Visual Culture Research Articles

A cultural dream: Europe in the plural

This article is the English translation of the ‘inaugural lesson’ that began Professor Mieke Bal’s year as professor of the ‘European Chair’ at the Collège de France. How, asks Bal, to overcome Europe as Babel (where no one understands the other), Europe as nostalgia (regretting lost time and idealizing the past), the pessimism close to despair of Europe as apocalypse? While she refuses to offer a positive, practical answer, Bal does propose an approach to some of the major issues at stake in the ongoing invention of Europe. Here she dreams of ‘Europe in the plural’, the ongoing invention of Europe as a semiosphere that, by way of its multiple differences, encourages mutual curiosity and debate, interaction, interculturality, and sharing between cultures and languages. This is the ground, proposes Bal, for that cultural ideal of Europe in the plural. It is also the ground from which spring Bal’s lectures at the Collège de France, which are to be presented in a series of articles forthcoming in Journal of Visual Culture.

Visual Storytelling: A Contemporary Approach to Online Journalism for the Millennial Generation

This case study examines the topic of digital visual content, information dissemination, art, and culture for local Indonesian products on the Instagram account Folkative. Folkative is a company targeting a young audience, primarily millennials. Founded to inspire, inform, and represent the diverse creative culture of Indonesian youth, Folkative accomplishes this through the creation of content and interactive online events aimed at the youth of today. The communication style of the Folkative Instagram account has a significant impact on online activities and the evolution of millennial communication patterns. This research employs a qualitative approach using the case study method. The researcher conducted in-depth interviews with 5 informants selected through purposive sampling criteria. The results of this study indicate that the form of content, quality perception, and reader attitudes support the dissemination of content through the Instagram account Folkative. Visual design, which presents the power of images, has become a suitable medium for storytelling, and it is favored by the millennial generation, particularly in the context of journalism. This transformation has shifted the style of journalism from traditional audio and text-based formats to visual art that narrates current and meaningful information for the audience, thus enhancing the literacy interests of the digital native generation.

In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s by Margaret Galvan

In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s by Margaret Galvan

Efficacy of a culturally tailored screening campaign to tackle cervical cancer disparities among Hispanic patients.

e13697 Background: Cultural barriers have been identified as drivers of cervical cancer disparities. Hispanic patients specifically experience a higher incidence of cervical cancer and are more likely to be diagnosed at advanced stages than non-Hispanic White patients, mediated by multiple factors including cultural perceptions. To tackle cultural barriers in cervical cancer screening, this study assessed the efficacy of a community-based media campaign to increase Pap tests within a predominantly Hispanic community in east Los Angeles (LA). Methods: The campaign was implemented through a collaboration of local community members, design and communication experts, and cancer researchers. Prior to campaign design, focus groups were conducted with at-risk Hispanic women aged 18-45. Learnings from these focus groups and additional study of the visual culture of east LA led to selection of the jacaranda tree, which blooms for a short time in LA each spring, as a visual cue to pursue screening. This imagery was accompanied by a scheduling phone number and messaging (“It’s time.” and “You can prevent cervical cancer.”) in Spanish and English. Campaign materials were displayed on bus benches, billboards, and light post banners throughout east LA. To analyze campaign efficacy, intercept surveys were conducted from 2015-2018 by trained interviewers at locations throughout the community. In their preferred language, female participants (n=770) were asked standardized questions assessing campaign recall, message interpretation, and likelihood of scheduling a Pap test after viewing the campaign. Results: Among participants, mean age was 47.4 years, 88.7% primarily spoke Spanish at home, 25.2% were uninsured, 80.6% had not been vaccinated against HPV, and 12.5% had not had a Pap test in the last 3 years. 25.7% of participants recalled having seen campaign materials prior to survey, with 71.7% interpreting the message as a call to prevent and/or get screened for cervical cancer. 89.3% of participants stated that they were Likely or Extremely Likely to schedule a Pap test after viewing the campaign, including 87.2% of those who had not had a Pap test in the last 3 years. Conclusions: These findings support the efficacy of a community-based strategy to increase cervical cancer screening. This campaign showed high screening intent in a sample of participants who were disproportionately uninsured (25.2% v. 8.5% overall in the US in 2018), with similar efficacy among those who were overdue for recommended screenings. These results emphasize the benefit of culturally tailored messaging to improve screening uptake within underserved populations.

