Place Image Research Articles

Joseph R. Wiebe, The Place of Imagination: Wendell Berry and the Poetics of Community, Affection, and Identity

Joseph R. Wiebe, <i>The Place of Imagination: Wendell Berry and the Poetics of Community, Affection, and Identity</i>

Retrospection and state of sports marketing and sponsorship research in IJSMS from 1999 to 2015

PurposeBased on the increasing significance and proliferation of sports marketing and sponsorship, it is important to explore the state of sports marketing and sponsorship research, assess the development of sponsorship-related research, and grasp its future directions. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to help scholars understand future research directions to improve our knowledge of sports marketing and sponsorship.Design/methodology/approachThis study used content analysis that incorporated three multidimensional measures and applied social network analysis in order to identify the knowledge structure of sponsorship research. The authors conducted content analysis to assess the status of the nature of sports marketing and sponsorship in the International Journal of Sports Marketing & Sponsorship (IJSMS). The authors coded 282 articles published in the IJSMS from 1999 through 2015 using three multidimensional measures.FindingsAnalyzing research trends in specific academic fields helps improve and provide understanding of research practices and future research directions to improve knowledge, in this case about sports marketing and sponsorship. This study is the most up-to-date research trend study regarding sports marketing and sponsorship (December 2015). Compared with previous trend studies that have focused on research purpose, research perspective, statistical method, and subject area, this study offers a more detailed analysis based on a wider set of concepts such as game types, individual authors, affiliated organizations, countries of origin, etc. Furthermore, social network analysis was used to identify the knowledge structure of sponsorship research in the IJSMS. The study provides valuable insight into the challenges marketers and scholars face as they implement a more market-centric business strategy.Research limitations/implicationsThe study aims to highlight the knowledge structure of sports marketing and sponsorship using social networking analysis. In order to highlight specific research area trends, the process of development should be explored together with the intellectual structure of sports marketing and sponsorship research using “Author Co-citation Analysis”. Such an analysis would provide the advantage of incorporating the development process into sports marketing and sponsorship research.Practical implicationsMarketers and researchers have long explored the effects of sponsorship, an alternative marketing strategy to commercial advertising that involves placement of brand images and logos on athletes’ uniform and equipment as well as on structural elements of sports venues. Sponsoring the Olympic Games or the World Cup enables marketers to leverage the exposure made possible at a global sporting event, producing favorable responses to sponsoring companies. From a marketing communication perspective, this study makes a valuable contribution to the literature by reviewing the diversity of articles and the knowledge structure of those articles. The results should benefit marketing studies by offering crucial strategic implications for marketers seeking to adopt future sponsorship strategies.Originality/valueThe results provide valuable insights that can improve the understanding of the knowledge structure of sports marketing and sponsorship and suggest planning and directions for research on similar topics. This study’s findings provide insight into the challenges marketers and managers of corporate sports marketing firms face as they implement a more market-centric business strategy.

Weber and Simmel on the sociological form (transcription of a round of ‘Sociology, the game’)

In the following transcription, the reader will witness the progress of a board game invented and played by two sociologists. In the round of ‘Sociology, the game’ described here, the two players chose to play two classical sociologists, Max Weber and Georg Simmel. Upon picking question cards relating to different themes (on concepts, writing and methods, among others), they answer with their authors in mind, translating their approach in contemporary language and trying to address some of today’s issues. As the game moves on, the reader will observe that the players engage in a dialogue and seem increasingly concerned with the sociological form and the place of imagination in doing sociology: moving back and forth between each author’s stance and their own concerns as contemporary sociologists, the game helps them at once to bring two different thinkers closer together, and to gain perspective on current issues in doing and writing sociology. The reader will note that the format of the game provides an interesting laboratory of ideas, while not precluding humour and entertainment.

