Visual Cultural Studies by Institute For Architecture

VISUAL CULTURE STUDIES

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COLOPHON TU DELFT 2013 / 2014 MSC3 - SEMINAR VISUAL CULTURE STUDIES SEMINAR LEADERS: Mitesh Dixit Charlie Koolhaas STUDENT ASSISTANT: Stef Bogaerds 2

CP Kees Kaan

CP Chair: Prof. Kees Kaan

STUDENTS: Gloria (Jia) Chen Mingjie Ning Chen Li Fei Wu Wilbert Veltman Xuefei Li Egidijus Kasakaitis Yann Mu Hrvoje Smidihen Xiao Du Siwen, Liu Robertus de Bruin Alex Krosbacher Vijoleta Petrak Alina Tomosiunaite Dorine Verbaan Hwayoung Lee Elisabeth Travlou Arnoud Stavenuiter Yinxin Bao Roland Reema Mi-Jung Gim Wilbert Veltman Vaidas Vaiciulis Shu Xia Marija Mateljan Sotiria Diamanti Narinna Gyulkhasyan Guang Ruey Tan Susanne Leon Shirley Omanette Varun Kaushnik Wenjia Wang Ansis Sinke Maosen Geng Kaegh Allen Tanya Starchenko Mahedy Al Sraiffe Jennifer Wichtowski Agata Majcherska Ivan Thung Michael Zhang Peng Zhao

SEMINAR BRIEF The Seminar examines visual culture through the ways in which ideological and historical forces such as politics, economics and technology exert influence on the ‘objects’ of visual culture that take the form of photography, film, music, painting, sculpture and literature. We looked at how these objects are divided into industries and disseminated into the cultural realm via mediums such as television, publishing, cinema and the Internet. And finally consider the ‘apparatuses for viewing’ that determine the way in which these objects are interpreted; looking to diverse theories of perception- from psychoanalysis to semiotics, in order to understand the interplay between our identities and emotions and the cultural ‘objects’ that give meaning to our visual world. Around this process we touched on a vast range of topics from Plato’s theories of beauty to McLuhan’s theory of virtuality. We went back into the seminal theories of the past to see how the prophets of visual culture where able to know how today’s visual culture would be determined, in order to make judgments about what its future might be. SEMINAR METHOD Each week a theme related to Visual Culture was explored. To demonstrate the method of evaluating ‘objects’ Charlie Koolhaas used her own personal work as an artist, writer and sociologist to demonstrate the ways of looking and discussing objects. Mitesh Dixit lectures used the canons of Western Intellectual thought to examine the objects, which define Chicago.

Contents

01. THE GAZE

Gloria Chen Mingjie Ning Chen Li Fei Wu Wilbert Veltman

02. SEMIOLOGY: SIGNS AND SYSTEMS Xuefei Li Egidijus Kasakaitis Yann Mu Hrvoje Smidihen Xiao Du

04. THE BODY AND ITS REPRESENTATIONS Robertus de Bruin Alex Krosbacher Vijoleta Petrak Alina Tomosiunaite Dorine Verbaan

05. FETISHISM, FANTASY AND DESIRE Hwayoung Lee Elisabeth Travlou

03. WHAT IS VISION? 06. THE MEDIUM IS THE PERCEPTION AND SPACE MESSAGE Siwen Liu

Arnoud Stavenuiter Yinxin Bao Roland Reema Mi-Jung Gim Wilbert Veltman

07. SIMULATIONS AND SIMULACRA Vaidas Vaiciulis Shu Xia Marija Mateljan Sotiria Diamanti

10. GLOBAL CULTURE INDUSTRIES Kaegh Allen Tanya Starchenko Mahedy Al Sraiffe 5

08. MEANING AND 11. THE OBJECT AND EXPERIENCE IN THE AGE IDEOLOGY PHOTOGRAPHY Narinna Gyulkhasyan Guang Ruey Tan Susanne Leon Shirley Omanette Varun Kaushnik

09. NETWORK THEORY, SOCIETY AND MEDIA Wenjia Wang Ansis Sinke Maosen Geng

Jennifer Wichtowski Agata Majcherska

12. NEWS, PROPAGANDA, THE ART OF WAR AND THE IMAGE OF TERROR Ivan Thung Michael Zhang Peng Zhao

1. THE GAZE 7

Gloria Chen Mingjie Ning Chen Li Fei Wu Wilbert Veltman

Gloria Chen

Norman Bryson - The Gaze in the expanded field Name: Gloria Chen Student No.: 4234715 E-mail: J.Chen-8@student.tudelft.nl

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1 Author’s view: Author examines a term that has become important in contemporary discussions of painting and of visuality: Gaze. It compares the difference between western and eastern opinion. For the western aspect, the concept of the Gaze passes from Satre to Lacan. For eastern aspect, Kitaro Nishida and Keiji Nishitani’s theoretical development, in authors’ view, go further than Satre and Lancan’s. In author’s view, although Satre and Lacan progressively dismantled centralized subject, the standpoint of the subject as center is actually retained. While in Nishida and Keiji Nishitani undertakes a much more thorough displacement of the subject in the field of vision. The concept of sunyata, translated as “blankness”, “emptiness” relocates the Gaze in an expanded field. The gaze is not regarded as a terror. Gaze always seems to be menace in our future. However, gaze is not the intrinsic fact. This menace is a social product, determined by power. “Lacan seems to me, at least, to view the subject’s entry into the social arena of visuality as intrinsically disastrous.” “Terror comes from the way that sight is constructed in relation to power, and powerlessness. To think of a terror intrinsic to sight makes it harder to think what makes sight terroristic, or otherwise.” Power uses social construct vision to create terrors.

Power disguise and conceals its operation of terror in visuality. Satre: Decenter subject by the inseparable relationship between subject and object. The viewpoint and vanishing point are inseparable: there is no viewpoint without vanishing point, and no vanishing point without viewing point. Annihilation of the subject as center is a condition of the very moment of the look. Lacan: Lacan pushes the concept of gaze further. It marks a fundamental shift away from the ground on which vision has been previously thought. The viewing subject does not stand at the center of a perceptual horizon, and cannot command the chains and series of signifiers passing across the visual domain. We view ourselves through others’ vision. Seeing on the field of the other, seeing under gaze. Kitaro Nishida & Keiji Nishitani: They go further in dismantle subject. They pay more attention to decentralized objects. Vision is traversed by something wholly ungovernable by the subject, something that harbors within it the force of everything outside the visual dyad.

2 Other authors critique the author’s text: Hans Belting: Florence & Baghdad Renaissance Art and Arab Science In this book’s conclusion, Hans belting critiques Norman’s the Gaze in the expanded field. He said that Norman started his research on debate about the concept of subject in Western world. This subject is defined by object which to be viewed. In East Asia culture, the frame of vision is dismantled that the subject and view is beyond a fixed point. According to Norman Bryson, Japanese philosophers are critical of that Western intellectual hold the opinion that subject is defined by object to be viewed. In a no boundary space, which is also called emptiness, or the sunyata in Japanese, all the objects do not exist stably. Thus, the need of view in Western philosophy is not exist. A viewer who lose its frame, view the painting, flowing from one point to another point. It is no more like a independent observer which is considered to have a conscious focus point. Scroll painting in China shows the continue changes of flowing view points. Viewers, who have to open the scroll painting by self, are allowed to change his viewpoint from one to another. They don’t need to find a specific focus point.

