Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2021.1928864
Anna Näslund Dahlgren, A. Wasielewski
Art museums began using computers to help organize, catalogue, and coordinate their collections as early as the 1960s. In more recent times, art historians have consolidated the use of digital tools in the discipline within the emerging field of Digital Art History (DAH). In this historiographic study, we set out to understand DAH through an analysis of existing scholarship in the field. Our method combined both text mining and close reading of three datasets of art history journal articles published in the last decade: DAH (International Journal of Digital Art History, special issues of Visual Resources), Art History, and Art Journal. We studied the topical focus of these journals, looking at which agents, materials, and methods dominate and how they are contextualized. Based on this, we found that the subject matter and topical focus of scholarship in DAH differs significantly from scholarship in Art History or Art Journal. More specifically, the historical concerns of museums with regard to digitization still dominate DAH compared to other scholarship in the field. We argue that there are a number of historical and practical reasons for this, including early adoption of computers within museums, the need for simplicity in digitization projects, and issues of copyright. The persistence of this affiliation, in turn, raises critical questions for the future of the field of art history, including who can access art historical datasets, and how and by whom they are created.
{"title":"Cultures of Digitization: A Historiographic Perspective on Digital Art History","authors":"Anna Näslund Dahlgren, A. Wasielewski","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2021.1928864","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2021.1928864","url":null,"abstract":"Art museums began using computers to help organize, catalogue, and coordinate their collections as early as the 1960s. In more recent times, art historians have consolidated the use of digital tools in the discipline within the emerging field of Digital Art History (DAH). In this historiographic study, we set out to understand DAH through an analysis of existing scholarship in the field. Our method combined both text mining and close reading of three datasets of art history journal articles published in the last decade: DAH (International Journal of Digital Art History, special issues of Visual Resources), Art History, and Art Journal. We studied the topical focus of these journals, looking at which agents, materials, and methods dominate and how they are contextualized. Based on this, we found that the subject matter and topical focus of scholarship in DAH differs significantly from scholarship in Art History or Art Journal. More specifically, the historical concerns of museums with regard to digitization still dominate DAH compared to other scholarship in the field. We argue that there are a number of historical and practical reasons for this, including early adoption of computers within museums, the need for simplicity in digitization projects, and issues of copyright. The persistence of this affiliation, in turn, raises critical questions for the future of the field of art history, including who can access art historical datasets, and how and by whom they are created.","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"36 1","pages":"339 - 359"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45193447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2022.2037357
Ilya Brookwell
This paper is a practical and theoretical look at the notion of “emojis as civic duty.” I frame the discussion in terms of an “emoji code” that goes beyond an evolution of natural languages to integrate more fundamentally into specific experiences, particular communities, and a networked regime of images. I introduce Stuart Hall’s “circuit of culture” as an alternative theoretical frame to prevailing linguistic research that investigates only the form and function of emojis. Hall endures because he helps us to recognize a politics of the image beyond form and function, signaling an interplay between consumption and production through live-streaming media. I make theoretical connections to others who have thought about media as essentially political communication. Finally, I offer a preliminary analysis of “emojis as civic duty” in the case of an esports champion. I conclude by suggesting where future study is necessary for a more robust notion of a “Gamer Citizen” to take shape.
