Visual Logics Research Articles

Visualizing Citizenship in a Bureaucratic Frame

ABSTRACTIn this article, I focus on how Pakistani Hindu migrant men in India circulate bureaucratic portraits of reportedly forcefully converted women, leveraging the evidentiary value of images within a visual idiom of liberal citizenship. The style of these portraits—rectangularly framed, front‐facing individuals—is akin to the style of passport photos. The images and their captions circulate as visual evidence to reify normative claims to Indian citizenship within a Hindu‐India imaginary. Such images generate veracity through their state‐like form, shaping how migrant men see themselves into recognition. By emphasizing how migrant men adopt a bureaucratic visual convention (the passport‐photo look) to make claims about associative fates based on a shared group status, I expand our understanding of the identity photograph. I argue that bureaucratic framing is an aesthetic register that facilitates claims to citizenship within the visual logics of state recognition.

There Is a Digital Art History

In this paper, we revisit Johanna Drucker’s question, “Is there a digital art history?” – posed a decade ago in this journal – in the light of the emergence of large-scale, transformer-based vision models. While more traditional forms of neural network have long been part of digital art history, and digital humanities projects have recently begun to use transformer models, their epistemic implications and methodological affordances have not yet been systematically understood. We focus our analysis on two main aspects that, together, seem to suggest a coming paradigm shift towards a “digital” art history in Drucker’s sense. The visual-cultural repertoire newly encoded in large-scale vision models has an outsized effect on digital art history. The inclusion of significant numbers of non-photographic images allows for the extraction and automation of a much wider gamut of visual logics. Large-scale vision models have “seen” huge swathes of online visual culture, biased towards an exclusionary visual canon; they continuously solidify and concretize this canon through their already widespread application in all aspects of digital life. We use a large-scale vision model to propose a new critical methodology that acknowledges the epistemic entanglement of neural network and dataset. We propose that, in reading a corpus of visual culture through a neural network, we are always also doing the reverse. Digital art history is here, but not in the way we expected: rather, it has emerged as a crucial route to understanding, exposing, and critiquing the visual ideology of contemporary AI models.

Review: Molecular Capture: The Animation of Biology, by Adam Nocek

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

Reading hieroglyphs behind glass: A glimpse of reparative feminism in Riddles of the Sphinx (1977)

This article examines Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s 1977 avant-garde essay film Riddles of the Sphinx as a cinematic text that makes the museum a site for imagining psychoanalytic feminism as a reparative reading practice. I argue that the film questions gender and race as “musealized” images that make predetermined essences present, and offers instead images of working through the damages of sexism and racism that erode the familiar poles of idealization and denigration. Focused on the psychic life of a middle-class white woman as she begins extricating herself from the narrow confines that white patriarchal culture has allotted her, Riddles revises the visual logics of castration, which opens the possibility that white women can, instead of defending themselves against shame, respond to the forms of sexism and racism that write Black women’s lives.

Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children’s Media Culture, by Meredith A. Bak

