining photography's insertion into the so-called revolution of communication in middle-nineteenth-century America. The first section of the present study links photography to the introduction of telegraphy, the development of the railway and the expansion of the postal system. The second section examines aspects of the reception of photography in nineteenth-century America and argues this is related to improvements in communication and transportation technologies. The conclusion calls for a broader consideration of the links between the history of photography and the history of media.

Attraverso la relazione tra immagine e parole e le teorie sull'ékphrasis, viene analizzato dapprima il personale rapporto che Calvino ha con le immagini e la visualità in generale; successivamente ci si soffermerà sulle descrizioni di opere d'arte che lo stesso Calvino scrive per Valerio Adami, Domenico Gnoli e Giorgio de Chirico.

This paper examines how Filipino comics have evolved from the Western model to the current manga style, and to analyze whether it is simply an artistic trend or the future of comics in the Philippines. Through archival research and interviews with Filipino manga artists, the author aims to shed light on the transformation of the comics industry in the Philippines, and contribute to the understanding of popular culture and artistic trends as important fields of study in which the analysis and observation of how aesthetic perception can change through exposure and appropriation.

In this article I raise a series of questions around the history, theory, and practice of Visual Culture Studies as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that studies visual cultures. These questions include: What is Visual Culture Studies? What are its genealogies? Why are the bonds between it and its intersecting fields of inquiry such as Art History, the very fields that inform it, so tense? What is the purview or object domain of Visual Culture Studies, or, rather, what is the ‘object’ of study of Visual Culture Studies? If Visual Culture Studies is actually different from Art History, which I think it is, how do these differences show themselves? How does the question of, for instance, ‘place’ as a geo-political-aesthetic subject in our transcultural era enable us to speak about an interdisciplinary ‘object’ of Visual Culture Studies that is not determined in advance, and that can only come together, come into being, become known it us, as it takes shape by way of the critical study of it? In the end, then, what does it mean to ‘do’ Visual Culture Studies?

El artículo presenta una breve historia de la panadería tradicional en el Perú destacando en el siglo XX las variantes regionales de pan según sus denominaciones, tamaños, formas, sabores, consistencias y significados van de acuerdo con los gustos y costumbres de la clientela local.

Se explica sobre las expresiones plásticas vinculadas a la producción panadera según su carácter duradero y efímero. Como expresiones duraderas se consignan las bateas de madera de formas alargadas y circulares. En la plástica efímera se encuentran los diversos tipos de pan con formas heredadas y otras creadas, que reciben diferentes denominaciones. De este grupo resaltan por sus formas artísticas y escultóricas las famosas t´anta wawas, que adquieren un significado vital dentro y fuera del contexto de las festividades y son consideradas objetos mágico-religiosos y de propiciación.

Se trata de valorar una tradición plástica vigente hasta nuestros días y que todavía no ha merecido un estudio profundo.

Following his acclaimed history of the Situationist International up until the late sixties, The Beach Beneath the Street, McKenzie Wark returns with a companion volume which puts the late work of the Situationists in a broader and deeper context, charting their contemporary relevance and their deep critique of modernity. Wark builds on their work to map the historical stages of the society of the spectacle, from the diffuse to the integrated to what he calls the disintegrating spectacle.

The Spectacle of Disintegration takes the reader through the critique of political aesthetics of former Situationist T.J. Clark, the Fourierist utopia of Raoul Vaneigem, René Vienet’s earthy situationist cinema, Gianfranco Sangunetti’s pranking of the Italian ruling class, Alice-Becker Ho’s account of the anonymous language of the Romany, Guy Debord’s late films and his surprising work as a game designer.

At once an extraordinary counter history of radical praxis and a call to arms in the age of financial crisis and the resurgence of the streets, The Spectacle of Disintegration recalls the hidden journeys taken in the attempt to leave the twentieth century, and plots an exit from the twenty first.

Standard genealogies of knowledge posit the circulation of modernity in one direction, from the West to “the rest.” This history reveals the waves of influence flowing the opposite way, from nonstate people to the state. The essay introduces a new method for the history of knowledge that traces the travel of narratives, packets of media containing messages. Masks long viewed as objects of collection are seen here anew as subjects of recollection, mnemonic devices that archive the global propagation of knowledge. One set of masks is reunited with the narratives they encode: stories employed as a survival strategy by the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw, a network of peoples who utilized the anthropologist Franz Boas as a host body to enter and alter the world that came to colonize them. The efforts of the Indigenous intellectual George Hunt to disseminate the masks—and, with the masks, his family message of transformation—directly shaped the concept of culture. Using the masks as teaching tools, Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw thinkers civilized Boas into a new modernity, shifting him from categorization to communication, from signs to messages, and from a Self/Other perception to a global consciousness of Host–Guest relations. The masks recollect a profound yet long suppressed Indigenous influence on modern thought.