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Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2022.2041262
Marie Tavinor
This is the first extensive publication dedicated to the Canada Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, originally built in 1958 by Enrico Peressutti from the Milanese architect collective BBPR, and restored in 2018 by Alberico Belgiojoso, son of another of BBPR’s founders. This book is a welcome addition to the bibliography on the ‘open-air museum’ of national pavilions in the Castello gardens, in which there are still important gaps. It is handsomely illustrated and contains authoritative contributions and a wealth of archival material. The book mainly focuses on the architectural history of the Canada pavilion from early conceptual designs to its recent restoration. However, it goes beyond important architectural discussions to encompass the relationship between visual art and architecture, and finally in the complex organisation presiding over national representation at the Venice Biennale. While the Venice Biennale started in 1895, Canada was a comparatively new participant. Its first national presence there dates to 1952, two years after Mexico, and two decades after the USA built their own pavilion in 1930. The post-war period was one of major change and expansion at the Biennale. 1948 and the display – in the Greek pavilion – of Peggy Guggenheim’s iconic collection of Surrealist artists and young Abstract Expressionist artists heralded a new era in its history. Turning its back on its prewar hesitance towards artistic innovation and on its fascist years, the post-war Biennale resolutely embraced the display of avant-garde movements, and the growing internationalisation of the art world. Reflecting and amplifying these shifts, the 1950s saw the third wave of pavilion construction in the Castello gardens, after the first wave started in 1907 with Belgium, and the second wave took place during the interwar period. The post-war constructions embodied the Biennale’s openness and filled its gardens with pavilions belonging not only to European neighbours such as Switzerland (1951) and Holland (1953–1954), but also to overseas countries such as Israel (1951), Venezuela (1953– 1956), Japan (1955–56) and Canada. Prestigious architects such as Josef Hoffman, Bruno Giacometti, Carlo Scarpa, Alvar and Elissa Aalto, Takamasa Yoshizaka and Gerrit Rietveld contributed their own interpretation of modernist architecture which visually underlined the aesthetic shift taking place at the Biennale. The
{"title":"The Canada Pavilion at the Venice Biennale","authors":"Marie Tavinor","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2022.2041262","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2022.2041262","url":null,"abstract":"This is the first extensive publication dedicated to the Canada Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, originally built in 1958 by Enrico Peressutti from the Milanese architect collective BBPR, and restored in 2018 by Alberico Belgiojoso, son of another of BBPR’s founders. This book is a welcome addition to the bibliography on the ‘open-air museum’ of national pavilions in the Castello gardens, in which there are still important gaps. It is handsomely illustrated and contains authoritative contributions and a wealth of archival material. The book mainly focuses on the architectural history of the Canada pavilion from early conceptual designs to its recent restoration. However, it goes beyond important architectural discussions to encompass the relationship between visual art and architecture, and finally in the complex organisation presiding over national representation at the Venice Biennale. While the Venice Biennale started in 1895, Canada was a comparatively new participant. Its first national presence there dates to 1952, two years after Mexico, and two decades after the USA built their own pavilion in 1930. The post-war period was one of major change and expansion at the Biennale. 1948 and the display – in the Greek pavilion – of Peggy Guggenheim’s iconic collection of Surrealist artists and young Abstract Expressionist artists heralded a new era in its history. Turning its back on its prewar hesitance towards artistic innovation and on its fascist years, the post-war Biennale resolutely embraced the display of avant-garde movements, and the growing internationalisation of the art world. Reflecting and amplifying these shifts, the 1950s saw the third wave of pavilion construction in the Castello gardens, after the first wave started in 1907 with Belgium, and the second wave took place during the interwar period. The post-war constructions embodied the Biennale’s openness and filled its gardens with pavilions belonging not only to European neighbours such as Switzerland (1951) and Holland (1953–1954), but also to overseas countries such as Israel (1951), Venezuela (1953– 1956), Japan (1955–56) and Canada. Prestigious architects such as Josef Hoffman, Bruno Giacometti, Carlo Scarpa, Alvar and Elissa Aalto, Takamasa Yoshizaka and Gerrit Rietveld contributed their own interpretation of modernist architecture which visually underlined the aesthetic shift taking place at the Biennale. The","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"36 1","pages":"397 - 401"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42261456","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2021.1969209
H. Nelson
The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly reframed our ability to connect in bodily, physical ways, prompting a retreat to the digital. Artist Meriem Bennani and filmmaker Orian Barki offer a vessel for this escape in their series 2 Lizards, released in eight episodes in the early stages of the pandemic. Set in a New York populated by animal surrogates, the animated series showcases the eponymous lizards – voiced by Bennani and Barki – navigating the anxiety, boredom, and catharsis of the ensuing quarantine in New York, replete with Zoom birthdays, rooftop concerts, and protests against racial inequity. The series strives to provide a sense of digital tenderness through its inherent hybridity. The lizards, cyborg avatars melding the human, the animal, and the machine, elude binaries and strictures, presenting a new way of forging connection and probing the emotional contours of life in the pandemic. Native to Instagram and created with a wide circle of collaborators, friends, and family, 2 Lizards relishes the elision between online and offline and the liberatory potential of the in-between. Bennani and Barki propose that through the Internet, there are new possibilities for communion, touch, presence, and care when bodies remain contingent and vulnerable. To be animals, they suggest, is to radically reimagine what constitutes the stuff of human experience.
