Iron Mountain Cloud. On the Visual Culture of a Virtual Information Manager

The development of information technologies, the widespread use of Internet content have led to a situation where the skills of working with visual materials are becoming more popular and make a necessary component of education in the XXI century. The would-be teacher, operating with visual images, must form the younger generation’s skills to evaluate critically, interpret and summarize information, i.e. must have a high level of visual and information culture. This problem is in focus for the preparation of wouldbe mathematics and computer science teachers, because their activities are designed to form students’ information picture of the world, scientifically competently and quickly to convey basic ideas and form fundamental ideas about the world and its laws under conditions of the intensification of the educational process. The nature of the phenomenon of “visual and information culture” is dualistic. It is a synthesis of two phenomena – visual culture and information culture. Analysis of the essence of the concepts “visual culture” and “information culture” allowed revealing the essence of the phenomenon “visual and information culture of would-be mathematics and computer science teachers”. The visual and information culture of would-be mathematics and computer science teachers is the integrative quality of personality, which combines values, aspirations for development in the field of visualization and informatization of education; computer and mathematical, psychological and pedagogical, technological knowledge; ability to perceive, analyze, compare, interpret, produce with the use of information technology, structure, integrate, evaluate visually presented educational material; ability to analyze, predict and reflect on their own professional activities in the visualization of educational material using computer visualization means, which provides professional self-development and self-improvement. So, it should include various components, among which we distinguish the following: professional-motivational, cognitive, operational-activity, and reflexive. The content of each of these components and the mechanism of their formation is developed both individually and in teams. The cognitive component is characterized by developed visual thinking, which we see in the ability to transform various problem situations in the structure of new knowledge, in the creation of cognitive structures in which information is presented by creating models, schemes and more. The operational component is also characterized by a communicative aspect: the ability to transmit educational information by visual means, on the one hand, and the ability to perceive and understand educational information presented visually, on the other. The components are characterized in full and quite widely, which makes it difficult to determine the levels of their formation. This determines the prospects for further exploration, which is to find criteria for determining the levels of formation of visual and information culture of pre-service mathematics and computer science teachers.

Scholars, the general public, and special collections libraries are increasingly aware of the importance of visual images in examining the past. With the proliferation of sophisticated digitization technologies, researchers now have the opportunity to "see" images in new ways. No longer considered secondary to text and used merely to illustrate the written word, visual materials are taking their rightful place as primary evidence that document the past and influences our understanding of the present. The Library Company of Philadelphia supports this continuing focus on the historical importance of visual culture.

In this introductory article to the special issue of Religion and Gender on gender, normativity and visuality, we establish the theoretical framework to discuss the influence of visual culture on gender norms. This introduction also provides a reflection on how these norms are communicated, reaffirmed and contested in religious contexts. We introduce the notion of visuality as individual and collective signifying practices, with a particular focus on how this regards gender norms. Two main ways in which religion, gender and normativity are negotiated in visual meaning making processes are outlined: on the one hand, the religious legitimation of gender norms and their communication and confirmation through visual material, and on the other hand, the challenge of these norms through the participation in visual culture by means of seeing and creating. These introductory reflections highlight the common concerns of the articles collected in this issue: the connection between the visualisation of gender roles within religious traditions and the influence of religious gender norms in other fields of (visual) culture.

We take this opportunity to reflect on the first year of publishing LALVC , plan for the future, and thank all of the contributors, peer reviewers, editorial board members, subscribers, and other supporters. The enthusiasm for LALVC 's content, as revealed by submissions, subscriptions, mentions on

