For more than a century, the relationship between cinema and the city has constituted an aspect of profound fascination for film and visual studies. Constantly renewing itself, this connection represents the interaction of a complex network of technological forms, ergonomic configurations, evolutionary perspectives, human and material aggregations, all redefined within the canons of filmic language. The cities of the future, before moving from the design phase to the productive phase, have often been modulated and experienced within filmic spaces, (...) sometimes glimpsing subsequent mutations. Through the study of video installations such as Prisma (2022) by Vhils and Hypnosis Display (2014) by Clipson and Harris, films such as Code inconnu (2000) by Haneke, Code 46 (2003) by Winterbottom, Anon (2018) by Niccol, and recent works by Refik Anadol, I will try to outline a possible visual interpretation regarding the present and future urban image. (shrink)

Visual representations have often played a crucial role in imagining future urban forms. In the aftermath of the Second World War, a noteworthy new genre of urban plan was published in Britain, most deploying seductively optimistic illustrations of ways forward not only for the reconstruction of bomb-damaged towns and cities but also for places left largely undamaged. Visual representations have often played a crucial role in imagining future urban forms. In the aftermath of the Second World War, a (...) noteworthy new genre of urban plan was published in Britain, most deploying seductively optimistic illustrations of ways forward not only for the reconstruction of bomb-damaged towns and cities but also for places left largely undamaged. This paper assesses the contribution of visual elements in this,process with a detailed case study of the maps, statistical charts, architectural drawings and photographs enrolled into the 1945 City of Manchester Plan. The cultural production of these visual representations is evaluated. Our analysis interprets the form, symbology and active work of different imagery in the process of reimagining Manchester, but also assesses the role of these images as markers of a particular moment in the cultural economy of the city. This analysis is carried out in relation to the ethos of the Plan as a whole. (shrink)

In classrooms, museums, health clinics and beyond, the educational uses of visual media have proliferated over the past fifty years. Film, video, television, and digital media have been integral to the development of new pedagogical theories and practices, globalization processes, and identity and community formation. Yet, Brian Goldfarb argues, the educational roles of visual technologies have not been fully understood or appreciated. He contends that in order to understand the intersections of new media and learning, we need to (...) recognize the sweeping scope of the technologically infused visual pedagogy—both in and outside the classroom. From Samoa to the United States mainland to Africa and Brazil, from museums to city streets, _Visual Pedagogy_ explores the educational applications of visual media in different institutional settings during the past half century. Looking beyond the popular media texts and mainstream classroom technologies that are the objects of most analyses of media and education, Goldfarb encourages readers to see a range of media subcultures as pedagogical tools. The projects he analyzes include media produced by AIDS/HIV advocacy groups and social services agencies for classroom use in the 1990s; documentary and fictional cinemas of West Africa used by the French government and then by those resisting it; museum exhibitions; and TV Anhembi, a municipally sponsored collaboration between the television industry and community-based videographers in São Paolo, Brazil. Combining media studies, pedagogical theory, and art history, and including an appendix of visual media resources and ideas about the most productive ways to utilize visual technologies for educational purposes, _Visual Pedagogy_ will be useful to educators, administrators, and activists. (shrink)

Many questions concerning the future of the urban Indian landscape have at their core the conflict of a modernist design aesthetic, which privileges uniformity and predictability, with what many consider to be the unsightly presence of a chaotic local aesthetic. The hand-painted signboard, a hallmark of Indian urban experience, is largely disdained by modernist planners, who became especially vocal in the lead-up to the Commonwealth Games in 2010, when the goal of transforming Delhi into a ‘world class city’ envisioned, (...) among other measures, a reining in of the city’s frenetic signboard culture. This paper examines the ingenuity of the hand-painted signboard which employs complex visual strategies such as three-dimensional depth cues, typographic innovation and visual metaphor, while assessing the unique ways in which hand-painted signage shapes the experience of public space in an urban environment. Against ideas of uniformity and order which underpin liberal modernist visions of the city both in relation to its visual cultures and the use of public spaces, this paper proposes what we call an ‘aesthetic of accommodation’: the visual and the social order here become sites for the expression of an ‘adjustment’ ethic visible in the hybrid art practice of hand-painted signboards and the multiple rather than single usage of public spaces evident in the manner in which signboards spill onto sidewalks and sidewalks onto streets. (shrink)

Cinema acts as a significant mediator between urban reality and the imaginary sensory experience of the fictive world. Viewing the city through the lens of a camera enables us to build new narratives. Films have captured port cities within the flows of, goods, people, and ideas, making them ever-present in shared memories, historical narratives, and urban nostalgia. Cultural production plays a role in the on-going construction of local port cultures, whether films, festivals, music, literature, theater, advertisements, or events. Telling (...) the story of the port city – it's past, present, and future; its buildings and its people – contributes strongly to the creation of port city cultures.[i] The big screen can help viewers to perceive complex port city regions, learning from their history, understanding cultural values and developing shared urban narratives to tackle the upcoming challenges. In a broader sense, port city’s ‘Cine-scape’—to use a term coined by Richard Koeck,[ii] puts the cinematic approach to port cities into the spotlight. (shrink)

Governmentality is a spatial formation negotiated within historically-constituted political landscapes. In Bangkok, this spatialization of power is manifested in the militarization of urban life and the protocols of security procedure, but also in anti-government protests and an increasingly politicized visual culture. The memory and meaning of the city’s streets exist as an overlooked legibility that challenges the visual strategies of government control. Monuments, travel routes, and other public sites of national recognition now compete in an extended urban (...) arena of images, such as literature and cinema, which re-stage governmentality and the material contours of Thailand’s contemporary political disagreements outside of its institutional norms. I read this intersection between governing and image circulation through the development of a visual economy in Bangkok and depict how different communities—including a bureaucratized military and a populist political party, but also writers and filmmakers—intervene in its circulation. Each group zooms in on key spaces of the city in the attempt to speak to changing forms of governmentality. (shrink)

Culture serves as the spiritual foundation of a nation, shaping collective identity, memory, and meaning. As modern cities evolve into complex urban environments, the interplay between cultural representation and spatial navigation becomes increasingly significant. Public wayfinding systems, particularly subway guide-visual systems, serve not only as functional tools for spatial orientation but also as carriers of cultural symbolism, shaping human perception, experience, and interaction with the built environment. This study explores the deeper philosophical and religious dimensions of regional visual (...) symbols in subway guidance systems, examining their role in reinforcing collective memory, sacred space, and cultural continuity. Drawing upon theories from environmental psychology, semiotics, and religious aesthetics, this research investigates how subway guide systems serve as conduits of regional identity, visual semiotics, and metaphysical interpretation. By conducting comparative case studies of the London Underground and Mexico City subway visual guidance systems, this study examines how urban wayfinding incorporates elements of religious symbolism, cultural heritage, and sacred narratives into public spaces. These systems, beyond their practical function, act as modern representations of pilgrimage routes, sacred geography, and collective memory, offering insights into how visual semiotics influence human cognition and spiritual orientation in urban life. This research argues that subway guide-visual systems are not merely technical tools but also vehicles of cultural and religious significance, shaping contemporary experiences of sacred and symbolic spaces. By integrating regional cultural symbols into public navigation infrastructure, cities can preserve and transmit cultural heritage while fostering a deeper connection between individuals and their spiritual and historical landscapes. The study provides a philosophical and theological perspective on the semiotics of urban space, offering insights into the role of visual guidance systems in the broader discourse of religious philosophy, cultural identity, and metaphysical representation. Future research should further explore how spatial design, symbolism, and sacred narratives intersect in the formation of modern urban experiences. (shrink)

Citizens can be meaningfully involved in multiple phases of the urban planning process from decision-making to implementation via a dedicated online platform through which they can interact with planners and decision-makers. In historical contexts, local people are essential resources for decision-makers seeking critical local information needed for effective planning and intervention—including what those citizens recall from the past about the area’s social values and the built environment and what they imagine and hope for their neighborhood’s future. This public knowledge, collected (...) through storytelling and mapping, can play a fundamental role in shaping the framework for neighborhood rehabilitation plans. As a foundation for designing an online visual questionnaire to collect local knowledge and understand the views and expectations of local people, this study focuses on theoretical ideas to define a framework for an online visual questionnaire tool. The tool presented provides a common visual language that people can easily understand and use whatever their social class, education, or background. It also has the benefit of enabling citizens and planners to interact directly regardless of their geographical location. To proposing a framework for the online visual questionnaire, the first step was to review some existing visual tools and methods, including analog used for community engagement and digital used in urban planning to encourage and support public participation. Through an analysis of these methods, some important variables and criteria were identified that further our understanding of citizens’ perceptions of their neighborhoods. The next step, as part of a larger study, will be examining a historical public space, including a bazaar, hammam, and cistern—located in the historical context of Yazd— a central city in Iran registered as a cultural heritage site by UNESCO— as a case study with the larger goal of identifying some specific. (shrink)