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Mingjie Ning

Chen Li

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Un disegnatore che esegue un nudo, di Albrecht Durer, Unterweysung der Messung, Norimberga 1538 The Gaze

Chen Li

of signifiers that from the social milieu. It is “seeing on the field of the other, seeing under the Gaze.” The subject in Lacan is given by culture and history, not by nature. That will be a cultural screen with scotoma or stain on it. What we see is no Sartre’s narrative of “Gaze” involves two longer the real world , but just formed by stages. At first a watcher resides at the still paths or network laid down in advance point of the turning world with nothing of my seeing. threatening the occupancy of the self as focus of its visual kingdom. Yet all of a In the author’s standpoint, the line of sudden, an intruder enters and breaks thinking that passes from Sartre to Lacan the watcher’s self-enclosure. Watcher is in crucial respects remains held within in turn watched and there will be no cen- a conceptual enclosure, where vision is ter anymore. The opposition between the still theorized from the standpoint of a watcher and the intruder results in the subject placed at the center of a world. Although they aim to dismantle the annihilation of the subject’s center. centralized subject, their standpoint of In Lacan, there is a “screen” between the the subject as center is actually retained, subject and the world, which is the ir- which results in that the vision is porruption of the Signifier in the visual field. trayed as menaced at that vestigial center The effect of this insertion of the screen by the Gaze. is that the subject who sees is no more the center of visual experience because The direction of thought that passes from Nishida to Nishitani undertakes the vision is decentered by the network The term “Gaze” has changed its mean from Sartre to Lacan in the field of vision and visuality. And Nishida and Nishitani go further than them towards a radical reformulation of our thought.

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Titian â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Venus with a Mirror c. 1555

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a much more thoroughtgoing displacement of the subject in the field of vision. Nishitani’s aim is also to dismantle the anthropocentric subject. The concept of “blankness”, which from the Japanese “sunyata”, relocates the Gaze in an expanded field. Both the subject-entity and the object-entity cannot withstand the critique of sunyata and then break up. Everything in the world is under transformation. For this reason, the viewer who looks out at the object sees only one angle of the global field where the object resides. At the same time the object is taken away from the frame apparatus and placed on the expanded field of blankness. As a result, the viewer is a being that exists trough the existence of everything else in the universal field and not just as the subject-effect of the object that appears at the end of the viewing tunnel, which means that the centralization of the subject is totally abolished. These abolitions of self and center are not accompanied by any apparent sense of menace, which may indicate ways in

which Sartre and Lacan still operate from within a certain intellectual enclosure. Both Nishitani and Lacan have the same central theme of decentering but at the same time their approaches are quite different. Lacan’s account of vision as persecuted by the Gaze, itself unfolds within the Imaginary, an Imaginary constructed in a culturally and historically specific fashion. On the contrary, Nishitani’s keystone is the subject’s renunciation of a central subject position not the subject’s fear of dissolution. When talk about “sunyata”, theories of Buddhism comes to my mind. The two different thoughts of Ch’an between the Sixth Patriarch Hui Neng and Shen Xiu just represent the difference between Nishitani and Lacan. The Fifth Patriarch Hong Ren wanted to choose his successor. He said that “ Go and seek for Prajna (Wisdom) in your own mind and then write me a stanza about it. He who understands what the Essence of Mind

sunyata flung-ink

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Sixth Patriarch of Zen enlightenment

is, will be made the Sixth Patriarch.” Then “There is no Bodhi tree, Shen Xiu had his stanza: Nor stand of a mirror bright. Since all is void, “ Our body is the Bodhi tree, Where can dust alight?” And our mind a mirror bright, Carefully we wipe them hour by hour, Then the Fifth Patriarch chose Hui Neng And let no dust alight. “ as his successor. The viewpoint of Shen Xiu is based on the comparison between After Shen Xiu wrote this stanza, Hui himself and the Bodhi tree, between his Neng, who was totally illiterate, found a mind and a mirror bright. Firstly he gave boy to write for him: the Bodhi tree and mirror bright social and cultural meanings. When he look at

The “anamorphic flip” of the point of view.

these Signifiers, he could see himself like through a mirror because he considered himself having these same features too. But in Hui Neng’s stanza, he dismantled everything. Based on this, everything is changing and everything is just a temporary form in a flash. There will be nothing can enjoy independent self-existence. It is a more thorough viewpoint than Shen Xiu’s. Comparing these to Lacan and Nishitani, Lacan’s account of visuality is historically extremely important because

it marks a fundamental shift away from the ground on which vision has been previously thought; but Nishitani has a even deeper thought of decentering.

Fei Wu

THE GAZE

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Figure 1 Hans Holbein The Ambassadors, 1533. London, National Gallery of Art

In the article THE GAZE IN THE EXPANDED FIELD, Norman Bryson talks about a kind of visual culture

which aims to dismantle the center of subject, he calls it “the Gaze”. The core concept of this contemporary visuality is decentering subject. The author traces the concept from Sartre’s description of the Gaze of the other in Being and

Nothingness to Lacan’ reworking of that description in the first two sections of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. But his argument is actually that although the center of subject is progressively dismantled by Sartre and Lacan, their thinking about the Gaze still remains within a conceptual enclosure, where the vision is theorized from the standpoint of a subject placed at the centre of the world. Apart from Sartre and Lacan, the author explains the thought of Gaze passes from Nishida to Nishitani, which goes further than Sartre and Lacan in terms of dismantling the centre of subject. Sartre’s story of the watcher in the park could clearly explain his conception of the gaze and the other. When he entered a park and finds himself alone, nothing threaten the center of subject. But when someone else came, the viewer became spectacle to anthers’ sight, the subject became the object for other people. In this way the former centralized subject is disturbed and in some degree, dismantled. Although the linear relationship between subject and object is reversed, there is no radical overturning of the enclosure of thought treats the question of ontology in Sartre’s theory. Lacan, like Sartre, aims to dismantle the anthropocentric subject. He argues that between the subject and the world is inserted the entire sum of discourses which make up visuality. These multiple discourse act as a screen which casts a

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Figure 2 Sesshu. Landscape (detail). Tokyo, National Museum

shadow. The screen or network is greater than its individual agents. In this sense, the subject is no longer the center of the world, it adhere to a system of discourse. For the author, Lacan’s account of vision as persecuted by Gaze itself unfolds within the imaginary, which constructed in a culturally and historically specific fashion. (Figure 1 ) Nishitani has the same theme of decentering subject like Lacan, but his approach is different. The core idea of Nishitani is “emptiness”. He argues that the object exists as a part of mobile continuum. Every entity is

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a part of the whole universe, it can not exist independently. The object is no longer the dead end of a vision tunne, the essence of every entity is the co-relationship with the whole universe. In this sense, the center is dissolved. Nishitani uses “flunk link” and Ch’an painting to represent such Gaze. The landscape by Sesshu is a framed image, but as the link is cast, it files out of the tunnel of the frame, and opens the image on to the field of material transformation that constitutes the universal surround. In this way, decentering is achieved, the focus is spread out to the rest of the universe, everything outside the frame. (Figure 2)

lecture Geometry and Narrative of Nature Form at Harvard University. The visual culture behind Chinese painting is quite closed to Nishitani’s concept of sunyata. He referred Chinese painting to Chinese garden, which is a good example of representing the Gaze. The main idea of Chinese garden is to include the infinite universe into a finite area. Every view of the landscape and architecture in Chinese garden co-exists with others. Chinese garden could broaden visitors’ view from the small garden to the understanding of the whole universe. Wang Shu called it “do some big things in small things”. (Figure 3)

