Scopic Regime Research Articles

A View From Above Vertical Perspective in the Age of Total Images

Thanks to the technological dislocation of the eye of the beholder, the mechanical eye or both of them together, along recent decades the view from above has become a widespread, somehow trivial way to experience the world, imposing a new scopic regime. Deeply enmeshed and dependent upon technologies of surveillance, vertical perspective does not only democratize the point of view of the power: it provides us with an inhuman gaze on the world, liberating images from the constraints of naked human vision and erasing the distinction between images and maps, producing what Peraica has called total images. These topics are explored through a number of case studies from the visual arts.

(Re)framing built heritage through the machinic gaze

Built heritage has been both subject and product of a gaze that has been sustained through moments of colonial fixation on ruins and monuments, technocratic examination and representation, and fetishisation by a global tourist industry. We argue that the recent proliferation of machine learning and vision technologies create new scopic regimes for heritage: storing and retrieving existing images from vast digital archives, and further imparting their own distortions upon this gaze. We introduce the term ‘ machinic gaze’ to conceptualise the reconfiguration of heritage representation via artificial intelligence (AI) models. To explore how this gaze reframes heritage, we deploy an image-text-image pipeline that reads, interprets, and resynthesizes images of several UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Employing two concepts from media studies— heteroscopia and anamorphosis—we describe the reoriented perspective that machine vision systems introduce. We propose that the machinic gaze highlights the artifice of the human gaze and its underlying assumptions and practices that combine to form established notions of heritage.

Types of Visibility: Disruption, Consent & Contemporary Politics

This paper analyses representations of the coming-of-age process in contemporary narrative films that challenge dominant social and political ideologies. Through an intersectional analysis of Tomboy (2011), Girlhood (2014), and Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), all of which were directed by Céline Sciamma; Inxeba (2017) by John Trengove, and Moffie (2019) by Oliver Hermanus, I demonstrate how specific scenes and sequences expose and critique gender, race, class, and sexuality norms. Drawing from feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories, I identify three types of visibility across the films: disruption, consent, and contemporary politics. The analysis reveals how the selected films contest dominant cinematic gazes and scopic regimes by giving visibility to diverse identities and experiences. I argue that this study yields generative insight into the complexities of the coming-of-age process on the body as it is represented in contemporary narrative film.

The Visibility of a City in the Interwar Period. Scopic Regimes in the Photographs of Lajos Orbán (1897–1972) From Cluj

The Visibility of a City in the Interwar Period. Scopic Regimes in the Photographs of Lajos Orbán (1897–1972) from Cluj. Lajos Orbán was an amateur photographer, whose main body of work was produced starting from the 1920s when he became the employee of a local shop specialized in photographic equipment and member in local photographic societies, e.g. the Tessar Bowling Society. His photographs were displayed at international photo exhibitions, but he was organising regional photo contests and exhibitions as well. His photographs show the influence of the pictorialist photography, but traces of modernism or the new objectivism are present as well. These pictures became archival documents, and they are also important resources to the visual culture of Transylvania, the visual literacy of the people living in the interwar years. The paper offers an in depth analysis of the scopic regimes detectable in the photographic heritage of Lajos Orbán based on the ways human figures and spatial relations are represented in his pictures. Keywords: amateur photography, visual culture, urban life, “flâneur”, scopic regime, landscape, human figures

VOICING VULNERABILITY: MEDIATING VIOLENCE, VICTIMISATION AND FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY IN NORA GOMRINGER'S MONSTER POETRY*

ABSTRACTThis chapter examines poetic works by the Swiss‐German performance poet Nora‐Eugenie Gomringer that draw on monsters as a conceptual lens to engage with experiences of vulnerable subjects, that is, those that have experienced harm or violence or are considered especially susceptible to these risks. The anthology Monster Morbus Moden (2013–17), with its initial collection Monster Poems (2013), reflects poetically on how female subjects and their bodies, which are conventionally represented as weak, are simultaneously and paradoxically considered dangerously non‐normative and in need of policing. Gomringer explores how this paradox emerges from the interplay of textual and media surfaces, institutional logic and intersubjective power imbalances. The author employs an experimental mix of intertextual, intermedial and performative strategies that draws attention to the embodied and culturally iterative nature of such subject constructions. Putting emphasis on visualising and voicing victimisation, these works can be seen to probe to what extent a monstrous poeticisation of such experiences might shift stereotyping scopic regimes that produce the conditions for the widespread sexual violence against women or curtail reproductive freedoms. This experimentation, this article argues, seeks to establish awareness around the potential mobility of the concept of ‘vulnerability’ that has also been raised in recent feminist discussions.

