Pub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1177/14704129231166845
Jianqing Chen
This article studies the popular bullet-titling practice in contemporary China – typing and sending a layer of horizontally scrolling comments superimposed onto moving images. It first explicates bullet-titling practice as a retaliatory action against the tactile effects of moving images, reconceptualizing cinema’s tactile quality and recovering its association with bullet-like intensity through the notion of tacti(ca)lity. Tracing the changed perception of touch in relation to the emergence of the touchscreen interface, the author then delineates the transformation of bullet-titles from offensive weapons against the optical attacks of moving images to a venue for real-time conversation and communication among spectator-cum-bullet-titlers. The article ends with a discussion of bullet-titles’ construction of pseudo-real time, which constitutes a viewing community of ‘diachronic simultaneity’ that assimilates all temporally and geographically dispersed spectators into the unfolding ‘now’ of video playback. This ‘nowness’ reconciles contemporary media consumption’s contradictory demands for globalized simultaneity and individualized flexibility, obliterating us anew.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1177/14704129231161952
Isadora Bratton-Benfield
This article articulates the continuity between past and present infrastructural development in Las Vegas by focusing upon the materiality and visual cultural expression of the Google Henderson NV data center. The political implications and interstate dynamics at play in the development of this data center are historicized, focusing on large-scale tech and military projects that characterize the region’s development. Google’s promise that a data-driven future would be accompanied by social and economic benefits for the Las Vegas community lies in stark contrast to the reality of its data center’s function. The strategic adoption of Google’s vision by key local and state officials, alongside the data center’s material embodiment as visually abstract and camouflaged, allows the facility to avoid scrutiny and teaches us about the evolving position of labor in a post-Fordist economy, particularly with regard to housing and employment.
{"title":"Strategic visibility: architectures of data colonialism in Las Vegas","authors":"Isadora Bratton-Benfield","doi":"10.1177/14704129231161952","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14704129231161952","url":null,"abstract":"This article articulates the continuity between past and present infrastructural development in Las Vegas by focusing upon the materiality and visual cultural expression of the Google Henderson NV data center. The political implications and interstate dynamics at play in the development of this data center are historicized, focusing on large-scale tech and military projects that characterize the region’s development. Google’s promise that a data-driven future would be accompanied by social and economic benefits for the Las Vegas community lies in stark contrast to the reality of its data center’s function. The strategic adoption of Google’s vision by key local and state officials, alongside the data center’s material embodiment as visually abstract and camouflaged, allows the facility to avoid scrutiny and teaches us about the evolving position of labor in a post-Fordist economy, particularly with regard to housing and employment.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45386085","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-21DOI: 10.1177/14704129231161947
S. Cornford
This article uses the resolutional relationship between digital image and planetary surface in satellite remote sensing as a lens through which to view the reliance of visual culture on mineral resources. While most studies of resolution in satellite imaging have focused on visibility and invisibility, the author argues that the equivalence between pictorial and geographic space in its cm/pixel specification offers an opportunity to consider the physical relationship between the two. The proposed inversion enables the satellite and its transmitted images to be understood as contingent upon an unsustainably extractive industrial model. The article then traces the material trajectory in geophysical prospecting applications of remote sensing, identifying a recursive loop in which images are used to produce minerals that are used to produce images. The potential geopolitical impact of this circularity is then assessed with regard to an example of future remote sensing emissions governance. In this, and many other climate-critical applications, remote sensing potentially plays a vital role, yet its instrumental gaze tends to shape the earth as an informational resource whose mineral reserves should be capitalized upon. Ultimately, the author’s aim is not to denounce earth observation as ecologically untenable, but to propose that we find a measure with which to assess the planetary impact of the various aspects of industrialized visual culture. Conceiving of resolution not as a measure of pictorial space but of the terrestrial cost of producing, consuming, distributing and permanently storing digital images might enable a more relational understanding of image and ground, pixels and planet. Accounting for the inverse resolution of an image could bring the deep temporal costs of digital visual culture into focus.