Women’s clothes were at the center of political debate in the Spain of Philip IV (r. 1621–65), and no garment inspired more controversy than the wide-hipped farthingale, or hoopskirt, known as the guardainfante. Considered scandalous with its reputation for hiding illicit pregnancies, the guardainfante was banned in 1639. Nonetheless, the guardainfante became more popular than ever and turned into an enduring icon of Golden Age Spain during the reign of Philip’s second queen, Mariana of Austria (1649–65). Despite the guardainfante’s high level of visibility, most notably in court portraits by Diego Velázquez, very little is known about the historical experiences of the women who wore it. This article demonstrates that real women really did wear the guardainfante in a variety of contexts outside of portraiture and the theater. In Madrid and in cities throughout the Spanish empire, women of different stations and convictions participated in the political culture of their times by making, disseminating, and debating this controversial garment.

Co-Author, with Daniela Bleichmar.
This essay defines the category of ‘‘visual history’’ and introduces its operations across the essays included in this special issue. It proposes that such narratives accelerated time in cultures where it became increasingly common to traverse spatial distances. In this way, visual histories are not
simply guides to the times, but guides to time itself.

Recent years have seen not just a revival, but a rebirth of the analogue record. More than merely a nostalgic craze, vinyl has become a cultural icon. As music consumption migrated to digital and online, this seemingly obsolete medium became the fastest-growing format in music sales. Whilst vinyl never ceased to be the favorite amongst many music lovers and DJs, from the late 1980s the recording industry regarded it as an outdated relic, consigned to dusty domestic corners and obscure record shops. So why is vinyl now experiencing a 'rebirth of its cool'?

Dominik Bartmanski and Ian Woodward explore this question by combining a cultural sociological approach with insights from material culture studies. Presenting vinyl as a multifaceted cultural object, they investigate the reasons behind its persistence within our technologically accelerated culture. Informed by media analysis, urban ethnography and the authors' interviews with musicians, DJs, sound engineers, record store owners, collectors and cutting-edge label chiefs from a range of metropolitan centres renowned for thriving music scenes including London, New York, Tokyo, Melbourne, and especially Berlin, what emerges is a story of a modern icon.

Endorsements & Reviews:

“Vinyl is a state-of-the-art treatment of an unforgettable object and medium that raises many of the issues central to contemporary anthropology. Its subject-matter should make it appealing to students and general audiences, while its theoretical sophistication makes it relevant to scholars of music, technology, popular culture, and cultural objects.” –  Jack David Eller, Anthropology Review Database

“Bartmanski and Woodward have created a masterpiece that any record lover should have on their shelves” –  Record Collector magazine

“Bartmanski and Woodward … provide meticulous detail as to how materiality matters … Bartmanski and Woodward divide their book into chapters that fervently trace various aspects of vinyl: its history, its functionality and use as a medium, its production and physical properties, and its consumption. In each chapter, they attend to the materially mediated cultural meanings within which vinyl is entangled.” –  Robin Bartram, Northwestern University, Qualitative Sociology

“Vinyl culture is back, and it’s even more vibrant than it was in its heyday, before digitalization. Bartmanski and Woodward take us to the epicentres of this revolution, and let those who are behind it tell us about their passions for this iconic medium. This is an exemplary study of the social and sensory life of things." - David Howes, Professor of Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

“In the age of the digital, with the ubiquitous smart phone and MP3 technologies providing consumers with instant access to global sounds irrespective of where they are, Vinyl explores the persistence of an old technology within the production and consumption of music. In doing so it demonstrates the complex ways in which material objects form a meaningful part of our everyday lives – not just through the sounds of vinyl but by how it feels and looks. The text is beautifully written, impassioned, yet critical. Welcome to the world of the post-digital.” –  Michael Bull, Professor of Sound Studies, University of Sussex, UK.