QR code design: From digital graphics to environmental, product and fashion design

Classification of design codes by the level of complexity of their design was cre-ated for the first time. The obtained results are key to understanding the role of the QR code as a full-fledged work of art in the context of modern design. In the future, this will allow us to single out the most noticeable trends in the development of coded information in the conditions of modern visual culture.

“A Face of Anguish”: Pain and Portraiture in the Civil War Hospital

This essay traces the visual cultures that emerged around Civil War soldiers’ pain and argues that the method of portraiture has much to offer the field of health humanities. It begins by tracing efforts to capture Civil War soldiers’ pain in both popular and clinical media before turning to hospital accounts by Louisa May Alcott and Walt Whitman that adopt the trope of portraiture in order to make soldiers’ suffering legible to a wider audience. This essay argues that these ekphrastic accounts make visible not only soldiers’ suffering but also the act of observing and interpreting it, and the essay concludes by suggesting that by bringing into focus the process of perceiving another’s pain, the study of portraiture offers an important complement to both the field of narrative medicine and health humanities approaches to studying visual art.

From Digital Literacy to Critical Digital Ecology: Curricula as Digital Places in Art Education

Abstract This article makes a case for the critical potential of media ecology frameworks to address the limits of the media literacy frameworks prevalent in visual culture art education pedagogies that focus on art education with digital materials. In this article, I articulate a brief history of the literacy metaphor in visual culture art education, before summarizing recent arguments advocating for a shift from media literacy to media ecology in critical digital pedagogies. I then examine my own digital curricular place-craft in the development of Crafting Digital Places, a Web-based teaching resource that played a part in a series of remotely taught summer camp programs focusing on critical digital place-craft. In this article, I aim to illustrate the critical and practical limits of engaging digital materials via the literacy metaphor. I also aim to show how a media ecology approach—framing digital systems as places with agentic material qualities—affords art educators distinctive potentials for critical practice and curriculum design.

The Imagery of Death in the Visual Discourse of French Illumination of the 13th-15th Centuries: Iconographic Typologies and Artistic Practice

Classical historical and art studies in the context of the development of modern humanities are frequently synthesised with research on visual culture and social art history, forming a broad discourse on the study of the culture of a particular era, country, or community. This optics is taken as the basis for this study, wherein such a fundamental philosophical concept as the attitude towards death is considered from the standpoint of art history iconographic and cultural studies to identify worldviews and ideology in the development of visual narratives that cover and represent them. In this dimension, illuminated manuscripts are the research subject and object where, through the synthesis of text and image, the ability to semiotically read images and decode the symbolic content of cultural categories opens up wide interpretative possibilities for the researcher. The purpose of this study is to outline the wide variability of iconographic typologies associated with the theme of death in the late medieval European culture of the Latin West and to cover the features of the connection of visual culture with the system of worldview representations based on symbolism rooted in religion, folklore, and court aristocratic culture. The proposed study uses an interdisciplinary scientific approach and an art history approach. The research is based on the methods of stylistic and formal analysis, semiotics, and hermeneutics. The typological approach allowed identifying groups of images united by identical semantics of image interpretation, joint compositional and plot solutions designed to accessibly decode their semantics. First, the ontological and metaphysical foundations of the perception of death as a phenomenon in the philosophical and anthropological dimension in culture in general, and in western European culture in particular, are defined and characterised. In the context of the analysis of the features of the symbolic and iconographic interpretation of images of death in the visual culture of illumination of the 13th-15th centuries, groups of images are identified, united by identical semantics of interpretation of these images, joint compositional and plot solutions designed to accessibly decode their semantics, namely the imagery of the death of saints and clergy, imagery of the death of monarchs, the death of soldiers, noble chivalry, the death of fallen in battle, the death of women, imagery of suicides, as well as imagery of violent death, murder. This study covers a wide range of potential recipients in modern humanitarianism and can be useful for historians, medievalists, art historians, anthropologists, and cultural scientists.

