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Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology

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... Images are the constitutive elements of ideology. W.J.T. Mitchell (1986) explains that ideology is deeply connected to the image: ...
... One may then appraise the all-too important historical ideological functions of the EDSA uprising in the discourse of the nation by looking at its images. The way these images are worked out through the process of imagining serve to illustrate the formation of ideology in showing, following Mitchell's (1986) reading of Marx, how "concrete concepts originat[e] in a concrete image" (p. 169). ...
... It is commendable that the films presented their own takes on the problems of the country. Mitchell (1986) raises difficult questions in his discussion of the rhetoric of iconoclasm centering on the appropriateness of the camera obscura as a model for ideology: ...
Article
Twenty years after the EDSA uprising, 20 independent filmmakers created 20 films showing different images of the country. Ending the project with the film Mistulang Kamera Obskura, the omnibus film project self-crtically staged its representation of the social and the political. The camera obscura has a long and fraught history as a metaphor of ideology, most prominently broached by Marx in his discussion of being, consciousness, and ideology. This paper discusses the relation of the camera obscura to discourses of visuality, knowledge, and ideology. Reading the moving images as concretizations of ideas, it seeks to limit those ideas as constitutive of the various ideologies of the EDSA uprising which the filmmakers represent in the process of “depicting truthful images of the nation.”
... In this multimodal context, the symmetry and asymmetry of cinematic language produces and condenses narratives through visual composition. Such visual heritage of language developed since cave dwellers painted on cave walls to communicate ideas and beliefs (Mitchell, 1986(Mitchell, , 2015, while the contemporary phenomenon of human communication is extensively more visual than ever in education, economic, cultural, political, social and geographic, and information and communication systems Suvakovic, 2017). Furthermore, the art of cinema represents a grand narrative of modern human communication. ...
... Furthermore, the art of cinema represents a grand narrative of modern human communication. It is a multimodal medium that assembles images, texts, sounds, fashions, social critique, histories, aesthetics and semiotics (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006;Leeuwen & Jewitt, 2001;Mitchell, 1986Mitchell, , 2005Mitchell, , 2015Suvakovic, 2017). Consequently, the multimodal criticism in this study provokes further possibilities. ...
Article
The current investigation aims to explore the multimodality of the visual language in cinema, which articulates pictures and words into a creative medium of contemporary aesthetics and criticism. This multimodal discourse analysis focuses on Al-Akhar (The Other, 1999), a film that renders the postcolonial philosophy of Edward Said (1935-2002), the Palestinian-American critic. Youssef Chahine (1926-2008), the Egyptian cinematic artist, produced this film. The present creativity of multimodal cinematic visual language is significant in articulating form and content, where expressive components manifest through graphic, aesthetic, and semiotic symbolisms overlapping with local/global cinematographic ecologies. Three decades ago, Al-Akhar imagined today's media dominance when it criticised the sociopolitical landscape of the 1990s, which led to a series of inhumane incidents across different geographies at the beginning of the new millennium. It investigates the impacts of media and globalisation on Arabic social systems, discussing economies and cultural heritage with imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. This paper aims to identify Youssef Chahine's cinematic art as a medium of Edward Said's criticism. Methodologically, it adopted the aesthetic analysis as a qualitative research method to explore the visual language in the cinematic medium. The research's question corresponds to the critical role of media in rendering the cultural issues of identity from aesthetic perspectives. This paper is significant because it explores the impact of critical thinking on multimodal media, which aesthetically incorporates language, fashion, architecture, sociology, philosophy and education. Furthermore, it identifies a significant dualism in art resembling a multimodal articulation of Edward Said's criticism and Youssef Chahine's cinema.
... Referring to the inherently antagonistic implications of interartistic comparisons, for which Leonardo invented the concept of paragone, J. W. T. Mitchell (1986) described the ongoing debates on the relations between the visual and verbal arts as an all -out "war of signs." According to him, the fundamental reason why such discussions repeatedly result in disagreements is that, on the one hand, the belief persists that words and pictures "are not merely different kinds of creatures, but opposite kinds," and on the other, both sides "lay claim to the same territory (reference, representation, denotation, meaning)" (Mitchell, 1986, p. 47). ...
... Identifying these affinities allows us to correctly understand Stein's rather unseemly conservatism. According to Mitchell (1986), the tendency "to breach the supposed boundaries between temporal and spatial arts is not a marginal or exceptional practice, but a fundamental impulse in both the theory and practice of the arts, one which is not confined to any particular genre or period" (Mitchell, 1986, p. 98), but the historical significance of the modernist revolution as Stein understood and explained it is that it distinguished between breaching boundaries and confusing them. Stein embodied the avant -garde's awareness of the difference for, while admitting that she derived inspiration from the visual arts and was keenly interested in how painters deal with representing "the problem of the external and the internal" (Stein, 1961, p. 119), she at the same time consistently followed her essentially literary intuition in her own struggle with and in language, the only medium in which she felt she could effectively challenge and explode the conventions of visual representation by imitation. ...
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While the humanities have become a multimodal domain in which visual culture is immanent and various new cross-disciplinary perspectives and theories are being employed to investigate the relationship between artistic and literary forms of representation, artists’ writings remain understudied and underappreciated. Art/literature studies often proceed by pairing a specific work of art with a particular literary text or an aesthetic style with a poetics or a narrative technique, but they rarely consider situations when both elements of the chosen pair come from the same source — an artist-writer. But questions related to whether and how an artist’s ‘natural’ visual disposition may impact on how she/he approaches and handles verbal language and vice versa need to be asked to illuminate what is still a shadow zone in word and image studies. Citing examples of major representatives of American modernism in art and literature, the essay addresses some of the problematic issues involved in studying verbal expression by visual artists and the cogency of posited correlations between the painterly and writerly intuitions and competences at play in artworks and texts produced by artist-writers.
... It has been only in the last 30 years that an increasing number of historians have reacted against this 'whiggish' interpretation of art history. In particular, authors like Belting (1987), Mitchell (1986), Danto (1997), Summers (2003) and Carrier (2008) have suggested that progressive art history has become exhausted. They have argued that the 'naturalistic' schemes of artistic progress are only valid when it is assumed that imitation is the goal of art. ...
... As a result, abstract images are today understood as meaningfully constituted as representational art. The current revalorization of non-figurative images is also related to the recent proliferation of new disciplines, including iconology (Mitchell 1986), visual studies (Elkins 2003) and the anthropology of images (Belting 2011). Scholars working in these areas have proposed to replace the narrow discourse of art history, mainly centered on 'high art', by a new interdisciplinary approach focused on the examination of all kind of images. ...
... En este mismo sentido,Mitchell (1986), por ejemplo, habla de la imagen-texto y de la importancia de este tipo de estudios para tratar de entender, en este caso, la complejidad de las relaciones entre la palabra y la visualidad. Algunos han explorado, asimismo, la dimensión de lo intermedial, comoBolter y Grusin (2000), quienes emplean el término "remediation": "…we call the representation of one medium in another remediation" […llamamos a la representación de un medio en otro "remediación"] (p. ...