The 2012 Pritzker Prize owner Wang Shu talked about the philosophy behind Chinese traditional painting in his

When he showed the painting “Xishan Qingyuan Tu” (Figure 4) , he mentioned that before a Chinese painter starts to

Figure 3 Suzhou Master Of Net Garden

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Figure 4 Separated sections of Xishan Qingyuan Tu

draw a painting, he spends a lot of time visiting the site to experience it. But he never draw a painting in the site. The Chinese paintings never directly record what the painters have seen, framing their vision but represent a continuous experience. When you look at the painting Xishan Qingyuan Tu”, the view is extremely wide. There is no way a human could gain such a perspective like this. The painting is technically wrong in scientific term, but it’s actually the painter’s understanding of the universe. You can’t find a central point of the painting , your view is shifting.

As a result, you can feel the continuous movement and the inter-relationship between the entities in the painting. The gaze break through the boundary to a infinite universe. The center is dismantled.

Fei Wu

Wilbert Veltman

2. SEMIOLOGY; SIGNS AND SYSTEMS

Xuefi Li Egidijus Kasakaitis Yann Mu Hrvoje Smidihen Xiao Du

Xuefi Li

Beyond the most basic definition of SEMIOTICS as “the study of sign”, one of the broadest definitions is from Umberto Eco that “semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign”(Eco 1976,7). Semiotics involves the study not only of what we refer to as ‘signs’ in everyday speech, but of anything which ‘stand for’ something else. It could be substance based “sign”,

like logos, images, photographs and objects. While it could also be virtual things like words, sounds and gestures. From the views of two important semioticians, semiotics has a close relationship with linguistic and logic. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure thought ‘semiology’ was ‘a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life’, while to

the philosopher Charles Peirce the field of study which he called ‘semiotic’ was the ‘formal doctrine of signs’ which was closely related to logic. These two people are widely regarded as the co-founders of what is now more generally known as semiotics and they established two major theoretical traditions.

Ferdinand de Saussure - A ‘signifier’ (signifiant) - the form which the sign takes; - The ‘signified’ (signifie) - the concept it represents. Saussure’s term ‘semiology’ is sometimes used to refer to the Saussurean tradition, which is the theory from a linguist’s view constituted a starting point for the development of various structuralist methodologies for analyzing texts and social practices. What matters most to the Saussurean semiotician are the unerlying structures and rules of a semiotic system as a whole rather than specific performances or practices which are merely examples of its use. Saussure’s approach was to study the system ‘synchronically’ as if it were frozen in time. He defined a sign as being composed of a ‘signifier’ and a ‘signified’. A linguistic sign is between a concept (signified) and a sound pattern (signifier). For Saussure, both the signifier and

the signified were purely ‘psychological’; both were non-material form rather than substance. Though he disliked referring to it as ‘abstract’, the linguistic sign is wholly immaterial for Saussure. Based on basic Saussure’s model, the model used nowadays tends to be more materialistic than of Saussure himself. It is much easier to be understood and adopted that the signifier is interpreted as the material (or physical) form of the sign which described by Roman Jakobson as the external and perceptible part of the sign.

Charles Peirce

- The Representamen: the form which the sign takes (not necessarily material); - An Interpretant: not an interpreter but rather the sense made of the sign; - An Object: to which the sign refers. At around the same time as Saussure was formulating his model of the sign, of ‘semiology’ and of a structuralist methodology, across the Atlantic independent work was also in progress as the pragmatist philosopher and logician Charles Sanders Peirce formulated his own model of the sign, of ‘semiotic’ and of the taxonomies of signs. In contrast to Saussure’s model of the sign in the form of a ‘self-contained dyad’, Peirce offered a triadic model:‘A sign... [in the form of a representamen] is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object,

not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen’ (Peirce 1931-58, 2.228). In short, nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign. Peirce’s model of the sign includes an object or referent - which does not, of course, feature directly in Saussure’s model. The representamen is similar in meaning to Saussure’s signifier whilst the interpretant is similar in meaning to the signified (Silverman 1983, 15). However, the interpretant has a quality unlike that of the signified: it is itself a sign in the mind of the interpreter. So, unlike the synchronically structuralist dichotomy theory by Saussure, Peirce’s theory noted the effect of the interpreter when the sign works as a sign.

What comes to yo SIGN

our mind of these Ns?

Egidijus Kasakaitis

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SIGNS

NOISE

UDICIDELIBUS QUATENDERUM UT ES ET ESEQUI OMMOLUP TATIAM, ABOREPR ECEATE COMNIM ALIAM ESTIOREIUS PRENIETURIS AD QUI UT AUT ODIT ET PLACIA PERUM HILITAT URERUM ES DI CUPTA DI BERUM QUAM UTE PREPERUM QUE EOS DUNDENDIS RESENIM ILLAUT FACCATIS SEQUAS ANT.ATIUS IDEMPEL LESCITATIAE. LIQUODIST, COMMOLUPTI AUTECTATUR

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F R A GM E N T A T I O N Nonvo, c o n sulto inamplium in taterideat u m patrum pervidi tertem tabusa et que ia in v i r t u r. Catam

horte novesti telabuntem quis, Catam nostamquam o Cata, num tudactua omnin inum in dem des clestus in vas aussimis pos, dum, se, Patuus ve, culares vitum trunum es

habitam aperis se con senissu liciaedit. Artericaeque etridi pro perebatum tem quo virmius. I r t u i publi, C. Veris, que tus.

Pericatudem perum nostori s u m morus. Va l i e m ad iam n o s acesi spiorte ricessi c r u m ublica; n u m tuus p

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PERCEPTION THROUGH DISTANCE Udicidelibus quatenderum ut es et esequi ommolup tatiam, aborepr eceate comnim aliam estioreius prenieturis ad qui ut aut odit et placia perum hilitat urerum es di cupta di berum quam ute preperum que eos dundendis resenim illaut faccatis sequas ant.Atius idempel lescitatiae. Liquodist, commolupti autectatur suntium res ereperio berio. Tasped mintotatem fuga. Nem quodis eos rera nempore nissimenimi, sinciis culpa quidis alis etum audamus, temporestota quo bla cus eos

PERCEIVING

IDENTIFYING

LAYERING

FLATTENING

OBJECT

Yann Mu

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SIGN anything that 'stands for' something else.

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SIGNS

are

increasingly defining or even governing the environment we l i ve i n , n o l o n g e r having the needs to draw suppor t from architecture or any tools of building industry.

SIGNS

are

very often accompanied by colors and lights in our urban environment so that sometimes a collection of colored luminous spots becomes a sign of those signs. In a way, we can understand the meaning it conveys.

Semiotics studies how meanings are made and how reality is represented.

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Hrvoje Smidihen

We are living in the world

of the signs and symbols.