Reviewed by: Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany Michelle Smith Spinks, Jennifer, Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Religious Cultures in the Early Modern World, 5), London, Pickering and Chatto, 2009; hardback; pp. 224; 66 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. $US99.00, £60.00; ISBN 9781851966301. Tales of monstrous births were well known across Europe in the late medieval and early modern period. They were used symbolically by authors in a variety of media to 'represent and debate issues of morality, religion and politics' (p. 3). Curiously, there were more printed references in Germany than anywhere else, which suggests something other than a passing interest. Jennifer Spinks examines a number of illustrated printed publications, such as broadsheets, pamphlets and books, which appeared in sixteenth-century Germany. Beginning with instances of monstrous births in the late fifteenth century, she maps the development of such material across the Reformation, finally ending her discussion in the late sixteenth century. Central to her argument are the religious conflicts of the Reformation and early Counter-Reformation, and the role the resultant polemical propaganda played in promoting a visual culture grounded in natural and unnatural occurrences. In a world shaken to the core by religious disorder, monstrous births and other such phenomena were used didactically and apocalyptically: they were understood as messages from a God who was unhappy with the moral state of that world. Spinks begins by briefly outlining classical and early Christian ideas of monstrous births, before leading the reader to the sixteenth century where there is a 'rich array of visual and textual materials for understanding natural wonders and prodigies … [and which are] best encountered through illustrated print catalogues' (p. 8). This cultural history is laid out chronologically within a structure that analyses specific types of printed material – from crude woodcuts to sophisticated texts – together. The central focus is the positive and negative meanings which sixteenth-century people gave to monstrous births and how we, as modern historians, can access those meanings through a close analysis of this printed material. Spinks argues that her discussion 'places considerably more weight than any previous study on the positive interpretations given to monstrous births in the period immediately preceding the Reformation' (p. 10). Furthermore, she claims the evidence points to a marked increase in negative and apocalyptic interpretations which peaked mid-century. Different meanings were now being attached to monstrous [End Page 255] births in order to interpret emerging topics of concern. Travel narratives brought tales of monstrous races home to local audiences prior to the sixteenth century. Chapter 1 briefly discusses such travel literature, the visual effect it had on audiences, and the mentalities that developed with regard to those living on the outer edges of the world. Medieval imagery saw the idea of monstrous races and monstrous births as one body, as exemplified in John Mandeville's Travels. However, by the sixteenth century, monstrous births came to be seen as unique and unrelated to those marginalized races. Spinks analyses what she calls the 'culture of prodigies' (p. 23) that emerged during the reign of Maximilian I, and how the emperor used wondrous signs and monstrous births for political ends. The remainder of the chapter examines Sebastian Brant's broadsheets that brought the representation of monstrous births to a wider audience through an appealing combination of words and images, and paved the way for the outpouring of works seen during the sixteenth century. Chapter 2 places images of monstrous births firmly within the expanding visual culture of the early sixteenth century. Using the work of Albrecht Dürer and Hans Burgkmair the Elder, Spinks outlines the varying methods and approaches used to construct images of monstrous births that resulted in more naturalistic dimensions to artists' illustrations. Chapter 3 examines the images of the Monk Calf and the Papal Ass in the polemic pamphlets of Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon where they used the images as allegories of the Catholic Church. As Spinks argues, monstrous bodies 'became texts to be read and argumentatively decoded using highly visual language' (p. 11). Chapter 4 demonstrates that, by mid-century, there was an increase in the number of books that focused on...

"Visual culture and material culture paradigms for the study of religion." Material Religion, 5(3), pp. 355–356

Teacher opinions and discussions about Visual Culture Theory and Material Culture in art education are examined in this paper. Both approaches were compared and evaluated within their contents and fundamentals. Visual Culture Art Education (VCAE) in art education, specifically, has been criticized as having a Neo-Marxist or Cultural Marxist agenda stemming from Critical Theory, nonetheless, it is also viewed as being just another recent Postmodernist approach. Being a controversial theoretical account, VCAE seems widely unknown and not understood in its conceptual frame among art teachers in Turkey. Its name also may have caused confusion. In this study, art teacher opinions of VCAE content, principles, applications and practices were collected through a survey questionnaire; and examined. Participants were 71 art teachers. A purposeful, convenient, random sampling method was employed to represent a population of art teachers from various backgrounds, with various experience levels, with educational experience from various universities, working at various geographical regions and towns in Turkey. The study was designed and structured as descriptive survey research. Analyses revealed that art teachers usually are not aware of the typical discussions about VCAE. Having been criticized as an ideologically rooted theory, the applicability of VCAE in Turkey seems controversial in many aspects.
 Keywords: visual culture, Modernism, DBAE, VCAE, critical pedagogy, Postmodernism, neo-marxism

This dissertation examines the characteristics and visual images of the late Ming publications containing flowers, Sagunja, and fruits and vegetables. In the late Ming period, when the publishing culture developed enough to be called the media revolution, various kinds of books were published. There are a large number of books on flowers and horticulture, which have emerged as major interests of Jiangnam literati since the late 15th century. Among them, publications containing flowers, plum blossomm-bamboom-orchid-chrysanthemum, and fruits and vegetables are important indicators of the awareness of horticulture and visual culture, aesthetic attitudes of the literati during this period. These publications and visual images have been partially discussed in the category of paintings manuals, but the characteristics and contents of the publications, the function of illustration, and the relevance of the paintings have not been sufficiently examined and researched.<BR> Therefore, I divided them into two parts, which functioned as a visual material of plants manuals dealing with horticultural knowledge, which contained the visual images in the flowers, Sagunja, and fruits and vegetables paintings manuals, and investigated its aspects and characteristics. The former shows the accumulation of objective and empirical knowledge and information and the use of visual materials according to the spread of horticultural culture. On the other hand, the latter shows a pattern in which literati paintings are expanding and deepening as a detached appreciation culture with the rise of flowers, four gentlemen, fruits and vegetables paintings.<BR> Hua shi, plants and trees session of San cai tu hui, Cao ben hua shi pu, Mu ben hua niao pu, Mei zhu lan ju si pu, Sun xue ju bai hua lan zhu pu, Shi zhu zhai shu hua pu-Guo pu are the main subjects of discussion. Through this, it was found that Hua shi, which was mentioned as a design collection of letter papers, was book containing gardening knowledge and visual materials on flowers in the four seasons. In addition, among Mei zhu lan ju si pu, which was classified as poetry-insets book as a type of eight kinds of painting manuals, Zhu pu and Lan pu were identified as painting textbook to learn bamboo and orchid. Sun xue ju bai hua lan zhu pu is a new material that has not been dealt with in prints studies until now, and is expected to contribute to broadening the horizon of painting manuals research.

