The Image Is Dead, Long Live the Image! Disappearance and Evolution in Visual Culture

October 01 2023 Algorithmic Images: Artificial Intelligence and Visual Culture Antonio Somaini Antonio Somaini Antonio Somaini is Professor of Film, Media, and Visual Culture Theory at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, and a Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). His latest book (written together with Andrea Pinotti) is Culture visuelle: Images, regards, médias, dispositifs (Presses du Réel, 2022). For Grey Room he has published the article "Walter Benjamin's Media Theory: The Medium and the Apparat," Grey Room 62 (Winter 2016), pp. 6-41. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Antonio Somaini Antonio Somaini is Professor of Film, Media, and Visual Culture Theory at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, and a Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). His latest book (written together with Andrea Pinotti) is Culture visuelle: Images, regards, médias, dispositifs (Presses du Réel, 2022). For Grey Room he has published the article "Walter Benjamin's Media Theory: The Medium and the Apparat," Grey Room 62 (Winter 2016), pp. 6-41. Online ISSN: 1536-0105 Print ISSN: 1526-3819 © 2023 Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.2023Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Grey Room (2023) (93): 74–115. https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00383 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Antonio Somaini; Algorithmic Images: Artificial Intelligence and Visual Culture. Grey Room 2023; (93): 74–115. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00383 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 ContentAll JournalsGrey Room Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2023 Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.2023Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

During the last decade, the phrase ‘visual culture’ has come to identify a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to the visual in everyday life. While analytic perspectives may come from gender, race or media theory, political economy, psychoanalysis, and so forth, there is an apparent agreement about the critical relation the visual has to subjectivity and social organization. The travelling of critical and cultural theory across disciplinary boundaries has given ‘visual culture’ an institutional form through new degrees, programmes, cross-faculty appointments, courses, introductory textbooks, and research publications. This paper comments on the intellectual history of ‘visual culture’, identifies cultural aspects of visual performance that have been understated in recent formulations of visual culture and visual studies, and argues that the current institutional form of visual culture research has contributed to the disappearance of cultural and anthropological approaches within visual culture. The paper is developed in relation to a case study involving popular photography as a cultural performance of the Canadian north, and considers the contribution of performance to visual culture.

Review: <i>Molecular Capture: The Animation of Biology</i>, by Adam Nocek

Мета статті – виявлення змісту понять візуальних досліджень «візуальної культури» та «візуальної грамотності». У дослідженні використано метод інтерпретації, що дало змогу з’ясувати сутність досліджуваних об’єктів, в яких однаковою мірою присутні й духовні, і матеріальні, і художні форми предметності. Наукова новизна – розкрито сутність візуальної культури та візуальної грамотності як нових об’єктів соціогуманітарного знання. Результати та висновки – немає чітко означених і окреслених визначень щодо змісту понять «візуальна грамотність», «візуальна культура», «візуальна компетентність», «інформаційна компетентність», «медіаграмотність», «медіакультура», «медіакомпетентність». Наведено процеси візуальної грамотності: вивчення психологічних процесів, що залучаються до процесу візуального сприйняття; використання технологій створення візуальних повідомлень; вивчення інтелектуальних методів, що дають змогу інтерпретувати, розуміти візуальну інформацію (за Ю. О. Аверкіним). Наведено базові елементи моделі візуальної компетентності (за Л. Г. Масімовою). Наголошено, що усвідомлення феномена візуальності може підвищувати керованість технічною візуальною культурою, яка вже стала невід’ємною частиною науки, суспільного життя, масового дозвілля, а також візуальною грамотністю, необхідність формування якої обумовлена соціальним замовленням суспільства, сформульованим у вигляді положення про необхідність розвитку інформаційної й комунікативної компетентностей. Визначили, що культурологічне дослідження даної проблематики передбачає звернення до історико-культурних аспектів питань побутування візуальної культури і формування візуальної грамотності, розгляд даних категорій як соціокультурних феноменів, а також всебічне вивчення історії й теорії медіа, візуальних мистецтв, візуального дизайну та інших сфер, пов’язаних з виробництвом і споживанням візуальних змістів.