Reviewed by: Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children's Media Culture by Meredith A. Bak Monica Flegel (bio) Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children's Media Culture, by Meredith A. Bak; pp. xi + 276. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020, $30.00. My initial thought when beginning Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children's Media Culture was one of professional and personal jealousy that the author had chosen a research topic that allowed her to play with vintage optical toys. Meredith A. Bak describes her process as follows: "In the basement of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, I twirled thaumatropes that reanimated nineteenth-century visual puns … At the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, I watched as a projecting praxinoscope's spinning drum sent a luminous scene onto the wall" (4–5). Lest other envious academics question just why some of our colleagues get to engage in more pleasurable research than others, I will say upfront that Bak's playful encounters with these optical toys are central to her efforts to understand their role in childhood education in the nineteenth century. What I appreciated most about this book, over and above the real pleasure I found in learning about the wide variety of optical technologies that were developed throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was Bak's careful attention to the "specificity of each of these devices" (22). In her thorough analysis of the materiality of the phenakistoscope, the kaleidoscope, the thaumatrope, and various other toys and [End Page 566] technologies, Bak highlights the importance of understanding just how each of these was absorbed into classed and raced narratives of visual competency in children's education. The overarching argument of Bak's monograph is that present-day "aspirations and anxieties" about the child as media consumer and spectator were shaped in the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth, through optical toys and their role in the home and the classroom (11). These toys were key to teaching children not just concepts such as persistence of vision, but also specific competencies that were linked to middle-class identity: "The power to visually surveil, discern, or scrutinize the social and material world was one strategy that members of the economically and socially unstable middle class used to fix their own positions" (13). For example, Bak devotes a chapter to the thaumatrope, which is a simple card on strings with images printed on either side. Twisting the strings while watching the quickly flipping card allows the viewer to see one image superimposed upon the other. Bak theorizes the connection between this toy's training of the persistence of vision and the skills required of the managerial class: seeing and interpreting sets those with visual competencies apart from the working classes, distinguishing between "mental and manual labor, helping to justify and reinforce a division of labor in those terms" (87). Throughout her text, Bak convincingly demonstrates how often these toys were linked to specific job training and skills, as well as to racialized, classed, and imperial ways of looking at the world. From her discussion of the depictions of "greenhorns" unable to distinguish between optical technologies and reality, to her analysis of the objectification of peoples and cultures via the stereoscope, Bak demonstrates how the training of the child's eye to master optical technologies was closely linked to social mobility aided by specific ways of seeing (84). While I appreciated the chapter organization of the book, which allowed for deep analysis of specific kinds of technologies, I did find that this made some of the overarching arguments a bit harder to follow through the text as a whole. Each chapter engaged with how various optical toys and teaching tools shaped the child viewer and participant toward classed forms of media spectatorship. However, the nature of that training was at times buried in the details of each technology. Additionally, there is some focus throughout on the agency of the user and their ability to "resist, negotiate, or challenge the visual logics that such toys sought to impart," but this is not fully developed in the book, and would perhaps require more thorough...

Legitimizing the First Black Presidency: Cinematic History and Rhetorical Vision in Barack Obama’s 2008 Victory Speech

ABSTRACT Rhetorical studies has traditionally separated the mental images of rhetorical vision from other forms of visual rhetoric. This essay seeks to ease this distinction and show how visual culture complements visual language. I argue that contemporary culture has unique visual logics, techniques, and ways of seeing that influence how audiences engage with rhetorical vision. I examine Barack Obama’s 2008 election night address and argue that he presents a cinematic history in order to legitimize the first black presidency. This essay combines ancient and modern visual theories to highlight three strategies: phantasmatic montage, synecdochical gaze, and frames of enargeia and energeia. Ultimately, this analysis calls for more attention to the enthymematic nature of rhetorical vision and its connection to visual culture.

The transient museum: Or a vision of the not-yet-here

This essay forwards the idea of the transient museum, a theoretical and utopian project aimed at dismantling the visual logics that support the contemporary art museum. Beginning from the premise that such museums are predicated upon colonial and capitalist visual logics, the transient museum imagines ways of being in but not of the contemporary art museum and the economies of circulation it engenders. Its tactics engage visuality but, equally, a politics of the body and of movement. As such, Gwyneth Shanks frames two ways of performing the transient museum, against acquisition and an aesthetics of concealment, analyzing highly performative artworks by artists Rafa Esparza and Nari Ward to explain these categories. She argues that the transient museum names ever-accumulating forces of global and historical crisis—forces to which neither the museum nor contemporary art are immune—as a practice of enacting hope and remaking the contours of contemporary art.