Metaphors function not only as linguistic constructs but also as profound vehicles for spiritual and philosophical reflection in visual narratives. In cinema, multimodal metaphors—expressed through sound, imagery, and narrative structure—serve as powerful tools for conveying existential, ethical, and religious themes. Within the context of globalization and modernization, contemporary Chinese ethnic films often explore themes of ecological crisis, cultural displacement, and the search for identity. These themes, embedded in public consciousness, are projected onto the cinematic screen through a rich tapestry (...) of multimodal metaphors, shaping audiences' perceptions of human nature, spirituality, and the cultural imagination of China’s ethnic minorities. Grounded in cognitive metaphor theory and philosophical hermeneutics, this study employs the Film Metaphor Identification Procedure (FILMIP) to analyze the Tibetan film Snow Leopard, directed by Pema Tseden. It examines how multimodal metaphors contribute to the cognitive construction of religious and philosophical meaning in Chinese ethnic cinema, mapping various modalities to explore their deeper metaphysical and moral connotations. Through an analysis of symbolic imagery, environmental motifs, and human-animal relationships, the study reveals how the film engages with Buddhist and indigenous spiritual traditions, reinforcing themes of karma, interconnectedness, and moral redemption. By investigating the role of multimodal metaphor in expressing transcendent and existential concerns, this research offers insights into how Chinese ethnic cinema fosters religious dialogue and shapes national and spiritual identity. The findings suggest that ethnic films, through their metaphorical richness, not only deepen audience engagement with cultural and religious narratives but also contribute to a broader philosophical discourse on faith, belonging, and the human condition. Future studies should further explore the intersection of religious symbolism, cognitive semiotics, and cinematic storytelling in constructing spiritual and philosophical meaning. (shrink)

Our cultural climate is increasingly dependent upon visual space. Media and communication for the most part are exemplified through television and the Internet. Aural space has, for the moment, become an ambient presence. The aim of this article is to develop a phenomenological approach to interpreting our sonic environment by drawing upon a range of sound-scape theorists. I will, in some cases, provide a counter-argument to established theses, and in doing so endeavour to open up fresh debate for future (...) sonic enterprises. (shrink)

In examining the visual culture of Victorian London during the years 1855–1870, Lynda Nead in her book Victorian Babylon explores the difficult and restless narrative of modernization that any of us who have read D. G. Rossetti's “The Burden of Nineveh” will recognize as crucial to the Victorian imagination. As Nead promptly establishes, Babylon for the Victorians was a trope evoking gain and loss, triumph and hubris, future and past ruination. Taking this ancient city as her titular image, (...) then, Nead aims to rearticulate urbanism and modernity, indeed challenging us to reconceive what we mean by “modernity.” Positioning her own arguments against the influential architectonics of Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts into Air and favoring instead the writings of Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, and Michel de Certeau, Nead recasts modernity as an “untidy experience,” a “constant struggle with history” . Near her book's end, Nead provocatively claims: “Ruin is the resolution of the contradictory impulses of modernity” .Victorian Babylon explores the spaces of mid‐Victorian London and, more important, the experience of inhabiting those very spaces. This textual tour is divided tidily into three sections: a first on mapping and water, a second devoted to gas and light, and a third on obscenity, which Nead calls “improvement's other” . As Nead herself claims about the metropolitan travel literature she examines, her book speaks well to the eye. Victorian Babylon is a vicarious tour of London thanks to Nead's deft and abundant use of fresh images, which she has culled assiduously from private collections, archives, and especially illustrated nineteenth‐century periodicals. Her study thus takes us to fascinating places: readers travel along with John Hollingshead on his journey down to London's sewers; we are invited into Joseph Paxton's dreamscape of the Great Victorian Way; and we play for a night at Cremorne Pleasure Gardens, witnessing Madame Poitevin's balloon ride. We hesitantly enter the haunted and obscene Holywell Street.The catalogic abundance of Victorian Babylon works both to Nead's advantage and disadvantage. Surely the sheer range of Nead's material proves her points about the frenzy and incomprehensibility of modernity and the promiscuity of Victorian commercial culture. But invariably the variety of topics results in too much cursory analysis—a paragraph on photography followed by a paragraph on the International Health Exhibition; brief excursions into the realms of advertising, illustrated sheet music, and music halls. Subsequently, a reader might grow eager instead for book‐length studies of these issues. Yet the most egregious omission of an adequate treatment is the two‐page cursory overview of the picturesque. Here, Nead misses an opportunity to offer a more extended, theoretical treatment of the “metropolitan picturesque” and how this aesthetic category relates—or not—to the other psycho‐aesthetic touchstones for her work, which are the sublime and the urban uncanny. One might also rue the absence of an extended treatment of the relic versus the ruin at the book's close.The analysis of the book does grow stronger as it unfolds. The Cremorne Gardens in the second section make for interesting reading, and Nead is best at discussing London at night, the uncanny, and what she calls a poetics of gas. The final section on obscenity is most promising, for here the Babylonic polyphony of Victorian London—what Nead calls the twin mission, to build and destroy—hits the reader with full force. One might wish that Nead had spent a bit more time on obscenity before extending her treatment to the more symbolic, architectural expression of obscenity‐cum‐obsolescence, the Temple Bar. However, the fate of the Temple Bar is nicely evocative of the ruin and, thus, takes the reader full circle back to the ambiguities of modernity. (shrink)

This essay presents some thoughts on schizoanalysis and visual culture around the proposition that cinema survives in the digital age as a type of image that, after the movement-image and the time-image, could be called the neuro-image. By considering clinical schizophrenia as ‘degree zero’ of schizoanalysis in a more critical sense, a reading of The Butterfly Effect unfolds the temporal dimensions of schizoanalysis as typical for a definition of ‘the neuro-image’. The argument is that the neuro-image speaks from the (...) (always speculative) future. (shrink)

Art history on the edge : iconology, media, and visual culture -- Four fundamental concepts of image science -- Image science -- Image X text -- Realism and the digital image -- Migrating images : totemism, fetishism, idolatry -- The future of the image : Rancière's road not taken -- World pictures : globalization and visual culture -- Media aesthetics -- There are no visual media -- Back to the drawing board : architecture, sculpture, and the digital (...) image -- Foundational sites and occupied spaces -- Border wars : translation and convergence in politics and media -- Art X environment -- The historical uncanny : phantoms, doubles, and repetition in the war on terror -- The spectacle today : a response to retort -- Coda : for a sweet science of images. (shrink)

How can aesthetic enquiry contribute to the study of visual culture? There seems to be little doubt that aesthetic theory ought to be of interest to the study of visual culture. For one thing, aesthetic vocabulary has far from vanished from contemporary debates on the nature of our visual experiences and its various shapes, a fact especially pertinent where dissatisfaction with vulgar value relativism prevails. Besides, the very question ubiquitous in the debates on visual culture of (...) what is natural and what is acquired in our visual experiences has been a topic in aesthetics at least since the Enlightenment. And last but not least, despite attempts to study visual culture without employing the concept of art, there is no prospect of this central subject of aesthetic theory ebbing away from visual studies. The essays compiled in this volume show a variety of points of intersection and involvement between aesthetics and visual studies; some consider the future of visual art, some the conditions and characteristics of contemporary visual aesthetic experience, while others take on the difficult question of the relation between visual representation and reality. What unites them is their authors' willingness to think about contemporary visual culture in the conceptual frame of aesthetics. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophical aesthetics, art history, and cultural studies. (shrink)