Editorial Introduction

March 01 2018 The Random-Access Image: Memory and the History of the Computer Screen Jacob Gaboury Jacob Gaboury Jacob Gaboury is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley. His work engages the history and theory of digital media, with a focus on digital imaging, computer graphics, and visual culture. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Jacob Gaboury Jacob Gaboury is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley. His work engages the history and theory of digital media, with a focus on digital imaging, computer graphics, and visual culture. Online Issn: 1536-0105 Print Issn: 1526-3819 © 2018 by Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.2018Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Grey Room (2018) (70): 24–53. https://doi.org/10.1162/GREY_a_00233 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Jacob Gaboury; The Random-Access Image: Memory and the History of the Computer Screen. Grey Room 2018; (70): 24–53. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/GREY_a_00233 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 ContentAll JournalsGrey Room Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2018 by Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.2018Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Since the publication of Paul Schlicke’s ground-breaking Dickens and Popular Entertainment in 1985, Dickens’s relationship with popular culture has become an increasingly prominent area of Dickens studies. Work on Dickens and popular culture splinters into three sub-fields: Dickens’s relationship with Victorian popular culture, Dickensian ‘afterlives’ or posthumous remediations, and, in recent years, ‘global’ Dickens. Research on Dickensian afterlives has overwhelmingly tended to focus on Dickens’s posthumous relationship with the screen and on the re-presentation of versions of Dickens’s works since his death. The 2012 bicentenary celebration website was perhaps the first major attempt to map the myriad of local, amateur, and hitherto unregulated Dickensian afterlives online and in communities. It made manifest the fact that cultural analysis of ‘the Dickensian’ today cannot simply be a matter of analysing artistic texts or even screen adaptations. As Linda Hutcheon argues in the Preface to the First Edition of her influential A Theory of Adaptation (2006), ‘Adaptation has run amok. That’s why we can’t understand its appeal and even its nature if we only consider novels and films.’ This chapter offers a first attempt at theorizing this new adaptive landscape in relation to Dickens. It employs the idea of ‘crowdsourcing’ as an umbrella term to analyse a range of Dickensian appearances in new cultural space(s) which claim partnership, cooperation, or indeed a merging between cultural consumers and producers. While internet projects which define themselves as ‘crowdsourced’ are a main focus, the idea of crowdsourcing is also employed more elastically to examine a variety of self-proclaimed populist or participatory projects in order to revisit what we think we know about Dickens’s cultural reach in a new media era. The chapter tempers the optimism that characterizes so much new work which sees the internet as facilitating Dickens’s original utopian and inclusive vision of popular culture, breaking down cultural hierarchies and geographical boundaries to expand Dickens’s cultural impact and indeed the impact of literary culture. ‘Crowdsourced Dickens’ examines the evidence produced by a range of populist Dickensian ventures since the Bicentenary to argue that the internet has facilitated not an extension of Dickens’s audience or new ‘crowds’, but a reconfiguration of communication structures which allow ‘clubs’ to feel newly empowered. These clubs are literally and festively eccentric, the chapter argues, revelling in a celebratory sense of autonomous worldbuilding which rejects the tyranny of numbers and the cultural logic which associates value with larger cultural impact. The chapter draws analogies between postmodern and picaresque communication structures, implying that ‘new’ media theory would benefit from a sense of its own backstory. Finally, it calls for more interdisciplinary work on literary clubs, a topic largely neglected by both literary studies and new media theory which has yet to grapple seriously with the effect of the internet on the literary marketplace.

Visual Culture Studies represent an innovative approach to the study of visual culture, connecting Media Studies, sociology, aesthetics, history of art, iconography. The evolution of this field of study, thanks to authors such as W.J.T. Mitchell, M. Bal, J. Elkins and others, raises some relevant issues. Starting from the book Epidemia visuale (edited by Fabio La Rocca), this paper explores how visual culture can contribute to the evolution of media theories. Moreover, the vision is conceived as a social and cultural construction. In this perspective, different observation techniques produce new ways of knowing. The aim of the discipline is thus no longer the study of visual content, but the study of the connection between vision practices and forms of knowledge. A third set of questions addressed by the authors of this book deals with the evolution of visual culture within the conflicting and effervescent dynamics of contemporary digital social imaginaries.