“If You Wish a Picture”: Ekphrasis as Technique in Solmaz Sharif’s Look

This article analyzes the use of ekphrasis in Solmaz Sharif’s debut poetry collection, Look ( 2016 ). The poems in Look are constructed around terms taken from the United States Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms and describe the experiences of Sharif and her Iranian family in the aftermath of the events of 9/11. The prominent presence of sight and visuality in the collection will be analyzed through the concept of the “scopic regime.” Turning attention towards Sharif’s description of artifacts of family memory, including a video recording of Sharif’s father and a series of photos of her uncle, it is argued that ekphrasis functions in the collection as a mechanism by which to determine the conditions of visibility within the collection and, in so doing, navigate the problematics of mediating trauma and violence in the contemporary scopic regime.

Scopic Regimes of the Anthropocene: War, (Im)Mobility, and the Planetary Now in Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006)

Scopic Regimes of the Anthropocene: War, (Im)Mobility, and the Planetary Now in Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006)

Dramaturgy of Response-ability

Taking the recent relational turn in the discussion on care as a point of departure this contribution aims to ask: What are ways of a critical artistic practice that take care seriously as a challenge to the theatre apparatus, its aesthetic, its dramaturgy and to the way it thinks-with bodies, objects, materiality and more-than-human ways of existence? In which ways can performance find other modes of representation for that which matters within the theatrical frame but that usually exceeds its paradigm of visibility? By focusing on the performance Living Matters (2019) by German artist Eva Meyer-Keller, the article explores relational ways of thinking-with in the apparatus of theatre while interrogating its scopic regime for its exclusions and blind spots. In the performance, where grapes mutate into fluorescent deep-sea monsters under the eye of the microscope and where tampons perform cell division, scientific processes are interrogated rigorously as to their normative structures and presuppositions – but in such a way that consistently takes into account the theatrical peepshow apparatus in which the work unfolds. The article argues for a dramaturgy of response-ability which problematizes the purportedly ‘neutral’ frame of the black box, its objectifying gaze and the way it constructs objects and viewing subjects. Relationality is thereby understood not as a mere thought experiment, but as a theatrical practice of response-ability towards, with and by (more-than-human) accomplices.

Скопический режим и его место в эпистемологическом плане визуальной культуры

Introduction. The interest of modern humanities in the field of the visual involves systematic work with the structural and content elements of the spectacle, encoding important information about social being and thinking, about the value systems of man and society, about the nature of receptions and models of cognition adopted in a particular era. The subject of attention in the article is the basic coding tool of visuality - the gaze mode or the scopic mode. Elucidation of its nature and mode of action opens up the possibility of a philosophical consideration of the cognitive models of the era. The purpose: of the article is to present models of scopic modes in the aspect of the philosophical theory of visuality, to reveal their epistemological significance and to consider examples of the practi- cal operation of such modes in films of the 20th and 21st centuries. Methods. In the course of the study, general scien- tific methods of analysis and synthesis were used; the method of phenomenological reduction, which allows fixing the sensually perceived qualities of ob- ject-spatial screen images; a hermeneutic method that allows, on the basis of visible sign structures, to reveal the deep intentions of a visual image, as well as methods of structural and discursive analysis of a visual source, which make it possible to identify markers of the philosophical and cultural content of a visual text and the objective causes and conditions for its appearance. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that we ap- proach the visual source from the standpoint of epistemology, which allows us to find out the na- ture of the cognitive strategy of a particular era. We systematize the types of scopic modes accepted in visualism and reveal the possibility of theorizing an additional, “observational” mode, which is relevant for the beginning of the 21st century. Results. In the course of the analysis, we applied the tools and conceptual base of philosophical epistemology to modern visual culture, namely, to photographic and cinematic images. This made it possible to see a certain cognitive strategy behind the same type of way of organizing the spectacle and controlling the spectator’s gaze, and thereby open up a possible path to studying the epistemo- logical “a priori condition” of cognition characteris- tic of a particular era. The five most effective scopic regimes are considered: “Cartesian perspectivism”, “topographic” regime, “baroque” regime, “impulse” and “observational” regimes. Conclusions. Structural and discursive analysis of visual material (photographic series and films) of different decades of the 20th and 21st centuries makes it possible to highlight a special tool that encodes the cognitive intentions of the era in a visual image: the scopic mode or the gaze mode. Using the type of selectivity inherent in it and the dynamics of the gaze as the basic characteristics of the scopic mode, we distinguish five basic scoping modes in the visual practice of the XX—XXI cen- turies.. At the same time, understanding the regime of gaze as an expression and action of the episteme that dominates in a particular era, we discover the philosophical and epistemological field of study of photography or film.

