Visual Signifiers Research Articles

À la recherche de marqueurs visuels de l’impact du 11 Septembre à l’écran. Visions, viseurs et drones comme vecteurs et objets de représentation

Cet article se propose de présenter une méthode pour évaluer l’impact du 11 Septembre dans le domaine des représentations filmiques. Il s’agit, à travers quelques films de guerre, d’identifier un changement entre le mode de représentation avant et après la chute des tours jumelles, pour proposer un sismogramme culturel de l’événement. La méthode employée ici comporte les mêmes temporalités que celles du 11 Septembre, sur le plan chronologique comme sur le plan médiatique. D’un côté : visée, tir, impact, explosion, diffusion, dissipation, riposte. De l’autre : médiatisation (intrinsèque à toute représentation), remédiatisation, et finalement prémédiatisation, chacun des trois temps pouvant être plus ou moins fictionnels, ce qui s’avère être l’une des conditions mêmes du 11 Septembre comme événement médiatique à portée traumatique. Elle consiste à lire, au prisme de films portant sur les conflits américano-arabes d’avant et d’après le 11 Septembre (guerre du Golfe et campagne d’Irak à partir de février 2003), mais également réalisés avant et après le 11 Septembre, l’évolution des stratégies géopolitiques à l’aune des technologies employées. L’article prête une attention particulière à la représentation de la triade des conflits modernes : dispositifs de surveillance, machines de vision et de visée, traitement médiatique visant à virtualiser voire à désémantiser l’acte de guerre.

“This Is What's Real”: The Pathology of Black Addiction in the Hood Films of the 1990s

“This Is What's Real”: The Pathology of Black Addiction in the Hood Films of the 1990s

Over the Wall: A Drone View of the ‘Other’ Side

This study intervenes in the presumed remoteness of the visual condition and experience of the aerial image created by the drone apparatus, to create new knowledge about the cultural and societal spaces that these envisioning technologies reveal. Using The Walls that Surround Us, a short drone-film of the Peace Walls in Belfast by local film-maker James Brennan, this study captures the participant’s lived experience of the place that is the film’s subject, and analyses how the system of visual signification captured within the film, operates to intervene, sustain, or subvert his association with this place. This ethnographic framing of the other side of the wall using the drone apparatus, reveals how the human is interconnected with the wider material world, its histories, and events and thus, like the over general labels used to define the different communities in Belfast (Catholic and Protestant), cannot be reduced to dialectical opposition: as a technologically mediated condition there is at once difference and the same.

"A dream, dictating its own course": On Ralph Gibson’s Photobook Trilogy, 1970–1974

This paper scrutinizes American photographer Ralph Gibson’s photobook trilogy published by his own company Lustrum Press: The Somnambulist (1970), Déjà-vu (1973), and Days at Sea (1974). The success of the trilogy verified a sizable market for highly personal photobooks, which would become a defining trend in contemporary art photography. Focusing on the structure of visual signification in each volume, the paper performs for the first time a close analysis of Gibson’s sequencing method materialized in the book form. The inner logic of each publication is further elucidated in relation to the major sources of reference in 20th-century art, photography, and literature, such as the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, the cloud photographs of Alfred Stieglitz, and the Nouveau Roman of Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The paper argues that sequencing was an epistemological strategy for Gibson to prioritize arbitrary relations between two neighboring pictures, without impairing each photograph’s truth claim to the perceptible reality. This was the photographer’s tactic to reconcile the purported objectivity of the camera image and the subjective propensity for narrative and imagination in his photobooks. Gibson’s avoidance of heavy-handed manipulation and shocking subject matter led his work to the “surrealism of the perception,” which can be situated in the tradition of Surrealist photography advocated by André Bazin and Brassaï.

