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This article discusses Kei Miller's The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion through the lens of visuality and multisensory poetic performance. Reenacting the tradition of map critique in postcolonial poetry, Miller both decries the map's instrumentality to colonial dominance and reflects on the map's utility in creating and communicating spatial knowledge. The two purposes are intensively manifested in his deployment of the visual vis-à-vis other senses. Enmeshing its capacious trope of visuality within a synesthetic poetic texture, Cartographer both revolts against the visual scheme associated with colonial cartographic regulation and erasure, and refashions the eye into a crucial means to affirm and empower underprivileged peoples and cultures. Ultimately, Cartographer illustrates how poetry conducts postcolonial critique through animating and cultivating the senses in a way that gestures beyond the binary of domination and resistance. Miller's cartographic inquiry materializes in a geopoetics actively foregrounding its multisensory engagement, which begets "eye errant" as a paradigm of geo-cultural knowledge that negotiates rather than imposes, recognizes rather than misrepresents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly we are faced with broad societal challenges that encourage us to rethink existing institutions. Yet many people also want to preserve institutions they cherish. This tension points to the need for change that can erode or discontinue unsustainable or problematic aspects of institutions while also maintaining what is sacred and valued. In this paper we ask how can organizations deinstitutionalize taken-for-granted practices while also preserving the institution? We answer this question by exploring how Trout Unlimited deployed visual and discursive tactics to push out unsustainable catch-and-harvest fly fishing practices and insert new catch-and-release practices. Our primary theoretical contribution is a model of repair-focused deinstitutionalization, illustrating how custodians utilize three forms of work to respond to threats—mending, caring, and restoring—all with an eye on deinstitutionalization via repair rather than disruption. Importantly, we show how the construct of repair is multipurpose, not limited to maintenance strategies, but can also be a catalyst for change. In addition, we extend research on deinstitutionalization by presenting a multimodal approach that goes beyond discourse, with particular attention to visuality and show how different modalities present different affordances in longer-term repair efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By going through a history of electronic visuality, from fluorescence glows in European laboratories in the nineteenth century to the computer screen in the twentieth century, this paper discusses technical image operations in the interaction between media machines and media people. Examining this set of apparatus from the evolution of a neglected technical object – the vacuum tube, it traces the history of the screen and the temporal-spatial composition of electronic graphics in television, radar, and early computer systems. In doing so, it outlines the entangled history of analog and digital displays and demonstrates the impossibility of neglecting the role of the human observer in the technical invention of visuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literatures and organising show us how, in contemporary racial financial capitalism, housing is formed through dispossessive histories and geographies. Here, we query how these enter into play in the visual regimes through which housing is seen and experienced. For if the visual realm is as much a construct as any other housing matter, finding a grammar to tap into its workings might become handy when its violent outcomes come to the fore. What is reproduced in the visual regimes of housing? What is offered and taken anyway? What might never be seen, and by whom? The article offers a tentative analytical approach to questioning what we call dispossessed exposures: the (en)visioning of homely futures that are deprived, already in the social construct of seeing with the house, the possibility of radical care for and of habitation. These ideas are unpacked through reflection on two films: Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables and Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouihl’s Gagarine. We offer these reasonings as a contribution to ongoing conversations in the renewed field of housing justice scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article starts by considering how 'the talk' that black and non-black minority families give to their children comes as a duty to transfer the wisdom of how to be invisible forward through generations. It is not uncommon to think about being visible as a social good, but this is not quite so straightforward when one occupies a body deemed as 'other.' This article exposes this tension to explore how invisibility can be understood as an independent, complex, and nuanced social dynamic in its own right by considering literature that uses invisibility as an analytical lens, providing a synthesis of that literature to offer a preliminary multidimensional model of invisibility to extend extant tools for sociological study. This literature considers race, gender, sexuality, various presentations of power, and different social systems to demonstrate a model that identifies how the intersection of power, affect, presence, and voice fluidly transfigure across time and space to create an overall social construct of invisibility. This suggests that deeper development of a multidimensional construct of invisibility can provide a reasoned and valuable additional lens to address a range of social dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western society associates knowledge with vision