This article reports on the work developed on the first semester of the 2020–21 academic year in a curricular unit called art and visual culture belonging to the curriculum of the master’s course in design and visual culture at IADE, Faculty of Design, Technology and Communication of Universidade Europeia, Lisbon, Portugal. For the students’ work – to write an academic article – we used JAWS as a template for a hypothetical submission. Each student developed one article as if to submit for publication in this journal. The work was divided into two phases: research and writing. In the first phase, art and humanities methods were explored, concerning reading and organizing textual and visual materials. Gillian Rose’s Visual Methodologies and Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne method were explored. Students chose one exhibition held in Lisbon at the time to be the subject of the article. A ‘Warburg panel’ was created, bringing depth in analysis linking contemporary art or visual culture with Romanticism and or Modernism. In the second phase, writing was structured organizing a visual rhetoric deriving from the images already collected. Textual strategies like paraphrasing, quoting and commenting were also explored to finalize an article using a defined article already published by JAWS about an exhibition held in Portugal. The article concludes on the virtue of using academic journals as a learning tool.

My dissertation examines representations of lovesickness and disappointed love in British visual culture from the 1830s to the 1870s, an era wrought with political, ideological, and social change. This period in England encapsulates the many distinct traits of and changes in Victorian society due to the social and political issues that affected the arts, including the perceived morality of the middle class family and its gender roles, new medical theories about the female mind and body that influenced how artists portrayed women, the reign of a powerful queen, and the beginnings of a unified suffrage movement. Throughout my dissertation, I examine the overwhelming feminization of the theme of disappointed love in the visual material, theatre, and poetry of Victorian England, demonstrating the theories surrounding the mental and emotional dangers of romantic love on Victorian women, and how those ideas were further emphasized in British visual culture. By the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1837, English society already viewed lovesickness as a mostly female malady and this belief extended towards assumptions about those suffering from disappointed love. While it was acknowledged that disappointment in love could certainly cause men to feel despair and anguish, the adverse effects of heartbreak on the female mind and body was deemed much more dangerous. Nineteenth-century British society heartily believed, or at least purported to believe, that men were more rational and intellectual, less affected by tender sensibilities than women, whose soft hearts reflected their emotionality. For the average Victorian, a woman’s death due to disappointed love was not a far-fetched fantasy but a believable truth. My dissertation primarily focuses on art as material culture, taking a contextual approach to examine societal beliefs and mores while going beyond “fine art” through an interdisciplinary study of ephemera, visual culture, medical texts, and literature. Compared to studies that more broadly consider Victorian gender roles and representations of feminine madness, my dissertation focuses on the role of love in cultural beliefs about femininity, emotional excess, and fragility, reconsidering the negotiation between ideal love, dangerous love, and the reality of love and marriage. Through a careful analysis of visual material as diverse as Richard Redgrave’s tragic painting Ophelia Weaving her Garlands (1842), the printed broadside of “The Dreadful Death of Margaret Moyes” (1839), Henry Peach Robinson’s photograph Fading Away (1858), and George Frederic Watts sculptural bust of Clytie (ca. 1867-1868), I argue that depictions of lovesick and lovelorn women, in which the male beloved is the center of the woman’s world, were conceived as cautionary tales to young ladies, representations of male fantasy, and reinforcements of feminine dependence on masculine strength, revealing issues of male power, female identity, and gender inequality in Victorian visual culture.