This chapter traces the evolution and transformation of folk visual culture as expressed on paper currencies of the capitalist periphery from the last quarter of the nineteenth century until the eve of the Second World War. It focuses on the emergence and evolution of folk banknote iconography in the less than developed world. It aspires to contribute to the understanding of nationalism as an aesthetic experience. The banknote has a subtle ‘nation-branding’ effect. The fact that folk culture became the dominant aesthetic contour of depreciated currencies—in the aftermath of war, the preparation for war, or during military struggle—is anything but accidental. The chapter argues that the physical spaces, like a public square, and virtual spaces, like the surface of a banknote, exist in relation to each other, customising the visual culture of each and every citizen in each and every nation-state. Keywords:banknotes; citizenship; folk visual culture; nationalism; visual culture

The interrelations between culture and economic development cause noticeable interest in the academic community in recent years, however a set of questions still remain open. In particular, there isn't a lot of works about the interdependence of visual culture and economic practices. The paper shows the interdependence of accounting practices that ensure transparency in society, with the evolution of visual culture for the last one thousand years. Accounting history for this period is presented as a consequence of the stages which provide the increasing of transparency in economic units (or availability of information) to the actors interested in their activity - from owners to society in general. Visual culture is considered as set of objects suggesting their visual perception, and the technologies supporting them. Synchronism is shown between accounting revolutions and significant changes in visual culture and technologies: these are cultural innovations of the beginning of the 2nd millennium, period of the Renaissance, second half of XIX and end of the XX centuries. Joint periodization is offered for the accounting practices and visual culture, on the basis of changes in the mechanisms of transparency in society, i.e. technologies and instruments of information perception and cultural practices' reproduction. It is shown that visual aspects and innovative technologies supporting them had the greatest impact on development of accounting from all aspects of culture, and this impact can be traced only in the context of the European culture.

The purpose of the article is to justify the appropriateness of studying media in general and new media in particular in the context of culturology. The research methodology consisted in the theoretical foundations of Leslie Whiteʼs science of culture applied to Marshall McLuhanʼs media theory. The article ascertains that the principles of universalism, technodeterminism, and evolutionism can be considered as inherent not only in cultural studies but media theory as well. The author indicates methodological weaknesses of media research, which get exacerbated in the process of the development of digital media. The article provides an argumentation in favor of technological determinism of L. White and M. McLuhan, and also points to reasonableness of its re-actualization in the theory of new media. Conclusions. The combination of culturological and media discourses allows for developing a relevant approach to the study of media as an integral part of culture. It is stressed that the context of new media especially actualizes the issue of combining L. Whiteʼs theory of culture and M. McLuhanʼs theory of media, as well as adjusting the direction of media research in accordance with their basic theoretical guidelines.

Jane Lief Abell (JLA): What made you choose anthropology? Did it have anything to do with your interest in photography? Erica Lehrer (EL): I chose anthropology because I wanted to be able to tell good stories that came from sustained attention to small things. I hoped—and still hope— that seeing how individuals (and also objects) are constrained and enabled by the larger social and cultural forces that they are caught up in can create both critical consciousness and empathetic understanding. Photography was an early tool that helped justify my desire to observe and analyze the world around me. I grew up with parents who developed and printed their own photos, so looking closely at the social and material world was part of my upbringing, which I later pursued on my own. My mom liked to take surreptitious photos of couples kissing; my dad preferred seaweed and rusty nails. My earliest attempts to document, make sense of, and communicate about what would later become my dissertation fieldwork (and then my book Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places [2013]) was through photography—photo essays, and later exhibits, which included field notes and then some material artifacts I had collected during fieldwork. The impetus for making exhibitions grew out of a few parallel realizations. First, I began to see that the topic of my research, namely Jewish heritage brokering in Poland, was a source of great dispute among the people whose cultural imaginaries it implicated. I felt like I needed to be in conversation with these broader audiences—foreign Jews and local Poles (including some Jews)—alongside the ostensibly primary goal of writing for other anthropologists. I was also struggling to capture and transmit what for me was the peculiarity of the forms that “Jewish culture” was taking. These included wooden figurines of Jews and “kosher” vodka in bottles with caricatured Jews on the labels and also the particular aesthetic of the urban landscape—atavistic, candlelit cafes with “Jewish” food