Violence, Affect, and Time-Based Media in Mexico, 2010–2019

This essay examines what affect studies can contribute to the analysis of violence and audiovisual media in twenty-first-century Mexico, paying particular attention to the temporal nature of violence and of time-based media. Does the photo of a dead child and her father on the Mexico-US border, as seen on the front page of a newspaper, allow viewers to perceive the slow violence of neoliberal economies and contemporary immigration policies? Or does it merely encourage shallow cries of pity? Given today’s saturated and vertiginously paced mediascape, do feature films have any role to play in encouraging audiences to viscerally recognise the duration and weight of state repression? In order to adequately analyse the complex sensorial dynamics of audiovisual media, this essay begins by proposing a tripartite conceptual framework that recognises multiple and inter-related forms of violence, overlaid audiovisual economies, and the contemporary scopic regime. The essay then deploys this framework in a comparison of the sensorial engagements of two recent films: Desierto (Jonas Cuarón, 2015) and Ayotzinapa, el paso de la tortuga (Enrique García Meza, 2017).

One village, many nostalgias: The entanglements of embodied scopic regimes in the landscape production of Chinese nostalgia tourism

This article uses investigations into two villages to scrutinise the politics of space and visuality in the top-down development of nostalgia tourism across the Chinese countryside engineered by the government since 2014. It goes beyond the debate between the representational and non-representational approaches in tourist landscape studies and proposes the concept of ‘embodied scopic regimes’ as a more nuanced framework of analysis. It is argued that the landscape production in the current development of nostalgia tourism in China is featured by the coexistence and entanglement of three different embodied scopic regimes: ‘stop/gaze regime’, ‘flâneur/glance regime’ and ‘choraster/spectacle regime’. Each regime produces a unique fashion of visual pleasure and distinct mode of physical movements, manifested and afforded by different sets of cultural technologies. The operation of these multiple regimes also diversifies the meanings of nostalgia that these tourist sites claim to represent, which allows the overlapping between ‘reflective nostalgia’ and ‘restorative nostalgia’ in the same space. Based on this unique case, the article engages with the ‘landscape debate’ in critical tourist studies and extends the common ground between the two seemingly oppositional approaches.

Signature Urbanism: Shaping Subperceptual Forms for the New Multispectral City

AbstractErsela Kripa and Stephen Mueller, codirectors of the Project for Operative Spatial Technologies (POST) research centre at Texas Tech University College of Architecture, describe the city in all its newfound multispectral complexity and how their architectural interventions reveal a world determined by scopic regimes.