“A passionate ode to the analogue record, and testament to how vinyl embodies the content it mediates, with each record's unique journey etched into the material” –  Hillegonda C. Rietveld, The Times Higher Education

As wondrous lands are represented as “wastelands” to make way for urban and industrial development in Hawaiʻi, kūpuna or elders and cultural practitioners are currently building a movement across the islands to mobilize moʻolelo (stories and histories) in huakaʻi aloha ʻāina, (physical and spiritual travels to view and remember celebrated and sacred places) in order to protect them.  On these huakaʻi, moʻolelo have critical decolonial effects as they articulate an ʻŌiwi moʻoʻāina economy of abundance that restores “wastelands” to ʻāina kamahaʻo (wondrous land) and ʻāina momona (abundant land).  In this essay, I focus on a 2010 community struggle to protect the birthplace of the kupua (supernatural hero) Māui in Lualualei valley from a developer’s proposal for a light industrial park. The Concerned Elders of Waiʻanae organized the Huakaʻi Kākoʻo no Waiʻanae environmental justice bus tours to share the Māui moʻolelo and build a broad base of support for their struggles, enabling wonder to grow into direct action.  I discuss the ways that Indigenous and critical settler cartographies map the wonder of the Māui moʻolelo on the ground, and I look to narrative conventions of moʻolelo that compare and connect distant places, helping to grow affinity activism.

Towards the end of the decade long Iran–Iraq war, Saddam Hussein launched a deadly attack against the Kurds, known as the Anfal Campaign, killing more than a hundred thousand. One of the largest acts of genocide occurred on 18 March 1988 in the Kurdish city of Halabja. On that day, sweet-smelling poison gas was poured over the city, killing at least five thousand. Since 2001 Kurdish moviemakers have memorialized the tragedy of the Halabja massacre by producing cinematic dramas and narrative documentaries. These films are part of a discourse of authenticity and a politics of culture that permeate the Kurdish independence movement. This essay proposes that Halabja films can be divided into three stages: the era of consolidation, 2000 to 2009; the golden era, 2009 to early 2014; and the fall which followed the fall of Mosul to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Each era reveals new attitudes towards politics, society, and the massacre.

The rebirth of realistic representation in Italy around 1300 led to the materialization of a pictorial language, which dominated Western art until 1900, and it dominates global visual culture even today. Paralleling the development of mimesis, self-reflexive pictorial tendencies emerged as well. Images-within-images, visual commentaries of representations by representations, were essential to this trend. They facilitated the development of a critical pictorial attitude towards representation. This book offers the first comprehensive study of Italian meta-painting in the age of Giotto and sheds new light on the early modern and modern history of the phenomenon. By combining visual hermeneutics and iconography, it traces reflexivity in Italian mural and panel painting at the dawn of the Renaissance, and presents novel interpretations of several key works of Giotto di Bondone and the Lorenzetti brothers. The potential influence of the contemporary religious and social context on the program design is also examined situating the visual innovations within a broader historical horizon. The analysis of pictorial illusionism and reality effect together with the liturgical, narrative and typological role of images-within-images makes this work a pioneering contribution to visual studies and premodern Italian culture.

‘Reflexivity is the name of the game they say when it comes to modern and especially to postmodern art. This study tells a different story. Péter Bokody’s book goes back to where it all began: to Italian Trecento painting which marks the beginnings of the realistic mode. Realism means, among many other things, that one medium can embed another medium. If it does so it will enhance its realistic potential, strengthen the meaning of the whole scene and, finally, it makes a meta-statement: about the power of images, the different qualities of the artforms or even about stylistic options.’
Wolfgang Kemp, University of Hamburg

'Bokody’s book combines visual sensitivity, methodological variety, historical erudition and theoretical sophistication. His work encourages us to think with more precision and flexibility about the concepts of "realism" and reflexivity as applied to the achievements of Giotto and his contemporaries and in relation to subsequent generations of artists. Bokody provides fresh insights for all those who study, admire and teach this material.'
Joanna Cannon, Courtauld Institute of Art, London

'Engagingly written, this study will add significantly to our understanding of Giotto and his circle (including Lorenzetti, Gaddi and Daddi) in the dynamically changing world of fourteenth century Italy. Although primarily concerned with images within images in panel and mural painting, the work goes beyond its initial parameters and looks at such concepts as realism, spatial relations, illusionism, meta-painting, self-reflexivity, time and reception in Italian art. It is a study which exposes the viewer to new ideas and details that could easily be passed and whose iconography is significant in understanding the work in its entirety.'
Colum Hourihane, Independent Scholar, UK

The article offers a reconstruction of a chapel, set up in England in the 1470s to commemorate a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The reconstruction follows information drawn from the founder’s will. Made up of architectural components, paintings, wooden models, stones, maps, and a manuscript narrative, the composition was designed to evoke the Holy Land in England. A map of the Holy Land preserved in the Bodleian Library seems to be the only component to have survived. The article studies the installation in relation to the widespread European tradition of relocating the Holy Land to Europe, and discusses in greater detail the incorporation of a map of the Holy Land into the category of fifteenth-century devotional imagery. The first section of the article outlines the principal layout of the chapel as it emerges from the formulation of the rubrics. The second section details the collection of objects deposited in the chapel. A comparison with fifteenth-century devotional and pilgrimage imagery enables us to specify the exact composition of items. The third section focuses on the map of the Holy Land, discussing several features exclusive to MS Douce 389 as well as general features of the format. The last section presents the installation as an elaborate mimesis of the Holy Land.