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size DISCLOSURE STATEMENTNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsAce LehnerDr. Ace Lehner is an interdisciplinary scholar and artist specializing in critical engagement with identity and representation, modern and contemporary art history and visual culture, new media, photography history and theory, trans and queer history and theory, critical race studies, and performance. Lehner's artistic practice primarily utilizes new media and social practice to mine the complex relation between representations and the constitution of identities. Lehner's current book project is entitled Trans Representations: Decolonizing Visual Theory in New Media (working title). Lehner's writing on art and visual culture has appeared in Art Journal, Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change, Cultural Politics, REFRACT, and The Journal on Images and Culture. Lehner's scholarship has also appeared in numerous anthologies, including a forthcoming chapter co-authored with Amelia Jones in Jones's Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework (Wiley Blackwell, 2023).Lehner recently guest edited the first-ever issue of Art Journal dedicated to trans visual culture. And is currently, guest editing (with Chelsea Thompto) Trans New Media Art as Embodied Practice, a special issue of Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus.Lehner's artwork has appeared at the International Center of Photography, New York, NY; Geary Contemporary, Millerton, NY; el Museo del Barrio, New York, NY; Gallery La Central, Montreal, Canada; SOMArts, San Francisco, CA; and The Wassaic Project in Wassaic NY. In June 2023, Lehner will have a solo exhibition at Practice Gallery in Philadelphia, PA. Lehner holds a Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an MFA in Fine Art / MA in Visual Studies from California College of the Arts.

Research objectives (aims) and problem(s): This paper explores the phenomenon of sharenting—the widespread practice of parents sharing images and information about their children on social media—as an emerging area of interest in the educational sciences. The aim of the study is to critically analyze this practice from pedagogical, ethical, and socio-philosophical perspectives, with particular attention to its implications for child protection, identity formation, and educational responsibility in digital environments. Research methods: The study employs a theoretical and argumentative methodology, using an interdisciplinary qualitative approach based on a review of academic, philosophical, and legal literature. The analysis draws on philosophical (Sartre, Foucault), pedagogical (Mortari, Rousseau), sociological (Bauman, Giddens), and media theory (Watzlawick, Barile) frameworks, as well as relevant legal and institutional sources. Process of argumentation: The argument proceeds by first defining sharenting, then examining parental responsibility in the digital era, and finally presenting a pedagogical proposal rooted in an ethics of care, critical awareness, and the cultivation of digital citizenship. Research findings and their impact on the development of educational sciences: The contribution of the study is the formulation of an educational vision that acknowledges the need to support digital parenting through reflective, dialogic, and child-centered practices. Implications for the educational sciences include the urgent need to develop training models and pedagogical tools that equip teachers, educators, and parents to address the challenges of online communication. Such efforts should incorporate media literacy and relational ethics into curricula and educational practice. Conclusions and/or recommendations: Sharenting is not simply a communication trend but a crucial arena for rethinking educational practice in contemporary society. It raises fundamental questions about visibility, identity, and responsibility that demand pedagogical and ethical consideration.

With the powerful development of the advanced technologies, art actively engages the innovation to create a new system of imagery. As a result, there appeared various contemporary forms of media art. The estimation of such experiments is constantly fluctuating from their radical condemnation as spheres of the functioning of the “simulacra” ( J. Baudrillard etc.) up to hope for them to overcome the existing barrier between the “culture of hearing” and “culture of vision”, which in media art reaches its equilibrium (M. McLuhan etc.) In our opinion, it makes sense to take a moderate stance on the question of contemporary technological innovations, avoiding both their absolutism and total criticism that borders with demonization, whereas any changes in the artistic realm have their causes; they are connected to the constant unstoppable socio-cultural movement. These processes reflect changes in the perception and value hierarchy of the modern personality, which, with the help of technological innovations, can reproduce high-minded meanings, as well as simulate the world of horrible and ugly, or reduce artistic works only to the level of entertainment. For example, using modern media technologies in contemporary Ukrainian art projects, we will try to carry out a philosophical and cultural analysis of the nature and specifics of the media’s use by Ukrainian artists in comparison with world trends in this area.