Troubling Dignity, Seeking Truth: Black Feminist Vision and the Thought-World of Black Photography in the Nineteenth Century

In this paper, I revisit the thought-world of nineteenth century black photography between two of its most important practitioners: Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass. In the history of black photography, and increasingly in Black Studies writ large, these two figures drive discourses on visuality and freedom. Typically leading with Douglass’ own lectures on pictures, we study both Douglass and Truth as figures who understood the stakes of representation, its utility for abolitionist movement, and its possibilities for black self-image. While its critical to hold Douglass and Truth together, I aim, in this paper, to linger in the differences between their approaches to photography as a realm of thought and practice. I argue that Douglass pursued a comportment of dignity reliant on a gendered presentation of dominance and revolutionary leadership, while Truth, in a different vein, enacted an image-body politic that was intentionally entangled with the visual logics of property and objectification particular to black women’s bodies within slavery. By foregrounding Truth rather than Douglass in this intellectual genealogy of the visual, I want to gesture toward a black feminist vision that can open up the work of photography in Black Studies as we continue to think about what kinds of subjects and subjectivities photographs produce, complicate, and unravel.

China's ancient past in its contemporary art: On the politics of time and nation branding at the Venice Biennale

AbstractThis article examines the China Pavilion at the 2017Venice Biennalethrough an exploration of temporality. It argues that the pavilion's deployment of a politics of time – by mobilizing China's dynastic past and its traditional arts to enhance the present – constructs a mode of cultural timelessness that sustains a stultifying visual and discursive regime. Touting the theme of 'Continuum – Generation by Generation', the pavilion paid a lofty tribute to folk-art practices such as embroidery and shadow play, elevating two paintings from the Song Dynasty as the fount of contemporary artistic imagination. This recourse to the past mirrors a predictable and safe representational strategy often mobilized by the country to shape its own public and media image on the global stage. In view of this, the pavilion can be more constructively investigated as an exercise in image and perception management, or nation branding, which reveals the self-narratives that the country embraces. Nation branding serves as a complementary analytical lens that probes the instrumentalization of Chinese traditions, history and past, while crystallizing some parallel visual logics and aims of contemporary art. Aesthetics and nation branding are, therefore, conjoined to question the shared visuality that perpetuates, to borrow a term from Rey Chow, the 'affect of pastness' that obscures a more timely and inventive imaginary of the country.

Sacred Forms and the Crowd's Guilt in Late Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Execution Imagery

As new histories of the public execution are published, cultural perceptions of crowds are again enjoying scholarly interest. This contribution evaluates the role to be played by visual culture in crowd culture, weaving an account that draws from a closer analysis of live visual relations to explain both crowd impulses and its afterimages. A visually structured history can be navigated in order to examine the murder on 20 August 1672 of Jan and Cornelis de Wit at the hands of a street crowd, a determining event in the Dutch ‘disaster year’ of 1672. Giving close examination to contemporary prints, a drawing and a play, the contribution makes two overarching observations: first, that a Christological reading of the execution site strongly informed all of the after-images of the murders. Moreover, sacredness worked as a schema for the mob's own part during the tragedy. Second, the crowd's behaviour followed a pattern of structured theatricality and merriment that is best understood in the context of historical disturbance culture. The Dutch crowds of 1672 offered a double bill of religious and secular visual logics, blurring the limits of a judicially ordered punishment and producing in the tacit testimonies examined here a marked affective response.

By all appearances: thoughts on colonialism, visuality and racial neoliberalism

ABSTRACTIn a Montreal neighbourhood in the fall of 2013, a community mural celebrating ‘diversity, adversity and solidarity’ was vandalized: the image of a Black woman was spray-painted white. In this paper, I take the events and discourses surrounding this incident and my personal responses to them as a starting point for examining the racialized politics of visual representation. Using critical race-class analysis informed by contemporary theories of Black visuality, I consider dynamics of Black invisibility and visibility in Canada and consider the role visual texts play in reinforcing, reproducing, and resisting racialized social relations. I argue for caution regarding politics of representation, and consider Black and Indigenous art practices for the creative forms of resistance to colonial-capitalist ideology and visual logics they offer.

The Skyscraper’s Unseeing Eyes: Louis Sullivan, Nella Larsen, and Racial Formalism

Abstract Since its inception, the skyscraper has served as an icon of American innovation, modernity, and freedom. Upholding this image has erased the racial thinking and racist practices foundational to this born-and-bred American architectural form. This essay restores the import of race to the skyscraper by reading formalist theories by the father of modern architecture, Louis Sullivan, alongside a work of African American modernist fiction, Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929). Reading Sullivan alongside Larsen explains how skyscrapers and blackness together have defined what gets seen as modern. The unexpected pairing reveals the visual racial logics built into skyscraper aesthetics and adds an architectural thread to the well-established scholarship on Larsen’s novel.