while affiliating blindness with ignorance. Following critical disability studies and drawing upon non-structured interview data and ethnographic observations with visually disabled people, the article opposes this idea by examining how blind assemblages construct knowledge and highlight its heterogeneous and dynamic character, usually obscured by visual shortcuts. After discussing how the research participants encounter discourses devaluating knowledge not based primarily on vision, the article focuses on divisive practices that lead to the construction of dis/ability and ab/normality, and how they can be revised by conceiving knowledge, senses and dis/ability as assemblages. The heterogeneous and dynamic character of knowledge, which the text argues for, defies perceiving blindness as a deficit and blurs the divisions between the self and the other as well as the sighted and the blind since knowledge is produced collectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent decades have witnessed an unprecedented amount of conflict around visual representations in India. The field of the visual is the new terrain for rumour mongering and for maiming uncomfortable oppositional voices. With the fast-spreading mobile culture, penetrating social media and continued legacy of the pictorial as an embodiment of the real, the visual has taken over both the oral as well as the written words in its usefulness to serve the political. Can we simply comprehend such a visual aggression by taking recourse in the enhanced role of visual media in our everyday life, along the lines of a 'visual turn'? Is the visual sphere another surface of politics? With these key questions, this article revisits certain contemporary visual events by focusing on words that float in public spaces from streets to television screens. On a broader terrain, with an emphasis on aesthetics, the article relooks at an often-settled equation between the visual and the political on the one hand and the question of the visual as an archive of the contemporary on the other. Following Rancière's notion of aesthetics as a field of the distribution of the sensible, this article has tried to focus on vernacular words circulating outside the confines of the literature and create a domain of political communication hitherto ignored by scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits the lynching photograph to consider the rhetorical and cultural practices that instructed the unseeing of white mobs for what it reveals about dematerializing representations of the state in social media imagery documenting anti-Black police brutality. To do this, the author draws on creative, curatorial, and architectural examples that bring the eye into confrontation with the state's hidden hand – the rig that naturalizes the public's first-person (shooter) perspective, the body-worn or (para)surveillance camera footage, obscuring contemporary lynching's stately face from public view. The author reflects on the staging and circulation of lynching photography as well as the exhibition of representative artistic renderings; an example of transgressive spatial engagement at the recently opened National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama; and then turning to Canada, the author offers a case study that considers the outer-national visual implications, concluding with example works by visual artists, Anique Jordan and Jalani Morgan, whose transgressive creative practices demonstrate disinvestments in repair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how competing actors established, spread, and challenged visual representations of the Chinese nation during the COVID-19 pandemic. It asks: how do official gatekeepers of meaning in China imbue their visual construction of a crisis-hit nation with pathos?; and what happens when their critics utilize the resulting repertoire of visual cues for their own ends? To answer these questions, the article first examines the visual libraries of nationalism and national crisis from which Chinese propaganda drew during the COVID-19 outbreak. It then analyses the struggles that ensued over such representations, specifically the use of national flags and the sentiments they elicit. The analysis traces representations of the flag of the People's Republic of China (PRC) from an initial satirical portrayal in a Danish broadsheet to the angry Chinese backlashes that followed on social media, and it shows how the tensions over such portrayals became part of a meme war over the sovereignty of Hong Kong. The analysis shows how representations of the nation can become a matter of existential anxieties during a time of crisis, especially in highly networked communication environments where authoritative official actors and their supporters are no longer in control of the symbols they established as part of their 'emotional governance'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay forwards the idea of the transient museum, a theoretical and utopian project aimed at dismantling the visual logics that support the contemporary art museum. Beginning from the premise that such museums are predicated upon colonial and capitalist visual logics, the transient museum imagines ways of being in but not of the contemporary art museum and the economies of circulation it engenders. Its tactics engage visuality but, equally, a politics of the body and of movement. As such, Gwyneth Shanks frames two ways of performing the transient museum, against acquisition and an aesthetics of concealment, analyzing highly performative artworks by artists Rafa Esparza and Nari Ward to explain these categories. She argues that the transient museum names ever-accumulating forces of global and historical crisis—forces to which neither the museum nor contemporary art are immune—as a practice of enacting hope and remaking the contours of contemporary art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a time when the