Scholars of modernity have taken a particular interest in processes of urbanization and—thinking of Simmel, Benjamin, Mumford and Weber—the character of different varieties of city. From a different angle, notions of urban imaginary have gained greater purchase in the field of contemporary urban studies in comparative analysis of varieties of city. This essay begins with notes on both classical accounts of the city in social theory and current concepts of urban imaginaries. The notes revolve around the essay’s (...) main topic: the institution of cities of New World, specifically those of the United States and Canada. Paralleling Castoriadis’ conception of the imaginary institution, the present author argues for a more exact notion of metropolitan imaginaries, differentiated from the broader subject of urban imaginaries. ‘Metropolitan imaginaries’ denotes processes of urbanization at the heart of networks of migration, transport, and flows of capital and culture. As part of larger imaginaries, metropolises generate immigrant cities. The specific kind of creation in question produces creativity also by concentrating intellectual and creative schools of design in architecture and visual culture. In sum, metropolises are not merely part of networks of connection and creation; they produce networks and act as the hubs of interaction and creativity within larger social imaginaries. The essay explores this argument in the contexts of US and Canadian modernity and state formation, with specific foci on New York, Chicago, and Toronto. The conclusion notes two limitations to the case presented here and sketches planned directions for future research. (shrink)

A little-known mendicant order, the Apostolic Clerics of St Jerome, better known as the ‘Jesuati’, was founded by Giovanni Colombini of Siena in the mid-fourteenth century, receiving formal recognition from Pope Urban V at Viterbo in 1367. The congregation flourished, particularly over the course of the fifteenth century when it established conventual houses in most major cities of central and northern Italy, but was eventually suppressed in 1668. Known for their piety, penance and service to the sick and dying, the (...) Jesuati played a significant role in the visual culture of later medieval and early modern Italy, and one that has subsequently been much neglected. This study will identify and discuss five categories in which the Jesuati intersected with the arts: church and convent architecture, images depicting the approval of the order by Urban V, altarpieces and other forms of church decoration, the trigram of the Holy Name of Jesus, and the manufacture of coloured glass and artists’ pigments, the latter including ultramarine azzurro that was highly prized. (shrink)

Cities are sites and crucibles of creativity and destruction. How we order and imagine ourselves is revealed by the visible forms of our built environments. Cities are the ultimate material expression of human desire and design. They are also forces of energy and fields of tension that structure our everyday imaginings and activities. How we move, think, act, interact, create and maintain our lives is bounded by what cities provide us. How we make common-wealth and differentiate ourselves from others also (...) determines what cities are and might be for us. This issue explores the urbanism that is Manila in all its vital contradictions. A mega-urban region of over 20 million souls, it is both dynamic and discordant, creative and destructive. Like most global mega-cities, Manila is dangerous to its own citizens – polluted, dense, violent, and poor, with inadequate and badly maintained infrastructure and public utilities, but it is also a fecund incubator of cultural ideas, projects and networks. This issue explore both sides of this Janus-faced city – its urbanism and its visual cultures. Two common threads run through the articles in this issue: first is the dialectic of private and public, and second is the cultural traffic that informs place-making across time through the constant movement of peoples around the world-system and in the ever-pragmatic syncretic and local appropriations of cultural ideas, traditions and artefacts into new configurations, stories and views. As these contributions take issue with visual culture, we have given pride of place to photos, images and artworks themselves. For, as our colleague, Eduardo de la Fuente, has observed in this journal’s pages (2010), the sociology of art is more than a socio-aesthetics. It is also a chronicle of the experience, performance and movement of aesthetic objects lodged in and across institutions, traditions and collective consciousness. (shrink)

We may think of the city as a kind of symbol of what most characterises our era: if it is true that our era is most characterised by complexity and uncertainty, it is also true that the city may be what can most clearly show what complexity and uncertainty actually mean. Our era’s harshest lesson is precisely that, when we move from the village to the city, specifically contemporary cities becoming not only exponentially big but also exponentially (...) interconnected, complexity and uncertainty increase as our era’s equally harsh global challenges, from climate change to pandemics to wars. Yet, contemporary cities’ global challenges may be not only harsh lessons but also unmissable opportunities. In what follows, as a philosopher, I shall work on at least two reasons why contemporary cities, specifically their future as what is likely to further increase complexity and uncertainty, may teach us something key from an epistemological perspective: first, to abstract more and, second, to be wiser, which are two epistemological capabilities that may be more crucial than ever in the future. (shrink)

The proposed volumes are aimed at a multidisciplinary audience and seek to fill the gap between law, semiotics and visuality providing a comprehensive theoretical and analytical overview of legal visual semiotics. They seek to promote an interdisciplinary debate from law, semiotics and visuality bringing together the cumulative research traditions of these related areas as a prelude to identifying fertile avenues for research going forward. Advance Praise for Law, Culture and Visual Studies This diverse and exhilarating collection of essays (...) explores the many facets both historical and contemporary of visual culture in the law. It opens a window onto the substantive, jurisdictional, disciplinary and methodological diversity of current research. It is a cornucopia of materials that will enliven legal studies for those new to the field as well as for established scholars. It is a 'must read' that will leave you wondering about the validity of the long held obsession that reduces the law and legal studies to little more than a preoccupation with the word. Leslie J Moran Professor of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London Law, Culture and Visual Studies is a treasure trove of insights on the entwined roles of legality and visuality. From multiple interdisciplinary perspectives by scholars from around the world, these pieces reflect the fullness and complexities of our visual encounters with law and culture. From pictures to places to postage stamps, from forensics to film to folklore, this anthology is an exciting journey through the fertile field of law and visual culture as well as a testament that the field has come of age. Naomi Mezey, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C., USA This highly interdisciplinary reference work brings together diverse fields including cultural studies, communication theory, rhetoric, law and film studies, legal and social history, visual and legal theory, in order to document the various historical, cultural, representational and theoretical links that bind together law and the visual. This book offers a breath-taking range of resources from both well-established and newer scholars who together cover the field of law's representation in, interrogation of, and dialogue with forms of visual rhetoric, practice, and discourse. Taken together this scholarship presents state of the art research into an important and developing dimension of contemporary legal and cultural inquiry. Above all, Law Culture and Visual Studies lays the groundwork for rethinking the nature of law in our densely visual culture: How are legal meanings produced, encoded, distributed, and decoded? What critical and hermeneutic skills, new or old, familiar or unfamiliar, will be needed? Topical, diverse, and enlivening, Law Culture and Visual Studies is a vital research tool and an urgent invitation to further critical thinking in the areas so well laid out in this collection. Desmond Manderson, Future Fellow, ANU College of Law / Research School of Humanities and the Arts, Australian National University, Australia. (shrink)

Spatial Turns brings together essays that apply a spatial analysis to German literature and other media and engages with specifically German theorizations of ...

This collection of essays, on French and francophone prose, poetry, drama, visual art, cinema and thought, assesses guilt and shame in relation to structures of ...

The study titled "Visual Pollution of the Tigris Riverbanks in Baghdad City" consists of two main sections: the first section is dedicated to the theoretical framework, while the second section covers the practical aspect (field study). Specific areas of Baghdad were selected for this study due to the widespread presence of solid waste along the riverbanks. The importance of the study lies in the fact that visual pollution is one of the dangerous types of pollution that affects (...) both human health and the environment. The study concluded that visual pollution along the Tigris River banks results from the impact of human activities spread linearly along the river, and the lack of environmental awareness among residents has negatively affected the river environment through the disposal of household and construction waste and the discharge of untreated wastewater from sewage treatment plants. The research recommends the importance of strict monitoring of human activities near the river, imposing financial penalties on violators of environmental standards, and working on rehabilitating and developing the riverbanks to make them attractive environments for residents, turning them into tourist and recreational areas that serve the city. (shrink)