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Introducción: Las adaptaciones cinematográficas realizadas a partir de piezas teatrales han devenido un ámbito propicio para examinar las relaciones intermediales y transdisciplinarias entre ambas prácticas artísticas. Objetivo: Se propone analizar las relaciones intermediales que pueden hallarse entre La casa vieja, obra teatral del cubano Abelardo Estorino, y Casa vieja, su versión fílmica, de Lester Hamlet, con el fin de indagar en la productividad del diálogo que se produce entre teatro y cine. Métodos: Hemos desarrollado un análisis comparativo entre algunos elementos relevantes de ambas obras, que permiten establecer conexiones y hallar diferencias entre los dos medios artísticos examinados. Resultados: En sentido general, es posible afirmar que en la película Casa vieja se realiza una transposición de la obra teatral mediante la cual se reescribe la pieza de Estorino, confiriéndole nuevos significados. Conclusiones: En Casa vieja es posible detectar la presencia de diferentes procedimientos y figuras intermediales que permiten apreciar la revalorización que hace el filme de la pieza teatral, así como la productividad de actualizarla y transponerla a un nuevo contexto y medio distinto. Las marcas de teatralidad dentro de la película hacen posible, asimismo, reflexionar acerca de los profundos conflictos y problemáticas sociales planteados a través de su argumento.
... 1 For example, as James A.W Heffernan (1991) shows, a gendered reading of the relationship between the verbal text and the graphic image is a fruitful approach, given the properties associated with women and men, and images and texts, respectively. Overall, the age-old word/image hierarchy debate beginning with Plato, via da Vinci to G. E. Lessing and forwards demonstrates that the relationship between the symbolic and the iconic sign systems is littered with notions of power, subordination, supremacy, and imitation (see for example W.J.T. Mitchell, 1986). It is thus fruitful to discuss ekphrasis in terms of othering practices: Does the ekphrasis give voice and power to the (silent) source medium, or is it instead speaking for it, thus undermining its non-verbal communication mode? ...
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T he first time I wrote about Wislawa Szymborska's poem "Photograph from September 11" ("Fotografia z 11 wresnia") was in my dissertation, 2014. I chose it because it was so very intermedial, so to speak. It is an ekphrasis, a poem about a photograph, where the media specificities of both the written text and the photograph are highlighted in intricated ways. The more times I read it, the more fascinated I became by the structure of the poem, and moreover, by how it treated temporality and spatiality. I have always felt that I was not yet done with that poem, which is why I now return to it, once again with an intermedial approach: I will examine how the poem approaches the spatiotemporal properties of the involved media types and what role they play in its conveyance of respect, grief, and empathy. Furthermore, I will use Karen Barad's posthumanist theory on agen-tial realism to discuss the ethical and intermedial implications of entanglement and separateness between observer and observed, as well as between verbal text and photograph. My aim is to show that Szymborska, by engaging in the media specific affordances of photographs and texts respectively , in her poem renegotiates temporality and the relationship between subject and object.
... In addition, from an image-based perspective, Stuart Hall's system (1973), later modified by Ross (2011) and Morley (2006), can be further expanded based on W. J. T. Mitchell's (1986) theory of "Imagetext". Ross (2011) and Morley (2006) expanded Hall's Encoding and Decoding system into ideological and text-related versions, but the text version can be further extended regarding the renewed character of a text. ...
Conference Paper
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Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC), such as text and image generators, provides a way to generate content automatically. However, these technologies have created questions about social dimensions such as representation and identity. Based on AIGC and traditional Chinese women's writing culture, this paper explores how it has evolved into a unique system under extreme conditions and influenced today's women's movement. It further explores the development of AI and other technologies on it. Unfortunately, the data trained by AIGC still has a gap with reality and a particular algorithmic bias. The authors hope this study will remove bias from art creation and alleviate the disconnect between AI art, artistic integrity, and cultural equality. Nüshu. Artificial intelligence. Generative art. Encoding decoding. Intangible cultural heritage.
... There is a growing body of research, however, that develops more ways to analyse and use images in research (Reavey, 2012), not only as a practical device to produce knowledge, but also as a way of knowing the world. Research on imagery can cover a wide variety of topics relating to graphic images (e.g., pictures, statues, designs), optical images (e.g., mirrors, projections), perceptual images (e.g., sense data, appearances), mental images (e.g., dreams, memories, ideas), and verbal images (e.g., metaphors, descriptions) (Mitchell, 1984;1986). ...
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The theory of social representations has offered a significant and nuanced theoretical framework to gather and interpret knowledge across a wide range of subjects and mediums in order to discuss how different social and material contexts are perceived for the purpose of providing a meaningful foundation to a given reality. The theory has been critiqued and expanded hugely to provide a rich source of intellectual enquiry within social psychology and beyond. However, one area that has received scant attention, is the significance of graphic imagery as a source of data from which to explore social representations within the public consciousness. As imagery in media and social media has become an extension of perceptions of a given social reality, this special issue aims to fill this gap to explore how the power of the image can reflect the diffusion of social representations across our often politicised social and cultural worlds.
... My analysis is informed by Homi K. Bhabha's theory of colonial discourse (1994) and his notion of stereotype, specifically, in a sustained dialogue with Visual Studies. In this field, paintings are not only seen as pictures, that is, as pictorial objects, but also as images (Mitchell, 1986). From this perspective, casta paintings operate as visual artifacts that produce and reproduce discursive effects beyond those generated in the context of their production (18th century), and still circulate as images through diverse formats, supports, and media. ...
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The aim of this essay is to analyze the ways in which the development of the casta pictorial genre contributed to the production and stabilization of racializing and racist stereotypes. These racial stereotypes still persist in cultural imaginaries in and about Latin America as part of the long duration of coloniality. Casta painting from New Spain is analyzed here as a pictorial genre and as a colonial discourse in connection with situated social and racial concepts, such as Creole, caste, and calidad. The analysis develops through a dialogue with perspectives from Semiology of Art, Visual studies, Postcolonial studies, and Latin American Critique of Coloniality. In this regard, this essay intends to create a conversation among different disciplines and fields of study in order to develop a complex, transdisciplinary approach to a problem from colonial times: the production and circulation of ethnoracial stereotypes and their impact on social relations, lived experiences, and subjectivities.
... The pictorial approach developed by Mitchell (1986), and followed by other authors (Mirzoeff, 2016;Brea, 2010), broadened the conception of the visual and recognized its incidence in different dimensions of social and political life, beyond art and advertising, which generated the inclusion of images in different fields of study. Gradually -and while still considered as little addressed (Brown et al., 2017;Della Porta, 2013;Hansen, 2018)-the visual dimension in the study of contentious politics has been developed in the last decades from different perspectives: e.g., social movements (Doerr et al., 2015;Della Porta, 2013), demonstrations (Doer & Milman, 2014Sun & Luo, 2022;Veneti, 2017), graffiti Drechsel, 2010;Gómez-Abarca, 2014;Mubi Brighenti, 2010), the use of symbols (Olesen, 2015), specific cases of political confrontation such as Spain's Indignados (Rovisco, 2017), Hong Kong's Umbrella movement (Patsiaouras et al., 2018), Argentine expressions during the dictatorship (1976)(1977)(1978)(1979)(1980)(1981)(1982)(1983) (Ryan, 2020), Chile's student protests (Manzi et al., 2021), or Latin American visual resistance as a cultural unit (Ryan, 2016), and even in the development of methodologies focused on the visual (Doerr & Milman, 2014;Doerr & Teune, 2008;Philipps, 2012). ...
