Visual Studies

Special Issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews on 'Computational Picturing'

by Annamaria Carusi

Guest edited by Annamaria Carusi, Aud Sissel Hoel and Timothy Webmoor

Visual tools and instruments have been a focal point of historical, social and cognitive studies of science for quite... more Visual tools and instruments have been a focal point of historical, social and cognitive studies of science for quite some time, and even more so with the onset of the digital era. Profound questions about the nature of scientific knowledge are posed by the plethora of digital images and computational visualizations to be found in scientific domains. Currently, we are seeing the emergence of a new generation of computational and digital tools which are fast becoming entrenched in all research domains across science, social science and the humanities, and which are even constitutive of new cross-cutting domains. It remains unclear which distinctions become important now that the predominant form of picturing is computational or in what specific ways this makes a difference.
This special issue consists of a collection of papers that address different aspects of the methodological and theoretical questions raised by computational forms of picturing.

Materiality and Meaning in Social Life: Toward an Iconic Turn in Cultural Sociology

by Dominik Bartmanski

Introduction to the book "Iconic Power" co-authored with Jeffrey C. Alexander

With this volume, we push the study of culture into the material realm, not to make cultural sociology materialistic... more With this volume, we push the study of culture into the material realm, not to make cultural sociology materialistic but to make the study of material life more cultural. We introduce the concept of iconicity, and alongside it the idea of iconic power. Objects become icons when they have not only material force but also symbolic power. Actors have iconic consciousness when they experience material objects, not only understanding them cognitively or evaluating them morally but also feeling their sensual, aesthetic force.

Iconspicuous Revolutions of 1989. Culture and Contingency in the Making of Political Icons

by Dominik Bartmanski

A Chapter in the Book "Iconic Power"

Published in 2012 by Palgrave Macmillan

Sociological interpretation of news images inevitably take us beyond the surface of pictures to the surfaces and... more Sociological interpretation of news images inevitably take us beyond the surface of pictures to the surfaces and depths of events, to singular bodies and powerful crowds, sights and sites, built structures, and symbolically constructed narratives. It is precisely the new prism of iconicity through which the effects of shocking and euphoric events that seem well known can be explained in full. If icons are indeed stars of the social universe, then sociological analysis provides lenses through which we can better see them. With the theory of iconic power, we can make use of the light of “social stars” to learn new things about the social universe as such.

In his chapter “Iconspicuous Revolution: Culture and Contingency in the Making of Political Icons,” Dominik Bartmański revisits the European icons of the euphoric year of 1989 and asks what constitutes a powerful iconic fact. Specifically, he explains why the fall of the Berlin Wall emerged as the icon of 1989 and has retained this symbolic status ever since. The answer is not obvious. 1989 was full of epochal events and important figures busy making history. Especially the earlier, politically unprecedented changes in Hungary and Poland had opened up a revolutionary space in which such events like the fall of the wall became possible. And yet they have not attained the same lasting influence on the international audiences. To reconstruct this phenomenon is to tell a story about how the iconic can trump the political. By demonstrating what counts in public perception as “revolutionary,” “political signal,” and “beginning” and “end” of a social process, Bartmański shows the role that iconicity plays in constituting these key categories and thus in structuring our ability to notice, understand, and remember events. He argues that it is precisely the iconic power of events that turns them into “objective,” temporal markers of history.

Successful Icons of Failed Time. Rethinking Post-communist Nostalgia

by Dominik Bartmanski

published in Acta Sociologica 2011

Under what cultural conditions can the relics of symbolically polluted time re-emerge as its purified signifiers and... more Under what cultural conditions can the relics of symbolically polluted time re-emerge as its purified signifiers and culturally successful icons within new circumstances? What does it mean when people articulate ‘nostalgic’ commitments to social reality they have themselves recently jettisoned? Drawing on the ideas of the iconic turn and American cultural sociology, the article offers a new framework for understanding post-communist nostalgia. Specifically, it provides a comparative reinterpretation of the phenomenon of so-called Ostalgie as manifest in the streetscapes of Berlin and its counterpart in Warsaw. One of the key arguments holds that ‘nostalgic’ icons are successful because they play the cultural role of mnemonic bridges to rather than tokens of longing for the failed communist past. In this capacity they forge a communal sense of continuity in the liquid times of systemic transformation. As such, the article contributes to broader debates about meanings of material objects and urban space in relation to collective memory destabilized by liminal temporality.

The Word/Image Dualism Revisited: Towards an Iconic Conception of Visual Culture

by Dominik Bartmanski

published in Journal of Sociology, 2012

Is there any difference between the widely discussed ‘pictorial turn’ and the emerging ‘iconic turn’? If so, does it... more Is there any difference between the widely discussed ‘pictorial turn’ and the emerging ‘iconic turn’? If so, does it matter? The answers to these questions are positive if we look at the problem from a cultural sociological point of view. It has been observed that the concept of the ‘iconic turn’, coined by a German philosopher Gottfried Boehm, may capture more effectively the sense of life attributed to visual objects than W.J.T. Mitchell’s famous ‘pictorial turn’. This article endorses this conjecture and provides a theoretical context for its justification. It thus contributes to the emerging debate about the paradigm shift in studies of visual culture.