SEMIOTICS

Different signs and symbols have since always been a constituent element of human life used for different types of communications, indications and symbolisms. Signs are everywhere and in everything around us. Theories regarding signs were present in history of philosophy since ancient times. However, scientific discipline that deals with signs, semiotics, was established not earlier then late 19th century. The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure are considered co-founders of semiotics. Since they worked completely independently separated by the ocean, they established two different theoretical traditions: Saussure’s term was ‘semiology’, while Pierce named discipline ‘semiotics’. According to Saussure ‘semiology’ was discipline dealing with role of signs as a part of human life: ‘It is possible to conceive of a science which studies the role of signs as a part of social psychology… We shall call it semiology.’ Since Saussure was originally linguist, he believed semiology can found its answers in language: ‘Nothing is more appropriate then the study of language to bring out the problem of semiological problem’. Furthermore Saussure focused on distinction between language and speech. He saw language as a well-organized system, while speech was just realization, performance of language. In his studies, Saussure focused on language, as underlying system, rather then on speech. According to Saussure, sign was composed of signifier, a sound pattern, and signified, a mental concept while the whole process was called signification. It is important to stress that same signifier, for example word ‘computer’ can have different connotations for different people: it can be Mac or PC.

Charles Peirce considered ‘semiotics’ as formal doctrine of signs focusing more on the physical signs and not systems and language. According to Pierce anything could be a sign; not necessarily itself, but in some correlation. The relation between signs he believed was the key element. Peirce developed triadic system, which consisted of the sign, the object and interpretant. The object is sign’s subject matter while interpretant is the sign’s meaning or concept. Pierce also divided signs in three categories: symbol in which relation between sign and meaning has to be learned; icon in which sign is imitating meaning (onomatopoeia) and index in which meaning is direct result of sign (smoke and fire). Further development of semiotics through 20th century was more or less divided between Saussurean and Peircean models. However, Umberto Eco, Italian philosopher tried to merge both theories. Similar to Pierce, Eco believes that everything can be sign: ‘Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything, which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else. Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything that can be used in order to lie’. However, he found Pierce’s theory to formal. However Eco admired Saussure: ‘Saussure’s definition is rather important and has done much to increase awareness. The notion of sign as twofold entity has anticipated and promoted all correlational definitions of sign-function.’ However he was criticizing Saussure because he was excluding all other signs except conventional artificial signs. Umberto Eco focused on natural unintentional manifestations that can act as signs and transmit some meaning.

A B

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Xiao Du

3. WHAT IS VISION? PERCEPTION AND SPACE

Siwen Liu

What we see Where we see

WHAT IS VISION? PERCEPTION AND SPACE Siwen Liu 4226836

INTRODUCTION What is vision? The understanding on this question has a series of evolution throughout human history. From historical views on physiology, light entering the pupil and then via nerve bundles to stimulate the soul in the brain; this process resulting vision. For Dene Descartes, eye is the division of the external objects and the internal soul1. In modernization age, there were knowledge and value systems established base on vision. It was also a set of cultural guidelines from subject awareness to social control, forming a visual practices and production systems. It can be seen as scopic regime in Martin Jay’s theory2. When comes to the postmodern condition, the visual field is full of meanings not just shapes, but a comprehensive way to discuss everyday life. So what does this mean for the contexts of visual culture? For example what is the effect of viewing art in a public social context rather than in a museum? This essay will discuss how where we see affect what we see. And how space affects perception and what this means for the mediums of visual culture. NEW WAY OF SEEING In the second half of the 20th century, when

camera was invented, the ways of seeing dramatically changed. We could see things which were not there in front of us. The original painting hanging on the wall of art gallery, and it can only be in one place at one time. When camera reproduces it, it became available in anywhere, any size. It can be seen in a million different places at the same time. Once all the paintings belonged to their own place. Originally, paintings were seen as the inseparable part of the buildings which they were designed for. And everything around the painting consists for an integrated meaning. Now the reproduced product made it belongs to no place. They surrounded by different object, differed colours, different sounds. Everyone can see them in the context of their own life3. According to John Berger, the camera has destroyed paintings’ unique original meaning. But at the same time it multiplied art work’s possible meanings. By making the work of art transmittable, they can be used to make arguments or points which very different from their original meaning. The most obvious way of manipulating them is by using movement and sound. When the camera moves in to examine details of a painting from the whole, the comprehensive effect of the painting can be changed (Fig.1.1-1.3). As well paintings are modified

Fig.1.1 The Procession to Calvary, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1564. Fig.1.2, 1.3 Details of the painting. With a different camera movement, the painting can be shown as an example of landscape painting. Or details can present it in terms of the history of costume or social customs. It can also be presented as a story.

and changed by the sounds viewers hear when looking at them. A piece of explain or a background music may change the significance of the art work. Lastly, paintings can be changed by putting with others in the same screen. When paintings are reproduced they become a form of information which is being transmitted and so there they have to hold their own against the other information which is jostling around them. The meaning of an image can be changed according to what besides it or what comes after it4. Concern for the mediums of visual culture, this kind of change maybe is not a negative effect. In some ways reproduction makes the meaning of works of art broaden, because the reproduction can be used in an extensive way. Rather than just keep silence in the gallery, reproduction art works can communicate with users in different contexts. It is easier to connect our experience of art directly with other experiences. And they also make accessible, pictures were like words rather than holy relics. THE AGE OF MECHINAL REPRODUCTION In order to have a fully understand, we should look at the situation which we are living. As Walter Benjamin wrote in his book, changed technical standard brought new art forms. The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. Mechanical reproduction of works changed the art of public relations. The characterized of this progressive behavior is related to expert-like appreciation and close association, which has a great social significance5.

CONCLUSION In conclusion, I think the new medium of visual culture created a new relationship between people and art works. Within it we could begin to define our experiences more precisely in areas where words are inadequate. Not only personal experience, but also the essential historical experience of our relation to the past: that is to say the experience of seeking to give meaning to our lives, or trying to understand the history of which we can become the active agents. Notes 1 Optics, Rene Descartes, 1637,Discours de la mĂŠthode. 2 Scopic Regime of Modernity, Martin Jay, in Vision and Visuality, Hal Foster, Bay Press, 1988. 3, 4 Ways of seeing, John Berger, 1972 5 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin, 1936.

4. THE BODY AND ITS REPRESENTATIONS; IMAGE AND IDENTITY

Robertus de Bruin Alex Krosbacher Vijoleta Petrak Alina Tomosiunaite Dorine Verbaan

Robertus de Bruin

Alex Krosbacher

It is a mystification to condemn all violence as ‘bad’, violence is in fact “distributed between acts and their contexts, between activity and inactivity.”

VIOLENCE SLAVOJ ZIZEK

Vijoleta Petrak

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Dorine Verbaan

Violence: Visuals, Languages and Capitalism Violence. Six Sideways Reflections by Slavoj Žižek.