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This paper is embedded in the Chilean demonstrations of October 2019, a series of massive protests and riots in different cities of the country that demanded political, economic, social, and cultural changes. Through a photographic recollection (298 photos) of the images (n=1211) displayed on the walls during the first two weeks of the mobilizations in Santiago de Chile, the centre of the demonstrations, and using the content analysis method, this paper aims to define the main themes that were represented in the popular demands and to examine the public participation in this context. The analysis shows that the main themes expressed through the visuals were the rejection of the Chilean political structure and the denunciation of the excessive use of public violence by the police. The ideas expressed can be summarized in four groups: violence, politics, identities, and love. Moreover, in addition to the triggers of the protest, it develops the reproduction of already established signs, and the raise of new imaginaries linked to the popular discourses. Finally, this study shows the role of the visual expressions that, regardless of their quality, contribute to the construction of meaning through visuality in the political contingency.
... It probes the nature of visual language and its relationship to wider meaning-making processes. However, semiotics has been accused of neglecting the sensorial, imaginative, and affective qualities of images in its focus on decoding (Mitchell, 1986). ...
... In recent years, the field of International Relations (IR) has experienced both a 'narrative turn' (Roberts, 2006) and a 'visual' or 'pictorial turn' (Mitchell, 1986). Building on insights in literary studies and cognitive linguistics (Fludernik, 2009;Sarbin, 1986;White, 1987), the growing body of scholarship on narratives in IR argues that we are all 'story-telling beings' (Devetak, 2009: 795) who think, communicate and make sense of our environment through narratives. ...
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Biographical narratives generate a continuous sense of political community across the state’s past, present and future, and provide the state with ontological security. Building on growing International Relations scholarship that highlights the power of visuals in shaping global politics, our article proposes visual rhetorical analysis as a tool to interrogate how governments employ images to tell their biographical narratives. The rhetorical approach transcends the methodological divide in the current ‘visual turn’ literature between the cognitive psychological and poststructuralist perspectives. We illustrate the analytical value of the rhetorical approach through an empirical study of how the totalitarian regimes of China and North Korea communicate their biographical narratives – the ‘rightful great power’ narrative and the ‘family state’ narrative, respectively – through propaganda imagery of their leaders. To this end, we develop a close semiotic reading of selected photographs of Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un in different narrative settings.
... El giro pictórico desarrollado por Mitchell (1986), y continuado por otros autores (Mirzoeff, 2016;Brea, 2010), amplió la concepción de lo visual y reconoció su incidencia en diferentes dimensiones de la vida social y política, más allá del arte y de la publicidad, lo que generó la inclusión de las imágenes en diferentes campos de estudio. Paulatinamente -y siendo aun considerada como poco abordada (Brown et al., 2017;Della Porta, 2013;Hansen, 2018)-la dimensión visual en el estudio de política contenciosa se ha ido desarrollando en las últimas décadas desde diferentes perspectivas: por ejemplo, los movimientos sociales (Doerr et al., 2015;Della Porta, 2013), las protestas (Doer & Milman, 2014;Sun & Luo, 2022;Veneti, 2017), el graffiti Drechsel, 2010;Gómez-Abarca, 2014;Mubi Brighenti, 2010), el uso de símbolos (Olesen, 2015), casos específicos de confrontación política como Indignados de España (Rovisco, 2017), el movimiento de los Paraguas de Hong Kong (Patsiaouras et al., aravena-ortiz, s. ...
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Este artículo se enmarca en el estallido social de octubre de 2019 en Chile, una serie de protestas masivas en diferentes ciudades del país que demandaban cambios políticos, económicos, sociales y culturales. A través de una recolección fotográfica (298 fotos) de las imágenes (n=1211) plasmadas en los muros del epicentro de las protestas de la ciudad de Santiago de Chile durante las primeras dos semanas de las movilizaciones, y utilizando el método de análisis de contenido, este artículo busca definir los principales temas representados en las demandas populares y explorar la participación pública en este contexto. El análisis evidencia que las principales cuestiones expresadas visualmente por los protestantes fueron el rechazo a la estructura política chilena y la denuncia al excesivo uso de la fuerza pública, y se concentraron principalmente en cuatro grupos: violencia, política, identidades y amor. Asimismo, muestra la adhesión a nuevas temáticas ajenas a los principales detonantes de las protestas, como la defensa de los derechos de minorías identitarias y las denuncias de violencia en la misma protesta, la reproducción de signos preestablecidos y el surgimiento de nuevos imaginarios alineados con los discursos populares. Finalmente, este estudio visibiliza el rol de las expresiones visuales que, independiente de su calidad gráfica, participan de todas formas en la construcción de sentido de la contingencia política.
... El giro pictórico desarrollado por Mitchell (1986), y continuado por otros autores (Mirzoeff, 2016;Brea, 2010), amplió la concepción de lo visual y reconoció su incidencia en diferentes dimensiones de la vida social y política, más allá del arte y de la publicidad, lo que generó la inclusión de las imágenes en diferentes campos de estudio. Paulatinamente -y siendo aun considerada como poco abordada (Brown et al., 2017;Della Porta, 2013;Hansen, 2018)-la dimensión visual en el estudio de política contenciosa se ha ido desarrollando en las últimas décadas desde diferentes perspectivas: por ejemplo, los movimientos sociales (Doerr et al., 2015;Della Porta, 2013), las protestas (Doer & Milman, 2014;Sun & Luo, 2022;Veneti, 2017), el graffiti Drechsel, 2010;Gómez-Abarca, 2014;Mubi Brighenti, 2010), el uso de símbolos (Olesen, 2015), casos específicos de confrontación política como Indignados de España (Rovisco, 2017), el movimiento de los Paraguas de Hong Kong (Patsiaouras et al., aravena-ortiz, s. ...
Article
Full-text available
Este artículo se enmarca en el estallido social de octubre de 2019 en Chile, una serie de protestas masivas en diferentes ciudades del país que demandaban cambios políticos, económicos, sociales y culturales. A través de una recolección fotográfica (298 fotos) de las imágenes (n=1211) plasmadas en los muros del epicentro de las protestas de la ciudad de Santiago de Chile durante las primeras dos semanas de las movilizaciones, y utilizando el método de análisis de contenido, este artículo busca definir los principales temas representados en las demandas populares y explorar la participación pública en este contexto. El análisis evidencia que las principales cuestiones expresadas visualmente por los protestantes fueron el rechazo a la estructura política chilena y la denuncia al excesivo uso de la fuerza pública, y se concentraron principalmente en cuatro grupos: violencia, política, identidades y amor. Asimismo, muestra la adhesión a nuevas temáticas ajenas a los principales detonantes de las protestas, como la defensa de los derechos de minorías identitarias y las denuncias de violencia en la misma protesta, la reproducción de signos preestablecidos y el surgimiento de nuevos imaginarios alineados con los discursos populares. Finalmente, este estudio visibiliza el rol de las expresiones visuales que, independiente de su calidad gráfica, participan de todas formas en la construcción de sentido de la contingencia política.