Extending current boundaries between the private, domestic and public display of mourning, love and visual culture in Mexico City

by Marcel Reyes-Cortez

2012: Social History, (May, Routledge), pp. 117-141.

Status and Function of the Projected Image In the Theatrical Situation

by Jasper Aalbers

"Shadow-lands": A Topological Glossary (v1.1)

by Gavin Keeney

Draft 05/20/12

Post-mortem of the exhibition "'Shadow-lands': The Suffering Image", Dennys Lascelles Gallery, Deakin... more Post-mortem of the exhibition "'Shadow-lands': The Suffering Image", Dennys Lascelles Gallery, Deakin University, Waterfront Campus, Geelong, Victoria, Australia, April 18 through May 18, 2012.

See also "Fifth (Final) Circular" (05/22/12):

http://cornell.academia.edu/agencex/Talks/79406/_Shadow-lands_The_Suffering_Image

Church Space in Byzantium

by Sotiria Kordi

by Sotiria Kordi

Being a social space, the church building is a social product. This term however, does not refer to a collective... more Being a social space, the church building is a social product. This term however, does not refer to a collective product, created through a type of collective, anonymous productive procedure, but rather to a product created by certain individuals in order for it to be used, lived, and consumed by a community.

"Expanding Materially-Instantiated Social & Spatial Relations: Almanac of the Dead as a Reconceptualization of History & Modernity"

by Laurie Rodrigues

My study engages Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991) with Thomas Edison’s short film, “Sioux Ghost... more My study engages Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991) with Thomas Edison’s short film, “Sioux Ghost Dance,” from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show (c.1894). I will demonstrate how Almanac re-imagines traditional social and spatial arrangements, revealing the historically-specific space of social relations and re-announcing the spatial and temporal proportions of that space. The novel’s re-mapping of the Americas constitutes an alternatively-networked politics of pure antagonism that simultaneously betrays the discord of “coherent” networks and territorially-confined forms of modernity, but also the antagonism that belies the identitarian subject him/herself. This paper elaborates Almanac’s reading of capitalist networks and other Euro-American epistemologies as configuring a logic of stasis. Aligning Edison’s film with moments from the novel, I argue that such spatializations imagine actors within a blank space outside of history, figuring them as static scenery to the progress of modernity. Highlighting the virtual and material entanglement of spatial and social relations, Silko’s Almanac of the Dead asserts that social relations (as material practices) are limited to—and thus refigured by—the spatial formations that they actualize. The novel’s materialist strategy for resistance evades multiculturalism’s politicized and territorially-confined model of identity. Encountered in this manner, I argue that Silko’s novel performs a necessary re-configuration of alternatives to existing, static nationalisms and liberal multicultural identity politics.

"Expanding Materially-Instantiated Social & Spatial Relations: Almanac of the Dead as a Reconceptualization of History & Modernity"

by Laurie Rodrigues

My study engages Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991) with Thomas Edison’s short film, “Sioux Ghost... more My study engages Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991) with Thomas Edison’s short film, “Sioux Ghost Dance,” from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show (c.1894). I will demonstrate how Almanac re-imagines traditional social and spatial arrangements, revealing the historically-specific space of social relations and re-announcing the spatial and temporal proportions of that space. The novel’s re-mapping of the Americas constitutes an alternatively-networked politics of pure antagonism that simultaneously betrays the discord of “coherent” networks and territorially-confined forms of modernity, but also the antagonism that belies the identitarian subject him/herself. This paper elaborates Almanac’s reading of capitalist networks and other Euro-American epistemologies as configuring a logic of stasis. Aligning Edison’s film with moments from the novel, I argue that such spatializations imagine actors within a blank space outside of history, figuring them as static scenery to the progress of modernity. Highlighting the virtual and material entanglement of spatial and social relations, Silko’s Almanac of the Dead asserts that social relations (as material practices) are limited to—and thus refigured by—the spatial formations that they actualize. The novel’s materialist strategy for resistance evades multiculturalism’s politicized and territorially-confined model of identity. Encountered in this manner, I argue that Silko’s novel performs a necessary re-configuration of alternatives to existing, static nationalisms and liberal multicultural identity politics.

"Seeing Immanent Difference: Lorna Simpson and the Face's Affect"

by Laurie Rodrigues

Published in _Rhizomes_, Issue 23 (April 2012).
Special Issue on Deleuze and Photography. Guest Editor, Michael Kramp.