“Philosophy Needs To Find A Place For Imagination Also In The Analysis Of Action”: Faculty Interview with Professor Katja Vogt

In her recent project, Imagination and Agency, Professor Vogt addresses the gap between the philosophical theory and empirical research. I was curious about how this project aims to incorporate philosophical questions into an interdisciplinary debate.&#x0D; She explains that there is a significant body of empirical work on mental simulation and imagination as components of agency, since philosophers have also long been interested in imagination. However, philosophers tend to focus on what are called “lofty domains”: thought experiments, science, and art. Vogt argues that philosophy needs to find a place for imagination also in the context of the analysis of action. She thinks that it’s a long-standing idea that, when you make a decision, you decide between options that you consider possible. This is why her project examines the modal scope, the study of ways in which propositions can be true or false, of agential thought, since decision making is concerned with what is and what is not possible. As an example, she cites Aristotle, , who argued that no one deliberates about whether to become a god, because it’s impossible to become a god.

Silent performances: Are “repertoires” really post-Kuhnian?

Ankeny and Leonelli (2016) propose “repertoires” as a new way to understand the stability of certain research programs as well as scientific change in general. By bringing a more complete range of social, material, and epistemic elements into one framework, they position their work as a correction to the Kuhnian impulse in philosophy of science and other areas of science studies. I argue that this “post-Kuhnian” move is not complete, and that repertoires maintain an internalist perspective. Comparison with an alternative framework, the “sociotechnical imaginaries” of Jasanoff and Kim (2015), illustrates precisely which elements of practice are externalized by Ankeny and Leonelli. Specifically, repertoires discount the role of audience, without whom the repertoires of science are unintelligible, and lack an explicit place for ethical and political imagination, which provide meaning for otherwise mechanical promotion of particular research programs. This comparison reveals, I suggest, two distinct modes of scholarship, one internalist and the other critical. While repertoires can be modified to meet the needs of critical STS scholars and to completely reject Kuhn's internalism, whether or not we do so depends on what we want our scholarship to achieve.

The Place of Imagination: Wendell Berry and the Poetics of Community, Affection, and Identity. By Joseph R. Wiebe.

The Place of Imagination: Wendell Berry and the Poetics of Community, Affection, and Identity. By Joseph R. Wiebe.

Review: Unbuilt Utopian Cities 1460 to 1900: Reconstructing Their Architecture and Political Philosophy, by Tessa Morrison

Tessa Morrison Unbuilt Utopian Cities 1460 to 1900: Reconstructing Their Architecture and Political Philosophy Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2015, 262 pp., 30 color and 55 b/w illus. $124.95, ISBN 9781472452658 In 2008, Austrian architect, theorist, and scholar Gunther Feuerstein published a volume titled Urban Fiction: Strolling through Ideal Cities from Antiquity to the Present Day .1 The book combined visual evidence from historical illustrations and written evidence into a series of playful descriptions of what it might be like to wander through unbuilt places of utopian imagination. By rendering these fictional cities in a fictional fashion, Feuerstein adopted a unique strategy to avoid one of the problems that has long haunted would-be scholars of utopian architecture: how to subject the buildings of literature to the formal and historical analyses that are the tools of architectural historians. This problem has encouraged past historians to concentrate on ideal cities that have been visually rendered in some capacity, as with Ruth Eaton's copiously illustrated Ideal Cities: Utopia and the (Un)Built Environment (2002) and Helen Rosenau's narrower but more rigorous The Ideal City: Its Architectural Evolution (1972).2 One of the issues with utopian images, however, is that they often suffer from a lack of fidelity to the texts they are meant to illustrate, perhaps most famously in the case of Thomas More's germinal Utopia (1516), early editions of which featured a frontispiece depicting conventionalized representations of Renaissance cities bearing almost no likeness to the Utopian towns described in the book. Tessa Morrison attempts to tackle both the methodological problem of formally analyzing written architecture and the analytical problem of reconciling illustrations with texts in her new book, Unbuilt Utopian Cities 1460 to 1900 . She does so by creating digital models for ten ideal cities (four from the Renaissance and six from the age of industry), all of which, she …