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. In his book “Violence. Six Sideways Reflections”, he talks about the different forms of violence. Talking about violence Žižek says: “My underlying premise is there is something inherently mystifying in a direct confrontation with it: the overpowering horror of violent acts and empathy with the victims inexorably function as a lure, which prevents us from thinking. A dispassionate conceptual development of the typology

of violence must by definition ignore its traumatic impact” (Violence, Žižek ). The basis of Žižek’s analysis in Violence is not trying to give a definition of violence, but distinguishing a cluster of different forms in which violence appears. He distinguishes subjective violence and objective violence. Žižek defines subjective violence as the most commonsensical forms of violence produced by identified subjects, that is to say visi-

ble violence such as insults, killings (Violence, Žižek). It is the visible violence we see on the streets and television. Objective violence include symbolic and systemic violence. Symbolic violence is embodied in language and its forms (Violence, Žižek). Bourdieu also talks about species of capital and symbolic violence. He explains: “When a holder of symbolic capital uses the power this confers against an agent who holds less, and seeks thereby to alter their actions, they exercise symbolic violence.” (Bourdieu). The disapproving looks and gestures of parents when a daughter brings home her boyfriend, that convey the message that she will not be permitted to continue this relationship, is an example of symbolic violence. Objective violence is the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism. It is not only about the direct physical violence, but also about the mental part as in domination, exploitation and threat of violence. The violence within the social structures in societies in which capitalism represents one of the most important forms of systemic violence within contemporary societies (Violence, Žižek). Žižek quotes that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. He explains that until now there was always one big argument for capitalism. Despite the fact that it sometimes causes dictatorship, in the end capitalism always demands for a democracy. But a new phenomenon is rising in Asia, and it is slowly spreading over the world. Pe-

ter Sloterdijk asked himself a question: “From which person of our time will they build a monument in 100 years from now?”. The answer according to Slavoj Žižek is Lee Kuan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore. He is one of the first who successfully adapted the principle that we call authoritarian capitalism (capitalism with Asian values). What if Asia develops a capitalism that is more efficient, dynamic and productive than the western liberal capitalism. It creates a kind of capitalism that no longer naturally demands for a democracy, but works even better within an authoritarian political structure. ...

... ... But, in a final twist, Zizek counsels us to do nothing in the face of the objective, systemic violence of the world. We should “just sit and wait” and have the courage to do nothing: “Sometimes, doing nothing is the most violent thing to do”.

5. FETISHISM, FANTASY AND DESIRE; IMAGES SELL!

Hwayoung Lee Elisabeth Travlou

Hwayoung Lee

Elisabeth Travlou

6. THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE; THE MOVE FROM PAINTING TO PRINT

Arnoud Stavenuiter Yinxin Bao Roland Reema Mi-Jung Gim Wilbert Veltman

Arnoud Stavenuiter

In T

what

the e

The i

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E ac h development e n c o u r ag e s new ways of perceiving and ordering our world; of defining our role in it. When we learned to make rationality visible through writing, it gave us cities, architecture and forgetfulness. When we learned to print our writing, it provided us with the possibility to have private opinions – to be an individual. In contemporary times, media like TV and internet have equally powerful effects on us. They created the mass, and caused single models of exploration to fall apart into a fragmentary landscape. “The technique of the suspended judgment is the discovery of the twentieth century”, so says McLuhan.

The medium is the Massage Marshall McLuhan argues that media, in

tever form, are extensions of our senses. The book is an extension of

eye, for instance. These extensions then alter the way we think and act.

invention of the alphabet encouraged the habit of perceiving all environment in visual and spatial terms. The fact that meaningless symbols had to be strung together and

orchestrated

into

sentences,

one

man

could transmit an image of reality to another, made continuity and connectivity to be the organizing the

principles

building

blocks

life. of

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rationality.

By human effort, the extensions of our 5 89

senses are in constant development.

6 90

1 drifting 2 twisting 3 whiteout 4 blackbird braille 5 Wenceslasaire 6 avalanche Come on man, you’ve got 44 to go, Come on man, you’ve got 44 to go. Come on man, you’ve got 44 to go, Come on man, you’ve got 44 to go. 7 swans-a-melting 8 deamondi-pavlova 9 eiderfalls 10 Santanyeroofdikov 11 stellatundra 12 hunter’s dream 13 faloop’njoompoola 14 zebranivem 15 spangladasha 16 albadune 17 hironocrashka 18 hooded-wept Come on Joe, you’ve got 32 to go, Come on Joe, you’ve got 32 to go. Come on now, you’ve got 32 to go, Come on now, you’ve got 32 to go. Don’t you know it’s not just the Eskimo. Let me hear your 50 words for snow. 19 phlegm de neige 20 mountainsob 21 anklebreaker 22 erase-o-dust 23 shnamistoflopp’n 24 terrablizza

25 whirlissimo 26 vanilla swarm 27 icyskidski 28 robber’s veil Come on Joe, just 22 to go, Come on Joe, just 22 to go. Come on Joe, just you and the Eskimos, Come on now, just 22 to go. Come on now, just 22 to go, Let me hear your 50 words for snow. 29 creaky-creaky 30 psychohail 31 whippoccino 32 shimmerglisten 33 Zhivagodamarbletash 34 sorbetdeluge 35 sleetspoot’n 36 melt-o-blast 37 slipperella 38 boomerangablanca 39 groundberry down 40 meringuerpeaks 41 crème-bouffant 42 peDtaH ‘ej chIS qo’ 43 deep’nhidden 44 bad for trains 45 shovelcrusted 46 anechoic 47 blown from polar fur 48 vanishing world 49 mistraldespair 50 snow

Kate Bush - 50 Words For Snow

The effect language seems to have on our ways of thinking and our behavior is baffling, but how deep does the rabbit hole go? This question puzzled many thinkers. The branch of science and philosophy that investigates it has an imposing history, including giants like Wilhelm von Humboldt the man that said language was the spirit of the nation and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Matters took foothold in the 1950s with the formulation of what came to be known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, a theory composed with ideas of linguist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf. The latter however, preferred to call their work the principle of linguistic relativity. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is the idea that differences in the way languages encode cultural and cognitive categories affect the way people think, so that people who speak different languages also tend to think, behave and experience the world differently. An example: in English, the colors blue and dark blue have a semantic relationship; one is a darker version of the other. In Russian such a relationship does not exist. Therefore someone who speaks Russian will experience the relationship between blue and dark blue the same way a speaker of English would experience the relationship between blue and, say, pink. In short, the hypothesis says that language is not simply an overlay through which an objective reality is depicted, but that language actually plays an active role in the construction of that reality. In the 1960s however, the idea that all languages were universal in nature came into focus and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis fell out of favor. 20 Years later though, experiments showed that effects of linguistic relativity could be detected in the social use of language, color perception and spatial cognition. Therewith the quest for probing the rabbit hole's depth is once more in full swing, as contemporary scientists are conducting research to explore the way language influences thought and behavior and to what extent.

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What does MARSHALL MCLUHAN mean when he says...

