Imagery Streams Research Articles

Reconstructing the theater of terror

ABSTRACT The study explores the nexus of violence and mass media, and the ability of terrorists to enhance their influence and resources via effective marketing of their actions. We utilized a dataset of 242 IS propaganda videos in order to examine how the Islamic State employed visual propaganda to enhance the effectiveness of a low-cost, high-impact terrorist campaign, by reconstructing the theater of terror. Our findings illustrate the positive relationship between the IS territorial control and the quality of its media production, thus the IS uses propaganda to develop a relatively low-cost avenue to global media attention. Prior acts of terrorism were risky, high cost, and required news media to cover the incidents. For IS, a steady stream of battle imagery allowed it to develop highly efficient low-cost propaganda. Additionally, we identified associations between the video’s thematic components, including between level of depicted violence and the tendency of the videos to be critical or to include religious symbols, as well as their production value. It reflects the importance that terrorist groups place in maximizing the symbolic impact of their violent videos which intend to depict their military capabilities, and capacity to retaliate against their enemies.

Palangyo’s Dying in the Sun as a Solution to the Neomodernist Mind Style

This paper studies the dialectics of modernist, postmodernist and neomodernist mind style as exemplified in Peter Palangyo’s novel, Dying in the Sun ( DITS). Set in East Africa, the novel, especially its first half with its tragic vision replete with harrowing images of sickness, suffering, despair, and death, has often been described as an example of African neomodernist writing. However, this study appropriately locates it within the context of the “antimodernist” temper of postmodernism. The research investigates the author’s and main character’s narrative mind style referred to in modernism as stream of consciousness, its historicity, and landscape imagery as symbols of the defeat of despair and cynicism, as well as the resurgence of hope that dominates the second half of the novel. It considers the development of the character’s perception as well as the narrator’s point of view from cynicism and death to hope and understanding, and concludes that Palangyo’s visionary mind style in the novel is an African solution to modernist cynicism and nihilism.

Fonds de financement européens et cinéma latino-américain

Over the last ten years, a substantial number of Latin American directors have made films that have been supported by European funding bodies; they that have been showcased in festivals around the world, and in some cases distributed internationally. These funds have brought women filmmakers from Latin America into the spotlight, and those who have benefitted from support with production (and in many cases post-production) include the Peruvian director Claudia Llosa, the Argentinean directors Lucia Puenzo, Lucrecia Martel and Celina Murga, the Paraguayan Paz Encina, the Chilean Dominga Sotomayor, and the Mexican Yulene Olaizola, among others. This creates the curious scenario whereby Europe is instrumental in co-creating a boom in Latin American women’s filmmaking, a scenario that raises a number of interesting questions and ties in with wider debates around European subsidies for ‘world cinema’. Is this a form of neo-colonial European intervention in the cultural production of less developed nations? Is Europe looking to the world to supply a stream of exotic imagery for its entertainment? Should European funding bodies be celebrated for enabling the production of important films that would either not be made, or would have much lower budgets, and a much less visible trajectory without them? These questions will be addressed through the specific case of one of the most high profile and controversial Latin American directors, Claudia Llosa, whose films have won awards on the international festival circuit while provoking disquiet among Peruvian and Latin Americanist critics for what some see as a Westernising and racist representations of poor Peruvians. I consider the key positions in the European funding of ‘world cinema’ debates, and then position a reading of La teta asustada/The Milk of Sorrow (2009) within these debates. I begin with a brief discussion of Llosa’s first film Madeinusa (2006), as this film initiated the controversies surrounding Llosa’s depiction of indigenous Peruvians. Do Llosa’s films confirm the critical positions by being subject to a process of othering for a European cinephile festival audience? Or, do they challenge neo-colonialist readings of European co-funded projects? What findings can be drawn through the focus on single film texts? I warn against generalising conclusions and contrast Llosa’s approach with that of Lucrecia Martel and Lucia Puenzo in particular through their diverse approach to representations of ethnicity and class.