Hobbes and political realism

Thomas Hobbes has recently been cast as one of the forefathers of political realism. This article evaluates his place in the realist tradition by focusing on three key themes: the priority of legitimacy over justice, the relation between ethics and politics, and the place of imagination in politics. The thread uniting these themes is the importance Hobbes placed on achieving a moral consensus around peaceful coexistence, a point which distances him from realists who view the two as competing goals of politics. The article maintains that only a qualified version of the autonomy of the political position can be attributed to Hobbes, while arguing more generally that attending to the relation between ethics and politics is central to assessing his liberal credentials from a realist perspective. Against the prevalent reading of Hobbes as a hypothetical contract theorist, the article proceeds to show that the place of consent in his theory is better understood as part of his wider goal of transforming the imagination of his audience: a goal which is animated by concerns that realists share.

Spaces to Play, Places to Meet: Welcoming Young Children in Regional Western Australian Towns

Drawing on qualitative data from a study of three towns in the South-West of Western Australia, this article emphasizes participants’ yearning for spaces to play and places to meet by detailing the towns’ narratives of welcome and longing and framing themes of playfulness and hospitality. We argue that towns that see themselves as places of courtesy, curiosity and imagination are well-positioned to construct a vernacular of playfulness and hospitality for their citizens, activating quality of life for people of all ages. We also extend an invitation to early childhood settings to act as public common spaces, places of welcome, encounter and hospitality.

A socialcultural psychology of the life-course

It was a pleasure and honour to be invited to present my work at the British Psychological Society’s Developmental Psychology Section and Social Psychology Section Annual Conference 2015, and I here thank the organisers for this kind invitation. I was particularly happy to intervene under this double auspice, as I believe that it is not only theoretically relevant to articulate developmental and social dynamics – I also believe that it is the only way we can address current human and societal challenges as psychologists. In this paper, which is very close to the lecture I gave, I first go back to the link between social and developmental psychology, before sketching a sociocultural approach of the life-course. I then argue that, in order to understand human specificities, we need not only to understand the many social spaces and places through which people move and act, but also, the places of memory, dreams and imagination through which they wander. I finally present two current research topics, before coming back to some implications of my propositions.

Investigating the Place of Imagination in Farabi’s Epistemological Theory

The issue of the role of imagination and its importance and position in Islamic epistemological structure, especially for Farabi and advocates of Gnostic approach, has established the chance to achieve a theoretical framework in understanding Islamic epistemology. For Gnostic approach advocates, wisdom and truth have appearance, essence, perception, and intuition in a way that imagination as a means of abstraction of objects and shapes from their material reality has an active and decisive role in creation of wisdom and truth, it can also interpret human conscience and inner being; therefore, as a theoretical means for thought and analysis, the basis for imaginative reaction is to symbolize and interpret. From this perspective, every sensory experience and awareness necessarily contains a certain level of imaginative nature and quality.There is a special type of dualism in Farabi’s approach and imagination which is related to his interpretation of religion and religious reality. He believes that religious truth is a metaphorical, artistic, literary, and imaginative truth. For him, human possess another unique value which is the value he generally possesses towards art and aesthetic work. Another important point according to Farabi is the difference between philosophy and religion. According to him, philosophy inclines towards sense and experience while religion deals with intuition, predictions, and speculation. In intuition, philosophy supports necessity whereas philosophy supports essence, and this is what causes to think that these two are of different types. Due to their differences, specific transverses have appeared in them. This division cannot be solved except for Farabi’s philosophy and his epistemology theory which is based on the unity between nature and essence (from the beginning) and totally deals with maintenance of balance.Farabi’s epistemology theory in imagination is a philosophical-rational theory that is based on logical credits and rational preliminaries and bold dependence on the relevant results. From this perspective, Farabi was creative in philosophical speech and has exceeded the words of Plato and Aristotle, and through imagination his theories proposed a new critical epistemology in associations like religion and philosophy, art and science, and wisdom and essence, which was effective in the history of philosophy after him.