Delving into the Magdalene’s vase

In the art of medieval and early modern Europe, Mary Magdalene can be identified by the vase she holds. Other iconographic studies of Mary Magdalene mention her ointment jar, but while images may be brought before the reader, the vase is generally mentioned as the object that permits the author to name the figure and little more. This article intends to tap the rich meanings and connotations of the vase beyond simple visual signifier in studying it – in form and materials and function – through an anthropological lens. It will do so in examining a corpus of Italian images, at the forefront of Magdalenian iconography since the invention of the “indigenous icon,” as defined by Hans Belting, and the effects of Franciscan patronage that so invested this saint with their particular strain of piety. We will see that the inventiveness of Italian artists, particularly as applied to the alabastron, continues from the 1270 panel of Guido da Siena through to the early modern era with Titian’s 1535 Pitti Magdalene. After this period, with the Counter-Reformation’s more formulaic directives, the vase seems to have lost some of its density of meaning. For the period considered, the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, the results will demonstrate an intimate connection with her conversion, her femaleness, and her role in the narrative of redemption.

Problems of cliche in the context of creativity of choreographer-director of modern dance

The purpose of the article is to identify the specifics of the use of clichéd expressive means in the process of creating a production of modern choreography and to determine the ways to get rid of clichés in the context of philosophical and worldview types of choreographic life. Methodology. In order to identify the peculiarities of the use of clichéd means of expression in the performances of modern dance, the typological method, the method of structural-semantic and textual analysis was applied. Scientific novelty. The problem of the use of clichéd expressive means by choreographers-directors of modern dance is investigated; the features of the use of clichéd forms of visual expressiveness are considered on the basis of modern choreography productions; based on the analysis of the theoretical works of the leading choreographers of the 20th century. the approaches to avoiding the use of clichés in the process of staging modern dance have been identified. Conclusions. Certain lexical elements of modern dance, compositional features, and visual means of expressiveness of choreographic performances in their own semantics are clichéd, since, as a result of the frequent use of choreographers-directors (usually due to positioning as necessary elements of the text of the choreographic performance, which provide an easy and accurate way of transmitting the encoded information) have lost their imagery, and their semantic content has gradually decreased. In contemporary dance productions, the cliché is a kind of sign of the choreographic text, which has its own conceptual content and structurally organized form, providing a certain meaning to the concept placed in this cliché. This meaning can be interpreted as an element of the semantic system, the internal structure of which is associated with its relationship with other elements of this structure and reflect the system of connections and relationships between objects and phenomena of reality existing outside a separate sign in the form of a converted form of this objective content, which largely depends on the projected on the iconic image created by the choreographer of the viewer's social experience. The meaning of the choreographic cliché is considered as a result of the process of determination, when a “psychic image” appears in the viewer's mind, the presence of which is manifested through a visual signification and is fixed in the signs of the dance text. Changes in the content of the cliché as a sign (its meaning) create differences of an individual and social nature, reflecting the choreographer's ideas about the surrounding reality. The choreographer-director of contemporary dance comprehends and rethinks life in accordance with his own philosophical and worldview principles, revealing life concepts that are closer to a paradox and distant from the established logic. Seeing life as a force, the choreographer constantly strives for awakening in order to free himself from disciplinary individualizations.

Performing Togetherness: Tourist-Like Photography from Abu Ghraib


 
 
 The article explores the infamous photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison that circulated and were made public in 2004. It specifically looks at how the sense of togetherness was enacted by the U.S. military personnel stationed in the site, and the way cameras were instrumental in this process. It argues that the resultant photographs can be seen as tou- rist-like in several respects. A notable aspect of the photographic images is that the soldiers who took them repeatedly appear in the frame themselves. Appearing in and photographing the abusive acts was not only a form of structuring and reinforcing power relations at the prison, but also an attempt to portray a fun-having personnel group. The visual signifiers – thumbs up, smiles, pointed fingers – authenticate the images, lending them some of the qualities of tourist photography. At Abu Ghraib, the soldiers’ photographic practice also partly served as a sense-making mechanism, allowing a symbolic distance between the camera-wielder and unforeseen emergent events. It promised a wishful alternative to the grim realities of the prison: an overcrowded and undersupplied facility with a lack of on-site leadership. The scars of resultant violence – and the notorious photographs that document it – remain relevant, and continue to resurface in recent so- cial and political contexts.
 