Beyond the Literal: Teaching Visual Literacy in the 21st Century Classroom

Visual imagery and composition inherently have the power to shape comprehension and interpretation beyond the literal. Today's students increasingly inundated with a steady stream of imagery from multimedia platforms including the Internet (i.e., social media – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), television, film and advertisements (White, 2012) are global consumers of media in their everyday lives yet they often lack the skills necessary to move beyond passive receivers of visual media messages. Visual literacy is vital for 21st Century learners and those who teach. Classrooms can become spaces for students to effectively communicate in and contribute to analytical and global dialogue for discussions of race and diversity, multicultural life and history thus encouraging students to become active deconstructionists of visual grammar.

Advertising Coral Reefs with Underwater Panoramas: An Application Study on Presenting Information to Prospective Divers

This paper describes the development and empirical practice of the underwater panorama system at two landmark dive spots at Green Island, Taiwan. Recreational scuba diving has become popular on coral reefs. Information highlighting dive spots can assist prospective customers with selecting their dive destinations. Underwater panoramas are a new approach for presenting such tourist attractions. The system's hardware includes a tailored cylindrical housing containing a spherical digital video camera. Its panoramic images enable people to come closer to the real underwater world. Footage can be viewed using PCs, laptops, tablets, and other common digital viewing appliances. The imagery streams give visitors a spherical preview of the underwater world at a specific dive spot. In a still panoramic image, the underwater features of the dive spot are supplemented with location-based service and tourist information, thereby presenting a rapid reference to potential viewers.

The iconic turn in American political culture: speech performance for the gilded-age picture press

The advent of the illustrated press changed the nature of American presidential oratory and contributed to a major rearrangement of the political power structure, helping the presidency to usurp “imperial” dimensions. Until the Civil War, American politics took the form of juridical, argumentative text/speech contests. After the war, the emerging illustrated press (i.e. picture reportage and editorial cartoons) favored dramatic visual performances in lieu of programmatic declarations. And by providing a stream of imagery, which made the American polity imaginable as a unified theater of iconic action unobstructed by the constitutionally mandated separation of powers and persons, the picture press created a virtual space with presidents at the steering wheel, at the expense of the traditionally predominant legislative branch. Thus aided by the picture press, Wilson and his successors were able to transform the virtual rearrangement of power relations into a real one, without any change in the Constitution.

What really happened to the 1960s: how mass media culture failed American democracy

Wherever we turn these days, we encounter reminders of the sixties. They're invoked in presidential campaigns, American military actions, and outbursts of mass protest. We're bombarded with media-saturated anniversaries of iconic events, from JFK's inauguration (and assassination) to urban riots and Woodstock. But as Edward Morgan suggests, these references offer little more than an endless stream of distracting imagery that has more to do with today's politics and economics than with the reality of yesterday's social movements. In his provocative look at mass media's connection with those turbulent years, Morgan simultaneously seeks to explain what happened in the 1960s and what happened to how we remember it. His comprehensive overview and critical analysis reveal how the mass media have shaped the popular image of a raucous decade in ways that have curtailed its promise of democracy. Morgan's in-depth study of social movements and their depictions in corporate America's print media, film, and television helps to explain why the past still provokes deep emotions even antagonism half a century later. He blends history, sociology, political science, media and cultural studies, and critical theory to explain why the 1960s have been so virulently targeted, particularly by critics on the right who blame today's self-indulgent culture on baby boomers and sixties permissiveness instead of the real culprits: consumer-driven capitalism and neoliberal politics. Emphasizing the tensions between capitalism and democracy, Morgan investigates the fate of democracy in our media-driven culture, first by examining the ways that the 1960s were represented in the media at the time, then by exploring how popular versions of the have glossed over their more radically democratic qualities in favor of sensationalism and ideological constructions. He reminds us of what really happened then shows us how the media trivialized and satirized those events, co-opting and commercializing the decade's legacy and, in doing so, robbing it of its more radical, democratic potential. By revisiting this chapter of the past, Morgan shows that it has much to tell us about where we are today and how we got here. Whether you lived through the or only read about them or only saw Hollywood's version of them in Forrest Gump this book will put their lessons in clearer perspective.