Crossing the Cobequid: Meeting Places/Lieux de rencontre

Canadian studies has long served as meeting for disciplinary approaches. As this theme issue of the Journal of Canadian Studies demonstrates, Canadian studies continues to offer tremendous potential for interdisciplinary connection and co-operation. The essays assembled here were originally presented as papers at conference jointly organized by the Centre for Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University and the Gorsebrook Research Institute at Saint Mary's University in September 2013. Places: An International Canadian Studies Conference/Lieux de rencontre: Colloque international en etudes canadiennes brought together academics, artists, and authors interested in placebased cultures and in creative and scholarly collaboration and production; they came from across Canada and around the world. As special feature of the conference, participants travelled from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Sackville, New Brunswick, crossing the Cobequid Pass and tracing the movements of Indigenous peoples through the millennia. In recognition, we broke the journey at the Glooscap Heritage Centre (now known as the Millbrook Cultural and Heritage Centre) in Millbrook, Nova Scotia, the authors of The Language of This Land, Trudy Sable and Bernie Francis, introduced Mi'kma'ki as a fluid and living landscape filled with networks of reciprocal relationships and moral obligations (2012, 25). Crossing the Cobequid little later that day became the occasion for reflecting on how the land is deeply embedded in Indigenous knowledge and society. As participants travelled from one place to another, from Halifax to Sackville, across the Cobequid Pass and the provincial border between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, sharing their knowledge and learning from each other, ideas took shape and the interdisciplinary essays published here are the result.In addition to academic sessions and to keynotes by Andrea Bear Nicholas, Cole Harris, Tania Martin, and Graeme Wynn, the Meeting Places Exhibition featured work and performances by artists Alison Creba, Ray Fenwick, Eryn Foster, Frank Shebageget, Tom Sherman, Aaron Weldon, and Mitchell Wiebe, curated by Gemey Kelley at the Owens Art Gallery. The creative writers who gave public readings at the conference are similarly engaged in reimagining place. Poems and films by Hermenegilde Chiasson and stories by Alexander MacLeod are embedded in real and imagined places. Aritha van Herk's Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta (2002) and Michael Crummey's pictorial elegy Newfoundland: Journey into Lost Nation (2004), written in collaboration with Greg Locke, meditate on the authors' relationship to the places they live. Each of their readings, like the artworks on display, enacted the generative role of in Canadian arts and culture.This theme issue shares some of the highlights of the gathering with readers everywhere. Since the emergence of Canadian Studies in the 1960s, has served as both marker of identity and an object of study. Understanding Canada as and understanding place(s) within Canada have been integral to the development of Canadian Studies, from Northrop Frye's inquiry where is here? in the Literary History of Canada (1965, 826), to the situatedness Smaro Kamboureli considers formative in Canadian literary culture (2014, 7), and to the critical readings of displacement, movement, and belonging produced from various inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives. Studies of region and regionalism in literature, from Laurie Ricou's influential Vertical Man, Horizontal World (1973) and Frank Davey's cultural critique in From There to Here (1974) to Patrick O'Flaherty's The Rock Observed (1979), proliferated in the 1970s.Although early studies of region may seem dated in an era when, under the pressure of globalization, national identities seem to dissolve with their borders, these readings of local and regional cultures in Canada shaped the emerging field of Canadian Studies, often creating their own object of study as well as new cultural expressions and products. …

Exploring Young Children’s Use of Illustrations in a Picturebook

Using analysis of oral reading and eye movements, this study examined how third grade children used visual information as they orally read either the original or the adapted version of a picturebook. Eye tracking was examined to identify when and why students focused on images as well as what they looked at in the images. Results document children’s deliberate use of images and point to the important role of images in text processing. The content of images, availability and placement of text and images on a page, and children’s personal strategies affected the use of images.