The M

By Yinxin Bao

R e a r- v i e w m i r r o r

All media are extensions of some human faculty

The medium is the message “Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. “ (McLuhan, 1967, p. 8) Basically the idea is t h a t t h e m e d i u m i s m o r e i m p o rtant than the content, in term of i t s e f f e c t o n t h e w h o l e s o c i e t y. It concerns the general medium including both the electric medium such as radio and television and the traditional medium like painting and printing. However

people may focus more on the content and ignore the effect of m e d i u m , a s h e w r o t e i n U n d e rstanding Media: “it is only too typical that the ‘content’ of any m e d i u m b l i n d s u s t o t h e c h a racter of the medium. “(1994, p. 9) McLuhan used the example of electric light to support this idea, as he explains that electric light is pure information without content, but it creates a completely new environment in the w h o l e h u m a n s o c i e t y. T h e s a m e situation goes for other medi-

Medium is the Message

Te l e v i s i o n 93

M.Mcluhan

um. In his lecture(1977) he said: “Doesn’t matter what you said on the telephone, the telephone as a service is a huge environment. And that is the medium. And the e n v i r o n m e n t a f f e c t s e v e r y b o d y. What you say in the telephone a f f e c t s v e r y f e w. . . . W h a t y o u print is nothing compare to the effect of the printed word. The printed word sets up a paradigm, a structure of awareness which a f f e c t s e v e r y b o d y, i n v e r y v e r y drastic ways, and it doesn’t very matter what you print as long as

Global Village

you go on with that form of act i v i t y. ” All media are extensions of some human faculty This statement try to explain to the reader what the “message” is and the effect that it can have on human s o c i e t y. McLuhan wrote like this: “For the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” He used the railway as an example:” The

I I I I

love love Iove Iove

you! you! you! you!

One example of how the medium c a n c h a n g e p e o p l e â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s b e h a v i o r and perspective. As the sound film industry replace the silent film, it changed radically both the way actors act and also the way audiance perveive the movie. In this hilarious scene in Singâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;in in the Rain, the actors are making people laugh because they are performancing using the old form but in a new medium.

railway did not introduce movement or transportation or wheel o r r o a d i n t o h u m a n s o c i e t y, b u t it accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure.” (1994, p. 8) Because media are extensions of h u m a n b o d y, t h e y h a v e t h e a b i l ity to change our perspectives about the world in return. “The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and actthe way we perceive the world. “(1967, p. 41) This explains the fact that the technology today changes enormously our way of living.

used to explain the fact that we tend to refer to the past when we are faced with a new future. “Our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old” (1967, p. 85) The new media extend our ability but we cannot be fully aware of it from the very beginning.

Global Village The media is everywhere and they can connect us to everywhere else.”All media work us o v e r c o m p l e t e l y. T h e y a r e s o pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.” (1967, p. 26) As a result of this whole connection with electric media we become profoundly involved with everybody else in the whole planet, which makes us living in a global village.

Te l e v i s i o n McLuhan sees television as crea t i n g a n e w a w a r e n e s s . “ Te l e v i sion complete the cycle of the human sensorium.” (1967, p. 125) As a result, television is threate n i n g p e o p l e ’s t r a d i t i o n a l i d e n t i t y. “ I n t h e t e l e v i s i o n , i m a g e s a r e p r o j e c t e d a t y o u . Yo u a r e t h e screen. The image wrap around y o u . Yo u a r e t h e v a n i s h i n g p o i n t . This creates a sort of inwardness, as sort of reverse perspective with has much in common with Oriental art.” (1967, p. 125) He wrote about some positive effects that television can have o n o u r s o c i e t y, f o r e x a m p l e h e believe that the television generation is more serious, earnest and dedicated than children of any other period.( 1967, p. 126) H e a l s o c i t e d S u k a r n o ’s w o r d s that Hollywood can help people to build up the sense of deprivation in colonized nation.( 1967, p. 131)

R e a r- v i e w m i r r o r “ We l o o k a t t h e p r e s e n t t h r o u g h a r e a r - v i e w m i r r o r. W e m a r c h backwards into the future. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects to the flavor of the most recent past.” ( 1 9 6 7 , p . 7 4 - 7 5 ) T h i s i s a i n t e resting metaphor that McLuhan

McLuhan said in his lecture in 1977 that he is avoiding to make value judgment about what the new media may bring. However his follower Neil Postman tried to warn people in 1985 that we may be “amusing ourselves to death” as we are increasingly involved into a new media world controlled by the TV entertainment

i n d u s t r y. I t i s t h e s i t u a t i o n i n A l d o u s H u x l e y ’s B r a v e N e w W o r l d : “ i n H u x l e y ’s v i s i o n , n o B i g B r o t h er is required to deprive people o f t h e i r a u t o n o m y, m a t u r i t y a n d h i s t o r y. A s h e s a w i t , p e o p l e w i l l come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. “(Neil Postman, 2005, p. xix) P o s t m a n ’s a n a l y s i s o f t h e i n f l u ence of TV industry is supporti n g M c L u h a n ’s i d e a t h a t “ t h e media is the message”. McLuhan is more positive about what TV

will bring. He believe that the television generation is more serious and dedicated. While in P o s t m a n ’s d i s c o v e r y t h e T V a s an environment is basically entertainment. He discuss mostly the situation in the United States where he found the entertainment industry was making the public culture meaningless. “television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for representation of all experience.” (Neil Postman, 2005, p. 87)

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Entertainment Industry

N.Postman

References Marshall McLuhan. (1967). The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Penguin Books Marshall McLuhan. (1994). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. The MIT Press Neil Postman. (2005). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Penguin Books Marshall McLuhan. (1977). Monday Conference: Marshall McLuhan 'The medium is the message ' [ A u d i o f i l e ] . A B C R a d i o N a t h i n a l . R e t r i e v e d f r o m h t t p : / / w w w. y o u t u b e . c o m / w a t c h ? v = I m a H 5 1 F 4HBw

Roland Reema

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Notes, not part of the collage: I am working on McLuhan’s “Medium is the Message” The draft is a sequence of spreads. “The Magazine magazine” Working on essay, Roland

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7. SIMULATIONS AND SIMULACRA; FROM REALITY TV TO COMPUTER GAMES

Vaidas Vaiciulis Shu Xia Marija Mateljan Sotiria Diamanti

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Vaidas Vaiciulis

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Shu Xia SIMULATIONS AND SIMULACRA FROM REALITY TV TO COMPUTER GAMES

Beth Coleman: An Interview with the Virtual Cannibal There is a tendency for people to shout or amplify their messages in a hyperbolic way when engaging new media platforms, which provide people the freedom to break the taboo while the reality cannot.

112

Virtual Cannibal seizes the paticipantsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; imagination via the platform of Second Life., where they join in a gynophagia sexplay group that simulates sexual engagement. Two basic sentiments about virtual world engagement: a sense of the unreality of life, disengagement, a feeling of ennui, and feeling outside of himself; the actuality of the simulated experience, describing the visceral response of his part and other participants.

SIMULATIONS AND SIMULACRA FROM REALITY TV TO COMPUTER GAMES Agency of networked subjects is capable of affecting oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life. People are more obsesed to be another person, who identified themselves in the virtual world. The virtual does not remain safely in its own domain because the exchange between simulated and lived is not unilateral. The channels of communication open in both directions. As a society, we are beginning to recognize the importance of pervasive media not only in how it connects us to other people, but also in how it reflects patterns of perception and behavior of self and world. Even among casual users of virtual platforms, we do not find a safety net of a world entirely apart. The walled gardens of past role-playing games, if it ever truly existed, are now porous.