{"title":"“I Wish I Could Have Been With You”: Imagining Digital Tenderness in 2 Lizards","authors":"H. Nelson","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2021.1969209","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2021.1969209","url":null,"abstract":"The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly reframed our ability to connect in bodily, physical ways, prompting a retreat to the digital. Artist Meriem Bennani and filmmaker Orian Barki offer a vessel for this escape in their series 2 Lizards, released in eight episodes in the early stages of the pandemic. Set in a New York populated by animal surrogates, the animated series showcases the eponymous lizards – voiced by Bennani and Barki – navigating the anxiety, boredom, and catharsis of the ensuing quarantine in New York, replete with Zoom birthdays, rooftop concerts, and protests against racial inequity. The series strives to provide a sense of digital tenderness through its inherent hybridity. The lizards, cyborg avatars melding the human, the animal, and the machine, elude binaries and strictures, presenting a new way of forging connection and probing the emotional contours of life in the pandemic. Native to Instagram and created with a wide circle of collaborators, friends, and family, 2 Lizards relishes the elision between online and offline and the liberatory potential of the in-between. Bennani and Barki propose that through the Internet, there are new possibilities for communion, touch, presence, and care when bodies remain contingent and vulnerable. To be animals, they suggest, is to radically reimagine what constitutes the stuff of human experience.","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"36 1","pages":"323 - 337"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42991870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2021.1957646
D. Abdulla
A pandemic introduces multiple factors that must be communicated to the public. The coronavirus outbreak has demonstrated the necessity of effective risk communication during a global pandemic and the importance of communication design within this process. Since March 2020, official and ad-hoc signage reminding the public to keep their distance, wear a mask, stay safe and stay at home have become ubiquitous in cities all over the world. This paper analyses the visual language of COVID-related signage – those made by designers and those made without – in London, UK from April 2020 to January 2021. A mixture of compositional interpretation and semiology was performed on 130 photographs of print-based signage to categorise them under themes. Results were categorised these under four broad themes: Thank you, Togetherness, Care; Safety and Security; Heroes and Protection; and Fear, Danger, Caution. The findings invite readers to reflect on the effectiveness of the visual communication strategy and ask who these designs are for.
{"title":"Keep Your Distance, Wear a Mask and Stay Safe: The Visual Language of Covid-19 Print-Based Signage","authors":"D. Abdulla","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2021.1957646","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2021.1957646","url":null,"abstract":"A pandemic introduces multiple factors that must be communicated to the public. The coronavirus outbreak has demonstrated the necessity of effective risk communication during a global pandemic and the importance of communication design within this process. Since March 2020, official and ad-hoc signage reminding the public to keep their distance, wear a mask, stay safe and stay at home have become ubiquitous in cities all over the world. This paper analyses the visual language of COVID-related signage – those made by designers and those made without – in London, UK from April 2020 to January 2021. A mixture of compositional interpretation and semiology was performed on 130 photographs of print-based signage to categorise them under themes. Results were categorised these under four broad themes: Thank you, Togetherness, Care; Safety and Security; Heroes and Protection; and Fear, Danger, Caution. The findings invite readers to reflect on the effectiveness of the visual communication strategy and ask who these designs are for.","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"36 1","pages":"218 - 246"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46082119","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2020.1964839
A. Ash
#isolationartviews photographically documents views from a Brighton window over 60 days of the UK first Covid national lock down. It records, reflects and comments upon the social interactions and routines of a seagull, local people and visitors to the artists block during the period of isolation.