Fashioning Spanish Cinema. Costume, Identity, and Stardom by Jorge Pérez

Reviewed by: Fashioning Spanish Cinema. Costume, Identity, and Stardom by Jorge Pérez Francisco Fernández de Alba Pérez, Jorge. Fashioning Spanish Cinema. Costume, Identity, and Stardom. U of Toronto P, 2021. 265 pp. ISBN: 978-4875-0911-8. This interdisciplinary new book by Jorge Pérez is full of illuminating insights about fashion and costume design in Spanish films. Some scholars who have previously devoted attention to the topic are Paul Julian Smith, Kathleen Vernon, and Eva Woods Peiró, though none dedicated monographs to the subject as completely as Pérez. Five chapters compose this book. The introduction is a foundational theoretical discussion regarding the difference between costume design and fashion, or the tension between feminist theory and fashion. The remaining chapters are meant to stand independently, and the author warns that they do not build to a general history of fashion and film. Neither are they organized chronologically. Instead, the book is driven by specific topics such as fashion labels and film directors, the examination of costume choices, and the supplemental meanings that costumes generate beyond characters' authenticity or verisimilitude. Despite the author's warning, I nevertheless perceive a general organizational principle in which the first and second [End Page 170] chapters focus on synergies generated by the collaboration between high fashion and film; in which chapters three and four aim to illuminate what is missing (more on this later); and in which the final chapter addresses the self-fashioning of stardom, or actors' off-screen need to produce and curate their personal brand as yet another professional skill. Chapter 1 discusses master couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga and his work for actors such as Conchita Montenegro, Sara Montiel, and Rocío Dúrcal. This chapter is a must-read for anyone interested in Balenciaga because it offers new details about his professional practice vis-à-vis the film industry. The chapter contains nuanced readings of several films and the way in which Balenciaga's designs functioned in (and out of) the films. Chapter 2 similarly focuses on labels and directors, in this case Almodóvar and the house of Chanel. Pérez concludes that the participation of designers in making costumes for film goes beyond symbiotic publicity, that we should consider as well the agency of actors, the interaction with design labels, and that couture, a spectacle into itself, creates narratives and affects independent of the films in which it is displayed. I mentioned earlier that chapters 3 and 4 could be conceptualized as "what is missing." Men's costume is often a missing part of fashion or film studies. Pérez's response is to start from the beginning, with the first piece of clothing many western men put on each day, by dedicating chapter three to thoroughly exploring men's underwear. From the comedia sexy to cine quinqui, men in underwear are represented as backward or modern, ridiculous comedic relief or sexual objects. Pérez argues that we can mark the stages of development of Spanish culture throughout the twentieth century by the type of underwear worn and the circumstances in which we see actors in their undergarments. In Chapter 4, Pérez details the ways in which immigrants are (un)dressed in recent Spanish films. Missing in some movies, Pérez tells us, are clear references to the scopic regime and awareness of the coloniality of power. The chapter explores how clothes (re)produce or confront dominant race relations by oversignifying non-white actors' attire or the lack of it. Even when movies are pushing for equality and integration, race and ethnicity continues to be marked in film by the sartorial hyper-visibility of the non-white immigrant body. Pérez concludes that the evolution of these films moves from exotifying and eroticizing through garment choice to, in the most recent movies, the possibility of a non-sexual transnational community emerging through fashion and style choices. Chapter 5 takes the readers from the screen to the red carpet. In a chapter that feels a rushed at the end, Pérez explains how having a personal sense of style has recently become a requirement for actors. From Victoria Abril to Penélope Cruz, briefly touching on...

School data walls: sociomaterial assemblages to aid children’s literacy outcomes

ABSTRACT Educators, parents, and policymakers agree on the need to assess children’s learning to inform literacy teaching practices but are often divided about how best to gauge literacy development. In ensuing debates, school data walls have become pedagogically and spatially contested sites. We think of data walls as -scapes and scopic regimes that have sociomaterial force and that coalesce as complex assemblages worth interrogating. On that basis, our aim is to consider two kinds of data wall by drawing from a three year study of literacy teaching practices in government schools in one Australian state and sharing insights with resonance in similar education systems. Analysis shows that the first, more common data wall mapped and privileged quantitative data about, and summative testing results for, children and functioned primarily as an accountability tool. The second data wall added layers of qualitative data and formative assessment and facilitated valuable professional learning and development in support of children’s learning outcomes. Our findings are significant because they reveal how data walls foster integrative approaches to literacy assessment that cut through the debate. Findings also furnish theoretical insights about how data walls are powerful assemblages, enable sound educational outcomes, but require ongoing attention to their sociomaterial effects.