THE POWER OF POLITICAL IMAGES

by Jon Simons

Prepared for delivery at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, August 30th- September 3rd, 2006. Copyright by the American Political Science Association

CRITICAL IMAGES AS CRITICAL THEORY

by Jon Simons

Paper prepared for the Social Theory 2000 conference, May 11-14, 2000, Lexington, Kentucky

The paper argues against a tendency in critical social and political theory to be suspicious of, if not hostile too,... more The paper argues against a tendency in critical social and political theory to be suspicious of, if not hostile too, the prevalence of images in politics and culture. Such critics (Ewen,  Habermas and Bordo) are shown to hold to an ideological, negative images of images that fit into what Mitchell calls an iconoclastic tradition. Bordo's method for demystification of images by means of their contextualisation and complication is brought to bear on her own attitude to images. A fuller account of images, offered by Stafford, attends to the role that images play in human cognitive processes. Moreover, certain images that emulate analogical cognitive processes play a critical role by demonstrating the ways in which knowledge is constructed by means of  broad, complex coherent images of events and processes. Analogy is linked to coherentist notions of truth by drawing on Alcoff’s new coherentism, which links coherence to an immanentist notion of truth. The paper concludes by suggesting that there is an analogy between images which emulate cognitive processes and truths that emerge from coherent constellations of beliefs and practices.

Images: a reader

by Jon Simons

HYPERICONICS: Hypertext and the social construction of information about the history of artistic notions

by Gerhard Jan Nauta

As You Can See: Applying Visual Collaborative Filtering to Works of Art

by Gerhard Jan Nauta

published in Digital Humanities Quarterly

Art historically relevant visual knowledge can be deconstructed and the resulting components of this visual knowledge... more Art historically relevant visual knowledge can be deconstructed and the resulting components of this visual knowledge — visual discernments — lend themselves to be socially negotiated. Individual visual experts (like connoisseurs) do not share some grand and undividable cognitive cataloguing system; they are attentive to piecemeal visual discernments and the patterns in which these occur in reality. In conventional scholarly communication sophisticated tools to discuss perceptual patterns are lacking. This paper not only proposes a theoretical model of visual knowledge accumulation, but also describes a practical implementation, Art.Similarities, which is designed as a prototype of such a sophisticated tool. Using a custom-made interface it records visual behavior: the non-verbally expressed visual similarity judgments of distributed individuals. Users can be assigned to groups according to the qualities of their judgments. These qualities may be distilled from emerging similarity patterns. The implications of individual judgments in different user groups may vary considerably. Emerging patterns can be assessed both according to human analysis and statistical procedures. Most studies on art evaluation are attentive to either the characteristics of works, or the characteristics of observers. In this study both are considered as interdependent entities consistently.

Seeing Double. 9/11 and its Mirror Image

by Gérôme Truc

published on laviedesidees.fr

Why is the photographic record of 9/11, the most photographed event in history, limited to an endlessly repeated loop... more Why is the photographic record of 9/11, the most photographed event in history, limited to an endlessly repeated loop of a handful of images? In a book as rich as it is concise, Clément Chéroux, a historian of photography and a curator at the Pompidou Center, dissects this “9/11 paradox”.

March 11 as a New September 11: The Photographic Coverage of the 2004 Madrid Bombings

by Gérôme Truc

Published in "Etudes Photographiques", n°27, 2011, p. 125-163 (in French and English) [The  on-line version is only in French and without images unfortunately.]

The Madrid bombings of March 11, 2004, were immediately hailed as a ‘new September 11.’ This article seeks to... more The Madrid bombings of March 11, 2004, were immediately hailed as a ‘new September 11.’ This article seeks to determine whether this analogy is also pertinent to the photographic coverage of the two events. It is based on the statistical treatment of a sample of 248 photographs that were featured on the day following the attacks on the front pages of newspapers in Spain, the rest of the Europe, and the United States. As in the case of September 11, the entire body of these photographs can ultimately be reduced to six ‘images-types’ or ‘master images’ that were endlessly repeated. But the relative frequency of each of them and the actual photographs most widely reproduced vary from one geographical area to another. This is especially the case for images of the dead and wounded, which were much more visible in Spain than in the United States. This observation then becomes an occasion to identify the effects of globalization on the distribution of news photographs in the United States and Europe, as well as to explore the journalistic practices and types of intericonicity that lead to different ways of photographically representing death.

A Visual Approach to Multiculturalism

by Jerome Krase

This is a draft of an article that appeared as “A Visual Approach to Multiculturalism,” in Beyond Multiculturalism edited by Giuliana Prato, Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2009: 1-38.

There are undoubtedly many ways by which one can approach multiculturalism and its many intersections at the local,... more There are undoubtedly many ways by which one can approach multiculturalism and its many intersections at the local, national and global levels. Each different perspective on the subject adds another dimension to our understanding of this complex, and changing phenomena. Offered here is a visual approach to one of its more ubiquitous versions, ethnic diversity, as it is expressed in the appearance of vernacular landscapes. It is argued that there is something about ethnic vernacular landscapes that can be best grasped via the use of image-based research. It is also suggested that such an approach might provide some needed focus to the inter- and intra-disciplinary debates over cultural diversity in its many scientific and related ideological forms.