Visual_Culture

The online social platforms known as virtual worlds present their users various affordances for avatar based co-presence, social interaction and provide tools for collaborative content creation, including objects, textures and animations. The users of these worlds navigate their avatars as personal mediators in 3D virtual space to collaborate and co-design the digital content. These co-designers are also the residents of these worlds, as they socialize by building inworld friendships. This article presents a social semiotic analysis of the three-dimensional virtual places and artifacts in the virtual world known as Second Life by the collaborative efforts of its so-called residents. The social semiotic perspective is used to develop a multimodal analytical framework and to analyze the co-creation of meaning potentials by various social actors who use the available semiotic resources as mediational means. The findings show that co-design and co-creation practices do not only depend on various actors and their mediated interactions, but also on a variety of tools, practices and resources that digital media platforms provide. Moreover, the multimodal analysis of these places demonstrates how the audio-visual characteristics of designing in multi-user virtual environments generate experiential, interpersonal and textual meaning potentials.

The seaside played a vital role in the Victorian social world, a location recurrently explored and imagined in the art of Charles Conder. Starting his career in Australia in 1888, Conder quickly became part of the colonial artistic milieu, and accompanied artists such as Tom Roberts on excursions to the seaside. The works Conder produced here, such as Coogee Bay, reflect Australia’s adoption of the English pastime of visiting the sea. As a social space, the seaside was a location where class was not diminished but paraded. Conder’s images of well dressed women by the sea continued when he moved to Europe in 1890, such as in Solitary shore, where a well-dressed woman stands beneath the billowing fabric of a striped beach tent. Importantly, the seaside was a place which permitted and even encouraged the presence of children, as is evident in Dieppe. This work demonstrates the activities which occurred on the shore, including exploration and discovery. Importantly, the seaside experience was about the improvement of mind and body, and not only children would search for shells and sea life, but adults participated in the collection of specimens, engaging in amateur natural science. Bathing is also illustrated by Conder; however, his figures often appear outside of designated bathing areas. Further, Conder produced numerous imaginative works set by the sea, such as Maidens on a terrace. Conder’s images, ranging from observations of strollers along the coast to fantastical realms peopled by beautiful unclothed women, attest to his persistent inspiration by the seaside.

My research is on Australian artists in Europe 1890-1914, particularly in London. I am focussing on the spaces these artists entered and also created, spaces of sociability where they negotiated their identity especially in regards to nationality in the immediate pre and post federation period. I am interested in the communities they joined and formed, and the extent to which they both assimilated with and distanced themselves from the European and Australian art worlds. They continued and renewed friendships established in Australia, forming a supportive community. However, they also sought to engage with the European art community, training and exhibiting in an effort to gain recognition there and in turn in Australia. Through adopting the role of the bohemian artist, they became part of a cosmopolitan creative community. I seek to explore how whilst abroad artists considered manipulated and invented their ‘Australian-ness’. This cultural exodus was perceived as essential for ambitious Australians, and an engagement with the European art world altered their status as peripheral artists. However, travelling to England was somewhat complex as this was a journey ‘home’ to the motherland, yet the artists maintained connections with Australia. Hence, they developed multiple conceptions of home, and ‘home’ can be conceived not as a single fixed space but rather as a membership within the Empire. This status as members of the Empire reinforced the connection between artists in Australia and England, and despite the physical distance encouraged a dual interchange between the metropolis and the periphery.

John Longstaff’s The Sirens (1891) is an intriguing painting, drawing from the classical mythology that had held the artist spellbound as a child. This work captures the fin de siècle type of the femme fatale, with the predatory creatures whose song lured men to their deaths personifying the danger inherent in the feminine. This paper will explore the legacy of the Sirens in contemporary visual culture, considering the persistent theme of women who, like these mythical beings, would bewitch and then literallydevour men (as opposed to instances of metaphorical or sexual consumption, for example). The often interwoven responses of allure, fear and revulsion provoked by such a display of female power emerge in the works that will be focussed on: the film Teeth (2007), the music video ‘Sick, Sick, Sick’ by Queens Of The Stone Age (2007), and the characters Poison Ivy from DC comics (1966-) and Mileena from the video-game franchise Mortal Kombat (1993-). The dangers inherent within the female body manifests in these examples in various ways, envisioned variously – and often simultaneously – as abject, erotic, maternal, monstrous, natural and ultimately unknowable.

"Mixing facts and fiction, Hollywood screen biographies have told the lives of popular music icons at least since The Jazz Singer (1927). However, biopics construct narratives that deal problematically with issues of race. This article aims to describe how representations of African American musicians have changed from 1970s ‘black jazz biopics’ (Gabbard 1996) to more recent films on rock, hip hop and rhythm ’n’ blues acts. On one hand, I analyse the way 1970s music biopics constructed a peculiar new narrative about race and popularity. On the other hand, I show the extent to which films such as Tina (1993), Ray (2004) and Notorious (2009) have subtly modified the racialized distinctions of former biopics, placing black musicians within a cinematic mythology which historically had been reserved to white subjects. The shift from jazz to other music genres, thus, is related to significant changes in biopics’ narratives and visual strategies. However, I argue that music biopics still deal with a distinctive notion of ‘the popular’ (Williams 1983), which frames blackness as otherness and whiteness (Dyer 1997) as just ‘human nature’.