Examining the Influence of Communication Technology, Image Technicalities, and Image Narrative on Environmental Awareness in the Digital Age: A Study of Worlds Top 20 Environmental Photography Winners 2020

In today's digital era, photography has experienced a transformative shift, revolutionizing how we capture, share, and engage with images. Advancements in technology and the widespread availability of digital devices have made photography more accessible than ever. This has resulted in a proliferation of visual content across various platforms, shaping our visual culture and influencing societal perceptions. With the rise of social media and online platforms, photography has become a powerful tool for self-expression, storytelling, and documentation. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to identify the relationship between communication technology, image technicalities, and image narrative in documentary photographic images World Top 20 Environmental Photography Winner 2020 to audience awareness in the digital age. A quantitative approach (content analysis) was used to answer the study's objectives. The study data set was analyzed using IBM SPSS software version 27 to see whether there is a significant relationship. The study results found that the highest βeta value was the narrative image variable of 0.939, followed by the βeta value of the technical image of 0.035, and the last is the βeta value of the communication technology of 0.025. This suggests that image narrative variables are significantly related to interpreting documentary photo images of environmental issues that shape consciousness. The study's implications are anticipated to provide stakeholders insights into the critical elements of photography, serving as a guide for producing high-quality photographic images with meaningful content and effectively educating the public about environmental issues.

INTERDISCIPLINARY OUTLOOKS ON SHILPASHASTRAS: INTEGRATING ART, AESTHETICS AND SPIRITUALITY

This paper aims to explore the multidimensional possibilities of Shilpashastras, an ancient Indian recognised tradition about various disciplines - Shilpashastras, the ancient Indian texts on art, architecture, aesthetics and craftsmanship, represent an insightful source of knowledge that has significantly formed the cultural and artistic backdrop of the ancient India. Among these, Sangramansutradhara, Manasollas, Aparajitpreccha, Kashyapshilpshastra, shilpratnakar, 'Manasara Shilpa Shastra'etc. As an inclusive guide, investigating into the elaborate details of architectural and sculptural components found in temples and other structures. It precisely outlines philosophies of design, spatial geometry, and construction techniques, providing a complete view of temple architecture. The 'Vastu Shastra' additional covers the discourse by focusing on the main beliefs of design, layout, and three-dimensional prearrangement, offering an insightful considerate of how spaces can be organized to harmonize with cosmic dynamisms. This concise study aims to lighten the elaborate links between artistic expression, aesthetic principles, and spiritual symbolism essential in ancient Indian texts. Themes to be addressed include historical perspectives on the development of Shilpashastras, philosophical insights into their aesthetic foundations, the spiritual significance of symbols and iconography, contemporary applications in art and design, and strategies for cultural heritage preservation. It seeks to expedite dialogue and collaboration among scholars, artists, practitioners, and enthusiasts, enriching our understanding of ancient Indian iconography, approach to reflect a all-inclusive understanding of the relationship between art, architecture, and spirituality in ancient India, providing invaluable insights into the symbolic language and visual culture of the time.

Book Review: Palfrey, Barnabas and Telser, Andreas (Eds.): Beyond the Analogical Imagination: The Theological and Cultural Vision of David Tracy

Book Review: Palfrey, Barnabas and Telser, Andreas (Eds.): <i>Beyond the Analogical Imagination: The Theological and Cultural Vision of David Tracy</i>

Dwelling as Method

This article proposes and delineates “digital dwelling” as one method of grappling with a central methodological challenge that we, as feminist researchers, face of how researchers might account for the multiple entanglements of affect, history, culture, politics, and resistance within feminist digital media artifacts. Using our method of digital dwelling, we analyze three sets of carousel posts on Instagram from three different accounts: Intersectional Environmentalist Collective, For the Wild, and Richa Kaul Padte. We explore how the inter, para, and meta-textual arguments curated through these carousel posts change the ways audiences relate to one another and to the current political moment, and how audiences, including individual researchers, are situated in affective and embodied ways within the research scene. By demarcating small, embodied data curation as a key space of method and analysis, we suggest that the personal relationships we develop in community as researchers with located acts of transgression, like these posts, are significant to consider more fully through their emergent intertextualities, especially for those invested in contemporary social media, protest, and visual cultures.

Unity and Diversity in Greek Art

Athenian art was more or less dominant in the visual culture of the Greek world in the classical period but not in all areas. We explore here the influence of Athens on the art and architecture of regions that had developed their own local traditions. Thishappened in times of crisis, political as well as social. Such crises can be detected in the last decades of both the fifth and the fourth centuries BCE. We will begin by examining the impact of the Peloponnesian War on the artistic development of Arcadia and Laconiaand conclude with the aftermath of the Macedonian conquest of Athens after the Lamian War. It appears that in the last twenty years of the fourth century the Macedonians hired Attic masons to reproduce Athenian buildings in Macedonia, and the ban on luxurious grave monuments imposed on Athens by Demetrios of Phaleron drove Athenian artists to emigrate to Macedonia.