Introduction

IntroductionA Delicate Balance: Warren Sonbert’s Creative Legacy Jon Gartenberg (bio) For the very first time, a selection of writings by filmmaker Warren Sonbert is assembled together in this special edition of Framework.1 Although known primarily as an experimental filmmaker, Sonbert and his career extended deeply into other realms of the creative arts. He was an opera, music, and film critic; a kindred spirit to the Language poets; a screenplay author who adapted Strauss’s 1940–41 opera Capriccio; a collaborator on other filmmaker’s productions (Gerard Malanga’s In Search of the Miraculous [US, 1967] and Charles Henri Ford’s Johnny Minotaur [US, 1971]); an essayist on both the fine and performing arts; and a leading theoretician on cinematic montage. The objective of these collected writings, then, is to expand the narrow categorization of Sonbert as a now-deceased, marginalized experimental filmmaker into a broader reconsideration of his entire creative career. This endeavor should serve to reposition his legacy as a truly Renaissance thinker who articulated, in both profound and coherent fashion, how diverse forms of artistic expression can be so deeply connected to the human condition. Organizational Approach Even for students of film history who are familiar with Sonbert’s cinematic output,2 the texts assembled in this publication are sure to be a revelation. “Film Syntax,” Sonbert’s most renowned essay, which so lucidly articulates his unique theory of montage, has been printed numerous times in various publications.3 Aside from this text, however, the other articles authored by Sonbert and [End Page 11] reproduced herein are from more obscure publications or now defunct journals, including Shiny, Motion Picture, Tikkun, CinemaNews, Spiral, and the NY Film Bulletin. In addition, numerous unpublished notes, reflections, and essays that were authored by Sonbert—both handwritten and typed—have been gathered together to be published for the first time in this journal.4 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Warren Sonbert with his Bolex camera. My Framework editor, colleague, and collaborator, Drake Stutesman, suggested (in brilliant fashion) that we reproduce these documents in the form in which Sonbert initially committed his thoughts to paper and in the original format of the journals in which these articles first appeared. The obsessive focus of our moving-image culture on the final product, especially in terms of the overall work of avant-garde artists, tends to obscure the more significant aspect of their working process. Our concerted effort in this publication was to reverse this paradigm. Like his writings, Sonbert’s finely tuned, montage masterworks were created in handcrafted fashion, using a handheld Bolex camera, rewinds, and a splicer to simulate the cinematic rhythms developed in the artist’s mind’s eye.5 This working process is further manifested by the publication of Sonbert’s typed shot [End Page 12] lists, not only of his completed films, but also of the production and work reels from which these shots were selected.6 The reproduction of Sonbert’s draft texts provides a more precise view of Sonbert’s thought processes, especially when comparing them with the published form in which they appeared. As a particular case in point, we have reprinted both Sonbert’s typed notes for a screening of Nathaniel Dorsky’s films at the Pacific Film Archive and the program note published by that institution. In his typewritten draft, Sonbert employs the term “mammoth” when describing Dorsky’s Hours for Jerome (US, 1982), yet this single, but significant word is not included in the published program note. For Sonbert, “mammoth” refers not so much to the size and length of Dorsky’s movie, as to the great ambition of Dorsky’s filmmaking enterprise. Sonbert later affirms (in another omitted section), “Deep in design and exhilarating in execution, these films provide generous affirmations of faith in the future of cinema.”7 This specific example illustrates the precision and great care with which Sonbert put his thoughts to paper with words. The careful choice and placement of every word in a sentence paralleled Sonbert’s conscious selection and placement of individual images in expressing the larger themes coursing throughout his own montage films of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. No...

Childhood, Biosocial Power and the “Anthropological Machine”

This article examines how childhood has become a strategy that answers to questions concerning the (un)governability of life. The analysis is organized around the concept of “biosocial power,” which is shown to be a particular zone of intensity within the wider field of biopolitics. To grasp this intensity it is necessary to attend to the place of imagination in staging biosocial strategies, that is the specific ways in which childhood is both an imaginary projection and a technical project, and to this end Agamben’s concept of the “anthropological machine” is used to examine how biosocial power has been assembled and deployed. The paper begins with the question of childhood as it was posed towards the end of the nineteenth century, focusing on how this positioned the figure of the child at the intersection of zoē and bios, animal and human, past and future. It ends with a discussion on how the current global obesity “epidemic” has transformed this one-time vision of mastery into a strategy of survival.