 

Nationalism in Official Tourism Websites of Balkan Countries

This paper investigates the official tourism websites for the Balkan countries of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, and Turkey to learn about its depiction of the nation for an international tourism market. The research combines Pauwels’ (2012) multimodal discourse analysis method designed for cultural websites with Smith’s (1998) six main institutional dimensions to seek out potential nationalistic patterns involving the state, territory, language, religion, history, and rites and ceremonies. The findings mostly involve verbal and visual signifiers that have a historical context to them such as antiquity, communism, Yugoslavia, religion, irredentism, the Ottoman Empire, and national identity. The findings illustrate that official websites, while being sensitive not to alienate international tourists, portray a sense of nationalism but do so in a different way, based upon the historical experiences and unique features of each country surveyed.

When Movies Get Sick

Stevens offers insights about the impact of COVID-19 on film industry It has suddenly unfastened the values that traditionally attach to proximity, particularly regarding human bodies, as vocabulary focusing on the distance between them- social distancing, self-isolation, quarantine- become part of our quotidian language Distance has become the sign of intimacy- of respect, care, concern, shared understanding of a shared world, a sense of belonging to a form of life Within discussions of film aesthetics, cinephiles tout the value of cinema for inviting audiences to attend to bodies in space, referring to the composition recorded by the camera and whose projection is offered up for our pleasure

A Tale of Two Lines: “The Transylvanian” and “The Imperial”: Mapping Territorial Integration through Railway Architecture

AbstractWhile states undertook railway construction targeting economic and military objectives, this article questions whether and to which extent their symbolic territorial cohesion was also at stake. The hypothesis we aim to verify is that railway buildings acted as recurrent visual signifiers of territorial coherence and had, therefore, the potential of being instrumental as state-building tools. This research explores how an architectural reading of railway networks can inform our understanding of state-building projects and processes. We expect that geographically scoped railway architectural history is capable of cross-fertilizing political and planning history, through a better understanding of empire, state, and regional building discourses. The investigation focuses on the stylistic architectural choices of edifices on two trunk lines in Transylvania, North-West Romania, before World War I, while this territory belonged to the Habsburg then, as of 1867, Austro-Hungarian Empire. The large-scale analysis of railway architecture is discussed in relation to railway-line ownership, political (central, regional, and local) agency, economic development, and architectural Zeitgeist, highlighting state-building and territorial integration patterns. The mapping carried out reveals two successive architectural layers. These denote a shift in the role of railway architecture from an initial liberal phase, before the 1880s, to a bloom phase, prior to World War I. While during the former there was little state control over architectural aspects, during the latter architecture became a foremost representation instrument for the state railway administration. At the same time, the extant railway architecture appears as a palimpsest, a genuinely cross-border, European heritage, documenting the dynamics between imperial, state, regional, and local agencies.

Bill Gates Covid19 Conspiracy in Reddit Memes: A Semiotic Approach

Covid19 as global issue connects other social variables such as Bill Gates conspiracy issue that becomes the most predominant covid19 issue discussed globally in public (Shalini, 2020). Memes as meaningful entities exist to influence internet public in facing Bill Gates issue even without rational and empirical inquiry for some particular people that believe in them. Reddit website as easily accessible website becomes one of memes website that shares actively more numerous memes related to Bill Gates conspiracy issue than the other websites. The memes contain cultural values represented by verbal forms and visual forms to exchange belief and rational arguments.This study conducts interpretation data based on qualitative mtethod. Associating particular signifiers to Bill Gates in whole data refer to Bill Gates’ negative track record, past ideas, ambitions, and pace. Several data contain visual signifier and written signifier that support each other to acquire signified in a data such as Bill Gates in virus form who injects an old man. Signifiers reflect predominatly negative assosiations related to Bill Gates. It explicates negative connotation that exists consistently. Myths which exist represent that Bill Gates’s vaccine as a danger, Bill Gates as a mastermind behind the pandemic, and Bill Gates as an opportunist who concerns on expansion of business to reach vaccine business.