European Union is intensifying its electronic frontier through unmanned aerial vehicles or drones, and remotely piloted aircraft and satellite remote sensing devices, it is crucial to ask what this 'view from above' in effect enables. Although creating enhanced visibility in the Mediterranean basin of migrants' crossings, the technological solutions provided by the European Union do not prioritize search and rescue. In analyzing European Union policy documents regarding visibility-making at Europe's maritime borders, as well as the rationale presented by the industry delivering the technological backbone, this article shows how the 'view from above' is not only constructed through data but feeds back into data-generating 'vision machines'. The working together of the scopic/visual/ocular and the digital/algorithmic/metrical is coined 'postvisuality' – a term highlighting the entanglement of image and code and the subsuming of the visual under the digital, or digitality. Postvisuality is framed by Europe's long history of racial securitization, which in this case facilitates migrants' data doubles becoming a key locus for financialization and the generation of a surplus for the security and defense industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article endeavors to describe the impact of 'visual essentialism' as an approach towards trans visual culture, including the violence it enacts and the mistrust it fosters towards self-defining language for gender identities. It borrows Susan Stryker's insight in her introduction to her Transgender Studies Reader (2006, edited with Stephen Whittle) that trans phenomena move to the foreground when set against an ambient background consisting of gender normative conditions. It extrapolates this visual metaphor for understanding trans in contrast to non-trans into a method to analyze trans visual culture. The author argues that, by focusing on how the figure and ground relate in alignment, or not, the analyst can better examine how the components of visuality are working together to position one's value-laden perspective on visible transgender and non/trans things. This elaboration along three proposed categories of value, namely political, symbolic and commercial, is offered to better understand and parse the noted problem of trans visibility increasing alongside transphobic violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2010 Belgrade Pride Parade represents a critical moment in the story of Serbia's democratisation process and highlights the threat that right-wing extremism poses to democratic rights and personal freedoms. Through a focus on patterns of visibility and visuality in the coverage of different protagonists in the streets of Belgrade, we explore the ways in which distinct communities perform their affinities, their right to be seen in public spaces, and rejection of 'the other'. We conduct a visual framing analysis across four news programmes (RTS, Prva TV, TV B92 and Pink TV), emphasising the stylistic-semiotic choices which work to construct the contested spaces of the city. In shifting attention to how the news images work to create the spaces of political 'appearance' and the potentials for political agency through mediated visibility, the article explores the uneasy ambivalence of the democratisation process for authorities and the resulting marginalisation of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in news coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent explosion and changes in camera technologies has had a bearing on state surveillance, amateur photographic practices, and people's involvement with camera cultures. Much of urban life is now mediated by photography in different forms—from being caught, often unaware, on CCTVs, to a far more self-conscious engagement with some of the more readily available camera forms. This article is an attempt to open up some of the issues at stake when engaging with this array of cameras, and to think about the stakes involved. Would the manner in which one engaged photography differ if it were produced by a surveillance device rather than by a personal camera? The article is divided into two main parts. The first engages the contexts and nature of surveillance technology, focusing particularly on the CCTV camera. The second locates the CCTV discussion within campus politics and attempts to think about the uneasy and challenging relationship between photography, truth and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migration is not readily seen. A vast infrastructure supports its visualization, making migration visible and actionable. Recent scholarship on the visuality of migration has clearly shown how visualizing migration is an integral part of governing it. Concepts and research approaches from Science and Technology Studies (STS) are particularly appropriate when studying these connections between knowing and doing. In this paper, the performativity of visual methods and their data practices are analysed with respect to the monitoring infrastructure of European border management. Three such methods – patrolling, recording and publicizing – are reconstructed through analysis of their histories and their present. Patrolling involves the tactical domination of terrains. Recording involves the production of documentary objectivity. Publicizing involves the pictorial capture of fleeting realities. These methods are irreducibly political. Their political significance is explored through the concept of demonstrative effects that helps to show how methods of visualising migration at once involve specific demonstrations of the European association that is operative in them. These demonstrations make visible what Europe can and cannot do. The so-called 'migration crisis' of Europe turns out to be more than political discourse but entangled with the very methods that render migration apparent and governable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article