Skin theory: Visual culture and the postwar prison laboratory By CristinaMejia Visperas, New York, NY: NYU Press. 2022. 256 pp.

Skin theory: Visual culture and the postwar prison laboratory By CristinaMejia Visperas, New York, NY: NYU Press. 2022. 256 pp.

Enabling futures? Disability and sociology of futures

Much envisaging of the future is inherently ableist. Euro-American cultural imaginaries traditionally have emphasised the narrative of medical progress, assuming the end of impairment. Disability is a frequent trope for and in dystopias, whereas more positive or progressive futures ignore the presence and aspirations of disabled people who are frequently excluded from individual and collective endeavours to articulate and shape the future. They are presumed to be in effect ‘futureless’, lacking a future of value, leaving an unoccupied space for existing inequalities and privileges to flourish. This paper brings disability studies and sociology of futures into dialogue and makes the case for creating crip space(s) within sociologies of the future. Foregrounding disability can trouble and enrich sociological engagements with futurity, while analytic perspectives from sociology of futures can inform scholarship in disability studies.

The Practical Application of Twenty-four Seasonal Pulp Painting in Elementary School Teaching

The purpose of this paper is to explore the practical application of twenty-four solar terms pulp painting in elementary school teaching. By introducing the concepts and cultural connotations of the twenty-four solar terms, combined with the age characteristics and aesthetic needs of primary school students, it proposes a method of utilizing papier-mâché paintings in classroom teaching for the creation of solar term themes. This practice can help students increase their understanding of traditional Chinese culture and cultivate their sensitivity to the natural environment and artistic expression ability. The article also discusses how to design specific pulp painting projects that incorporate the characteristics of the twenty-four solar terms, guide students' creative expression in teaching, and demonstrate their understanding and imagination of the festival culture. Finally, it concludes that through the practice of twenty-four seasons pulp painting, it can promote the development of students' comprehensive literacy, while providing an interesting and educational art experience for primary school students.

The Development of Casta Painting as Visual Genre in New Spain and the Production of Ethnoracial Stereotypes

The aim of this essay is to analyze the ways in which the development of the casta pictorial genre contributed to the production and stabilization of racializing and racist stereotypes. These racial stereotypes still persist in cultural imaginaries in and about Latin America as part of the long duration of coloniality. Casta painting from New Spain is analyzed here as a pictorial genre and as a colonial discourse in connection with situated social and racial concepts, such as Creole, caste, and calidad. The analysis develops through a dialogue with perspectives from Semiology of Art, Visual studies, Postcolonial studies, and Latin American Critique of Coloniality. In this regard, this essay intends to create a conversation among different disciplines and fields of study in order to develop a complex, transdisciplinary approach to a problem from colonial times: the production and circulation of ethnoracial stereotypes and their impact on social relations, lived experiences, and subjectivities.

Analysis and Exploration of Popular Photography Concept under Visual Culture

Analysis and Exploration of Popular Photography Concept under Visual Culture

Natural mythology and cultural imagination: Three portraits of Bessie Head

Hallett, a painting by Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, and a sculpture by Claudette Schreuders. It argues that these portraits each symbolise Head to a certain degree: Hallett wanted to capture the Artist in Exile; Nkosi wanted to capture a Struggle Hero; and Schreuders wanted to capture a Fellow South African. This paper is interested in how all three of these artists – although to different ends and effects – each mythologise Bessie Head, and how this relates to a broader project of national mythology. In this way, this analysis hopes to contribute to a greater understanding of Bessie Head in the cultural imagination of South Africa.

Georgian Literary Needlework Pictures, Realization, and Iconic Meaning‐Making

AbstractThis article examines a group of Georgian needlework pictures based on late eighteenth‐century cabinet prints of literary works. Focusing on how these needlework productions were realized, including which decisions regarding the colour of silk thread and chromatic patterns, as well as visual revision, were made by the female silkworker, the article seeks to introduce these pictures as meaningful remediations of printed visual literary culture. The silkworks will be shown to advance interpretations of and to provide framing for six literary characters and the ways in which their stories were iconically rendered by the silkworkers.