... ideologije. W. J. T. Mitchell opozarja, da »reprezentacija ni prepis vidne resničnosti, ampak proces, s katerim družbeni in kulturni svet izoblikuje videnje samega sebe« (Mitchell, 1986). 6 Politična in družbena vloga podob ter njihova kontekstualna interpretacija so postali osrednji predmet raziskav tako na področju nove umetnostne zgodovine kot vizualnih študijev. ...
... Czarniawaska und Joerges orientieren sich hierbei an Mitchell (1986) und verstehen "Ideen" als verbildlichte Medien, die in erster Linie durch kommunikative Akte weitergegeben werden (vgl. Czarniawaska und Joerges 1996, S. 20). ...
... Czarniawaska und Joerges orientieren sich hierbei an Mitchell (1986) und verstehen "Ideen" als verbildlichte Medien, die in erster Linie durch kommunikative Akte weitergegeben werden (vgl. Czarniawaska und Joerges 1996, S. 20). ...
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Zusammenfassung Wie kommen institutionelle Vorstellungen in die Schule, wie reagieren Schulleiter/-innen auf Ansprüche und wie vollzieht sich dadurch in weitestem Sinne organisationaler Wandel? Diese Fragen sind zentrale Themen des dritten Kapitels. Um sie im Detail zu behandeln, knüpfen die Ausführungen an die bereits in Kapitel 2 diskutierten Theorienansätze an. Im Kapitel werden Konzepte zu institutionellem Wandel und die Verarbeitung von institutionellen Vorstellungen in konkrete Handlungen diskutiert.
... At the theoretical intersection of visual communication perspective (Worth, S, & Gross, 1974;Gross, 1980;Lester, 1995;Mitchell, 1986;2005) and social media visualities (Serafinelli and Villi, 2017;Karsa, 2017aKarsa, , 2017bManovich, 2017;Highfield and Leaver, 2016), this research finds itself navigating, aiming to promote a dialogue between theory and empiricism: images, ephemerality and Instagram Stories. With so many routine events transformed into visual content, new possibilities for scientific questions arise in visual communication studies. ...
Conference Paper
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Digital images and social media usage have become trending research topics in visual communication and new media studies in the past decades, yet many questions and concepts within their interconnection remain undiscussed. Hereby, this paper aims at examining how add-on features in ephemeral content platforms such as Instagram impact on notions and uses of contemporary images. In order to approach this interrogation, the article is divided into two parts: first it provides a theoretical discussion and possible definition for digital-networked images (Kasra, 2017a) from a visual communication perspective (Worth and Gross, 1974; Gross, 1980; Lester, 1995; Mitchell, 1986; 2005) and social media visualities (Serafinelli and Villi, 2017; Karsa, 2017a, 2017b; Manovich, 2017; Highfield and Leaver, 2016); elaborated on the previous ideas, a second part brings on an empirical qualitative descriptive analysis of Instagram Stories features with the use of netnography (Kozinets, 2015). As a result, it is understood that digital-networked images need to be analyzed and defined within their context; the studied platform presents changes on structural aspects of contemporary visual content production and affordances; and the technical characteristics found are directly interrelated to socio-cultural aspects. Despite ephemerality becoming ubiquitous in online digital images sharing, further research is still needed from Communication Science scholars to fully understand its relationship with other visual communication practices online.
... Scholarship regarding the identification power of icons abounds in rhetorical studies. In addition to the work of Hariman and Lucaites (2001, 2002 and the scholarship their work fostered (Born, 2019;Dreschel, 2010;Greenwalt & McVey, 2022;Jenkins, 2008;Mortensen, 2017;Mortensen & Grønlykke Mollerup, 2021), scholars broadly examining the identity building capabilities of icons also include Olson (1983), Edwards and Winkler (1997, Stein (2002), Cloud (2004), Palczewski (2005), Goldman (2005), Mitchell (2013), and Truman (2017. In determining the constitutive materiality of iconic objects, I utilize Hariman and Lucaites' (2007) five constitutive influences of iconic images as a framework to ascertain if objects are uniquely able to function as both visual and material vectors of identification. ...
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This dissertation examines the constitutive functions of multimodal cancer rhetoric in America and critiques the resulting ideological consequences. This study locates the multimodal manifestations of American cancer rhetoric within three realms – textual/oral, visual/material, and bodily/performative. Beginning in the discursive realm, it traces the metaphoric evolution of the “War on Cancer” and the “Cancer Moonshot Initiative” in presidential rhetoric before then moving to an analysis of artifacts from American cancer rhetoric’s nondiscursive formations. For the visual/material modality, this study analyzes the pink breast cancer “awareness” ribbon and the yellow Livestrong cancer “support” bracelet; for the bodily/performative modality, it then considers two portrayals of cancered bodies in popular media – Walter White from the television series Breaking Bad and the featured childhood cancer patients from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. To better understand the ongoing identification processes within and among the various modalities of American cancer rhetoric, this dissertation expands upon several theories of constitutive rhetoric. First, it utilizes an extended concept of constitutive metaphors to properly ascertain the identification and ideological power of the martial and space exploration metaphoric frameworks underlying the “War on Cancer” and the “Cancer Moonshot Initiative.” Second, it positions the pink ribbon and yellow bracelet of American cancer culture as iconic objects and locates their identificatory and ideological impact as emanating from their constitutive materiality. Finally, this study advances a narrative-based framework for understanding the constitutive corporality of cancered bodies in media. By attending to the physical contours of cancered bodies, this study effectively demonstrates the identity and ideological force of such bodies. Overarchingly, however, this dissertation contributes to a more nuanced understanding of constitutive theory through its focus upon cancer’s paradoxical status as an “invisible illness.” That is, although initially invisible, cancer transforms into a highly visible disease when medically treated – and this tension between what is visible and what is not, and its impact on processes of identification – demonstrates the latent power of invisibility in constitutive rhetorics.
... The entire society is like a machine that manufacture desires. Idols and gods [11] ...
Conference Paper
Due to the development and innovation of technology, a new steering has taken place in the traditional artistic paradigm. In this new context, the use of: iconology research methods on the basis of the evolution of images, which summarizes image generation methods. and a series of art works were drawn based on the results of the research.
... Efforts were made to avoid gaps on a chart, either to cover up the author's ignorance of that particular space or to achieve aesthetically harmonious design of the chart. Qualitatively and quantitatively more opulent content, even if it was a product of imagination, also added to the professional credibility and increased the commercial value of a chart (Mitchell 1986). ...