adopts a socio-visual constructivist approach to explain how the Kony 2012 video became a site of intense symbolic struggle regarding how to represent humanity in the digital age and, in the process, one of the most viral and intensely contested cultural artifacts of the last few years. The first section demonstrates that the video employs the visual conventions of personification and rescue, which form part of an iconographic repertoire coding certain events as humanitarian crises recognizable as such by Euro-American audiences. Conversely, the author examines how these tropes drew upon a neocolonial framing of humanitarianism, one that Ugandan and Western critics questioned and against which they offered an alternative vision of the post-civil war realities of northern Uganda. However, to avoid pictorial reification, the article's second section retraces the institutional and actor-based networks through which still and moving images from Kony 2012 and its associated campaign circulated. The concept of pictorial exponentiality is introduced to explain how these images multiplied in digital public spaces through the accelerating digital cycles. This section also examines the concept of digital feedback loops to make sense of the non-linear and institutionally 'flattened' social relations binding pictorial actors debating the video's representational content and responding to each other via social media- and web-based exchanges. Kony 2012 was a key marker of an era during which the visual politics and ethics of portrayal of the human unfold digitally, through social media and online video platforms as much as conventional institutions of image production and dissemination. By treating the video as a cultural artifact whose viral rise and fall are attributable to the pictorial conventions upon which it drew and the structure of the networks through which it circulated, the article reveals how understandings of humanity are visually constituted, contested, and undone in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about weaponisation of emotions through visual culture. It interrogates how geopolitics trickles down to everyday life and becomes personal through the embodiment of screen actors. While International Relations is attempting to move beyond the limits of existing disciplinary methods and methodologies to better grasp the emotional depths of world politics, this article delves into the 'method' in performance arts to understand how visual culture diffuses emotional narratives of the state to the population and affectively enables people to experience the international from the perspective of the United States. In this sense, focusing on 'method acting' which revolutionised performance arts in the United States from the 1950s, the article examines the mundane encounters in visual culture through which screen/state actors emotionally situate the audience to make them viscerally experience geopolitics, personally feel like a state/warrior and embody a commitment to the war effort at an emotional level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Roundtable on Visuality, Race and Nationhood in Italy brings together scholars from the arts, humanities and social sciences to discuss historical constructions of Italian whiteness and national identity in relation to the current xenophobic discourse on race and migration, stressing their rootedness in as yet unchallenged modern notions of scientific racism. Building on postcolonial historian and anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler's definition of the colonial archive as a 'site of knowledge production' and a 'repository of codified beliefs' in Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009: 97), the discussants conceive the archive as a multi-layered, collective repository of aspiration, dominance, desire, self-aggrandizement and fear through which the development of society's self-image can be revealed but also – through a systematic and critical approach to the (visual) archive of coloniality – contested. Based on the analysis of visual cultures (photographs, news footage, advertisements, propaganda, fiction film, etc.) the Roundtable addresses and connects wide-ranging issues such as: the gaze from above and below in colonial-era ethnographic film; the depiction of migration in the Far Right's rhetoric; representations of fears and fetishisms towards Others in Federico Fellini's work; and the exploitation of the colonial past in the Italy–Libya Bilateral Agreements on migration. The Roundtable was organized in response to the surge in xenophobic violence sparked by the Italian Parliamentary elections of March 2018 and to mark the publication of Gaia Giuliani's monograph Race, Nation, and Gender in Modern Italy: Intersectional Representations in Visual Culture (2018). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visuality is a concept that crosses boundaries of practice and meaning, making it an ideal subject for interdisciplinary research. In this article, we discuss visuality using a fragment from a video meeting of television producers at Swedish Television's group for programming in Swedish Sign Language. This example argues for the importance of recognizing the diversity of analytical and practice-derived visualities and their effect on the ways in which we interpret cultures. These different visualities have consequences for the methods and means with which we present scholarly research. The role of methods, methodology, and analysis of visual practices in an organizational and bilingual setting are key. We explore the challenges of incorporating deaf visualities, hearing visualities, and different paradigms of interdisciplinary research as necessary when visibility, invisibility, and their materialities are of concern. We conclude that in certain contexts, breaking with disciplinary traditions makes visible that which is otherwise invisible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Camille