A fundamental question in the psychological sciences is the degree to which culture shapes core cognitive processes — perhaps none more foundational than how we perceive the world around us. A dramatic and oft-cited “case study” of culture’s power in this regard is the Müller-Lyer illusion, which depicts two lines of equal length but with arrowheads pointing either inward or outward, creating the illusion that one line is longer than the other. According to a line of research stretching back over (...) a century, depending on the society you were raised in (and how much carpentry you were exposed to), you may not see the illusion at all — an ambitious and influential research program motivating claims that seemingly basic aspects of visual processing may actually be “culturally evolved byproducts”. This Cultural Byproduct Hypothesis bears on foundational issues in the science, philosophy, and sociology of psychology, and remains popular today. Yet, here we argue that it is almost certainly false. We synthesize evidence from diverse fields which demonstrate that: (1) the illusion is not limited to humans, appearing in non-human animals from diverse ecologies; (2) the statistics of natural scenes are sufficient to capture the illusion; (3) the illusion does not require straight lines typical of carpentry (nor even any lines at all); (4) the illusion arises in sense modalities other than vision; and (5) the illusion arises even in congenitally blind subjects. Moreover, by reexamining historical data and ethnographic descriptions from the original case studies, we show that the evidence for cultural variation and its correlation with key cultural variables is in fact highly inconsistent, beset by questionable research practices, and misreported by later discussions. Together, these considerations undermine the most popular and dramatic example of cultural influence on perception. We further extend our case beyond this phenomenon, showing that many of these considerations apply to other visual illusions as well, including similarly implicated visual phenomena such as the Ebbinghaus, Ponzo, Poggendorf, and Horizontal-Vertical illusions. We conclude by outlining future approaches to cross-cultural research on perception, and we also point to other potential sources of cultural variation in visual processing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"A City of Brick":Visual Rhetoric in Roman Rhetorical Theory and PracticeKathleen S. LampPerhaps none of the words Augustus, the first sole ruler of Rome who reigned from 27 BCE to 14 CE, actually said are quite as memorable as the ones Cassius Dio has attributed to him: "I found Rome built of clay and I leave it to you in marble" (1987, 56.30).1 Suetonius too discusses Augustus's (...) building program, offering an alleged quote along with an explanation of his motivation: "Since the city was not adorned as the dignity of the empire demanded, and was exposed to flood and fire, he so beautified it that he could justly boast that he had found it built of brick and left it in marble" (1998, Aug.28.3). Though Suetonius's explanation is practical, Dio argues Augustus's "city of brick" had a more metaphoric or symbolic meaning: "In saying this he was not referring literally to the state of the buildings, but rather to the strength of the empire" (1987, 56.30).Both historians, then, perceive a connection between the physical appearance of the city and Rome's place at the head of the (Roman) world. Maecenas, Augustus's right-hand man who was essentially the minister of culture, explicitly draws attention to this strategy in a speech fabricated by Dio. Maecenas advises Augustus, "Make this capital beautiful, spare no expense in doing so, and enhance its magnificence with festivals of every kind. It is right for us who rule over so many peoples to excel all others in every field of endeavor, and even display of this kind tends to implant [End Page 171] respect for us in our allies and to strike terror into our enemies" (1987, 52.30). Here Dio suggests, albeit in hindsight, that Augustus's building program was a conscious "display" of Rome's supremacy meant to elicit a reaction, particularly from those who dwelled outside the city.Though from this passage of Dio's it is possible to argue that the physical appearance of the city of Rome was meant to persuade, or at least elicit some response, the passage does not provide support for the claim that architecture, monuments, and city planning functioned rhetorically in ancient Rome. After all, Quintilian reminds us that "many other things have the power of persuasion" (1970, 2.15.6-9). Nonetheless, this passage does generate questions about the relationship between the Augustan building program, or more broadly the Augustan cultural campaigns, and rhetoric in the principate—specifically about the way in which the cultural campaigns functioned rhetorically to help Augustus gain and maintain power.Recently, I have argued that the Ara pacis Augustae, an Augustan monument commissioned in 13 BCE, functioned as a visual example of a rhetorical text, meant not only to celebrate Augustus's successful campaigns is Spain and Gaul but also to garner public support for Augustus's heir and the process of dynastic succession. Because specific rhetorical techniques often associated with the epideictic genre clearly function on the altar, the Ara pacis demonstrates that Augustus and/or his ministers were thinking rhetorically when constructing at least some Augustan monuments (Lamp 2009). Similarly, architectural historian Diana Favro has argued that certain aspects of Augustan architecture made use of rhetorical techniques related to the canon of memory (1996). These findings are perhaps not surprising given that George Kennedy, writing nearly forty years ago, acknowledged that Augustus, a figure he called "the greatest rhetorician of antiquity, " "developed new techniques of verbal and visual persuasion which took over some of the functions and adapted some of the methods of traditional oratory" (1972, 378, 382).Still, very little attention has been paid to Augustus as a rhetorical figure, which is not to say that scholars of rhetoric have paid no attention to Roman rhetoric. While the classicist Theodore Mommsen, writing in the latter half of the nineteenth century, went as far as to refer to the principate as the "end to the entire discipline of rhetoric" (1992, 125), the decline narrative in regards to Roman rhetoric is shifting. Traditionally, this decline narrative suggested that following the assassination of Cicero, traditional oratory retreated into... (shrink)

This book provides a unique insider’s look at the world’s largest film industry, now globally known as ‘Bollywood’ and challenges existing notions about Indian films. -/- Indian films have been a worldwide phenomenon for decades. Chapters in this edited volume take a fresh view of various hidden gems by maestros such as Raj Kapoor, Bimal Roy, V Shantaram, Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Shakti Samant, Rishikesh Mukherjee, and others. Other chapters provide a pioneering review and analysis of the portrayal (...) of Indian religious communities such as Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Parsis. The themes covered include unique Indian feminism and male chauvinism, environment and climate issues, international locations and diaspora tourism, religious harmony and conflict, the India-Pakistan relationship, asceticism, and renunciation in Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. Unlike many recent studies of Indian films, these chapters do not distinguish between popular and serious cinema. Many chapters focus on Hindi films, but others bring insights from films made in other parts of India and its neighbouring countries. (shrink)

Cinema Derrida charts Jacques Derrida's collaborations and appearances in film, video, and television beginning with 1983's Ghost Dance (dir. Ken McMullen, West Germany/UK) and ending with 2002's biographical documentary Derrida (dir. Dick and Ziering, USA). In the last half of his working life, Derrida embraced popular art forms and media in more ways than one: not only did he start making more media appearances after years of refusing to have his photo taken in the 1960s and 1970s, but his philosophy (...) started to draw more explicitly from visual culture and artistic endeavours. While this book offers explanations of this transition, it contends the image of "Jacques Derrida" that emerges from film and TV appearances remains spectral, constantly deferring a complete grasp of him. Tyson Stewart draws out the main tenets of spectrality from Derrida's seminal texts Of Grammatology and Specters of Marx and other writings, like Echographies of Television, in order to fill a gap in studies of Derrida and film. Throughout the book, he explains how various techniques and spectral effects such as slow motion, stillness, repetition, mise-en-abîme, direct address, and focus on body parts/bodily presence bring about a structure of spectrality wherein the past other returns to make impressions and ethical demands on the viewer. Drawing on communication theory and film and media studies, Cinema Derrida makes a major intervention in classical communication thought. (shrink)

The article analyzes the phenomenon of an innovative city from a cultural and philosophical perspective. The paper substantiates the characteristic features of an innovative city, namely: the tendency to move forward, dissatisfaction with the existing existence, the development of the category of opportunity from the point of view of assessing the innovative prospects of the city. The concept of "innovative city" in this study was compared with similar concepts of "ideal city", "city of the (...) future", "fast city", "creative city". The distinction was made regarding the substantive, operational and dynamic aspects of the innovative potential of cities. In particular, for the concepts of "ideal city" and "city of the future", the most important is the substantive side of the innovation process, embodied in the ideal image of the city; while for the "fast city" the potential of innovation is associated with the idea of movement, trend, speed and multi-vector flow of change. The theoretical and methodological basis of the study is a phenomenological approach that substantiates the city as a semantic space-time construct with innovative development potential. The authors consider the substantive, operational and dynamic aspects of the concept of "innovation" in relation to urban transformation projects. Special attention is paid to the phenomenological aspects of the generation, implementation and translation of innovations to determine the strong semantic dominants of the "creative city", "fast city", "ideal city", "city of the future", innovative city as a whole. Analyzing the models of urban development, the difficulties of innovative programs related to the problem of determining the specific results of transformations, the lack of processality as such, inconsistency, utopianism, the predominance of the effect of the significance of mega-events over the practical results of innovation are emphasized. The methods of neutralizing the negative consequences of innovative strategies by maintaining a wide range of semantic alternatives that identify strong semantic dominants of the city; controlling the speed of changes that allow to "remove" the conflict between the anthropological and innovative dimension of the city; overcoming the ratio of innovativeness and trendiness, in favor of building the city's own unique imagery. (shrink)

In a wide-ranging study, Josh Cohen argues that the American fixation with image - literally celebrating the surface, the visual, the spectacular spaces of the cinema and the city - has produced a crisis of literary perception, with crucial cultural and political consequences.