A Study on the Expression Strategy of Femininity in Hair Product Advertisement: Focused on Roland Barthes’s Smiotics

The purpose of this study is to analyze what kind of femininity was strategically used to emphasize the functions of a product in advertisements for hair care products. Semiotics based on Roland Barthes s Mythical Semantic Analysis Framework was used to see how the strategic use of language and visual signs in the advertisement appear by selecting four shampoo or essence TV commercials that use a female model. The analysis results are as follows. First, in hair care product advertisements, both metaphorical language and visual signifiers are used to express the state of hair before using the product. Second, it showed the advertisements used various visual signifiers to depict the functionality of the product. Third, in hair care product advertisements, the characteristics of using femininity were used to emphasize the effects of the product. Hair product advertisements were found to effectively apply femininity to match the function of the product, and it was found to represent desires and elicit identification through an emotional connection with women.

Toward a Democracy of Seeing: William Eggleston and the Achievement of Southern Photography

Something about the way the South looks has long fascinated outsiders and southerners alike. It seems to invite the stunning cover of William Eggleston's The Beautiful Mysterious, which is a blue-tinged, illuminated, nearly empty, parking lot. Another example: the “rust aesthetic” associated with the banged-up signs so common in William Christenberry's photographs seems like an authentic southern thing. In fact, a certain orange-brown, rustlike color permeates many of the photographs in The Beautiful Mysterious. A more shocking visual signifier of southernness has historically been the lynched black body, as, for example, that of Emmett Till in 1955. As it turns out, Eggleston (b. 1939) grew up in Sumner, MS where the murderers of the Chicago teenager were put on trial – and acquitted.

Poster Queers: A Visual Analysis of an LGBTQ+ Film Festival

Abstract This study concerns itself with the visual representations of The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival (a.k.a. Reeling) with specific attention paid to their marketing campaign materials, as exemplified by the annually created festival poster. It is my aim to situate these posters alongside the historical contexts of queer identity, sociopolitical advocacy, and LGBTQ+ cinema. This analysis will navigate the 36-year period of the festival organization’s existence, providing key in-depth interrogations into the decades, images, and trends both visual and narrative. My unpacking and theoretical discussions of the festival’s visual culture has been informed by the practices of semiotics and film genre theory. These methods were employed to answer the primary research question: How have the poster advertisements, as visual signifiers for The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival, symbolized their organization’s mission, represented queer identities, and engaged with the politically contested history of queer cinematic representation?

A Digital Postracial Parity? Black Women’s Everyday Resistance and Rethinking Online Media Culture

AbstractThis article examines and critiques digital media culture and its embedded postracial logics through the resistance strategies of Black women online. Specifically, I am interested in everyday resistance strategies as “seemingly innocuous” communication, which is understood from theorizations of “hidden transcripts” that black publics utilize to counteract dominance. In order to explore “everyday resistance” I employed focus groups with 20 Black women and present patterns of resistance strategies online, such as visual signifiers and posting news articles. Secondly, I interrogate how these resistance strategies “talk back” to and circumvent the underpinnings of digital media culture through the postracial logics of individuality and networked influence. Ultimately, Black women’s interconnected identities reveal the flaws of digital culture as postracial by demonstrating their resistance strategies that must work around any assumption of a “postracial parity.”

Costumes and Cosmopolitanism: Italian Opera in the North

AbstractThis article explores operatic costumes from a perspective of cultural exchange, with a focus on Giuseppe Sarti, first director of the permanent opera theatre in Copenhagen. Sarti's Danish audience had almost no prior exposure to opera and little understanding of Italian. After a disastrous first season, he took measures to realise more successful productions of Italian opera in a context of migration, notably by focusing on the costumes to bypass language differences. I argue here that the theatrical costumes commissioned by Sarti were crucial tools for transmitting and adapting the operatic genre to its new context, functioning as visual signifiers and as body technology. They represented the audience's first encounter with the character and conveyed crucial information about dramaturgy.

