Frames

Frames function as a tool of recognition. They determine what is seen, how it is seen, and, just as importantly, what remains unseen. The photograph above is an excellent example of this. It comes from Steven de Beer’s project “Kamuhaka,” completed as a part of the Reframe workshop discussed in detail in the _Perspective section of this issue. Initially, the photograph appears casual and innocent, but there is much more to it. It has a simple but arresting color composition, and the close-up framing highlights the textures of featured elements: the clean and ironed fabric of the shirt,…

Preface: Illness, Narrated

Going past ten issues of On_Culture, it is time for us to explore the further potentials of being an online journal and take a new approach in our teaser images. The current issue, Illness, Narrated, guest edited by Silvia Boide, Benjamin Brendel, Maaike Hommes, Melanie Kreitler, gave us the opportunity to open up our visual style to new possibilities, while challenging us to illustrate illness and narrative via a visual medium.
We wanted to move away from the dominant and paternalistic representations of illness such as pictures of […]

Emergent Emergencies in Complex Ecosystems

Reflections on the Limits of Narrative Cognition and a Revisiting of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990)

The felicitous concept of ‘emergent emergencies,’ as proposed by the editors of this issue, suggests a close interrelationship between an ethical and a cognitive problem. It implies that states of emergency can arise out of cognitive inability to comprehend ‘emergence’ — a term used to describe the behavior of complex systems marked by “circular recursion” rather than straightforward linearity or mono-causality […]