continent. 1.4 (2011): 242—252. Introduction The following two works were produced by visual artist Jonas Staal and writer Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei during a visit as artists in residence at The Bag Factory, Johannesburg, South Africa during the summer of 2010. Both works were produced in situ and comprised in both cases a public intervention conceived by Staal and a textual work conceived by Van Gerven Oei. It was their aim, in both cases, to produce complementary works that (...) could be read “through each other,” in which the movement of artistic construction would be imitated by textual deconstruction and vice versa. Both works deal with the way in which capital, apartheid, and monumentality are interwoven in South-African society. The Missing Link addresses a monument for democracy, erected on the premises of a private corporation running both an amusement park and the Apartheid Museum franchise. The textual intervention accompanying this public intervention investigates the limits of the inclusiveness of the anti-discrimination section in the South-African constitution, itself a monumental work of democracy. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth deals with the history and eventual dissolution of a monumental square, commemorating the Soweto Uprising, in one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The history accompanying this public dismemberment of memory is equally fragmented, which is expressed by the many voices recounting uncertain and perhaps even irrelevant “facts” about the genius loci, the way in which the memorial space has actually entered into the memory of the inhabitants surrounding it. Next to their individual practices, Staal and Van Gerven Oei have worked together on a number of projects ever since 2007, including several art residencies. Their work involves an investigation of the different interfaces between art, politics, and public space in media ranging from theater and public interventions, to video installations and (co-authored) textual works. The Missing Link Missing Link (1) Missing Link (2) Missing Link (3) Intervention on the monument entitled The Seven Pillars of the Constitution , part of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Seven Pillars represent the constitutional values propagated in South Africa since the abolition of the apartheid regime. The monument and museum were built by the Gold Reef Resorts corporation, which is also responsible for the theme park and casino next to it. By placing the word “capitalism” on the wall surrounding the museum, the capitalist system and the constant social divisions that it implies are interpreted as sophistic continuations of apartheid politics. Through the capitalist system, apartheid is still operational within South African society. Whereas during the apartheid regime, the separation clearly ran along race divisions, in the current, “democratic” system, the same actual separation is sustained without it being an explicit element of the foundations of the country, i.e. the constitution. This intervention foregrounds the constant role of capitalism is both periods. At the same time the intervention acknowledges that contemporary Western artisthood is a mirror of the privileges that are offered by the capitalist system, and the type of artist that it produces. The intervention initiates a critical discourse concerning the capitalist system situated within the disaster of capitalism itself, in other words: through the desire to break with the presumption that art would be able to operate outside the capitalist system and to confirm that art—and the artist himself—is in fact modeled on this system. The public intervention by Staal was supplemented by a textual intervention by Van Gerven Oei: a proposition to alter the seventeenth amendment of the South African constitution. Even though the anti-discrimination legislation in South-Africa is one of the most stringent and inclusive in the world, one factor—wealth—remains outside its scope, thus continuing the schisms along racial lines produced during the apartheid regime: §9.3. The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language, birth, and wealth. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth Intervention concerning the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The monument comprises a park on which different are placed recalling an important protest the black population against the former apartheid regime. In 1976, from a school adjacent to the park, they started a massive protest against the introduction of Afrikaans in the school curriculum. The police reacted violently, and shot several hundreds of students. The construction of the June 16 Memorial Acre was started in 2005, and from the start was the paragon of corruption. Coordinated by local politicians, some family members of the protest leader from 1976 gained control of the realization of the monument, outside the regulation through external institutions. The available budget of 41 million rand (at that time well over 5 million euro) was largely embezzled. In the meantime, the monument has become fully dilapidated and defaced. The park has become overgrown with weeds and covered in a layer of dirt, and the local population is slowly plundering the square to use the material for the construction and decoration of their own houses. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth develops the dynamics already existent around the June 16 Memorial Acre. Without obtaining official permission in advance, several local inhabitants were hired to break down the monument, sort the materials, and offer it to the neighborhood. Thus, the redistribution of wealth after the fall of the apartheid regime is finally taking place, albeit from the mere remains of the capital that was once invested in the community. The words “monument” and “for free” are spray-painted on the stacks of material, both in English and Zulu, as these are locally the most common languages. Van Gerven Oei supplemented Staal’s public intervention with an account of the history of the monument based on a series of interviews. The account clarifies how the different interests within the protest 1976 are reflected in the exceeding decay of the park, and how in the end those interests were represented by the June 16 Memorial Acre. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 1: Removing stones Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 3: Pulling down statues Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 4: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 5: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 6 The next day A Fragmentary History of the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth, Formerly Known as the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei The following text, based on interviews and online research aims to provide parts of a history of the park in front of Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto. The idea for the transformation of the park into a memorial site has its source in the events of June 16, 1976: the start of the the student uprising in Soweto. The development of the park was started in the early 1980s, and the actual transformation into a memorial site, the June 16 Memorial Acre, was initiated in 2005. Over the last few years, several monumental additions have been made to the park: A marble monument with three pillars was revealed on June 16, 2006. A sculpture of a book and several billboards on June 16, 2008. A sculpture of student leader Tsietsi Mashinini on June 16, 2010. The park was transformed into the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth on August 3, 2010. According to the entry “Youth Struggle” on the website South African History Online, the Bantu Education Act was introduced in 1953 . In 1954 , Dr Verwoerd, Minister of Native Affairs, stated: “What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd.” According to the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, the Afrikaans Medium Decree was issued in 1974 , forcing all black schools to use Afrikaans and English in a 50-50 mix as languages of instruction. The Regional Director of Bantu Education (Northern Transvaal Region), J.G. Erasmus, told Circuit Inspectors and Principals of Schools that from January 1, 1975 , Afrikaans had to be used for mathematics, arithmetic, and social studies from standard five (7th grade). English would be the medium for general science and practical subjects. Indigenous languages would be used for religion instruction, music, and physical culture. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on April 30, 1976 , students from the Orlando West Junior School in Soweto went on strike, refusing to go to school. Their example was followed by other schools in Soweto. A student from Morris Isaacson High School, Toboho “Tsietsi” Mashinini, proposed a meeting on June 13, 1976 to discuss further action. According to Weizmann Hamilton’s article “The Soweto Uprising 1976,” which appeared in the September 1986 edition of Inqaba Ya Basebenzi (Fortress of the Revolution), on June 13, 1976 , the South African Students’ Movement called a meeting at the Donaldson Community Center in Orlando. 300-400 Students representing 55 schools decided to hold a mass demonstration on June 16. According to Brian Mokhele, member of the Joint Community Safety Forum, Dr Edelstein was the first victim of the Soweto uprising and killed the day before the march on June 15, 1976 . Edelstein was an administrator at the pass office in Jabavu and gave golf courses to the local community. Edelstein was put in a garbage bin and pierced by pickaxes. The garbage bin was left at the very spot of the murder for many years. A few years ago, a child was beheaded at the same spot, and the basketball court next to it has been abandoned since. According to Marcus Neustetter, founder of the Trinity Session, this story is untrue. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on June 16 , Tsietsi Mashinini led students from Morris Isaacson High School to join up with others who walked from Naledi High School. A crowd of between 3,000 and 10,000 eventually ended up near Orlando High School. According to Raymond Marlowe, a local photographer, Tsietsi Mashinini was heading the march. According to the entry “Hector Pieterson” on Wikipedia, Dr Edelstein died on June 16, 1976 , stoned to death by mob and left with a sign around his neck proclaiming “Beware Afrikaaners.” The first child to die that day was called Hastings Ndlovu. According to Pat Motsiri, Orlando West is claiming struggle heritage through the Hector Pieterson Museum, while Hector Pieterson was from Jabavu. According to Pat Motsiri, his generation effectively struggled between 1980 and 1991, forcing the release of Nelson Mandela and negotiations with the apartheid regime while the 1976-generation was safely in exile. Nevertheless, this has not been recognized in any monument. After the abolition of apartheid, the generation from 1976 returned from exile, occupied important government and ANC positions, creating an abundance of 1976 memorials and refusing to acknowledge that this was only possible because of the younger generation’s struggle. He calls this a generational conflict. According to Archibald Dlamini, the park officer responsible for the Memorial Acre, he started working for the municipality in 1978. In 1981/82 , Isaac Makhele from Pimville, who used to work in the cemetery business, was the first developer of the park. It used to be just a normal park until City Parks decided to develop the Memorial Acre in 2006. In 2007 the work was stopped by the community. According to Brian Mokhele, he left the country in 1989 after he participated in the riots of 1986. But when he returned in 1999 he found that nothing had changed. He says that they were promised to be protected by the Constitution, but that reality is different. The police uses fear to suppress them so that they don’t come out to talk openly. He has been arrested twice, both times harassed and tortured by the police, but in the end always released without indictment. He says that this is their way to threaten communities to back off from politics. According to Moses, who is sitting outside rolling a joint, Brian knows everything. He tells Brian to tell me everything he knows. According to Brian Mokhele, Tsietsi Mashinini was possibly murdered in 1990 during his exile in New York. Two weeks before he was supposed to return to South Africa, his papers in order, he was found dead under mysterious circumstances. His coffin was sealed when he was buried. According to Pat Motsiri, he came up with the idea for the Memorial Acre in 2003 . He submitted the documents for the proposal to the council, which sidelined him as soon as the budget came out in 2005 . According to Brian Mokhele, there was on estimation R 41,000,000 spent to redesign the park and turn it into the Memorial Acre. The millions were divided by Amos Masondo, the mayor of Soweto, the local councilor Bongani D. Zondi, and the director of the city of Johannesburg, Pat Lephunya. They were dividing the money between several contractors: Tsietsi Mashinini’s brothers were involved in the development of the park, they got the tender to do the green areas, the landscaping. Construction was done by other companies, some did the paving, the toilets, etc. EMBA, a private company appointed by the municipality was in control of the money flow, but the money was quickly gone. According to Raymond Marlowe, the contractor bought a BMW with the money. According to Archibald Dlamini, the Mashinini brothers got the tender, so the space would look more like the other places around in Soweto. It was agreed that after they were done, they would return the property to the municipality. They did whatever they could do. According to Mafaisa, a member of the Jabavu business community, he was one of the contractors for the landscaping and the pavement under Mpho Mashinini, one of the brothers. He says that I should contact Mavi for information on Mpho. According to Poi Stuurman, a local youth worker, Mafaisa is one of the guys who ran away with the money. According to Mavi, Mpho Mashinini was never a contractor. The contracts were organized by Sbu Butelezi, the former head of the Gauteng Department for Public Works. The June 16 Foundation and the Mashinini brothers will be the beneficiaries of the park when it is finished. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks did not accept the Memorial Acre because it was not finished. The rest of the year, the unfinished park is not maintained, as should have happened. This was done deliberately so that in the end they can just clean the whole thing up and have a reason to redo the whole park. According to Brian Mokhele, the Mashinini brothers now work for the government. People that manipulate for money purposes always come from the government’s side. Because the park was left unfinished, the people from the neighborhood are taking away the stones to decorate their own homes with. According to Archibald Dlamini, because City Parks doesn’t accept responsibility of the park, he officially has nothing the guard, except for his cottage, which is municipal property. The thieves come at night and destroy the park, but he cannot do anything because he is sleeping. According to the website of the Thanda Foundation on June 16, 2006 a bronze statue of Hector Pieterson, the first child to die in the 1976 protests, made by Kobus Hattingh and Jacob Maponyane was unveiled in the Maponya Mall in Soweto. The statue is sculpted after the famous image shot by Sam Nzima of Mbuyisa Makhubo carrying the dead body of the boy. The sculpture was sponsored by the Thanda Foundation, founded by the Swedish entrepreneur Dan Olofsson and South-African entrepreneur Matthews Phosa. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, the Memorial Acre and Artwork were unveiled in 2006. According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre was still under development on July 24, 2006. According to Archibald Dlamini, City Parks only cleans up the park once a year just before the June 16 celebrations. Everybody is waiting for the Mashinini brothers to finish their job. The last time he talked with them was in 2007 . According to a sign on the school grounds of the Morris Isaacson High School, the June 16 Trail will be finished in 2008 . According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre contains another monument erected in Tsietsi’s honor. The monument was created as part of the Sunday Times Heritage Public Art program. Its physical form resembles a giant book which symbolizes the crisis in education experienced in 1976. On the face of the book is the map of the route taken by the students from Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu to Phefeni Junior Secondary in Orlando West (currently the site of the Hector Pieterson Museum), while the back cover of the ‘book’ is inscribed with a tribute to Tsietsi Mashinini. The monument was revealed on June 16, 2008 . According to Marcus Neustetter, the billboards on the Memorial Acre were part of a school project realized in 2008. Following several workshops, the students from different high schools along the June 16 Trail were invited to work with artists on the billboards, while the neighborhood community was invited to watch the process during the festivities on June 15 and 16, 2008 . The billboards were supposed to be removed because of construction works on the Memorial Acre, which never ended up happening. According to Brian Mokhele, the former toilet facilities were converted into a house for the park officer. This park officer has been working for city parks for more than 12-15 years, but does nothing here, because the park, including the new toilet buildings, is not finished. The government is now moving around looking for people to take this job because they stopped it. They confronted everybody who was going in and chased them away. According to John, in 2009 , some girls, around 16 or 17 years old, were raped by four men who had been drinking in a local shebeen. When the bar quit they said that they would go home by car, but instead raped the girls on the Memorial Acre nearby. This happened in the unfinished toilets, because the doors couldn’t be closed. According to Brian Mokhele, there used to be some fences around the park because of the construction work that was eventually stopped, but these were also stolen. According to Archibald Dlamini, people from the neighborhood started about two and a half years ago, and the last piece was stolen near the end of 2009 . Sometimes he would catch someone with a roll of fence, and then use it for his own cottage. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, a statue of Tsietsi Mashinini by Johannes Pokhela was revealed on June 16, 2010 , “Youth Day.” According to Shirley Makutoane, deputy principal of Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini, funded by the June 16 Foundation, has temporarily been placed within the school perimeter. The statue will be moved to the Memorial Acre when it will be finished, in 2011 . According to Brian Mokhele, beside the June 16 Foundation, there is also a June 16 Memorial Acre Foundation. Both foundations are quarreling about the money involved in the Memorial Acre project. Nobody knows who’s involved in them. According to Marcus Neustetter, the June 16 Foundation consists of people that were part of 1976 protest movement, local government officials, representatives of the Hector Pieterson Museum, and the council. According to students from the Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini is on the school ground because on the Memorial Acre it would be vandalized by youths from White City, an adjacent neighborhood. Accorcing to Brian Mokhele, the statue of Tsietsi should eventually be mounted on the Memorial Acre. It is wrong that the statue is in the school at the moment, because it is not a public school. He wants the statues to depict the massiveness of the force that was coming into Soweto after the protests. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks, City of Jo’burg, City Lights, and SAPS are making some sort of plan to take the plan back. They want to remove the trees from the Memorial Acre, and redesign the Memorial Acre into a relaxing park, without political content. They want to depoliticize the square. In doing so,they will have their own employment and not use local workforces. According to Brian Mokhele, the community wants to remove the monuments, amphitheater, and sculptures from the Memorial Acre because they do not resemble anything. The sculptures should be depicting the truth of what happened, because the Memorial Acre is a political heritage site. He wants to involve the people that actually participated in the struggle to make the monument so that everyone can enjoy it and get a better understanding of the struggle heritage. Therefore, he proposes collective ideology in which everyone has a say. This would prevent future vandalization of the monument. According to Pat Motsiri, the sculptures must depict the event around June 16, 1976. Like the story of Dr Edelstein, who was pierced by pickaxes, forced into a garbage bin and burned alive. According to Jonas Staal, the Memorial Acre should be destroyed, its elements stacked on pallets, thus forming the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth . According to Mafaisa, his men can do the work quickly. He has about twenty men working under him. (shrink)