Henrot's 2013 film Grosse Fatigue in relation to the histories of hypermedia and modes of interaction with the World Wide Web. It considers the development of non-hierarchical systems for the organisation of information, and uses Grosse Fatigue to draw comparisons between the Web, the natural history museum and the archive. At stake in focusing on the way in which information is organised through hypermedia is the question of subjectivity, and this article argues that such systems are made 'user-friendly' by appearing to accommodate intuitive processes of information retrieval, reflecting the subject back to itself as autonomous. This produces an ideology of individualism which belies the forms of heteronomy that in fact shape and structure access to information online in significant ways. At the heart of this argument is an attention to the visual, and the significance of art as an immanent mode of analysis. Through the themes of transparency and opacity, and order and chaos, the article thus proposes a defining dynamic between autonomy and automation as a model for understanding the contemporary subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines an anti-homeless visual campaign which appeared in New York City in the summer of 2015, in the midst of a resurgence of public concern over the visibility of homeless New Yorkers. The campaign, produced by a police union and titled “Peek-A-Boo, We See You Too” encouraged police officers and allies concerned with a perceived decline in “quality of life” to photograph homeless people on the street, tagging their locations and uploading the photographs to a website. Using the photographs, concurrent discourses, and evidence from surveys conducted by a homeless-led organization, I argue that this campaign represents more than simply an instance of revenge upon and against the homeless. Rather, I suggest that it represents a moment of what philosopher Kristie Dotson calls “epistemic backgrounding” a case in which the people visually displayed at the center of the pictures are “backgrounded” in the knowledge produced off of their images. Connecting this singular campaign with a broader conception of anti-homeless actions, I suggest that we might understand the relationship of visuality and homelessness as one which relies on revanchism for its political logic but produces the simultaneous absence and presence of homeless people through epistemic backgrounding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary organizations increasingly rely on images, logos, videos, building materials, graphic and product design, and a range of other material and visual artifacts to compete, communicate, form identity and organize their activities. This Special Issue focuses on materiality and visuality in the course of objectifying and reacting to novel ideas, and, more broadly, contributes to organizational theory by articulating the emergent contours of a material and visual turn in the study of organizations. In this Introduction, we provide an overview of research on materiality and visuality. Drawing on the articles in the special issue, we further explore the affordances and limits of the material and visual dimensions of organizing in relation to novelty. We conclude by pointing out theoretical avenues for advancing multimodal research, and discuss some of the ethical, pragmatic and identity-related challenges that a material and visual turn could pose for organizational research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through its specific rhetorical potential that is distinct from verbal text, visual material facilitates and plays a pivotal role in linking novel phenomena to established and taken-for-granted social categories and discourses within the social stock of knowledge. Employing data from the worldwide news coverage of the global financial crisis in the Financial Times between 2008 and 2012, we analyse sensemaking and sensegiving efforts in the business media. We identify a set of specific multimodal compositions that construct and shape a limited number of narratives on the global financial crisis through distinct relationships between visual and verbal text. By outlining how multimodal compositions enhance representation, theorization, resonance, and perceived validity of narratives, we contribute to the phenomenological tradition in institutional organization theory and to research on multimodal meaning construction. We argue that elaborate multimodal compositions of verbal text, images, and other visual artifacts constitute a key resource for sensemaking and, consequently, sensegiving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use a visual semiotic approach to explore how BP utilized the power of the visual after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. Through the careful construction and use of images on its corporate website, BP narrated a visual story that helped the company construct a “logic of representation” when its “logic of practice” became problematic and heavily scrutinized. We argue that the BP case has wider applicability in understanding how companies deploy the visual to create a reality that averts the limelight from risky practices, aid their post-disaster image restoration efforts, or even enhance greenwashing practices when decoupling is exposed. The study adds to a growing literature that raises the importance of visual literacy for both management practitioners and researchers of organizations. It also adds to the literature on greenwashing by showcasing the role of visual imagery in shaping green communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction briefly sketches the relationship between Europe and photography from its earliest days, through the experiments of the 1920s, and into the post-war years. This history is the background for approaching the contemporary concerns of European photography today. Concerns discussed include: the fluidity of Europe’s borders, the commemoration and integration of mass violence, the marginalization of non-citizens, the fallout of the end of industrial capitalism, and the responsibility of the viewers of the photographs in which these issues are envisioned. In addition, the appropriateness of photography, as well as its inadequacy to the task of documenting and imagining the current challenges to Europe, is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities around the world are suffering from mobility infrastructure crises. Governments are responding to these crises through different ‘fixes’. Mobilities researchers have analysed these fixes in terms of who they privilege and who they neglect. Yet little has been said about the actual materials that are used to garner support for these fixes, with analysis often focusing on the symbolic rhetoric of talk and text. This article develops geographical thought about the material agency of images by reflecting on four types of image-object used by WestConnex, a private motorway that is the proposed ‘fix’ to Sydney’s drivetime crisis. It does this to speculate on how different forms of geovisualisation might gain their authority through the material agencies of the images themselves, rather than just being the passive representations of a supposedly dominant power. In doing so, this article develops geographical understandings of the multiple ways that images participate in the production of future infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I will discuss the portrayal of Indira Gandhi in Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s graphic novel entitled Delhi Calm. Ghosh nicknames her Mother Moon. I will look at issues such as the conflation of the figure of the Mother Goddess and Indira Gandhi; the obliteration of the aspects of her feminine sexuality; the idea of the body politic and the body natural (for instance, the way in which her relationships with her son and her father are portrayed) and also, her political role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion through the lens of visuality and multisensory poetic performance. Reenacting the tradition of map critique in postcolonial poetry, Miller both decries the map’s instrumentality to colonial dominance and reflects on the map’s utility in creating and communicating spatial knowledge. The two purposes are intensively manifested in his deployment of the visual vis-à-vis other senses. Enmeshing its capacious trope of visuality within a synesthetic poetic texture, Cartographer both revolts against the visual scheme associated with colonial cartographic regulation and erasure, and refashions the eye into a crucial means to affirm and empower underprivileged peoples and cultures. Ultimately, Cartographer illustrates how poetry conducts postcolonial critique through animating and cultivating the senses in a way that gestures beyond the binary of domination and resistance. Miller’s cartographic inquiry materializes in a geopoetics actively foregrounding its multisensory engagement, which begets “eye errant” as a paradigm of geo-cultural knowledge that negotiates rather than imposes, recognizes rather than misrepresents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legitimacy and legitimation practices are key constructs in the neo-institutional literature. So far, much scholarship has drawn on ideational and discursive approaches of legitimation. Yet, the organizational world has become increasingly iconographical, and visuals seem to have been at the core of contemporary legitimacy claims. This research investigates the visual artifacts and practices embedded in the elaboration of legitimacy claims. Through an iconographic lens applied to practices unfolding in a meeting room, this research emphasizes the image-screen and image-object iconographies involved in the elaboration of legitimation claims. Visual practices elicit symbolic spaces that organizational actors may then mobilize as worlds of justification and legitimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While some scholars claim that games are not primarily visual texts, the horror genre is obsessed with vision and practices of looking. The aesthetic concept of horror vacui describes aspects of this obsession. Horror vacui is the fear of empty space that results in the over-marking of visual space, excessive decoration that threatens to overwhelm what is being decorated, the stuffing of gaps and caesura with further representation. Shed of its standard aesthetic meaning, horror vacui could also be used to describe the fear operable in off-screen space, the monstrous unseen that lies outside the frame and constantly threatens to appear within it. Forced to move through this blind space, horror games create the conditions for excessive representation and practices of looking that erupt around the threat of the unrepresentable and invisible. In recent horror games this threat is mobilized by anxieties concerning online and networked culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The way we see war – its visuality – is ever changing and dynamic. Despite the theoretical variety in International Relations (IR) scholarship, the themes of visuality, photography, and media have not been considered in a systematic fashion. The positivist core of IR is limited in its capacity to consider these themes outside of a cause-and-effect framework. This results in media mainly discussed in terms of its influence on international politics via its impact on (primarily American) foreign policy. The media and foreign policy literature follows this legacy; it arose as a response to post Cold War events and technological shifts. Similarly, the Revolution in Military Affairs of the 1990s opened up a space for strategic studies to address media and visuality. Recent literature from strategic studies engages with cultural and social theory in a way that shows how such tools may be