{"title":"#isolationartviews","authors":"A. Ash","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2020.1964839","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2020.1964839","url":null,"abstract":"#isolationartviews photographically documents views from a Brighton window over 60 days of the UK first Covid national lock down. It records, reflects and comments upon the social interactions and routines of a seagull, local people and visitors to the artists block during the period of isolation.","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"36 1","pages":"279 - 297"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43598086","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2020.2008778
Phaedra Shanbaum, L. Weinberg
On January 31, 2020, BBC news reported that SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) had “officially” arrived in the UK. The chief medical officer for England, Professor Chris Whitty, announced that two people in the city of York had tested positive for the virus. The pair received immediate treatment. They were moved from their temporary residence in York to a hospital in Hull. Two days later, they were transferred from Hull to an infectious disease unit at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle. The patients, the BBC tells us, joined 83 Britons who were evacuated from Wuhan, China, the then center of the epidemic. The airplane carrying the evacuees had landed in England the very same day. What began on January 31, 2020 as a minor inconvenience will most likely end with the UK having the highest death rate in Europe, and the fourth highest per million of the population in the world: 147,433 people have died in the UK of Covid as of 22/12/21 and the number rises every day. In many respects, Covid, and the discourse that surrounds it, is the timeliest way to think about the socio-cultural and political relations of the image. Covid’s transformation from a regional problem into a global issue accelerates social, political, financial and ideological ruptures. These ruptures are performed against the backdrop of a reluctant, solidarity-governed populace and are propelled by the state. This ambivalence towards governmental and institutional control, exercised on behalf of the governed, is reflected in the association of the pandemic with dystopian visions where the state gradually becomes a technocracy. As the crisis surrounding the pandemic progresses, it deepens already existing socio-cultural and political divisions and, possibly, creates new ones. For example, research has shown that the implementation of preventative measures to stop spread, such as national lockdowns, have hit vulnerable groups of people hardest, exacerbating pre-existing socio-political inequalities. Not only are these groups at higher risk of contracting the disease due to their occupations, housing situations and other issues related to systemic discrimination, but they are also deprived of their livelihoods due to government-mandated lockdowns. Furthermore, Covid is described in academic and popular texts as “unprecedented” and is, without doubt, a crisis. But what kind of crisis is Covid? What do the images that surround it tell us about the current world in which we live? That is to say, what do these images reveal about
{"title":"The Visual Cultures of the Virus","authors":"Phaedra Shanbaum, L. Weinberg","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2020.2008778","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2020.2008778","url":null,"abstract":"On January 31, 2020, BBC news reported that SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) had “officially” arrived in the UK. The chief medical officer for England, Professor Chris Whitty, announced that two people in the city of York had tested positive for the virus. The pair received immediate treatment. They were moved from their temporary residence in York to a hospital in Hull. Two days later, they were transferred from Hull to an infectious disease unit at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle. The patients, the BBC tells us, joined 83 Britons who were evacuated from Wuhan, China, the then center of the epidemic. The airplane carrying the evacuees had landed in England the very same day. What began on January 31, 2020 as a minor inconvenience will most likely end with the UK having the highest death rate in Europe, and the fourth highest per million of the population in the world: 147,433 people have died in the UK of Covid as of 22/12/21 and the number rises every day. In many respects, Covid, and the discourse that surrounds it, is the timeliest way to think about the socio-cultural and political relations of the image. Covid’s transformation from a regional problem into a global issue accelerates social, political, financial and ideological ruptures. These ruptures are performed against the backdrop of a reluctant, solidarity-governed populace and are propelled by the state. This ambivalence towards governmental and institutional control, exercised on behalf of the governed, is reflected in the association of the pandemic with dystopian visions where the state gradually becomes a technocracy. As the crisis surrounding the pandemic progresses, it deepens already existing socio-cultural and political divisions and, possibly, creates new ones. For example, research has shown that the implementation of preventative measures to stop spread, such as national lockdowns, have hit vulnerable groups of people hardest, exacerbating pre-existing socio-political inequalities. Not only are these groups at higher risk of contracting the disease due to their occupations, housing situations and other issues related to systemic discrimination, but they are also deprived of their livelihoods due to government-mandated lockdowns. Furthermore, Covid is described in academic and popular texts as “unprecedented” and is, without doubt, a crisis. But what kind of crisis is Covid? What do the images that surround it tell us about the current world in which we live? That is to say, what do these images reveal about","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"36 1","pages":"215 - 217"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47877319","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2021.1997698
Ashley Lazevnick
This article situates the digital model of SARS-CoV-2 within a longer history of imagining technologies that have given visual form to scientific phenomena. Using the Protein Data Bank of three-dimensional models, medical illustrators constructed a model of the protein-spiked virus. What does it mean to make something invisible to the naked eye tangible? What is the place of emotion, affect, and persuasion in this process? To answer these questions, this article compares the COVID-19 model with Niels Bohr’s diagram of the atom and James Watson and Francis Crick’s model of the DNA double-helix.