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Simulation and Simulacra

Jean Baudrillardís theory and correlations with Plato

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SOURCE: http://houaiche.tumblr.com/

ìÖThe simulacrum is never that which conceals the truthóit is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.î -Baudrillard, Jean (1988). Selected writings. Cambridge, UK: Polity-

In his book “Simulacra and SimulationBaudrillard claims that the world we live in is based on a system of symbols and signs which have replaced reality and meaning. Moreover, human experience is a simulation of reality and reality itself. The emergence of new media (TV, cinema,

print) brought a new culture, dominated by a new, unique semiological model; by simulations, that are objects and discourses with “no firm origin, no referent, no ground or foundation” (Poster, p. 1). In this world of simulation and simulacra, the distinction between the object and its representation is no

more possible. These simulacra have no referent in any reality except their own. They do not try to represent reality or simply to hide it. What simulacra do is actually to conceal that there is nothing as a reality, in the way we experience our lives. They are actually the significations of culture and media that compose what we understand as reality. Thus, simulations, taking over our relationship with the real life, create a hyperreality - the new linguistic condition of society ( Poster, p. 2). Hyperreality is the result of the lack of any distinction between reality and representation, between the real and the imaginary; it leaves room only for the a repetition of models of signs and of a stimulation of difference between what is considered real and what the representation of it, not for the real world.

In hyperreal world, signs of the real are substituted for the real itself (Poster, p. 166). According to Baudrillard, society is so much imbued with simulacra and our everyday life is so much imbued with the system of society that all meaning has become meaningless, since it is continuously changeable. This is what Baudrillard calls the precession of simulacra. Baudrillard describes four different orders and phases of signs and images (simulacra) that have to do with their relationship to the representation of the real. The first is the reflection of the basic reality, which is a representation of the order of sacrament. The second is the masking and perversion of a basic reality, described form Baudrillard as

According to Baudrillard, society is so much imbued with simulacra and our everyday life is so much imbued with the system of society that all meaning has become meaningless, since it is continuously changeable. the evil appearance; it is a representation of the order of malefic. The third phase is the masking of the absence of a basic reality. Here the sign or image plays at being an appearance and it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth phase, there is no longer an appearance and the sign or image is in the order of pure simulation. (Poster p. 170) Furthermore, describing how the relationship between simulation and reality has been changed through time, Baudrillard identifies three different historical periods in which simulacra contained different characteristics. During the pre-modern period , the representation was a clear reflection of the real object. Then, there was a distinction between the representation and the real, rendering the real irreproducible. The modern period of the industrial revolution is characterised

by the collapse of the distinction between representation and reality, since mass production made the proliferation of copies of the real possible (Baudrillard, p. 100-101). The uniqueness of the real object turned into an imitating ability of a commodity, which replaced the authenticity and power of the original (Baudrillard, p. 100-101). Finally, postmodernity of late capitalism, is the period when the destruction of meaning occurs (Baudrillard, p. 154). There is no longer originality; what exists is only the simulacrum. Baudrillardâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; s concept of simulacra is strongly related to Platoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s objection to representations which replace the real.

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SOURCE: http://www.anothermag.com/loves/view/19811/Simulacra_and_Simulation_by_Jean_Baudrillard

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SOURCE: http://www.rkaventures.com/coaching/the-allegory-of-the-cave

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8. MEANING AND EXPERIENCE IN THE AGE OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Narinna Gyulkhasyan Guang Ruey Tan Susanne Leon Shirley Omanette Varun Kaushnik

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Guang Ruey Tan Susan Sontag’s “In Plato’s Cave” from the book: On Photography Guang Ruey TAN Written in a literary way, Susan Sontag’s On Photography marks the nascent of polemical discussion of the role of photography and is now one of the most academically cited works on the subject of photography.1 John Berger wrote that “Susan Sontag has written a book of great importance and originality … all future discussion or analysis of the role of photography in the affluent mass-media societies is now bound to begin with her book.”2 Susan Sontag’s “In Plato’s Cave” from the book: On Photography attempts to dissect photography into a collection of anecdotes: 134

New visual codes: Photographs, argues Sontag, introduce new visual codes, an ethics of seeing that alter our notions of observation: the sense that the whole world can be contained in our head and collected as an anthology of images. These collections

of photographed images are miniatures representation of fragmented pieces of reality that anyone can acquire as a knowledge-like relation to the world. Tools of inaccuracy: Photographs justify evidence and first became an instrument of surveillance for its accurate relation to visible reality. However, Sontag questions this sense of accuracy, as photography is always an interpretation of the world according to the taste, conscience and standards imposed by the photographers on their subjects, like art paintings or drawings. The industrialization of photography further reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art to react against social uses. Substance of experience: Nevertheless, for most people, photography is not practised as an art but as a social rite, a way of certifying memories and experiences of family life or tourism. This has developed into dependence on photography as the principal devices for experiencing something, transforming the act of picture-taking itself into an event: something worth seeing – and therefore worth photographing.

Predatory weapon: Photography is an act of non-physical intervention but a form of participation that Sontag sees as an intrusion that can be conducted with detachment. Photography is a predatory weapon that violates the people being photographed, turning people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Photography is also a form of nostalgia, creating incitements to reverie of the distant people or vanished past. Conscience trigger: Photographs can reinforce a moral position but cannot create one as moral feelings are embedded in history. The quality of moral feelings depends on the degree of familiarity with the images that contribute to the photographic evidence of characterized event. Photographs do not necessarily strengthen the conscience but also deaden compassion after repeated exposure to images, therefore, Sontag argues, the ethical content of photograph is fragile. Information or fiction: Photographs are valued because they give information by making an inventory of knowledge but the value of information is of the same order as fiction when the borders seem arbitrary and photo-

graphs are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation and fantasy. Photographs render reality but hide more than it disclose. The limitation of photographs is exposed by the semblance of knowledge and wisdom. Addiction: Industrialization of photography turns everyone into image-junkies, an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Humanity is still in Platoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cave as photography changes are conditions of imprisonment. _________________________________ Notes

According to Google scholar, On Photography has been cited by 3252. http://scholar.google.nl/scholar?cites=3449524801138613747&as_ sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en# [Accessed on 21 Nov 2013] 1

John Berger is an English art critic. The quote is taken from the website of Susan Sontag foundation: http://www.susansontag.com/Susan2

Sontag/books/onPhotography.shtml [Accessed on 21 Nov 2013]

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This nearly iconic portrait (in the form of a lithograph) of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln is a composite of Lincoln’s head and the Southern politician John Calhoun’s body.

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In this doctored photo of Queen Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon — mother of Queen Elizabeth II — and Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King in Banff, Alberta, King George VI was removed from the original photograph. This photo was used on an election poster for the Prime Minister. It is hypothesized that the Prime Minister had the photo altered because a photo of just him and the Queen painted him in a more powerful light.

POWER

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After 58 tourists were killed in a terrorist attack at the temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor Egypt, the Swiss tabloid Blick digitally altered a puddle of water to appear as blood flowing from the temple.

CONSCIENCE TRIGGER

Hoping to illustrate its diverse enrollment, the University of Wisconsin at Madison doctored a photograph on a brochure cover by digitally inserting a black student in a crowd of white football fans. The original photograph of white fans was taken in 1993. The additional black student, senior Diallo Shabazz, was taken in 1994. University officials said that they spent the summer looking for pictures that would show the school’s diversity — but had no luck. 139

RACE AND GENDER F

In a case of reverse Photoshop body enhancement, consumers objected to an anti-childhood-obesity campaign in which a photo of a child was modified to make her appear heavier. California based agency First 5 ran an image of a chubby girl drinking from a bag labeled “Sugar,” above a caption that warned that sugary drinks can cause obesity. A blogger discovered the original photo of the non-overweight girl, drinking milk, on the First 5 website. Some consumers expressed that the ad’s shame-based approach to discouraging overeating could be more damaging than helpful to children.