The mestizo gaze: visualizing racism, citizenship, and rights in neoliberal Mexico

ABSTRACT This article explores the connections between racism, citizenship, and processes of socio-political disenfranchisement, as expressed through visual practices in neoliberal Mexico. It introduces four notions: “the mestizo gaze,” “the scopic regime of mestizaje,” “generic indigeneity,” and “racial indigeneity”. The article follows the management by the Mexican Parliament and the National Human Rights Commission of the case of Ernestina Ascencio, an elder monolingual Nahua woman who died after soldiers brutally raped her. Through the analysis of visual and other textual representations, the article shows how the scopic regime of mestizaje shapes the politics of representation that foster the State’s disavowal of indigenous people as Mexicans and as subjects of rights. The article argues that, in Mexico, racism and citizenship operate as interlocking exclusionary systems that produce a racialized regime of privilege and oppression, based on processes of visibility and invisibilization ruled by the mestizo gaze and the scopic regime of mestizaje.

On the Possibility of a Non-Anthropocentric Visuality

This paper aims to understand if it is possible to speak of a non-anthropocentric visuality. The progressive and continuous increase of information production at a global level has led us to witness a specific set of visual information that, we argue, can be considered to be decentered from anthropocentric ocular optics. If we are in fact able to speak of a non-anthropocentric visuality, as this paper strongly suggests, this means that such concept is distinct from a non-human vi- suality, and that this scopic regime allows for other forms of sensing that extend beyond human sensory capacities. If we subscribe to this perspective, import- ant consequences arise, specifically concerning the relation between visual in- formation and governance. This analysis reinforces the need to further examine and carefully look at visual information produced outside of ocularcentrism, and its implications for the knowledge that supports itself on it.

A global rethinking of the attribution of agency to images

A global rethinking of the attribution of agency to images

Before and after photography

The challenge posed to nineteenth-century painting is placed in the context of current uncertainties about artificial intelligence. It is argued that at the centre of photography was an ‘artificial retina’, generating a highly unified pictoriality. Impressionism adopts this retinal or optical model. Before photography paintings were organized around perspective, allowing more spatial drama. However, perspective is also an example of artificial intelligence, based on eyesight. Cézanne disrupts the unity of Impressionism reintroducing elements of the pre-photographic, combining two scopic regimes. A feature of this hybrid approach is the diagonal, initially connecting the picture plane to the horizon, but modified in response to the photograph. This can be observed in many works from Cézanne to Matisse and beyond. Further examples of the function of this diagonal are discussed in reference to contemporary works by Tomma Abts, Sharon Hall and Marc Vaux.

The Album Cover

The Album Cover

The Concept of Ocularcentrism & Photographic Models of Vision From the Perspectives of Software Studies and Cultural Analytics Methods of Social Media Images and the Consumer Society Theory

Scientific objective: The concept of ocularcentrism as the dominant ideology acts as a very important role within visual shaping photographic models of vision used by social media and photographic images. The paper focuses on the concept of ocularcentrism as the dominant effect of sight in visual culture, the problems of “ocularcentric discourse,” presented in forms of the “phono-logo-centrism” paradigm, and ocularcentric ways of seeing, or scopic regimes: “Cartesian perspectivalism,” the “Art of Describing,” “baroque vision,” and photographic models of vision that have been discussed in two theoretical contexts: Lev Manovich’s Software Studies and Cultural Analytics methods and Zygmunt Bauman’s consumer society theory that can be understood as the “embodied eye” and the “armed eye” concepts. Research methods: I suggest use of critical methods of Martin Jay’s Visual Studies in the perspective of the history of visuality from the ancient Greek to the philosophical, twentieth-century French thought, undertaking Software Studies and Cultural Analytics methods, in an analysis of the research project of Manovich’s “Phototrails,” as well as Bauman’s consumer society theory in an analysis of the photographic project of Alain Delorme’s “Totems.” Results and conclusions: I hope that exploring theoretical problems of visual culture will allow researchers to open a new field of reciprocal correspondence between the concept of ocularcentrism, photographic models of vision, Software Studies, and Cultural Analytics methods, as well as Bauman’s consumer society theory, based on possibility of coming to conclusions, posing questions, and hypotheses. Cognitive value: The paper is an attempt to make a contribution to the hitherto unexplored research on the concept of ocularcentrism as the dominant effect of sight, subjecting to analysis the research project of Manovich’s “Phototrails,” in the perspective of Software Studies and Cultural Analytics methods within “media visualizations,” as well as the photographic project of Delorme’s “Totems,” in the perspective of Bauman’s consumer society theory, consumerism, consumption, and social exclusion.