used for exploitation as well as emancipation. In opposition, the post-positivist research tradition of critical IR theory problematizes the world created by rationalist–objectivist social science and seeks answers to constitutive questions about the construction, production, and performance of actors and structures in International Politics. Flowing from this, the visual securitization program rejects the rationalism of the media and foreign policy literature, while still investigating the links between media and decision-makers. Overall, critical IR theory has carved a productive space for dealing with these themes by breaking away completely from the rationalist legacy and putting forward a more hermeneutic – as opposed to positivistic – approach to the subject. This review concludes that the way IR has so far dealt with these themes narrows our field of vision and prevents us from envisioning the broader regime of representation of war photography, a claim to be upheld in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, ethnographic research developed within the graffiti community of Lisbon is the starting point for a reflection regarding the social condition of the young members of this community. The graffiti writers live between two social and cultural universes, building complex strategies to manage identity and everyday life. Graffiti represents for many young people a ground for struggle and transgression, a chance to reject the law and hegemonic normatives, an arena where they experiment excitement, risk, heroic conduct and sometimes painful sanctions. In a security-prone society, danger becomes a space for freedom, where young writers challenge the limits of life and normative boundaries. This is often why there is a feeling of release and autonomy and of escaping the disciplinary control of social norms and worldly habits. This is why the nature of their exploits appears to be endowed with greatness and heroism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses recent (2009) work of Australian-born, British-based hyperrealist sculptor, Ron Mueck, in order to show how it not only engages with a range of specific contemporary concerns and debates, but also operates as a visual deconstruction of Cartesian subjectivity. In order to identify Mueck’s deconstructive practice, the article uses a combination of multimodal, sensory and discourse analyses to situate Mueck’s work discursively and institutionally, and to explore the ways in which it provokes reader engagement. As the author identifies, each of the works – Youth, Still life and Drift – addresses specific issues and they all provoke a self-reflexive engagement that brings together all aspects of viewer engagement (sensory, emotional, intellectual, spiritual), challenging the mind/body dichotomy that characterizes the Cartesian subject. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines historical transformations in the relationship between the image, time, and knowledge after the war. One site to investigate these changes in representation is at the locus of science, design, film and architecture in the works of Charles and Ray Eames and Gyorgy Kepes for the Center for Advanced Visual Study at MIT and in the interests of science education. In these works, including many science education and pedagogy films, the nature of the image, the materiality of vision, and the relationship between documentation and communication were being aggressively rethought. All these projects were deeply invested in the emergent terms of cybernetics and electronic media. Ontology, documentation, and representation were seemingly replaced by discourses of communication, performance, and modularity; the world as interface for the mediation of ongoing, lively communicative exchanges. The work of Charles and Ray Eames and Gyorgy Kepes provides evidence of a more global reformulation of the work of the document, the relationship between abstraction and materiality, and among science, aesthetics, and visuality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Among the most persistent and difficult problems in the field of copyright law is determining whether copying has actually occurred. This article responds to this challenge by proposing that judges and juries consider practices used in disciplines revolving around the close and methodical viewing of visual objects. Of special interest is connoisseurship, long employed by art historians, curators, and collectors to adjudicate the origins, provenance, and authenticity of art. Mindful of law’s emphasis on the spoken and written word, this article focuses especially on the visual analyses of Otto Pächt and Hans Sedlmayr, two art historians whose foundational status in the discipline of art history stems from the extent to which they attempted to systematically translate the experience of looking into words. The article concludes with a brief test case drawn from the high-profile 2005 dispute between architects Thomas Shine and David Childs over the latter’s alleged infringement of the former’s design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay asks: what is photography to the past, such that a photograph offers knowledge about the past? In an extended commentary on Katja Zelljadt’s account of early Berlin photography, the essay presents two broad positions on the quality of photographic knowledge. The ‘assimilative’ position seeks to equate photographs with all other signs in a semiotic universe, and to derive their meanings primarily from this context. The ‘exceptional’ position holds that photographs are indexical signs that carry a direct impress of the world, and thus carry true knowledge of the world. It is argued that the two positions can be collapsed in a radical spatialization of visual knowledge by expanding Gombrich’s thesis on the ‘primacy of meaning’ to include the powerful neuronal pathways through visual field maps and processing centers. The embodied mind