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This qualitative analysis of symbolic elements in nautical cartography aims to provide an interdisciplinary insight into some aspects of early modern cartographic representations of the Adriatic Sea. The nautical charts were supplemented with compass roses, a graphic structure that facilitates orientation and correlates with rhumb lines. The research objective focusses primarily on the variety of signs for the cardinal directions north and east, additionally considering some rare but innovative and avant-garde pragmatic uses of compass roses to indicate magnetic declination. On the majority of the selected nautical charts, most of which were created in Mediterranean and Western European cultural centres, decorative elements such as the fleur-de-lis and the cross were used in compass roses to determine the cardinal points. The compass roses of these nautical charts often served as symbolic evidence of the social and economic belonging of the Adriatic to the European part of the Mediterranean geographical system, as well as to the Christian sphere of tradition and influence. The study has thus proved the existence of significant symbolic communication capacity of a compass rose, which was not only a utilitarian but also an artistic element.
... The concept of imagery has been widely discussed in literary studies and linguistics (see Paivio, 1971;Mitchell, 1986Mitchell, , 1993Scarry, 1999;Abrams and Harpham, 2005;Starr, 2010;Szczepaniak and Lew, 2011;Dancygier, 2014). Di Yanni (2007, p.779) states that imagery is the heart of literature that aids readers to be part of the story, the poem, or the play. ...
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La vida de Francisco de Goya abarcó el período entre la Ilustración y los cambios turbulentos en España durante los siglos XVIII y XIX. A partir de 1792, sus obras comenzaron a reflejar los aspectos más oscuros de la sociedad, especialmente en su serie los Caprichos. Este artículo examina tres grabados: Todos caerán, ¿Dónde va mamá? e Hilan delgado, en los cuales Goya retrata mujeres con rasgos grotescos. Se sostiene que Goya veía a la nación española transformándose en una madrastra bestial y opresiva. El artículo subraya la ignorancia y el terror generalizado de la época, personificadas en monstruosas figuras maternas. Utilizando las teorías de la identidad nacional de Benedict Anderson, Jackie Hogan y Tamar Mayer, el artículo explora la relación entre la nacionalidad y la figura materna monstruosa en el arte de Goya.
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In Boating for Beginners, Winterson challenges the patriarchal reality and discourse by rewriting the Biblical story of the Flood. Rejecting the second-class position submitted to women both as actors and writers, Winterson presents the matriarchal version of the story first by herself and then by her female characters Gloria, Desi, and Marlene. She creates a new feminine myth, tradition, or hi/story by the postmodern premise that texts/reality might be constructed in many ways. Rejecting the essentialist reality constructed by men, Winterson turns her gaze towards alternative versions of reality by making use of storytelling by women storytellers. Then, Winterson takes women from the margin to the centre and overthrows their position as Other as creators of reality or hi/stories. Winterson asks for a place for the matriarchal realities and discourses and wants them to be recognisable apart from their acknowledged patriarchal counterparts. That is how his story grows into her story. At this point, it can be easily argued that Boating for Beginners deserves to be termed more than a simple comedy or something of an oddity.
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By applying Bourdieu’s theory of capital on the relational art and participatory practices, the following essay aims to explore the issue of autonomy of arts as introduced by Theodor Adorno while determining the social mechanism under which these practices operate. The purpose of this particular research represents an attempt to achieve an understanding of the relations of power under which relational art practices operate by applying Bourdieu’s theory of capital while at the same time examining the idea of “autonomy of arts” as it was introduced by Theodor Adorno in the late 90’s. As the research is conducted by an artist, it will inevitably be influenced by the empirical as well as the theoretical references applied to the artistic field. However, it is clear that from a disciplinary angle, relational art is directly engaging with society hence it does not only imply terms related to aesthetics, history and theory of arts. The research borrows notions from human sciences such as political philosophy, sociology and anthropology. It is also important to note that one of the main objectives of this research represents a nuanced and sincere clarification of the position from which relational art operates as well as an analytical exercise of the practices as well as its mechanism of infiltration and interaction in the world. Given the neo liberal capitalist structure, can arts gain at least relative autonomy? As I find myself working in the field of socially engaged art, I find it very important as a practitioner to be able to step outside my own field and acquire the role of the observer while analysing as objectively as possible my own position. The research applies the qualitative method as it examines a particular case study while it imports concepts from different fields. The first part of the article indicates the potential of the relational arts in acquiring a relative autonomy, while the second part contests its intentions and set of positions in realising its promise by applying Bourdieu’s theory of capital. The scope of the research is far from comprehensive as several theories that intersect with the field, as well as projects, are not being analysed while a lot of Bourdieu’s writings are left outside. Still, the essay recognises the influence of authors like Claire Bishop, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Terry Smith, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard as well as other historians and art theoreticians.
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This chapter will be devoted to study ekphrasis, the literary description of artworks, starting from the methodological premises of contemporary Visual Culture that in recent years has involved scholars interested in redefining the boundaries of disciplines, such as art history, literary history, media studies and aesthetics. The “new object” emerging from this interwining of disciplines is the notion of “scopic regime”. Developed within film studies, the notion of scopic regime introduces an analysis of visual practices interpreted as the interplay among pictures, gazes and dispositives.
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Primarily known as a children's book author and illustrator, Shaun Tan has repeatedly resisted this label and rather positioned himself between the fields of literature and fine art, emphasising that his training and primary interest are in the latter. This essay approaches Tan's work via his idea of 'untold stories', articulated in the eponymous section of his book The bird king and other sketches (2011) and in the 2018 solo exhibition at Beinart Gallery in Melbourne, Untold tales. Untold essentially means unpremeditated in Tan's vocabulary and relates to his evocation of Paul Klee's idea of 'taking a line for a walk'. Using his idea of untold stories as my central point, the essay foregrounds the untold critical story of Tan as a fine artist, focusing in particular on works that have received minimal to no critical attention: his 2015 series of paintings Go, said the bird, his 2003 public mural The hundred year picnic, and his ongoing 9x5 inch series of observational works in the tradition of the Heidelberg School of Australian Impressionism. The latter is a particularly strong and formative influence on Tan's career as a painter, allowing for a discussion of his work in the broader context of postcolonial art history and settler colonialism.
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Hundreds of public places across the world are named in honour of Nelson Mandela. However, there is no consistent level of expectation in terms of what we might learn about this great man when visiting these places. This paper examines an explanatory hypothesis that the process of place naming involving people – and any material representations that then refer to that person – not only offers the opportunity to learn about that person but also impacts one's experience and understanding of place. We refer to these material representations as 'graphic heritage.' We examine two highly contrasting urban places named after Mandela (also known as Madiba by South Africans), namely Nelson Mandela Square in Sandton, Johannesburg, and Nelson Mandela Park in Mamelodi, Pretoria in South Africa. In looking for traces of his values and legacy using graphic heritage, our methodological approach is guided by the design inquiry method of Zeisel, which uses annotated diagrams, observations of physical traces, and photo-documentation of these spaces. We position graphic heritage as an empirical research tool and as a form of critical inquiry that reveals very much (Sandton) and very little (Mamelodi) about the former president and rebel leader. The findings reveal contrasting settings and significantly different levels of access, diverse motivations through the naming acts, and differing levels of attentiveness to the visual-aesthetic considerations shown by those responsible for the two sites.