{"title":"Inverting resolution: accounting for the planetary cost of earth observation","authors":"S. Cornford","doi":"10.1177/14704129231161947","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14704129231161947","url":null,"abstract":"This article uses the resolutional relationship between digital image and planetary surface in satellite remote sensing as a lens through which to view the reliance of visual culture on mineral resources. While most studies of resolution in satellite imaging have focused on visibility and invisibility, the author argues that the equivalence between pictorial and geographic space in its cm/pixel specification offers an opportunity to consider the physical relationship between the two. The proposed inversion enables the satellite and its transmitted images to be understood as contingent upon an unsustainably extractive industrial model. The article then traces the material trajectory in geophysical prospecting applications of remote sensing, identifying a recursive loop in which images are used to produce minerals that are used to produce images. The potential geopolitical impact of this circularity is then assessed with regard to an example of future remote sensing emissions governance. In this, and many other climate-critical applications, remote sensing potentially plays a vital role, yet its instrumental gaze tends to shape the earth as an informational resource whose mineral reserves should be capitalized upon. Ultimately, the author’s aim is not to denounce earth observation as ecologically untenable, but to propose that we find a measure with which to assess the planetary impact of the various aspects of industrialized visual culture. Conceiving of resolution not as a measure of pictorial space but of the terrestrial cost of producing, consuming, distributing and permanently storing digital images might enable a more relational understanding of image and ground, pixels and planet. Accounting for the inverse resolution of an image could bring the deep temporal costs of digital visual culture into focus.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41956106","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1177/14704129221144985
Joseph M. Sussi
In Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway (2016: 31) describes ‘tentacular thinking’ through the arachnid’s sprawling ‘feelers’ that seem to stretch and entangle in mysterious and emergent ways, feeling in dark corners and wrestling with ‘a host of companions in sympoietic, threading, felting, tangling, tracking, and sorting’. In A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado (2021, henceforth referred to as Atlas), a ‘tentacular’ nuclear history is constructed that ‘feels out’ the lives ‘lived along’ the ‘nets and networks’ of the U.S. Nuclear Industrial Complex (p. 32). The Atlas is a remarkable digital book edited by the interdisciplinary artist Sarah Kanouse and the cultural geographer Shiloh Krupar. Kanouse, Krupar, and the over 40 contributors – including geographers, artists, anthropologists, and individuals directly impacted by the legacy of nuclear Colorado – unpack the sprawling history of nuclear development that has seismically and ecologically shaped Colorado as well as the mobilization of a labor force to implement the equally ‘tentacular’ administrative effort to mass produce the atomic bomb.
Donna Haraway(2016:31)在《与烦恼同行》一书中描述了这种蛛形纲动物通过其庞大的“触角”进行的“触手思维”,这些触角似乎以神秘而突现的方式伸展和纠缠,在黑暗的角落里感受,并与“一大批同伴进行交感、穿线、毡接、纠缠、追踪和分类”。在《科罗拉多核电站人民地图集》(2021,以下简称《地图集》)中,构建了一个“触手可及”的核历史,“感受”了美国核工业综合体“网络和网络”中的生活(第32页)。《地图集》是一本杰出的数字图书,由跨学科艺术家Sarah Kanouse和文化地理学家Shiloh Krupar编辑。Kanouse、Krupar和40多位贡献者,包括地理学家、艺术家、人类学家,以及直接受到科罗拉多核武器遗产影响的个人——揭示了科罗拉多州在地震和生态方面形成的庞大核发展历史,以及动员劳动力实施大规模生产原子弹的同样“临时”的行政努力。
{"title":"Sarah Kanouse and Shiloh Krupar, eds, A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado (2021), reviewed by Joseph M Sussi","authors":"Joseph M. Sussi","doi":"10.1177/14704129221144985","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14704129221144985","url":null,"abstract":"In Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway (2016: 31) describes ‘tentacular thinking’ through the arachnid’s sprawling ‘feelers’ that seem to stretch and entangle in mysterious and emergent ways, feeling in dark corners and wrestling with ‘a host of companions in sympoietic, threading, felting, tangling, tracking, and sorting’. In A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado (2021, henceforth referred to as Atlas), a ‘tentacular’ nuclear history is constructed that ‘feels out’ the lives ‘lived along’ the ‘nets and networks’ of the U.S. Nuclear Industrial Complex (p. 32). The Atlas is a remarkable digital book edited by the interdisciplinary artist Sarah Kanouse and the cultural geographer Shiloh Krupar. Kanouse, Krupar, and the over 40 contributors – including geographers, artists, anthropologists, and individuals directly impacted by the legacy of nuclear Colorado – unpack the sprawling history of nuclear development that has seismically and ecologically shaped Colorado as well as the mobilization of a labor force to implement the equally ‘tentacular’ administrative effort to mass produce the atomic bomb.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48973786","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1177/14704129221142494
Emilia Sawada
A year ago, President Joe Biden announced that the United States had withdrawn its troops from Afghanistan after 20 years, supposedly ending the longest war in US history. In Insurgent Aesthetics, however, Ronak Kapadia insists that the US has been waging a ‘long war’ throughout history, including the last century, and furthermore, that it is not simply ‘at war’, but is war itself (p. 5). Moreover, he proposes that contemporary South Asian, Middle Eastern, and diasporic multimedia artists resist the violence of the US empire by inspiring alternative ways of knowing and feeling, beyond the forever wars of US security statecraft. Kapadia redeploys the term forever war to critically describe, not only the United States’ global war on terror in the aftermath of 9/11, but also its domestic war on crime and, by extension, drugs (p. 5). While the US empire – the machine behind these affiliated wars – has often projected itself as borderless, monolithic, and everlasting, the artists of Insurgent Aesthetics demonstrate that even empire fails to last forever, that ultimately the powers of the US security state are evanescent. These artists’ embodied practices of opposition, refusal, and escape in the realms of installation, performance, photography, painting, video, literature, and new media shed light on their insurgent aesthetics, the book’s titular concept. Kapadia proposes that the artists’ insurgent aesthetics constitute a relational, collective aesthetic praxis that enables them to rearticulate the subjugated knowledges of Arab, Muslim, and South Asian populations and, in so doing, craft a queer calculus of the forever war. A queer calculus, Kapadia suggests, troubles dominant knowledges about the forever war; it renders intimate, sensuous, or affiliated what has been estranged, disappeared, or divided by US technologies of abstraction, such as aerial surveillance or statistical calculation; and it envisions new ways to inhabit the world, if not new worlds entirely.