{"title":"Giving the Virus a “Realistic Feel”: COVID-19 and the Rhetoric of Medical Models","authors":"Ashley Lazevnick","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2021.1997698","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2021.1997698","url":null,"abstract":"This article situates the digital model of SARS-CoV-2 within a longer history of imagining technologies that have given visual form to scientific phenomena. Using the Protein Data Bank of three-dimensional models, medical illustrators constructed a model of the protein-spiked virus. What does it mean to make something invisible to the naked eye tangible? What is the place of emotion, affect, and persuasion in this process? To answer these questions, this article compares the COVID-19 model with Niels Bohr’s diagram of the atom and James Watson and Francis Crick’s model of the DNA double-helix.","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"36 1","pages":"310 - 322"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44581455","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2021.1989910
E. Dare, A. Antonopoulou
Throughout the pandemic and in conditions of ‘lockdown’, in which the authors could not meet in person, Alexandra Antonopoulou and Eleanor Dare adapted their long-term collaborative writing project, The Phi Books (2008–), to the constraints of pandemic quarantine, in the second lockdown deploying their own chatbot and AI image generator as new collaborators. Given the complexity of such a mediated experience, in which fears around surveillance, corporate control, glitch and signal loss (not to mention illness) have been consistently present, how might we theorize the encounters and complex processes of mediation we experienced online, as writers and academics but also as friends? What, if anything, have we learnt from our collaboration being mediated by one or two corporate platforms? This article elucidates the author’s patterns of interpretation and resistance as mediatized and informed by embodied experiences. It also discusses the role of third-party agents, which the authors term ‘Coagulagents’ (coagulant and agents), serving to destabilize or deterritorialize the familiar presumptions of their work.
{"title":"The Image of Collaboration: Mediation and Enervation under Lockdown","authors":"E. Dare, A. Antonopoulou","doi":"10.1080/01973762.2021.1989910","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2021.1989910","url":null,"abstract":"Throughout the pandemic and in conditions of ‘lockdown’, in which the authors could not meet in person, Alexandra Antonopoulou and Eleanor Dare adapted their long-term collaborative writing project, The Phi Books (2008–), to the constraints of pandemic quarantine, in the second lockdown deploying their own chatbot and AI image generator as new collaborators. Given the complexity of such a mediated experience, in which fears around surveillance, corporate control, glitch and signal loss (not to mention illness) have been consistently present, how might we theorize the encounters and complex processes of mediation we experienced online, as writers and academics but also as friends? What, if anything, have we learnt from our collaboration being mediated by one or two corporate platforms? This article elucidates the author’s patterns of interpretation and resistance as mediatized and informed by embodied experiences. It also discusses the role of third-party agents, which the authors term ‘Coagulagents’ (coagulant and agents), serving to destabilize or deterritorialize the familiar presumptions of their work.","PeriodicalId":41894,"journal":{"name":"Visual Resources","volume":"36 1","pages":"298 - 309"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41408628","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/01973762.2021.1960778
N. Yadav
For Indian citizens, 2020 was not just the year of a global pandemic. It was also the year that brought home the fact that the world's largest democracy is slowly but surely crumbling under the stewardship of a far-right government that has been stoking communal tensions, eroding civil rights and hollowing out the economy from within. The administration's handling of Covid-19 has been marked by a trademark mixture of cruelty and incompetence: announcing the world's strictest lockdown with no prior notice, resulting in a mass exodus of migrant workers forced to travel hundreds of kilometers on foot from cities to their villages; peddling fake science; vaccination mismanagement, etc. It has been aided in this process by the country's mainstream media that has largely abdicated its adversarial role of holding those in power accountable. Webcomics have stepped into this vacuum to critique the socio-political dimensions of the pandemic through satire, their caricatures shared far and wide on social media and private messaging apps. These webcomics, I argue, have taken up the mantle of editorial cartooning which Victor Navasky has theorised as both routinely trivialised and powerfully subversive. The social media trolling received by Acharya as well as a Supreme Court injunction issued to Taneja testifies to what Navasky calls the peculiarly incendiary power of caricature. In my paper, I offer close readings of the Covid-19 related digital cartoons of Satish Acharya and Rachita Taneja and analyse the ways in which they offer a counter-hegemonic narrative of the pandemic in India.
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