Black Soundscapes White Stages: The Meaning of Francophone Sound in the Black Atlantic

Black Soundscapes White Stages: The Meaning of Francophone Sound in the Black Atlantic

A normal form for spider diagrams of order

We develop a reasoning system for an Euler diagram based visual logic, called spider diagrams of order. We define a normal form for spider diagrams of order and provide an algorithm, based on the reasoning system, for producing diagrams in our normal form. Normal forms for visual logics have been shown to assist in proving completeness of associated reasoning systems. We wish to use the reasoning system to allow future direct comparison of spider diagrams of order and linear temporal logic.

From remediation to premediation: or how the affective immediacy of late 90’s digital society evolves to an continuous affectivity anticipation of future in the 21th century

Richard Grusin one of the most well known on media studies researchers and a pioneer on this area. His work concerns historical, theoretical, and aesthetic aspects of media technologies. With Jay David Bolter he is the author of Remediation: Understanding New Meda (MIT, 1999), which sketches out a genealogy of new media, beginning with the contradictory visual logics underlying contemporary digital media; Remediation has a remarkable connection with his fourth book, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (Palgrave, 2010), which argues that in an era of heightened securitization, socially networked US and global media work to pre-mediate collective affects of anticipation and connectivity, while also perpetuating low levels of apprehension or fear. The richness of his analysis is the connection between our daily and real life to the digital ambiances that underlies our society. Richard Grusin had recently visited many Brazilian Universities and research groups for a series of conferences and master classes focusing on the dark side of the digital humanities, and also the discussion on premediation social state-of-life.

Sentimental Science, Somaticization, and Forensic Drama

This article examines the forensic drama Bones as reflective of forensic dramas generally, which deploy visual logics and a set of discourses that have emerged across a range of institutional spaces. These discourses tend to conflate persons with bodies, privatize and somaticize violence, obviate the confessional act, and privilege the visual mediation of the body as a way of knowing. Bones, and other contemporary forensic dramas, rearticulate older logics of the body to contemporary techniques of policing. I will argue that the convergence of these logics implies a social order where surveillance is privileged, the justice system is mechanized, and body-based modes of social sorting operate under the guise of scientific governance.