THE PROCESSION AND PLACEMENT OF IMPERIAL CULT IMAGES IN THE COLOSSEUM

The Colosseum is well understood as a dynastic monument that was key to the Flavian building programme and to Flavian ideology. From this point of view it has been approached as the fulfilment of Augustus's ambition for a large-scale amphitheatre, as serving to diminish Nero's memory as it was constructed on the atrium of his dismantled Golden House, and as a victory monument built with the spoils of the Jewish War. One important political aspect of this dynastic monument has been largely overlooked: its connection with emperor worship. Outside Rome, it is well known that amphitheatres served as a venue for the procession and placement of imperial cult images; in Rome, the Circus Maximus and the theatres were venues for the display of imperial images and attributes brought in during their respective pompae. Through the deployment of textual, topographical and visual evidence, this article demonstrates that the Colosseum also had a pulvinar that displayed images and attributes of the gods and divi brought in during the pompa. The location of the pulvinar and the mechanisms by which it was serviced are explored, as are the ideological implications of cultic activity in the Colosseum.

A call to multiple arms! protesting the commoditization of hindu imagery in western society

ABSTRACTOver the past two decades, with the explosion of all things yoga, Hindu imagery has become part of an “Indo-chic” marketing trend, which has seen the mass production of henna, bindis, yoga mats, and “sari-esque” merchandise for Western consumption. Lunch boxes, nightlights, and T-shirts with the likeness of Hindu gods are popular sellers. While the appearance of these products is somewhat problematic due to their decontextualized nature, these commodities are not considered inherently disrespectful to the Hindu community. It is the emergence of Hindu imagery on other types of products—objects considered polluting in certain Hindu contexts—that has been significantly more disconcerting. This essay highlights the connection between an asserted globalized Hindu community and Hindu imagery. It further explores how Hindu images are signified through the discourse of protest generated by diasporic Hindus in reaction to the representations of gods and goddesses on commodities—in the North American, European, and Australian context—that are deemed ritually impure. By examining the discourse of protest and the consequent apologies issued by the offending companies, this essay argues that new rituals and regulations for the appropriate usage and placement of divine Hindu images and symbols are established.

UNDERSTANDINGS OF ADVANCED STUDENTS ON NATURE OF SCIENCE AND THEIR MOTIVATIONAL STATUS TO LEARN NATURE OF SCIENCE: A TURKISH CASE

In this study, the purpose is to describe advanced students’ motivational status to learn Nature of Science (NOS) and their understandings on NOS by using Ranking Questionnaire for “interest” and “importance” and modified version of Views on Nature of Science Questionnaire. The results indicated that the participants did not see NOS as an important subject compared to mathematics, science and social science subjects. Moreover, the participants were more interested in mathematics and science subjects than in NOS subject. The results on NOS understandings also showed that the participants were transitional in terms of “evidence and observation based science” and “subjectivity” while they had informed understandings on “place of imagination and creativity in science”. They were also naïve in terms of “existence of one method in science”, “no hierarchy between theory and law”, “tentativeness” and “difference between observation and inference”. The results explained an important motivational problem to implement any NOS teaching methods to change misunderstandings. Key words: advanced high school students, motivation, nature of science, school subjects.