(first publication by Jazz Research Journal and Equinox)"

Innovation is a buzzword with remarkable contemporary currency, one frequently instrumentalized in the constant search for new technologies, means of production, market adaptations, scientific discoveries and social changes. With its more insidious applications in mind, a number of recent academic discussions – from visual culture studies and the global art history to the history of science and media archaeology – have come to treat the paradigm with caution, even scepticism. Yet at the same time, for better or for worse, it remains implicit within the bulk of humanistic academic production. This one-day interdisciplinary conference thus confronts innovation at a crossroads. It interrogates its place within theory and praxis by asking: How are we best to approach and define innovation in contemporary academic discourses? Is the paradigm purely a means of disarming social pressure for an all-inclusive equalized prosperity; or might it be recuperated to provide a stimulus for sustainable growth? Can we understand innovation in a broader global spectrum without falling into the trap of cultural essentialism; or does this concept perpetuate Western-centric views and mores? Can the concept of innovation be used for the analysis of historical periods; or does it figure too easily in teleological narratives?

"Ilya Rabinovich began photographing the museums of Chişinău to reclaim a personal identity, lost when he migrated from Moldova to Israel at the age of eight. Rabinovich’s personal quest eventually led to this collaboratively authored book project that questions the moral role of museums in creating national identities. The book
is built around 65 striking color photographs, taken in seven different museums, accompanied by detailed captions that lead the reader on a virtual tour of the exhibits.Four separately authored chapters precede the photographs to introduce the project and photographer, and another two essays conclude the volume. One of these concluding essays contextualizes the exhibits with regard to Moldova’s recent political history; the second questions the general capacity of museums to adapt newer, more inclusive, modes of representation. In design, the book is an appealing souvenir that presents an attractive overview to a handful of Moldova’s museums, but it is probably best read by specialists in regional history, ethnography, and cultural studies, who are equipped to engage in an “intense reading process . . . to unravel the Moldovan identity puzzle” (17). The truly ideal audience would include those responsible for creating the exhibits. But because the book’s format creates the appealing atmosphere of a treasure hunt, it could also be used productively in courses on identity, nationalism,or east European history."

"In the past decade, visual arts have emerged as one of the most
effective forms of engagement with the remains of the Soviet past. From online photo collections of Soviet memorabilia1 to critically acclaimed film documentaries2 and catalogs,3 these visual projects relentlessly bring back images and representations
of the period that in the early 1990s seemed to have vanished
irrevocably. It would be wrong to dismiss these projects as merely nostalgic. Yet it would be just as wrong to ignore a significant affective charge that authors and audiences of these postsocialist explorations of socialism invest in material and visual traces of recent history. Often done outside the frameworks and conventions of professional history, these assemblages of representations usually offer neither coherent narratives,
nor convincing interpretations, nor consistent critique. Instead,
they pile up one piece of historical evidence after another, creating
in the end fascinating catalogs of symptoms of socialism, which have yet to be decoded."

"The young democratic nation of Moldova (formerly USSR) has a tumultuous relationship with its own history. From the height of Communism to the years after its fall, nationalistic narratives and “organized forgetting” of certain events have influenced Moldovans’ understanding of their past, and the content of their museums. In this paper, photographs of two of Moldova’s national museums in the capital city of Chişinău are used as case studies to examine contemporary Moldovan curation. This inquiry into the current state of the museum demonstrates that Soviet display techniques continue to haunt exhibition spaces and that the exhibitions themselves promote a particular –but inconsistent– idea of national identity.

"

"Impactul transformărilor dramatice de la finele anilor ’80
ai secolului al XX-lea și primele două decenii de istorie
post-sovietică a Republicii Moldova este un subiect de actualitate
pentru cei pasionați de istorie, muzee, fotografie, dar și pentru cercetătorii consacrați în domeniul istorie recentă, etnografie, muzeologie, memorie și construcție identitară. Studierea muzeelor naționale din Republica Moldova, ca instituții culturale semnificative și actori imolportanți în construirea memoriei și identității colective, a fost un subiect neglijat pentru o perioadă îndelungată de timp în Republica Moldova. În continuarea ideilor
afirmate de Benedict Anderson privind problema naționalismului și identităților (Anderson 1991), cercetătorii Peter Aronsson și Gabriella Elgenius, consideră muzeele naționale drept „spații unice în felul lor, capabile să pună în lumină ceea ce este, de fapt, imaginat cu referire la o ‚națiune’ în proces de constituire, renaștere sau deja formată” (Aronsson, Elgenius 2011, 5). Totodată, rolurile care pot fi asumate de către aceste instituții, în diferite contexte istorice, nu pot avea traiectorii și semnificații
comune în fiecare dintre societățile post-totalitare, muzeele naționale rămânând a fi „rezultatul unei logici negociate între știință și politică, universalism și particularism, diferență și unitate, continuitate și schimbare, materialitate și imaginație”
Aronsson, Elgenius 2011, 5)."