Statius and Epic Games: Sport, Politics, and Poetics in the Thebaid (review)

Reviewed by: Statius and Epic Games: Sport, Politics, and Poetics in the Thebaid Martha Malamud Helen Lovatt . Statius and Epic Games: Sport, Politics, and Poetics in the Thebaid. Cambridge Classical Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 336. $80.00.ISBN 0-521-84742-7. This is a clearly delineated and tightly focused project: a study of the games in book 6 of Statius' Thebaid. Statius' games give the aition for the Nemean games; like the games in the Aeneid, which celebrate the anniversary of Anchises' death, the context is funereal. They are held in honor of the child Opheltes (Archemorus), who was fortuitously crushed by a giant serpent while his nurse, Hypsipyle, related the story of the crime of the Lemnian women and her own affair with Jason to the Argive leaders. The games mark the end of the first half of the epic, and constitute the final digression before the battle narrative begins. The games are also a ludic prelude to the war that follows, a microcosm of the agon that unfolds in the second half of the epic. Both structurally and thematically, they are central to the poem. [End Page 113] Lovatt devotes one chapter to each of the events in Statius' games: the chariot race, the footrace, the discus, the boxing, the wrestling, the sword fight, and the archery competition. Her methodology is straightforward: she uses the games as a way to reread Statius' interaction with his epic predecessors and contemporaries, and uses them to explore themes and motifs that reverberate throughout the Thebaid as a whole. Thus, each chapter is structured around an intertextual analysis of Statius' sources followed by an intratextual analysis that takes a theme from the event and traces it through the rest of the poem. The bibliography is comprehensive, and on the whole this is a clearly written and engaging book, though there are some non sequiturs and points where transitions between ideas could be clearer. The introduction is a bit of a hodgepodge, lumping together a (very) brief examination of Roman concepts of games, a survey of how epic poets refer to their games, Roman epic writers' playing of Vergil against Homer in their treatment of games, and a comparison of the programs of the games in Homer, Vergil, Silius, and Statius with the programs of the Olympic games and the Roman ludi circenses. These are all interesting topics, but how they fit together conceptually is unclear, and they receive rather cursory treatment. Sadly lacking is a discussion of the games within the structure of the poem as a whole, and particularly their relationship to the bizarre story of Hypsipyle and Opheltes in book 5. Lovatt comes into her own, however, when she turns to close readings of the text. Space does not permit a summary of her many fine observations; let me cite a few representative points. She clearly shows that throughout book 6 "there is a persistent stream of imagery about the process of writing, reacting to poetry itself, a metanarrative in which he explores intertextual competitions, and reflects on the role of epic poetry under Domitian" (25). Her careful attention to Statius' multiple sources amply demonstrates how Statius' highly crafted, densely allusive text rewards close reading. The related themes of audience, spectator, and spectacle are examined from various viewpoints in the different chapters; chapter 2 in particular brings out the political dimensions of spectacles and competitions in imperial Rome. Chapter 4, "The Boxing," explores the play of national identities in the Thebaid, and in so doing makes some significant points about how Vergil constructs and complicates Roman identity in the Aeneid. Chapter 7, "The Archery," ends with a fine discussion of the emphasis on lack of control in the archery competition and its relation to the poetics of the epic as a whole: "It is not clear that Statius himself is even in control of his poem, as it veers chaotically into digression and excess. The teleological drive of epic narrative carries us into ever more horrific atrocity: there is no moral centre to this poem" (305). Lovatt is clearly not of the school that finds order and reconciliation at the end of the poem. Criticism...

Image Mosaicing from Video Sequences

The task of assembling individual frames from a video stream into a single giant sized image is known as image mosaicing. The present scenario deals with a real world situation where the video frames and the digital flight data are obtained from a sensor mounted on an aircraft. The paper describes different approaches of automatic image mosaicing suitable for the present application.The analytical method finds out matching points between the successive image pairs using some sort of similarity measures and use generalized transformation equation to calculate translation, rotation and scaling. The Fourier method uses Fourier transform to calculate the translation and rotation between successive image frames and assemble the images on a large geo-referenced canvas. In both the cases, perspective distortion in the image due to forward-looking sensor is eliminated.The algorithms, implemented in a SGI workstation, are used to generate mosaics of terrain from the stream of video imagery obtained during actual flight trial of an aircraft and results presented.