Remediating Destroyed Human Bodies: Contemporaneity and Habits of Online Visual Culture

Achieving Social and Cultural Educational Objectives through Art Historical Inquiry Practices Jacqueline Chanda (bio) Some overburdened art or generalist teachers may ask: "With all the things we have to know and do these days, why should we be interested in art history inquiry processes? What educational value is there in promoting the use of art history inquiry processes in teaching and learning?" The answer to the first question lies in art history's relationship to the humanities and the visual arts. The humanities is the branch of learning concerned with human thought and relations. We turn to the humanities when we wish to understand the human condition, social and cultural values, and ourselves. But some might say that historical inquiry methods do the same thing. What distinguishes art historical inquiry from general historical inquiry is the focus on the visual arts. Visual arts are in the branch of learning that deal with the production and study of visual imagery and material objects. In the context of art history inquiry, visual imagery and material objects are the primary data used for the study of changes in ourselves; religious, social, and cultural values; and human conditions. Visual imagery is one of the universal ways that the human condition and social and cultural values of the past and present are expressed. It is one of the fundamental means by which humans communicate feelings, emotions, ideas, ideologies, etc. Art educators have acknowledged for a long time the importance of the study of images and visual elements in the lives of children and the field of art education. This is even more evident today as the discipline moves to embrace notions of "visual culture," which emphasize exploring and studying all the things that visibly shape our lives. The acknowledgment of art history as an inquiry process rather than simply the study of facts about past artworks developed in the discipline-based arts education (DBAE) [End Page 24] movement of the 1980s and 1990s.1 In spite of the recommendations that art history be explored as a discipline of inquiry, much of the art history investigations that take place in the classroom today focus on understanding the artist through his/her biography and understanding the work of art through analysis of style and formal description.2 While the artist biography brings to light the artist's intention and a formal description examines what one can see in the work and makes reference to aspects of style and formal elements, the two approaches do not provide enough information to generate meaning and speculate about what social and cultural elements may have caused the work of art to look the way it does or the effects it may have had at the time of its creation. Unfortunately, many educators are not aware of how to extend their investigations to uncover these levels of analysis. Erickson provides one definition of inquiry as describing, attributing (determining who created the work), reconstructing (determining what the object originally looked like), and interpreting the artwork.3 While these aspects are all a part of an art historical investigation, they do not go far enough into the practices utilized by art historians when exploring a work of art. Therefore, in the context of this article the phrase "art historical inquiry processes" refers to the use of authentic activities (asking questions, collecting and analyzing data, interpreting, speculating about cause or effect, and disseminating knowledge) and approaches that art historians use when studying works of art; this approach goes beyond what is clearly seen in visual imagery in order to reveal not only the denotative but also the connotative meanings that are relevant to the historical and cultural context of the artwork. These authentic activities incorporate approaches related to structural analysis (that is, contemporary analysis—iconography, iconology semiotics, feminism, etc.—that draws from literary reading skills to generate meaning) and explore, examine, and facilitate the drawing of conclusions about the significance and place of visual imagery and material objects in the societies from which they come.4 The purpose of this article is to discuss the value of studying visual images and material objects using authentic art history inquiry processes to uncover meanings, and by extension...

Essay| October 01 1992 Vision Culture: Information Management and the Cultural Assimilation of VR Julian Bleecker Julian Bleecker Julian Bleecker is a graduate student in engineering at the University of Washington who is working on an M.S. thesis on VR, vision culture, and technology. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (1992) 20 (3): 11–13. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1992.20.3.11 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Julian Bleecker; Vision Culture: Information Management and the Cultural Assimilation of VR. Afterimage 1 October 1992; 20 (3): 11–13. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1992.20.3.11 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 1992 by The Regents of the University of California1922 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Versluys (2014, 2015) proposed a way of looking at the visual material culture of the Roman Mediterranean through the lens of globalization. Can this approach to globalization apply to the visual material culture of Great Britain in the Roman period if we make an effort to view the ‘Roman’ and ‘Celtic’ not a separate ‘cultural containers’ (Versluys, 2014: 149) but as one container, continuously creating a new visual culture? I will explore this question by considering Romano-British sculptures depicting the Gorgon and asking: How does the visual language differ from Classical examples? Is the subject matter used in a new way or context than, or the same as, in Roman examples and if so, how?&amp;nbsp;

Soaking up the rays forges a new path for exploring Britain’s fickle love of the light by investigating the beginnings of light therapy in the country, from c.1890–1940. Despite rapidly becoming a leading treatment for tuberculosis, rickets and other infections and skin diseases, light therapy was a contentious medical practice. Bodily exposure to light, whether for therapeutic or aesthetic ends, persists as a contested subject to this day: recommended to counter psoriasis and other skin conditions as well as Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and depression; closely linked to notions of beauty, happiness and well-being, fuelling tourism to sunny locales abroad and the tanning industry at home; and yet with repeated health warnings that it is a dangerous carcinogen. By analysing archival photographs, illustrated medical texts, advertisements, lamps, and goggles and their visual representation of how light acted upon the body, Woloshyn assesses their complicated contribution to the founding of light therapy. Soaking up the rays will appeal to those intrigued by medicine’s visual culture, especially academics and students of the histories of art and visual culture, material cultures, medicine, science and technology, and popular culture.