The object of this essay is to illustrate how the memory of the Foibe has been diffused in the Italian media since the end of the Second World War. In particular, this text will explore how certain paradigms of representation, which are characteristic of the memory of the Holocaust, have also been adopted to portray the group of violent events which we collectively call Foibe. These public discourses have been particularly reaffirmed during the last thirty years. Initially, we will introduce the subject with a brief historiographical reconstruction of how the theme of the Holocaust has been compared to the Foibe by historians. A second part will follow in which we will dive into the institutional politics that have been bent to the creation of a public memory of the Foibe based on that comparison. In the final part, we will analyze the modalities through which the paradigm of the Foibe/Holocaust has found effective expression through the realization of TV transmissions and fictional televised programs on the subject. Via the analysis of several moments, we will see how certain rhetorical and metaphorical themes persist out of preceding representations of the Holocaust, which were facilitated by the same media channels.

Le manuel d'Artémidore de Daldis - Onirocriticon (La clé des songes), écrit à la fin du IIe siècle, est riche de détails concernant l'image mentale, son statut et son potentiel polysémique. L'auteur enquête pour savoir si l'image peut avoir plusieurs significations ou une seule, puis comment sa signification change en fonction des circonstances et enfin comment les différentes images peuvent avoir la même signification. L'auteur évoque ensuite les critères iconographiques, critères qui aident à mieux comprendre les relations entre les attributs et les dieux. Artémidore met en relation des symboles simples avec des thèmes plus complexes; ce même type d'associations n'est pas sans évoquer ce que nous rencontrons dans l'iconographie plastique. Cette démarche n'avait, jusqu'alors, jamais été entreprise. Les explications des images mythologiques que donne l'onirocrite ont déjà permis de comprendre mieux leur utilisation dans l'art funéraire et ont révélé leur mode de fonctionnement imaginaire (see M.T. Olszewski, Artémidore, mythologie et symbolique funéraire, Archeologia (Warsaw) 52, 2001, pp. 39-60).

In this article, I draw on a photograph by the eminent Hungarian-American photographer André Kertész (1894–1985) to point toward a phenomenology of aesthetic encounter.  Shown in figure 1, this photograph is Kertész’s frequently published 1928 image of Meudon, a Paris suburb1. Drawing on my own interpretive experience of the photograph as well as student responses, I delineate a continuum of lived encounter that ranges from partial seeing to deeper aesthetic insight. Making use of the progressively-intensive designations of philosopher Henri Bortoft (2012), I highlight a spectrum of aesthetic experience that extends from limited assimilation to a more comprehensive and engaged participatory understanding.

On 8 July 2010 the front page of The Guardian newspaper featured an attractive colour drawing by the artist John Sibbick. It was entitled ‘Meet the Norfolk relatives’ and it depicted a pastoral scene of farmers and hunters going about their daily routines. However, the image was not included to illustrate a gargantuan sum recently paid for an impressionist painting. Nor was it a taster for an article about a long-lost work of art. This drawing was slightly different from the kinds that one would normally see on the front of a leading British newspaper. Its subjects were naked. Their bodies were hairy. They were, in fact, an artist’s impression of the early humans who lived on the Norfolk coast a million years ago...

The paper addresses the pioneering theories in iconic narratology put forward by Franz Wickhoff and Carl Robert in the late 19th century, and further develped by Kurt Weitzmann in the Seventies of the 20th century. Crucial in iconic narratives are the different ways in which a succession in time is translated into a spatial relationship proper to static images. The paper analyzes the tripartition of such ways proposed by the three authors as regards ancient and modern visual arts, and verifies their applicability to more recent media, such as photography and comics. Open question concerning iconic narratology are raised and discussed.

The present paper focuses on the concepts of urban and linguistic space. It considers the city as a diamesic melting pot. Graffitism is seen as a communication channel that needs to be examined in order to better understand the urban language and its many forms.
Key words: graffiti, linguistics, diamesia

This e-book is a collection of papers focussing on the discursive dimension of the 'eastern enlargement' of the European Union, relying on lessons from post-colonial scholarship, world-systems analysis and critical race studies. The empirical material comes from discourse of 'eastern enlargement' process in the late 1990s-early 2000s .