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This article, developed in conversation with ChatGPT and GPT-4, explores how artists have represented human-machine AI entanglements by using works by Lynn Hershman Leeson, Mario Klingemann, Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, and Luca Viganò as case studies.
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This study is dealt with a semiotic analysis of some selected images of the Iraqi English curriculum. The study adopts Barthes (1977) Visual Rhetoric and Eco (2003) Decoding and Encoding theory. The Semiotic Study presents the analysis of both verbal and nonverbal messages. The major aims of this study; is to clarify the importance of the signs, symbols and hints in images and text of iraqi English curriculum and how can they serve teaching and educational operation. As well, the reason behind choosing the images of curriculum, is that because of having a great effect in teaching operation that can attract student's attention by many things such as; colors, signs and symbols. Consequently, the topic of this study can get the attention and interest of students and the result not only having new vocabularies but having moral lessons and forming sentences. Semiotic study is chosen because it is the science that the studies signs and its functions.
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After more than four decades of the rise of postmodernity and postmodernism, we are essentially concerned with the issue of signification from historical and textual perspectives. What makes the situation of a preface writer more and more paradoxical is that “writing about” postmodernity and postmodernism is a two-fold activity. On the one hand, we are entrapped within the historical boundaries, but on the other hand, we produce a text through which we decipher the mere allegory of reading, in de Man’s terms, and come to realise the fact that how we have constructed the signified as such to refer to as “history.” Postmodernity is vain in the face of postmodernism, and postmodernism drops dead concerning postmodernity. The new yet effective epistemological and critical notion of performativity and experientiality arises at this point. The problem, however, is that once we attempt to verbalise the solid or concrete experience and performance, it falls ill against our deeply rooted convictions as to what we call truth and reality. As Steven Connor suggested, there is no end, a somewhat weird “nothing-arrives-nowhere” state. If we remember Beckett, a literary figure standing at the threshold of modernism and postmodernism, the characters are depicted as struggling to “begin.” Whenever I am asked about the gist discrepancy between modernism and postmodernism, I give a straightforward answer. In the case of modernism, as T.S. Eliot alluded keenly, we say “there is no way out,” borrowed from Dante’s Divine Comedia. In the case of postmodernism, it seems we say that “there is no way IN.” Hence, the modernist zeitgeist imprisons us within our very subjectivity. In contrast, the postmodernist zeitgeist is infected with the melancholy that we will never be able to grasp reality nor our subjectivity, as we have no entrance into what we conceive as reality. Truth, therefore, is ultimately gone and lost, and the only thing we have is the mere textuality and narratives, which cover -and make- reality within and without in a world where there is no hope for the truth. Truth, then, appears to be a strict ‘idea’ in Plato’s sense, and it sounds like one of the most resonating and prevailing utopic and platonic -and non-natural- concepts. There is no truth in the world of phenomena, and literature launches from this subversive point of the impossibility of mimesis. That gives a clue to understanding the outgoing idea of defamiliarisation; most readers think it is a modern product. However, the very concept of defamiliarisation started earlier since such discrepancy and discordance reside in the very nature of the arts. The arts produce an aesthetic effect (aesthetic pleasure) through the essential and spontaneous inconsistency between reality/experience and its verbal or nonverbal representation. Unmimetic mimesis, defamiliarising mimesis, and mimetic defamiliarisation are the main features of the arts; in the phase of modernism. Defamiliarisation overcomes mimesis, for subjectivities and fragments disappoint the expectations of the addressee; in this critical ‘phase’ of postmodernism. However, neither mimesis nor defamiliarisation is foregrounded. The addressee increasingly becomes aware that s/he is on the fringes of an ongoing ‘play.’The play of postmodernist representation erases the hierarchies and rules in the game, and the ‘decentredness’ lies at the centre of postmodernist aesthetics. Arpa’s “Postmodernism or Postmodernity” reveals and elaborates the complexity between postmodernism and postmodernism by referring to not only language also to literary texts. His chapter highlights pioneering critics and their precious and distinctive terms related to postmodern literary text. Yazıcı and Güven’s “Reconsideration of Historiography in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion” reveals how Winterson removes the hierarchy between fact and fiction, reality and fiction, scientific strategies of history, and narrative technique in fiction. The chapter provides the readers with a kinda historical book that represents a historical context significantly manipulated. The work is remarkable in that it employs various methods for understanding the past and history. Ağır’s “Garbage in E. L. Doctorow’s Postmodern Fiction” the hierarchy is carefully erased between fiction and nonfiction. In his influential article “False Documents,” Doctorow outlines the logical outcomes of this line of reasoning, concluding that “there is neither fiction nor nonfiction as we typically perceive the distinction: there is just story.” We remember at this point Hayden White and his suggestions about the timelessness and synchronicity in the realm of texts and narratives. Canlı’s “Postmodern Dystopias: Salman Rushdie’s Fury and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go” as Critical Dystopias refer to the dystopic worlds with catastrophe, destruction, despair, and what is more, a world of no hope. However, these works never give up their grip over the author’s experience while persistently incorporating a series of postmodernist techniques. Rushdie and Ishiguro are the authors who still have concerns about the human condition, so they do not seek reality or realism in the so-called realistic representation. They always take the human condition very seriously, but at the end of their narratives, the audience acknowledges that “there is no entrance.” Karabulut’s “An Intertextual Analysis of the Proto-Feminist Narrator’s Gaze in Aphra Behn’s: Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave” not only employs postmodernist techniques, but also explores how “gaze” is constructed in a narrative discourse. Thus, using a deconstructionist attitude, the article presents how the gaze is a construct in a truly postmodernist premise along with varied postmodern techniques. Yıldız’s “The Patriarchal Reality/Discourse Drowned in Postmodern Flood: Jeanette Winterson’s Boating for Beginners”, as the title suggests, represents how the so-called “Postmodern flood” eradicates the accordance between reality and discourse. The truth is an evasive category as we cannot have a genuine touch with it, and it simply resides in a far-fetched and unachievable realm. Yıldız and Kırmızı’s “The Representation Of Traumatic Experiences Through Postmodern Narrative Techniques In Slaughterhouse-Five By Kurt Vonnegut” represents and presents postmodern narrative techniques through a psychological perspective. As one of the prominent author in postmodern fashion, Kurt’s usage of parody, pastiche, intertextuality and metafiction is highly impressive all throughout the novel. Aldemir and Çıraklı’s “Undermining Hierarchies in J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year” reveals how the hierarchies between author and narrator, author and character, narrative levels and narrative layers, author, and intellectual, idealised reality and reality as performance, human ideal and degenerating bodily existence. More importantly, explored -and deconstructed- in the narrative is the hierarchy between “strong opinions and weak action, frail intentions infected subconsciousness. Like the academic novelist Elizabeth Costello and her too strong and confident “Eight Lessons,” these characters’ moral, political and philosophical rhetoric fades away as the narrative progresses. Not surprisingly, these narrative accounts and the way they are presented point to a humorous and witty drama of intellectual and parody of the intellectual speech. As regards the distinctive features or figures of postmodernity and postmodernism, I have to spend a few words. Steven Connor was not wrong to have referred to Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and many other critics regarding the issue. Highlighting these names, he provides precious hints as to what aspects of postmodernism we should stress. To my understanding and experience, the most crucial element of postmodernism is the lost representation and the fact that textuality overwhelms historicity, language/discourse overcomes [what we call] reality, and the idea of ‘game’ prevails over ‘representation.’ To me, this new phase of the impossibility of representation marks the distinctive feature of postmodernism and postmodernity. Secondly, I humbly argue that many readers and critics are confused, baffled, and puzzled by the differentiation between postmodernity and postmodernism, which paves the way for further complications. I suggest that Baudrillard and Lyotard should be taken as the pioneers of the ‘postmodern historical condition,’ rendering the social, economic, political, and cultural issues central to postmodernity. In contrast, Derrida, De Man, Barthes, and Culler are the key figures to have emphasised the essential loss of representation. I furthermore think that the latter is more important than the former, for if there is no representation, then there is no reality as such in the Kantian sense. So, what postmodernism has done to us is primarily to rob our humanist ideal and human who has lost their ‘integrity’ after modernism and then ‘reference’ and ‘signification’ after postmodernism. What we should consider now is that we should get ready for the ‘fascisms of post-truth garbage.’ The authors, narrators, characters, and opinion-makers in these fictional worlds or textual realms act as if so serious but they do not look ‘serious’ as they frequently prove ludicrous. Their over-confident discourse does not indicate an ‘epic quest of a heroic persona’ --God save dear Don Quixote! Like a mobius strip, these narratives are caught up in an eternal state of deferral. Hence, lacking a ‘genuine touch upon what we call reality’, these narratives are doomed to refer back to themselves in the fashion of self-referentiality, which brings about another critical issue regarding postmodernity and postmodernism. Then arises the significance of metanarratives, that is, narratives about narratives rather than narratives that represent reality. Thus, the eventual, yet most acute undermining in these novels has to do with ‘referentiality’ and ‘signification;’ and the very idea of binaries or hierarchies gradually dissolve the discourses into “decentredneess,” nurtured by an ongoing manipulation of the readers with overt and covert self-references to history, reality, biography, and politics. All in all, I should like to congratulate the editor of the book, Dr. Ayar, who called critical papers and colleagues in the field and achieved to bring together insightful and fabulous pieces under the title “Postmodern Trends in Literature and Arts”. Upon witnessing the waning pillars and properties of postmodernism, like the “fading coal of inspiration,” in Shelley’s terms, the present volume is so precious to contribute to the field with fresh ideas and discussions.
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Photography has been used to record different features of human societies since its invention in the first half of the nineteenth century. After years of being used as an illustrative tool in history, photography conquered its place as a primary source since the mid-1980s. In this article I add to this debate with a methodological approach to use photography in history of science and technology (including medicine and engineering). I argue that photography offers an exclusive view to understanding how science and technology were implemented, used, represented, and presented to the public. I offer both practical guidelines and a theoretical framework, based on Barthesian semiotics, which can be used by younger as well as by more experienced academics. I claim that this proposal has the potential to be used as a common denominator between assorted photographic collections and therefore to allow broader comparisons across different historical and geographic contexts. Moreover, it promotes the critical view of photography that should not be taken by its face value, but it should be understood within its sociotechnical and technoscientific context. This reflection certainly has its flaws and shortcomings, and it is naturally open to improvements, through its practical application to photographic collections.
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The Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature offers a critical overview of work on Latin literature. Where are we? How did we get here? Where to next? Fifteen commissioned chapters, along with an extensive introduction and Mary Beard's postscript, approach these questions from a range of angles. They aim not to codify the field, but to give snapshots of the discipline from different perspectives, and to offer provocations for future development. The Critical Guide aims to stimulate reflection on how we engage with Latin literature. Texts, tools and territories are the three areas of focus. The Guide situates the study of classical Latin literature within its global context from late antiquity to Neo-Latin, moving away from an exclusive focus on the pre-200 CE corpus. It recalibrates links with adjoining disciplines (history, philosophy, material culture, linguistics, political thought, Greek), and takes a fresh look at key tools (editing, reception, intertextuality, theory).
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El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar la Revista del Ferrocarril Central Argentino, entre 1911 y 1915, desde el foco de los estudios visuales y la historia social de las mujeres. Las representaciones de mujeres aparecidas en la revista entre su primer número y el inicio de la Gran Guerra permiten revelar tensiones entre la supuesta transparencia de las imágenes y la materialidad del impreso, su producción, manipulación y circulación, definiéndolo como un dispositivo cultural, atravesado por los discursos en torno a las diferencias y los roles asociados a los géneros. Consideramos que el ferrocarril y la revista ilustrada funcionaron como instituciones sociales mediante las cuales circularon los símbolos culturales (y los conceptos normativos asociados a ellos). Se intentará, a partir del análisis de las ilustraciones y fotografías de mujeres, comprender de qué manera la imagen impresa reforzó o tensionó esos significados, construyendo una representación de lo femenino dentro de un contexto marcado por la masculinidad.
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In this conversation, Mieke Bal retraces the perimeter of her analytically based art practice and her practice-based theoretical work, taking advantage of the operational concept of frame but also of the many actions it generates – such as framing, unframing, de-framing, and re-framing. She considers the act of framing, understood as a first gesture of interpretation, much more useful than the noun itself for our understanding of the effects and meanings of art. Framing as an action can also potentially subvert the traditional, linear, and chronological views of time, bringing into question unilateral thinking. From this perspective, re-framing does not mean doing something again but doing something different – that is, something new – while unframing, instead of a refusal of the act of framing, is to put chaos into an artwork.
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El concepto de traducción se encuentra en el corazón de la concepción, producción y circulación del arte. El arte en sí mismo es un proceso de traducción de la experiencia vital. En la raíz de la noción de representación está la noción de traducción intersemiótica, pues para concretar en términos materiales específicos una idea o imagen mental que tiene un referente en la realidad es necesario trasladar elementos de un sistema de signos a otro. La noción de mímesis en cuanto copia de la realidad también guarda una estrecha relación con el concepto de traducción, sobre todo cuando se piensa en un cierto modo de concebir la traducción desde el ideal de fidelidad a un texto original. El arte moderno y contemporáneo, profundamente híbridos e intermediales, han hecho de la noción misma de traducción uno de sus ejes conceptuales y uno de sus procesos de producción medulares. Muchas obras implican reflexiones y apuestas conceptuales y materiales en torno a la traducción misma: de un lenguaje a otro, de lo analógico a lo digital, de la presencia a la virtualidad, de una materialidad a otra, de un contexto medial a otro. El presente texto tiene el objetivo de plantear los conceptos de traducción medial y traducción material y mostrar algunos ejemplos específicos de estos dos procesos fundamentales tanto en la producción como en la circulación del arte moderno y contemporáneo. Me ocuparé de la traducción material y medial en su faceta procedimental, en cuanto proceso de producción conceptual y material del arte, y en su faceta de reproductibilidad, como parte esencial en las dinámicas de circulación de las obras en reproducciones impresas y digitales.