Introduction

During most of the modern history of the expansion of Western Christendom, China, as the world’s most populous country, was the great prize. Although the results were disappointing, as the numbers of converts both Protestant and Catholic remained relatively small throughout the height of China missions in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the promise of China missions never diminished. Despite the pre-eminence of China in overall mission history, very little attention has been given to the role and influence of China missions beyond the borders of China proper either to the Chinese diaspora or to the wider mission community. This special issue is a first attempt to explore the impact of “China” in missions beyond China’s borders. For our purposes, China becomes both a place where tactics and vocabulary could be invented and tried, a sort of laboratory for mission methodology, and a place of the imagination where “muscular” Christianity could be displayed and tested, or where medical practices were adapted with global implications. In more recent times, China missions, not allowed on the mainland after 1950, have once again as they did in the nineteenth century, addressed the needs of the Chinese diaspora in Europe and America. The essays in this collection challenge scholars to reflect more broadly on the variety of intercultural encounters enabled by missionary work, and ask us to think of this history trans-nationally by going beyond the borders of single nations or mission fields to embrace a global perspective.

Jack Smith: Notes on Some Homeless Objects

What doesn't exist is important.-Jack Smith1In affirming the importance of the nonexistent, Jack Smith insists on the centrality of the imagination in his work. For all of its typically late-night atmosphere of incense and dreamy music, his work rarely, if ever, was a continuously sustained reverie. Accidents, hesitations, revisions, conflicts, and assorted mishaps would intervene, opening up spaces that not only provided the opportunity for reflection but also presented themselves as possible appropriate topics for that reflection. Even given the importance of the imaginative nonexistent, the inevitable conflict with actuality embodied by these interruptions calls into question the ambiguous and unstable place of imagination in our lives and world. In this essay, through an examination of the nature of Smith's work itself, based on observations gained in several years of sporadic work as a photographer for Smith during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and through a consideration of philosophical approaches to the identities of imaginative objects, I will suggest that this metaphorical homelessness served to maintain an anarchic openness by resisting the regimentation of his work into a final form.-***Jack Smith was unique, both as a person and as an artist. That uniqueness, however, was never merely a matter of personal eccentricity. Tony Conrad has suggested that it was as if Jack was his own country:2 to spend time and work with him was to enter into a distinct culture with its own language, its own customs, its own values, its own way of doing even the most ordinary things.3 Whether wandering about the city with him or simply sitting around his East Village apartment, you were brought into a world transformed through a vivid personal mythology created by his extraordinary imagination, one dominated by the controlling forces of the lobster and populated by figures like Uncle Fishhook, Pasty Andy, and Yolanda La Penguina. A casual glance at something blue in the cityscape would be revealed, with an acknowledging giggle, as The Thief of Bagdad's (1940) Blue Rose of Forgetfulness. Even a simple act like peeling an apple or brewing coffee would become imbued with an oddly ritualistic character. Jack created himself, but he also created a world in which that self could, not without great difficulty, live and work.This act of transformation, of imaginative superimposition, was particularly striking when we would move out into the city with bags of costumes and props to shoot photographic slides on location. Posing against a white building with a vaguely toothlike scalloped upper level became a scene of Jack fending off a shark attack. Jumping over a fence into the sandy landfill on Manhattan's Lower West Side would (if we weren't caught) provide us with a quite convincing set for an exotic desert scene, albeit one in which the World Trade Center loomed in the back of the frame. At times, Jack's instructions would push up against the limits of photography's literalness: How exactly, do you bring out what Jack saw as the Yvonne de Carlo-ish qualities of a building, even if you happened to be aware of her role in his mythology as a debased studio-imposed copy of his muse Maria Montez? Jack was utterly committed to an imaginative world, but through his use of photographic media a tension inevitably emerged between the imaginative superimposition and the reality upon which the imagination is superimposed.The stated purpose of these photographic excursions was to provide material for Jack's slide shows, but one often got the feeling that for him they were also important in themselves. Jack loved to pose for the camera and to be directed as he did so, and the extended process of preparation, of putting on costume and makeup, choosing and arranging props, took on the character of a performance even in isolated situations where there was not even an audience of passersby.4 It often seemed to be a means by which he could physically participate in the adventures of his imagination, exhibiting the same commitment to them that he admired in the performances of Maria Montez. …