Articles with tag: visual culture

12/15/2021 _Perspective

Covering Surveillance

The Visualization of Contemporary Surveillance on Scholarly Book Covers

Fig. 1: The cover of Aziz Choudry’s (ed.) Activists and the Surveillance State combines imagery of vision and sound. 1_Introduction In their editorial to this issue of On_Culture, guest editors Wolfgang Hallet and Wibke Schniedermann foreground an essential question concerning the historical specificity of contemporary surveillance cultures: “How do films and other media visualize the invisible processes of surveillance?” [1] Our _Perspective deals with this question in a self-reflexive fashion in that we suggest examining the book covers of scholarly publications from the field of surveillance studies. We are interested in how these book covers illustrate the dilemma of visualizing the increasingly less visible phenomenon of surveillance. Our ideas are grounded in the emerging interdisciplinary field of invisibility studies, which is especially interested in the shifting contemporary configurations of what is regarded as visible and what is not. [2] Within surveillance studies, it follows up in particular on Jonathan Finn’s 2012 study of the representation of surveillance in stock imagery. If surveillance is “the dominant organizing practice of late modernity,” [3] surveillance is also “a fundamentally narrative act,” as Betiel Wasihun has argued. [4] Its deep structure is defined not only by the transformation of one state of affairs to another but by metaphors of vision, visibility, and invisibility. At first glance, this does not seem to apply to the current importance of “dataveillance,” [5] the forms of which increasingly subsume more traditional modes of audiovisual surveillance. Yet attempts to grasp the specificity of contemporary regimes of surveillance such as the “global eye” cannot escape the visual dimension. [6] This thesis is strikingly illustrated by Jeff Coons’s video contribution to this issue of On_Culture, “GlobalEyes,” which assembles publicly available CCTV camera footage. [7] It is further supported by the contribution by Martin Hennig and Miriam Piegsa, who argue that contemporary media representations of dataveillance in films, documentaries, and video games employ certain recurring visual metaphors based on the “[p]ersonalization and spatialization” of dataveillance. [8] The general cultural relevance of concepts of visibility and invisibility has been highlighted in this issue of On_Culture by Wasihun, who links these abstract ideas to the social dimension of shame. Emphasizing that contemporary dataveillance makes “the question of how to define interiority […] even more urgent,” she convincingly argues that the “concepts of visibility and invisibility […] are not outdated in the context of dataveillance.” [9] The advent of post-panoptic surveillance thus certainly marks a…

05/30/2016 _Perspective

Design and Modeling as Processes of Creating Culture

In the framework of the investigation into “Research as Art” by research area ‘Visual and Material Culture,’ Prof. Claudia Mareis (Basel) and Dr. Reinhard Wendler (Florence) hosted a two-day workshop on “Designing Models, Modelling Design” (February 3–4, 2016). In the workshop, the concepts of ‘design’ and ‘model’ served as semantic vehicles for a discussion on the temporal and material character of meaning-making. As ideas, both can foster an interdisciplinary analysis of emerging cultural phenomena, transcending disciplinary boundaries in academia as well as those between different fields of cultural reflection, social planning, and material production (such as architecture or engineering). The workshop revolved around the central notion that the creation of objects and images during modeling and design processes can fulfill a multitude of different functions: as means of representation, ideation, planning, or communicating ideas, they shape historically specific emergences of cultural phenomena. …

05/30/2016 _Perspective

Shake Those Methods!

The Art of Doing Research

In the winter term 2015/16, the GCSC research area ‘Visual and Material Culture’ held a number of meetings on the application of the research methodology while conducting research in the study of culture. As the immediacy of practical application of the research methods leaves a strong imprint on the ideas and knowledge that appear in academia, we wanted to report on our discussions in the light of the theoretical concept of ‘emergence.’ …

05/30/2016 _Perspective

Research Design

The explorative potential of research-planning processes in visual and material culture

The first session of the Creative Emergence of a Research Method series was dedicated to thinking about research processes and their design. The non-planned potential knowledge, emerging during those processes (also while reflecting on the research design process itself) became a central topic. It was a provocative session in which we took the abstract notion of ‘design’ as the ‘rituals of creativity’ and compared research design to object- or service-design processes. …

05/30/2016 _Perspective

Curating as Research

In recent years, curating seems to have become a flourishing practice; everything seems to be curated today: meals, music, marriage ceremonies. But beyond these inflationary uses, the professional curation of museums, exhibitions, or collections has also received increased attention — the arena where curating as research and means in the production of knowledge comes to the fore. University courses in traditional curating are booming, but there is little academic literature on the subject, and it often remains vague as to what the role of the curator and their methods and repertoire of tools might look like. For me as an artist, curator, and academic, but also for the research area ‘Visual and Material Culture,’ these questions, as well as how curatorial practice relates to academic work, are of central concern. …