{"title":"Ronak Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War, reviewed by Emilia Sawada","authors":"Emilia Sawada","doi":"10.1177/14704129221142494","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14704129221142494","url":null,"abstract":"A year ago, President Joe Biden announced that the United States had withdrawn its troops from Afghanistan after 20 years, supposedly ending the longest war in US history. In Insurgent Aesthetics, however, Ronak Kapadia insists that the US has been waging a ‘long war’ throughout history, including the last century, and furthermore, that it is not simply ‘at war’, but is war itself (p. 5). Moreover, he proposes that contemporary South Asian, Middle Eastern, and diasporic multimedia artists resist the violence of the US empire by inspiring alternative ways of knowing and feeling, beyond the forever wars of US security statecraft. Kapadia redeploys the term forever war to critically describe, not only the United States’ global war on terror in the aftermath of 9/11, but also its domestic war on crime and, by extension, drugs (p. 5). While the US empire – the machine behind these affiliated wars – has often projected itself as borderless, monolithic, and everlasting, the artists of Insurgent Aesthetics demonstrate that even empire fails to last forever, that ultimately the powers of the US security state are evanescent. These artists’ embodied practices of opposition, refusal, and escape in the realms of installation, performance, photography, painting, video, literature, and new media shed light on their insurgent aesthetics, the book’s titular concept. Kapadia proposes that the artists’ insurgent aesthetics constitute a relational, collective aesthetic praxis that enables them to rearticulate the subjugated knowledges of Arab, Muslim, and South Asian populations and, in so doing, craft a queer calculus of the forever war. A queer calculus, Kapadia suggests, troubles dominant knowledges about the forever war; it renders intimate, sensuous, or affiliated what has been estranged, disappeared, or divided by US technologies of abstraction, such as aerial surveillance or statistical calculation; and it envisions new ways to inhabit the world, if not new worlds entirely.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46950540","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1177/14704129221139864
G. Annovi
One of the last works by celebrated New York artist David Wojnarowicz is a black-and-white photograph of the artist’s face buried in the dirt. The photograph was staged in 1991, less than one year before the artist died of AIDS. Until now, Wojnarowicz’s photograph has been interpreted as the image of a burial, a reference to the artist’s impending death. This article compares Wojnarowicz’s photo to one of the last scenes of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968). The case of (Untitled) Face in Dirt and Teorema indicates the existence of a potentially complex relationship between Wojnarowicz and Pasolini, two queer artists who used provocation and sexual transgression to criticize capitalist society through their work. In this article, this complex relationship is explored to show, on the one hand, the import of Pasolini’s cinematographic and literary work in New York’s underground art scene of the 1980s. On the other, it demonstrates that Wojnarowicz’s last work conveys a positive message about his artistic legacy and future.