requires that each interpretive event, each ‘reading’ of a photograph takes place in a perspectival position. The essay then considers cartography and the Google-powered HyperCities geohistorical platform as an example of the latest networks knowledge in the hyperspatial internet. Emplacing photographic artifacts in wider and wider networks of contextualization can expand the universe of interpretive meaning, while also deepening their inscription into the terrestrial locations of their production. Rejecting the radical skepticism of the assimilationist position, the essay concludes that photography’s exceptional qualities in the circulation of signs anchors interpretation as we build historical knowledge by clearing pathways to perspectival nodes in the bottomless semiotic-embodied topology of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Late nineteenth-century theatre posters have been neglected by both theatre history and art history. Theatre history has done valuable work in cataloguing and describing posters but there have been fewer attempts to analyse their iconography or relationship to performance. Art history, whilst lavishing attention on the modernist-influenced 'artistic poster', has ignored the representational style which actually dominated the market. As elements of a shared visual culture, correspondences emerge between the aesthetic of the descriptive poster and that of spectacular theatre. Their tendency to blur the boundaries between real and fictive space has little precedent in fine art and challenges the notion of art as the determining influence on spectacular theatre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to contribute to a more adequate understanding of the adoption of modern audiovisual mass media by contemporary religious groups. It does so by examining Pentecostal-charismatic churches as well as the Christian mass culture instigated by its popularity and so-called traditional religion in Ghana, which develop markedly different attitudes towards audiovisual mass media and assume different positions in the public sphere. Taking into account the complicated entanglement of traditional religion and Pentecostalism, approaching both religions from a perspective of mediation which regards media as intrinsic to religion, and seeking to avoid the pitfall of overestimating the power of modern mass media to determine the world, this article seeks to move beyond an unproductive recurrence to oppositions such as tradition and modernity, or religion and technology. It is argued that instead of taking as a point of departure more or less set ideas about the nexus of vision and modernity, the adoption of new mass media by religious groups needs to be analyzed by a detailed ethnographic investigation of how these new media transform existing practices of religious mediation. Special emphasis is placed on the tension between the possibilities of gaining public presence through new media, and the difficulty in authorizing these media, and the experiences they induce, as authentic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visuality has become a keyword for the field of visual culture. However, while many assume that it is a postmodern theoretical term, the word was coined by the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle in his lectures On Heroes (1841). The centrality of Carlyle's discourse of visualized heroism to Anglophone imperial culture was such that any claim to subjectivity had to pass by visuality. Here lies the contradictory source of the resonance of 'visuality' as a keyword for visual culture as both a mode of representing imperial culture and a means of resisting it by means of reverse appropriation. Reading Carlyle in the imperial context leads to a distinction between Visuality 1, which is proper to modernity, and a Visuality 2 that exceeds or precedes the commodification of vision. This tension was played out in the work of Carlyle's admirers Oscar Wilde and W.E.B. Du Bois and in the politics surrounding the abolition of slavery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses Hopi videomaker Victor Masayesva, Jr’s 1992 film, Imagining Indians, and Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1991 novel, Almanac of the Dead, as test cases through which tore-evaluate a central debate in visual anthropology about the meanings and values of indigenous visual media, and as complex representations which force us to move beyond that debate’s endorsements and critiques. Through their shared embrace of anti-visualist modes, both Masayesva and Silko develop alternative strategies of visualization intended to revise neo-colonial relations – strategies which seek to reconstruct the modes of visual mastery linked to a Western optic into a more desiring, pleasurable relation to the image through the resources of proximity and tactility. They not only redraw the territory of subject– object relations informed by the gaze, but more foundationally may be said to rewrite the ‘scription’ through which social rules are inscribed upon the body, and to redesignate what Homi Bhabha has called the ‘rules of recognition’ that regulate colonial encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The role of visual perception in media literacy is paramount in understanding the shift from a linear perceptual process (literacy) to a holistic perceptual process (visuality) by which almost all information is now transmitted through the visual forms of mass media: television, film, and the Internet The media-literate individual must be educated in the processes of visual perception and how the media use the visual channels to transmit, and often distort, information. The media-literate person understands the meaning of the primary axiom of visual communication-The more we know the more we see-as well as the next most important axiom: What is not seen is as important as what is seen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]