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The aim of this article is not only to present specific images of paradise and utopia, which appear in various forms in the domains of European imaginaries throughout history, but also to show the connections of these images with the domain of political discourses aiming at changing the status quo and constituting a perfect, harmonious, and non-antagonistic community. The creation of such a community—despite the universalist visions that the imaginarium of paradise and utopia implies—is often based on the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. Mechanisms of this type are characteristic above all of maximalist political visions and ideas that seek to solve all human problems definitively and completely. Such aspirations are linked with revolutionary attempts to realize utopia or to build the kingdom of God on earth.
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Recent policy debates are commonly framed as questions of "sci-ence" versus "ideology". This is seen in polemics around issues that can be informed by bio-medical or geo-physical sciences: the coronavirus pandemic and climate change. The paper explores the basis for claims of difference between science and ideology: truth versus delusion; representations of reality and the means for interpreting it; and their relation to conflicting interests. Each of these three characteristics of ideology is explored by relating them to the methods of the sciences. Three questions are derived from that analysis: Does science hide premises or assumptions; or, conversely , does it proceed by unmasking hidden premises in rival scientific positions? Are the facts of science immediately interpretable, or are they embedded in a web of methodological and metaphorical operations? Are the operations of science insulated from human interests, conflicts, and ethical considerations for how one should live? These are then approached through a compressed case study of three phases of medical science: neo-Platonic herbal studies deriving from Paracelsus; the Enlightenment development of clinical medicine; and the development of immunology from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The concluding section draws on the case studies to answer the three questions. Each of the key elements of ideology is shown to also be involved in scientific reasoning. The development of medical science demonstrates that semiotic operations characteristic of ideology are also found in good scientific practice. In conclusion, it is proposed that science is better off for having learned from ideology. Critique is an epistemic virtue; images and metaphors enrich scientific thinking; and science will better serve humanity as its connections to the interests of all species, and to the Earth itself, are exposed.
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The author of the article focuses on the problem of correlation between the paradigms of “linguistic”, “iconic” and “visual” turns associated with contemporary art. The text discusses the history of the terms, analyzes the specifics of each of these turns, reveals their role and significance in art, history and culture, and provides specific examples of works of the 20th and 21th centuries. Attempts to overcome the methodological crisis in art studies have made the impact of these approaches felt throughout the world. The article pays special attention to a number of issues, which include changes in the concept of art and the boundaries of language; the expressive opportunities of the image and narrative; artistic vision; depiction of the “unimaginable”; the statuses of works of art, authorship, perception, symbols, as well as dialectical transitions of works of art from visuality to pictoriality. The article shows how, by studying the history of art as a phenomenon of culture, art studies have learned to find not only artistic characteristics, but also social and cultural features in the specifics of forms, structures and compositions. Carrying out a comparative analysis of the linguistic, iconic and visual “turns”, the author notes the dialectic of “reformatting” the view from the linguistic to the iconic and visual, and also comes to the conclusion that, the subtle modifications of the language of art demonstrate the constant evolution of artistic forms, art criticism, cultural and social meanings. Art contemplates the world directly, embodying it in images (semantic, visual, iconic, etc.). It is thanks to the peculiar integrity (interdisciplinarity) achieved in the artistic rethinking of historical reality that art reveals an amazing depth of meaning.
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The aim of this paper is to analyze Anne Louise Germaine de Staël’s novel Corinne ou l’Italie (1807) from the point of view of the cultural studies and the visual studies, to shed a light on de Staël’s attempt at promoting the construction of a modern Italian national identity, founded on the arts. The article examines how de Staël’s participation in the Italian nation-building was half linked to her prejudices upon the Italian lateness in the process of civilization Northern European countries were undergoing, and half focused on creating a transnational, cross-boundary and European artistic language.
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Fragments of An Aesthetic is an investigation situated in the discipline of fashion design. In this research, the locus of aesthetics is the word, with the research asking how the aesthetic dimension of word compositions might inform an exploration of an aesthetic: the surface ap-pearance of objects. The interest in an aesthetic emerges from L-R’s (the fashion designer) practice where dec-oration animates the design process and influences the arrangement of elements and the structuring of forms. Roland Barthes’s proposition that the rhetorical and metaphorical nature of words is the true signification of fashion prompted L-R’s creative investigation. Here; however, the research observes and analyses L-R’s play with words in the pursuit of an aesthetic and is not a semiotic analysis of representations of fashion. To this extent, it studies a suspended moment of ideation in a fashion design practice where an aesthetic deemed as unknown or undetermined, is imagined, composed and translated. It regards the search for an aesthetic as a search for meaning and is illuminated by theories, philosophies and practices, including those of Adam Phillips and Richard Serra, whose common thread is that a search for an aesthetic as meaning originates from a sensuous experience of words. The research sought to find how the qualities of the words utilised in aesthetic exploration might resist a denotative/literal translation and tend towards a con-notative/metaphorical aesthetic. Several experiments – Damage, Aesthetics of Arrangement, Making Meaning/Making Sense, and Les Mots et Les Images – are moments where the designer, posing as a designer-author (producer) and designer-reader (perceiver), used words as objects to think with, as materials to give a perceptible form to ideas, and as mediums that mediate between the designer-author and designer-reader. Within the experiments, L-R composed word-fragments and image-fragments as translations of imagining; the designer collects and composes fragments as cues and hints of an aesthetic. The fragments are not broken-off from something, but in this moment of ideation they are incomplete; they are conceptually, modular ideas whose arrangements point towards the development of a concept. In Fragments of An Aesthetic, L-R has interpreted post-design process philosophies, theories and practices relating to the rhetorical and metaphorical qualities of words and the aesthetics of objects and applied the understandings he gained to advance his design process. L-R, reflecting on the research’s influences on a moment of his ideation, considers the potential to fashion design as residing in how words can be utilised in ways other than to communicate ‘fashion-ness’. In searching for an aesthetic, the designer-author, using words, can originate an authorial style. Then, by stepping into the role of a reader, the aesthetic dimension of these compositions can be translated and developed into an image-based aesthetic.
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Building upon work in visual studies and art history on symbolic perspective, film studies on structures of looking, and linguistic anthropology on entextualization and ideology, this article explores the semiotics of vision/visibility and perspective. In particular, I focus on ethnographic data from the cinema of Tamil Nadu, India, wherein (being seen) seeing a film image and being seen in a film image emerge as pragmatically problematic for those party to the image. In doing so, the article asks: what does it mean and do to see and be seen by, look away from and be effaced by the film image and, further, see or be seen vis‐à‐vis the above (seeing someone being seen in a film image, be seen looking away, etc.)?
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Este artigo apresenta o conceito de ideologia em A ideologia alemã, de Marx e Engels, a partir da relação entre a inversão real gerada pela divisão do trabalho e a inversão ideológica, considerando o problema de a ideologia ser caracterizada como a inversão da realidade das relações de produção ao mesmo tempo que a expressão dessas mesmas relações. Por meio da análise do conceito procura-se reavaliar a importância dos manuscritos inacabados de “I. Feuerbach”, tendo em vista que a discussão bibliográfica mais recente atribui ao texto um caráter menor se comparado ao capítulo dedicado a Stirner.
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