Riverlands of the Anthropocene invites readers into universal questions about human relations with rivers and water for the precarious times of the Anthropocene. The book asks how humans can learn through sensory embodied encounters with local waterways that shape the architecture of cities and make global connections with environments everywhere. The book considers human becomings with urban waterways to address some of the major conceptual challenges of the Anthropocene, through stories of trauma and healing, environmental activism, and encounters with the (...) living beings that inhabit waterways. The book's unique contribution is to bring together Australian Aboriginal knowledges with contemporary western, new materialist, posthuman, and Deleuzean philosophies. It foregrounds how visual, creative and artistic forms can assist us in thinking beyond the constraints of western thought to enable other modes of being and knowing the world for an unpredictable future. Riverlands of the Anthropocene will be of particular interest to those studying the Anthropocene through the lenses of environmental humanities, environmental education, philosophy, ecofeminism and cultural studies. (shrink)

Abstract:Christian Bendayán (Iquitos, Peru 1973 -) is one of a cadre of visual artists from Iquitos, Peru that has cultivated an Amazonian pop aesthetic over the last decade. Bendayán creates an alternative, counter-dominant viewpoint to seemingly intractable archival versions of the Amazon and its peoples. The place, its habitants, and its flora and fauna have been documented in published texts and drawings by sixteenth-century missionaries, eighteenth-century botanists, nineteenth-century rubber barons, and countless adventurers. I argue that Bendayán queers some of (...) these archival documents through his incorporation of gender non-conforming and homoerotic figures into his depiction of Iquitos. Additionally, he reconfigures images and texts from previous eras via his transformation of historical facts into open-ended narratives that reflect a queer temporality that toggles back and forth between the past, the present and the future. Through his transformation of archival materials, and his incorporation of local myths and pop culture, he presents physical desire not as a means to procreation, but as an end in and of itself. In sum, through his paintings, Bendayán perceives from and with Iquitos. He turns his city into a distinct viewpoint instead of a fantastical destination for the projections of outsiders. (shrink)

Cinema and Agamben brings together a group of established scholars of film and visual culture to explore the nexus between the moving image and the influential work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Including two original texts by Agamben himself, published here for the first time in English translation, these essays facilitate a unique multidisciplinary conversation that fundamentally rethinks the theory and praxis of cinema. In their resourceful analyses of the work of artists such as David Claerbout, Jean-Luc Godard, Philippe (...) Grandrieux, Michael Haneke, Jean Rouch, and others, the authors put to use a range of key concepts from Agamben's rich body of work, like biopolitics, de-creation, gesture, potentiality and profanation. Sustaining the eminently interdisciplinary scope of Agamben's writing, the essays all bespeak the importance of Agamben's thought for forging new beginnings in film theory and for remedying the elegiac proclamations of the death of cinema so characteristic of the current moment. (shrink)

After a century of cinema, accounts of this cultural form see it as divided between documentation and animation (the real and the magical). Yet the challenge that cinema presented in terms of a relocation of perception from the eye to the machine has become occluded. The shock of cinema in its earliest manifestations resided in the body of the spectator, no longer the site of primary perception, but dependent on an other (the camera, the projector) lacking in human qualities. This (...) article argues that the newly configured body–machine relationship provided by cinema became a marginalized feature of cinematic culture, an ex-centric cinema relegated to the sub-fields of science and educational film. In the mid-20th century the project surfaces spectacularly in the work of pioneering designers Charles and Ray Eames, most poignantly in their film Powers of Ten (first made in 1968, remade in 1977), a journey into the cosmos and back again into the body of a man. Bringing together discourses of space travel, cartography, physics and cinema, the film moves us towards an understanding of visual culture as an apparatus of calculated possibilities, where visualization replaces representation. If we take the Powers of Ten as a non-representational film, an ex-centric cinematic practice, we uncover non-linear and non-representational ways of apprehending the relationship between bodies and matter. This literal line of flight is one path that cinema may have taken. Its presence, however, is detectable outside of the cinema, in the software programs of electronic cartography copyrighted as Google Earth. The human body is not made virtual by its engagement with calculated visualization but is in turn part of the field of enquiry, equally porous, and definable in various scales and in different dimensions. (shrink)

The pursuit of a sustainable future necessitates the integration of critical thinking into environmental education, as it plays a crucial role in equipping individuals with the necessary skills and knowledge to address complex environmental challenges. This article aims to examine the significance of critical thinking in the educational framework for cultivating ecological culture. By exploring the relationship between critical thinking skills and sustainable practices, the study analyzes how critical thinking abilities can contribute to creating a solid foundation for a sustainable (...) future. This article presents the findings of a sociological survey conducted between March and June 2023, focusing on assessing the development of environmental culture competencies among residents of Yekaterinburg City (N = 250). The survey utilized a Google Form as the data collection tool. Statistical analysis was performed using the Vortex program version 10.0. The study findings indicate a significant level of ownership and shared responsibility among residents, suggesting their active engagement as catalysts for positive change in fostering a sustainable and equitable society. The findings of the study revealed that the city’s ecological situation is considered one of the most urgent issues by the citizens of Yekaterinburg. The article proposes a model of ecological culture in academic disciplines and presents a structured approach to raising environmental awareness in conjunction with the integration of critical thinking into academic disciplines. (shrink)

The framework in which, better than in any other, cultural complexity becomes clear as a network of perspectives is the city: it is here that the greatest variety of subcultures, together with the widest range of contrasting modalities, seems able to handle its meaning. The city is at the same time an active place of cultural production and a passive and active place of memory keeping. It fuels styles and models of sensitivity also, and especially, through art and (...) architecture. Therefore, it becomes itself a cultural model able to orient taste, but also to continually disorient it through agency. Starting from the revitalization of the cultural capital of the cities, art can play the important role of cultural magnet by catalyzing moods and emotions, conveying otherwise chaotic needs and languages, promoting new tolerance and social and cultural integration. However, in the meantime, from a secluded and distinct place that organizes the use of cultural and artistic products within recognizable boundaries, the city is becoming an undifferentiated place, a city-beyond, scattered and/or boundless. Characterized by the undifferentiated and the mutant, the uncertain and the liquid, the deformable and the relative, the space of art perception will be rethought within and without the city. (shrink)

Despite much excellent work over the years, the vast history of scientific filmmaking is still largely unknown. Historians of science have long been concerned with visual culture, communication and the public sphere on the one hand, and with expertise, knowledge production and experimental practice on the other. Scientists, we know, drew pictures, took photographs and made three-dimensional models. Rather like models, films could not be printed in journals until the digital era, and this limited their usefulness as evidence. But (...) that did not stop researchers from making movies for projection at conferences as well as in lecture halls, museums and other public venues, not to mention for breaking down into individual frames for analysis. Historians of science are more likely to be found in the library, archive or museum than the darkened screening room, and much work is still needed to demonstrate the major effects of cinema on scientific knowledge. Film may have taken as long to change science as other areas of social life, but one can begin to glimpse important ways in which ‘image machines’ were beginning to mediate between backstage experimental work and more public demonstration even around 1900. (shrink)

1. This book is a fascinating look at how early cinema and moving images inspired and were inspired by other more static forms of visual culture, such as painting, photography, and tableaux vivants. The contributors to this volume demonstrate how cinema responded to and was positioned within broader artistic and cultural frameworks. 2. This book is another strong contribution to the Proceedings of Domitor series, of which we are now the sole publishers. 3. It will benefit from our well (...) established reputation in early cinema studies. (shrink)

Cinema and Machine Vision unfolds the aesthetic, epistemic, and ideological dimensions of machine-seeing films and television using computers. With its critical-technical approach, this book presents to the reader key new problems that arise as AI becomes integral to visual culture. The book theorises machine vision through a selection of aesthetics, film theory, and applied machine learning research, dispelling widely held assumptions about computer systems designed to watch and make images on our behalf. -/- At its heart, Cinema and Machine (...) Vision is an invitation for film and media scholars to critically engage with AI at a technical level, a prompt for scientists and engineers working with images and cultural data to critically reflect on where their assumptions about vision come from, and a joint recognition of the fruitful problems of working together to understand the algorithmic governance of the visual. (shrink)

Cities have consistently served as fertile grounds for the emergence and growth of radical ideas, political transformations, and social movements, with urban landscapes nurturing visionary concepts, idealism, and revolutionary ideologies. This research delves into the captivating world of radical cities, exploring the power of image and visual narratives to communicate and comprehend urban activism within diverse contexts. By analyzing various case studies and student works, we aim to create, study, and reimagine vivid portrayals of urban activism, radical urbanism, and (...) future socio-spatial developments. The focus lies on developing innovative visual modalities and collaborative critical pedagogical approaches that engage with the complexities of radical cities across North America, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and beyond. In this study, we explore the potential of image and visual narratives to decode and understand pivotal societal transitions in radical cities. By employing imaginative and critical pedagogy, we aspire to foster a more profound comprehension of urban activism and its impact on shaping the cities of the future. (shrink)

Detroit is frequently viewed as a city where hope has been lost, government is totally dysfunctional, and the infrastructure is beyond repair. For far too many people around the world, the Motor City is perceived as a city whose greatness is in distant memory. Detroit Resurgent, while not ignoring the problems facing the city, explores Detroit in a new way that reveals a culturally rich, very alive, and undeniably present side of the city. Through photographic (...) portraits, interviews, essays, and poetry, it demonstrates the vitality and humanity of Detroit’s people, providing a powerful counternarrative to the vision of Detroit as a Rust Belt wasteland. Giving voice to people with hopes for a brighter future and aspirations to create a new city out of the old required recording their own words and engaging a portrait photographer grounded in humanism whose approach is based upon the traditions of social documentary photography. Detroit Resurgent explores the city through the voices of those working in a multitude of ways to reshape it into a twenty-first-century urban space, through the auto industry, urban agriculture and food production, entrepreneurial action and small business, visual and performing arts, activism, and visionary leadership. (shrink)