More than Meets the Eye: A Multimodal Approach to Science-Popularizing Discourse and Representation of the ‘Other’ in a Selection of National Geographic Feature Articles

National Geographic Magazine (NGM) is an American cultural icon renowned for the dissemination of geographic knowledge, the exhilaration of cultural explorations, the popularization of science discourse, and the cultivation of visual imaginaries. Among popular science magazines, its distinctive force in the popular imagination squarely lies in the manipulation and division of labor among individualized and sensationalized textual and visual signifiers. While NGM is said to reproduce familiar iconic visual systems, representations of the ‘Other’ seem to constitute a unique configuration through which latent geopolitical ideologies impinge on the feature article multimodal ensemble. Extending past scholarship on National Geographic Othered representations, science-popularizing discourse, and multimodality, while mobilizing multiple tools drawn from several theories, this research proposes a genre-based multimodal framework to the analysis of feature articles as dialectically connected to the collective, the historical, and the generic dimensions of the cultural practices therein. As a point of departure, the paper examines two feature articles retrieved from the online version of NGM, particularly from the Reach for the Stars content hub the magazine created for UAE space endeavors in partnership with the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC), home to the UAE’s National Space Programme. Specifically, the study scrutinizes the representations of Arab space scientists (the Other) in manners that tie closely to the geopolitical culture of the US (the Self). Findings showcase that despite the magazine’s metaphor a window on the world, the multimodal ensembles of science-popularizing discourse in NGM emerge as complex cultural processes fashioned in response to the ever-changing US geopolitical ideologies.

Content and Correlational Analysis of a Corpus of MTV-Promoted Music Videos Aired Between 1990 and 1999

From 1990 to 1999 MTV promoted a series of 288 music videos called “Buzz Clips”, designed to highlight emerging artists and genres. Such promotion had a measurable impact on an artists’ earnings and record sales. To date, the kinds of musical and visual practices MTV promoted have not been quantitatively analyzed. Just what made some videos Buzzworthy, and others not? We applied two phases of content analysis to this corpus to determine the most common sonic and visual signifiers in Buzz Clips, then processed the results of that content analysis using polychoric correlations. Our findings show high degrees of shared variance between certain pairs of musical and visual elements observed in the sample music videos. We interpret a number of these relationships in terms of their relevance to a performer’s perceived ethnicity and gender, showing how certain audiovisual features regularly accompany white men (e.g., electric guitar) while others regularly accompany women and performers of color (e.g. drum machines).

The sound of silence: Blank spaces, fading narratives and fragile frames in comics

Abstract How does one translate silence onto a silent medium? Printed comic books and graphic novels are generally a non-auditory art form. This has caused them to be traditionally perceived as ‘silent’. This also means that comics artists have come up with some of the most innovative ways of translating sound to a primarily visual medium – bold letters, onomatopoeic words, fading images, etc. Nonetheless, these innovations have often in fact failed to address silence. As an art form where both the blank space and the printed word acquire their own unique visual signification, is comics rather a stubbornly un-silent medium? If so, then how does one depict silence in an un-silent medium? My article addresses these questions by first examining the works of Scott McCloud, Thierry Groensteen and Barbara Postema and their study of sound in comics. I then build on these theoretical frameworks to problematize the conventional correlation of visual signifiers with sound and silence, primarily examining the use of blank space or the lack of words as a default signifier of silence. Ultimately, I will argue that comic books provide a unique transmedial approach to re-analyse our conventional ideas for visual representations of sound.

Accused War Criminals qua Perpetrators: On the Visual Signification of Criminal Guilt

This article examines media representations of two high-ranking defendants from Serbia indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for war crimes in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. By drawing on a social semiotic multimodal analysis and by distinguishing between four types of perpetrator images (‘the politician’, ‘the strategist’, ‘the combatant’, and ‘the executioner’), the article provides a detailed analysis of the way in which visual material from the courtroom and from the war is used in television news broadcasts in order to ascribe – or not to ascribe – criminal guilt to the accused. Considering the specific culture of denial in Serbia, persistent despite of dozens of war crimes trials conducted at the ICTY and in domestic courts, the article further examines the use of visual materials in the defendant-centered national discourse and the victim-centered transnational discourse. The article argues that the use of visuals as exemplified in the victim-centered discourse is necessary albeit not sufficient for triggering the process of dealing with the past.