Referential Sights and Slights

Referential Sights and Slights C. Riley Snorton (bio) Well before the first episode of the first season of Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta (LHHA) aired on VH1, rumors were circulating about cast member Joseline Hernandez and her possible transgender history. Taking a familiar narrative arc, the rumors suggested that Joseline was assigned male at birth and lived as a boy under the moniker Joe until sometime after high school. Speculation about Hernandez’s transgender identity became constitutive to the buzz surrounding the show even before its debut, demonstrated by the numerous hip hop gossip sites who picked up the story and a video that went viral; the video was shot during an Atlanta premiere event, in which an audience member asks LHHA cast members and producer Mona Scott-Young (while looking directly at Hernandez): “Is there a transgender among you?”1 The circulation of this question and the various attempts to address it are the impetuses for this essay, for as the immediate responses bear out, they stage the limits of visual logics in representation while also illuminating the particular conditions of unrepresentability for the trans2 body. This is not to negate the numerous documentary projects—both photographic and filmic—that endeavor to represent transgender people, but rather it is to suggest that what is indexical about the trans body is unrepresentable in visual terms. Raising the question, how does one know that she is viewing a trans body? (And relatedly, how can one really be sure that she is viewing a cisgender one?) In the form of a reversal, Hernandez is first to respond to the audience member’s question: “ To me you look like a transgender—your hair, your clothes, everything.”3 Hernandez’s response relies on a recognizable form of transphobia, where the logics of visibility most frequently are used to evoke and dismiss transgender difference: there’s something perceptibly unnatural, off, or askew that allows one to identify the transgender in one’s midst. These logics suggest that there is no transgender to be found. Rather, a transperson’s “real [End Page 175] sex” is always present—not as a trace, per se, but as the truth of the cissexual that persists at the surface of the body. After a round of retorts exchanged between the audience member and Hernandez, Scott-Young joins the conversation, stating, “I have to say this for the avoidance of further doubt. I’ve seen her absolutely naked. There is no penis.”4 As Scott-Young’s comment referentially marks, the visual experience of witnessing Hernandez’s naked body is supposed to quell all doubts about Hernandez’s female identity. And yet, evidencing dissatisfaction with Scott-Young’s response and a substantial skepticism for the commonsense of the visual as proof, the audience member rejoins: “You don’t know that unless you ate it. Did you eat her?”5 At once, the audience member seems to be articulating a connection between transphobia and homophobia, in her request for Scott-Young to engage in queer sex in order to prove that Hernandez is a “real woman.” Paradoxically, if Hernandez is “really a man,” Scott-Young is able to recuperate and maintain her heterosexuality. And yet the shift from the visual to the gustatory, a reworking of the popularized legal adage—“I know it when I see it” to “I know it when I taste it”—at once reterritorializes female genitalia as sites for pleasures rather than proof of cissexuality. (Can one know a trans body based on that body’s experience of sexual pleasure? Is a cissexual female organ defined by its receptivity to oral, non-penetrative sex?) Scott-Young simply replies, “No, I wasn’t hungry,” which responds to the audience member’s question as if one’s desire to perform oral sex is analogous with a need to consume food, circumventing the question’s queer possibilities while sidestepping sexual desire all together. Yet if one reads Scott-Young’s response as a foreclosure on a set of queer inflected questions about bodies and pleasures, one must also consider how the exchange between the producer and audience member provides another outline for a frequently rehearsed set of articulations about the transgender...

Visual rationalities: Towards a sociology of images

Images are ubiquitous in (post)modern societies. Nevertheless, there is a lack of conceptual frameworks which relate sociological theory to a thinking about ‘the visual.’ Sociological theory has widely neglected to reflect on images and ‘the visual’ and to explore the role of images in constituting and reproducing ‘the social’. This article argues for a sociology of images. It aims to develop a conceptual tool to analyse images from a practice perspective. Following a theory of practice approach and referring to works in the sociology of science, it suggests the concept of ‘visual logic’ to analyse images sociologically. The article claims that social practice is intertwined with a visual logic. To investigate images from a sociological perspective, the article argues, implies to analyse the visual logic that shapes, and is constituted by, social practices. Taking medical images as an example and drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the article shows how this concept serves as an analytical tool to explore the social role of images. Physicians and medical researchers use images both because of their visual and non-visual dimensions. The article thus concludes by pointing to a multitude of visual logics – or, in their empirical form, ‘visual rationalities’ – that become evident when observing image practices ethnographically.

From kino-eye to anime -eye/ ai : the filmed and the animated in Imamura Taihei's media theory

As a contribution to the new critical work on animation and new media, this article re-animates the forgotten Japanese philosopher of media Imamura Taihei. Imamura'swork of the late 1930s and 1940s is not only the first attempt in Japanese to conceptualize the difference between film and animation, but his two major works Theory of Animation (1948) and Theory of Documentary Film (1940) represent the earliest philosophical attempt to think through the difference between film and animation in any language. Tracking Imamura's deployment of the notion of the filmed and the animated through these two books, I attempt to demonstrate the utility of these concepts for contemporary understandings of digital phenomena of all kinds. Imamura's analysis advances current understanding of visual media in that he shows the ways in which filmed and animated images are immanent to shifts in capitalism. In so doing, he provides a framework that, with just a small upgrade, can be redeployed to configure the visual logics of the so-called new economy and e-commerce. Finally, although Imamura reads animation as in some sense epiphenomenal to Fordism and Taylorism, he also provides critical maps and escape routes from these capitalist techniques by arguing that animation points to utopian possibilities beyond and between regimes that demand the extraction of surplus from disciplined, laboring bodies.