{"title":"Dirty encounters: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s legacy in David Wojnarowicz’s work","authors":"G. Annovi","doi":"10.1177/14704129221139864","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14704129221139864","url":null,"abstract":"One of the last works by celebrated New York artist David Wojnarowicz is a black-and-white photograph of the artist’s face buried in the dirt. The photograph was staged in 1991, less than one year before the artist died of AIDS. Until now, Wojnarowicz’s photograph has been interpreted as the image of a burial, a reference to the artist’s impending death. This article compares Wojnarowicz’s photo to one of the last scenes of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968). The case of (Untitled) Face in Dirt and Teorema indicates the existence of a potentially complex relationship between Wojnarowicz and Pasolini, two queer artists who used provocation and sexual transgression to criticize capitalist society through their work. In this article, this complex relationship is explored to show, on the one hand, the import of Pasolini’s cinematographic and literary work in New York’s underground art scene of the 1980s. On the other, it demonstrates that Wojnarowicz’s last work conveys a positive message about his artistic legacy and future.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"65413435","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1177/14704129221136217
Andrew Weir
Against the universalizing of the Anthropocene, radioactive dust affects specific communities more than others. At the same time, it carries particles from local sites to cosmic horizons. Uranium dust encodes deep timescales of planetary formation and extinction as they intersect with histories of violence and extraction, myth and current politics. This article analyses artwork by Yhonnie Scarce, descendant of the Kokatha and Nukunu peoples of South Australia, arguing for a particulate geo-fiction as method of engagement with colonial politics of deep time. By sampling and literally unearthing nuclear histories, Scarce’s work traces more-than-human toxic ecologies. Through a condensation of uranium-scale temporalities, the present moment of its exhibition is prised open. This becomes a speculative ethical encounter with responsibilities to deep histories and futures beyond itself, the lingering after effects of British colonial violence inscribed into the materiality of the work.
{"title":"Dust against the Anthropocene: Yhonnie Scarce’s nuclear geo-fictions","authors":"Andrew Weir","doi":"10.1177/14704129221136217","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14704129221136217","url":null,"abstract":"Against the universalizing of the Anthropocene, radioactive dust affects specific communities more than others. At the same time, it carries particles from local sites to cosmic horizons. Uranium dust encodes deep timescales of planetary formation and extinction as they intersect with histories of violence and extraction, myth and current politics. This article analyses artwork by Yhonnie Scarce, descendant of the Kokatha and Nukunu peoples of South Australia, arguing for a particulate geo-fiction as method of engagement with colonial politics of deep time. By sampling and literally unearthing nuclear histories, Scarce’s work traces more-than-human toxic ecologies. Through a condensation of uranium-scale temporalities, the present moment of its exhibition is prised open. This becomes a speculative ethical encounter with responsibilities to deep histories and futures beyond itself, the lingering after effects of British colonial violence inscribed into the materiality of the work.","PeriodicalId":45373,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Visual Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42542940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1177/14704129221142279
Homi K. Bhabha, Jae Emerling
This conversation contains ‘moments’ from a dialogue between the esteemed scholar Homi K Bhabha and Journal of Visual Culture editor Jae Emerling that took place at Harvard University on 7 March 2022. As part of the 20th anniversary celebrations of the journal’s founding, it was essential to include voices whose work, presence within the world, and poetic insights traverse the entirety of visual culture studies. Bhabha is certainly such a voice for our Editorial Collective, past and present. The goal of this open dialogue, if there is a single one, was to have a real conversation about Bhabha’s vital current projects, which address the socio-economic, political, and cultural dangers facing all of us. But it is also a hopeful discussion about the ‘survival’ of the theoretical humanities in the 21st century. We hope that it reads as dialogic-radiating lines passing through the singular points that shape the history of our present, while always remaining open and attentive to the unforeseen actualizations of the past–future events that compose each of us individually and collectively.
这段对话包含了受人尊敬的学者Homi K Bhabha和视觉文化杂志编辑Jae Emerling于2022年3月7日在哈佛大学进行的对话的“时刻”。作为该杂志创刊20周年庆祝活动的一部分,有必要将其作品、在世界上的存在以及贯穿整个视觉文化研究的诗意见解纳入其中。Bhabha无疑是我们编辑部的一个声音,无论是过去还是现在。这次公开对话的目标,如果有一个单一的目标的话,就是对巴巴当前的重要项目进行一次真正的对话,这些项目解决了我们所有人面临的社会经济、政治和文化危险。但这也是一场关于21世纪理论人文学科“生存”的充满希望的讨论。我们希望它读起来像对话辐射线,穿过塑造我们现在历史的奇异点,同时始终保持开放和关注过去-未来事件的不可预见的实现,这些事件构成了我们每个人个人和集体。
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Pub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1177/14704129221141922
Jasmin Ehrhardt, Lisa Nakamura
This article engages with TikToks created by incarcerated people using contraband cellphones. We read the #PrisonTok hashtag as part of a new genre of digital media created by imprisoned people that invites users to learn directly from them about everyday life behind bars, some of which includes producing and consuming digital media and memetic culture through practices of infrastructural fugitivity. TikTok’s affordances permit imprisoned people to share and demystify aspects of their everyday lives such as cooking, charging phones and maintaining digital infrastructure, despite prison rules prohibiting prisoners from owning phones. We discuss viral TikTok users such as Jeron Combs whose cooking videos have attracted millions of viewers, and conclude with an analysis of #PrisonTok’s implications for both media, visual culture and carceral studies. We do this to submit a framework for scholars, as well as free-world people broadly, to engage with illicit digital media created by imprisoned people.
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