The article analyzes the interdisciplinary methodology of city research within the philosophical and cultural approach. The authors argue that at present, besides sociological and economic approaches to the interpretation of the city, the cultural and philosophical examination of city is of special interest. It combines both theoretical issues and the practical aspects. The authors present the philosophical and cultural analysis of the city as well as the general concept of chronotopia. The concept of chronotope, proposed by (...) M. M. Bakhtin and his followers, is most often used as a tool for the analysis of fiction. According to the authors, the spatio-temporal diagnostics of the city also has significant theoretical and practical potential. The authors discuss various literary and philosophical texts analyzing the feautures and evolution of the “soul of the city” (written by Russians N.P. Antsiferov, I.M. Grevs, Y.M. Lotman, M.S. Kagan, I.I. Mitin as well as by foreign scholars Y. Slezkine, K. Schlogel, exploring the chronotope of Soviet cities). The article presents other modern Russian and foreign researchers who directly collaborated with the authors of this research in joint urban projects: M. Golovanivskaya (“syntax” of urban squares), “Ural matrix” (A. Ivanov, I. Lisovets, E. Trubina), chronotope of a small Israeli city (E. Rimon), Stanford chronotopes (J. Bender, D.E. Wellbery). Since the city, like any cultural phenomenon, manifests itself within a set of spatio-temporal coordinates, the chronotope can be considered as the basic tool for its philosophical and cultural interpretation. The article substantiates the practical aspects of applying chronotopia to the analysis of the city: chronotopes of the past and everyday life in cities of certain types, strategic opportunities and boundaries of the chronotopes of a given city. The authors concludes that the chro-notopia of city is a transdisciplinary field in the cultural and philosophical studies of the city. (shrink)

For most people in the world of cinema, ‘film’ still means ‘feature-length narrative film’, while so-called ‘shorts’ fill another, neglected, undervalued category. However, there appear to be more short films around than ever before – more opportunities to make and also to show them, thanks particularly to digital technology. This article takes the usual reductive characterizations of short audio-visual work – as being, variously, a training ground for future ‘professionals’, a free space where young people can indulge in anarchy (...) for a little while before growing up, or as a calling card for the film industry – and interrogates them in the context of a rapidly changing and evolving media culture. (shrink)

The dynamic development of the city has brought about significant physical and environmental changes in Malang City, impacting the increasingly blurred identity of heritage areas. One such area is Idjen Boulevard, representing an icon of the heritage road corridor in Malang City. To comprehend the evolving nature of these heritage areas, it is essential to conduct studies documenting their past conditions and dynamics across various historical periods: the Colonial period, the Old Order period (the beginning of Indonesian (...) independence), the New Order period, and the Reformation period. This comprehensive approach aims to understand the changes that occurred in each time periodization within each zone/road segment. These insights are crucial for determining future development control steps through targeted regulations. The research employs the Interpretive Historical Urban Landscape method, focusing on thirteen components that constitute the Cultural Landscape. This method involves analyzing the results of observations, both from literature and field sources, supported by tools such as CAD Mapper, Google Earth, Google Street View, GISTARU (an interactive urban spatial detail plan), and SketchUp. These tools are instrumental in obtaining findings about the hierarchy of changes in cultural landscape components and the dynamics within each zone of the specified observation unit. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to study the idea of black visual intonation in the video-essay Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016) by visual artist Arthur Jafa. With the aim at discovering the singularity of black cinema in filmic composition, the artist carried out an experiment to examine how embodied memories emerge in the form of songs and dances, recovering traditional cultural features that the Afro-Atlantic diaspora dissipated. We find that the aesthetic-political singularity (...) of black cinema emerges in the black verbal-vocal-visual intonation, which externalizes interactive inner energies and organizes a critical-discursive space in which black people can talk about themselves, their desires, dreams and sorrows. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Experimenting with Islam:Nietzschean Reflections on Bowles’s AraplainaIan AlmondIn a letter to his friend Köselitz dated March 13 1881, Nietzsche wrote: "Ask my old comrade Gersdorff whether he'd like to go with me to Tunisia for one or two years.... I want to live for a while amongst Muslims, in the places moreover where their faith is at its most devout; this way my eye and judgement for all things (...) European will be sharpened."1 Various motifs in the work of Paul Bowles—a fascination with cruelty, an obsession with destruction, a predilection for abysses (metaphorical and literal) in the landscapes of his stories—invite some kind of reference to Nietzsche, however brief. Nietzsche's desire to live in the most intense pocket of Islam he could find had, one suspects, less to do with Islam than with his desire for a "trans-European eye"2 —four years after his remarks on Tunisia, Nietzsche would say the same thing about Japan in a letter to his sister.3 Nietzsche's proposed trip to Tunisia would lead to a better understanding of Europe, not Islam, and would provide him with an outside perspective on the European disease of modernity—a different set of lenses for his Kantian spectacles. This conception of Islam was, therefore, a means to self-knowledge, a handy instrument for diagnosing one's own illness, and a useful mirror to observe with greater clarity the more unattractive elements in one's own features. Most of Nietzsche's references to Islam and Islamic culture—and there are well over a hundred and fifty of them in the Gesamtausgabe—become clearer when one keeps this functional, almost anthropological, approach to the Islamic Other in mind.Although there is nothing new about this idea of the Orient as a tool of European self-awareness—as early as the 1780s, Sir William Jones was [End Page 309] already hoping the study of Sanskrit and Arabic would offer a "more extensive insight into the human [read "European"] mind"4 —an awareness of the genealogy of such Western interest in Arabs and Mohammedaner certainly helps us better understand Bowles's own eerie fascination with the faith. The parodies of missionaries, academics, and policemen which we find in stories such as "The Time of Friendship" and "A Distant Episode" confirm the distance Bowles attempted to put between his own texts and those Orientalist traditions of both Christian (i.e., Islam as a pool of potential believers) and Imperialist (Muslims as potential human resources) provenance. In attempting to escape such vocabularies and textual traditions, Bowles ultimately replicates and reshapes their original representations, producing an irony of delicate complexities, which is the object of this article.Near the beginning of Bowles's witty, though somewhat caustic autobiography Without Stopping, a moment takes place that gives an insight into the way, in later years, the narrator would approach different cultures with the intention of constructing new worlds. At age five, Bowles relates how he often found himself alone in his parents large upstate New York house. Abandoned to his own devices, the young narrator began to entertain himself by fabricating and mapping out new countries with his own imagination: "Soon I invented a planet with landmasses and seas. The continents were Ferncowland, Lanton, Zaganokworld and Araplaina. I drew maps of each and gave them mountain ranges, rivers, cities and railways."5 The image is captivating not only for its visual appeal, of a five-year-old Bowles, future author of Sheltering Sky, sitting on the carpet, crayoning out his map of Araplaina. It also suggests the presence, very early on, of what will always be a central motivation in Bowles's fascination with the world of Islam: a desire for novelty, for the really new, as an escape from boredom. Bowles's Tangiers would later provide the very Araplaina he had been seeking all along.In the world of Bowles's North African short stories, a number of common features seem to unite the otherwise disparate collection of tales found in The Time of Friendship and The Delicate Prey. Probably the foremost of these is cruelty. In "The Delicate Prey," the Moungari traveler... (shrink)

The present online volume contains the papers prepared for the 11th Budapest Visual Learning Conference – ENVISIONING AN ELECTRIFYING FUTURE – held in a physical-online blended form on Nov. 13, 2024, organized by the University of Pécs (represented by Prof. Gábor Szécsi, Dean, Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Education and Regional Development), and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (represented by Prof. Kristóf Nyíri, Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences). Nyíri and Szécsi were responsible for sending out the call for (...) abstracts and inviting plenary speakers, Szécsi organized the physical surroundings. Nyíri’s task was to build up and continuosly update the conference website, as well as to edit the accepted submissions. As we indicated in the call for submissions, the conference was planned as an interdisciplinary encounter of communication and media theory, cultural sciences, sociology, psychology, philosophy, pedagogy, history, political science, picture theory, and other disciplines. We insisted on achieving new scholarly results. Especially with AI now complementing, or intruding into, the world of the internet, what image of the future can we conceive of, what new patterns of life and in particular forms of education should we strive to create? (shrink)