MARKETING F

POLITICS

In its coverage of the dispute between China and Japan over the Diaoyu Islands, China’s Xiamen Daily ran a front-page photo showing a group of Hong-Kong-based protesters standing on the island waving Chinese flags. Soon, an observant blogger noted that one of the flags had been modified. In the original photo, one of the protesters was holding a Taiwanese flag rather than the flag of the People’s Republic of China. The paper had removed the Taiwanese markings from the flag. Other Chinese papers also had obscured the Taiwanese flag when running the photo, but they did so by blocking the central part of the photo with a headline. Source: http://www.fourandsix.com

Susanne Leon

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Ascent to Sunlight

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9. NETWORK THEORY; SOCIETY AND MEDIA

Wenjia Wang Ansis Sinke Maosen Geng

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The influences of the stars as asserted by astrologers are nothing but unconscious, introspective perceptions of the activity of the collective unconsciousâ&#x20AC;Ś All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. - Carl Gustav Jung

The illustration left is from a mediev al Spanish language astrology tex tbook attributed to Alfonso X the Wise. The image is meant to depict the effect v arious other stars or constellations hav e in concert with Gemini. Uploaded to Wikimedia by Smerdis of TlĂś.

Collective Unconscious and Social Network Wenjia Wang

Jung’s collective unconscious 1 Jung’s collective unconscious is a development and recreation of Freud’s individual unconscious.2 The latter is limited to denoting the state of repressed or forgotten contents. It derives from personal experience and is a personal acquisition. But “collective” unconscious is inborn, not individual but universal. From Jung’s elaboration, collective unconscious refers to those universal common instincts and experience ever occurred during the evolution that precipitate at the bottom of a soul. It exists as the constitution of archetypes and manifest as archetypal images. As a tendentious and restricting law of human psychology, it has a significant impact on human behavior, comprehension and creation. Archetype An archetype is the primary constitution of the collective unconscious, the staging of primitive human experience and the common form of every psychological reaction. Jung believes that every significant idea in history, whether religious or scientific, ethical or philosophical, are bound to be able to trace back to one or several archetypes.

structuring expectations of the archetypes, and on the other hand it reveals an infinite variety of expression, a range of different images across individuals and cultural groups. Archetypal images - anima, animus, wise old man, the inner child, shadows and persona – takes different forms in different individuals and life stage. Footnotes: 1. Jung, C. G. 1983. The essential Jung. Ed. Anthony Storr. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1934/1954/1968. Archetypes of the collective unconscious. The archetypes and the collective unconscious. CW 9i. 2. In his later works, Freud called the instinctual psyche the “id”, and his “super-ege” denotes the collective consciousness, of which the individual is partly conscious and partly unconscious (because it is repressed). 149 3 The Image: Albrecht Dürer, The Holy Family with St John, The Magdalen and Nicodemus- c.1512. US Public Domain.

Archetypal images The archetype itself is neither conscious nor recognizable in our consciousness. They are empty of specific content or form until they encounter the individual and cultural environment of a human life. This encounter results in a dialectical process for on the one hand a human psyche is determined according to the

Among the latter there are human figures that can be arranged under a series of archetypes, the chief of them being, according to my suggestion, the shadow, wise old man, child (including the child hero), the mother (“Primordial Mother” and “Earth Mother”) as a supraordinate personality (“daemonic” because supraordinate), and her counterpart the maiden, lastly the anima man and the animus woman…. The above types are far from exhausting all the statistical regularities in this respect.” - Carl Gustav Jung

Collective Unconscious and Social Network Wenjia Wang

Bruno Latour’s Network Jung’s theory shows that the collective “affect” has a significance in the psychic field which is as central to what it is to be human as rationality was once thought to be. It bridges not only the universal and individual, but also what modernity distinguished as either nature or culture. But for contemporary socialists, Jung is still trapped in Dualism. For Bruno Latour , our big mistake as moderns is the exclusive focus on each pole of our modernizing to the exclusion of the other. Although Jung is success in bridging and mediating between these two poles, the entire dynamic is built 150 upon that bedrock of modernist rationality – the reliance upon oppositional thinking, a kind of theorizing that also underpins both Freud and Jung. In his book ‘We Have Never Been Modern’, Latour sets forth: Modernity… is multi-perspective. The contradiction between Newtonian mechanics and sub-atomic physics does not stop us from building computers that rely on the mutual cohabitation of both these worlds of matter. Modernity contains Enlightenment, the modern, the late modern, the postmodern, and the Ancient in ‘irrational’ practices as Jung was fond of reminding us. Modernity oscillates between its splitting or ‘purification’ and its re-linking or ‘networking’ tendencies (Latour, 1993). Whereas Jung initially conceived the collective unconscious as being an inborn, primordial matrix, studies of social networks show that collectivity shared between humans can be understood according to the ideas behind chaos theory (Lorenz 1995) .In chaos theory, the behavior of a complex system is largely dependent on initial conditions. Furthermore, the behavior of the system is an emergent property that is not directly obvious from the behavior of the individual components. As a result, these systems take on an almost lifelike quality. Footnotes: 3. Bruno Latour (born 22 June 1947) is a French sociologist of science and anthropologist. His studies of scientific practice were at one time associated with social constructionist approaches to the philosophy of science, but later he has diverged significantly from such approaches. He is best known for withdrawing from the subjective/objective division and re-developing the approach to work in practice. Along with

Michel Callon and John Law, Latour is one of the primary developers of actor–network theory (ANT). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Latour 4. Bruno Latour. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 10, 11, 12. What Does It Mean To Be A Modern? ix 5. Lorenz, Edward. 1995. The essence of chaos, Seattle: University of Washington Press.

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The Whole is Always Smaller Than Its Parts: A Digital Test of Gabriel Tardeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Monads. By Bruno Latour, Pablo Jensen, Tommaso Venturini, SĂŠbastian Grauwin and Dominique Boullier. Sciences Po, Paris.

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Before the philosopher has had the time to jot down all the treasures of bad faith deployed by the waiter (“as if it were not has free choice to get up at five a.m. every morning or to stay in bed, even if it means being sacked” (p.96)!), the cup of coffe has been transmuted into a botton-line. - Bruno Latour, PARIS : VILLE INVISIBLE The photoes are from PARIS: INVISIBLE CITY. Bruno Latour & Emilie Hermant. http://www.bruno-latour.fr/virtual/EN/index.html

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The myth of social network lies in billions of invisible particulars. It is a sum up of everything, on every scale, from every perspectiveand cannot be captured by any panoramic view.

The photoes are from PARIS: INVISIBLE CITY. Bruno Latour & Emilie Hermant. http://www.bruno-latour.fr/virtual/EN/index.html

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THE NETHERLANDS

WORLD OF FACEBOOK - MOST FRIENDSHIP CONNECTIONS OF INDIVIDUAL COUNTRIES

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YULIYA BARANOVSKAYA

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FACEBOOK FRIENDS VISUAL MAPS - GROUP FRIENDS IN CLUSTERS BASED ON MUTUAL FRIENDS

mouseover for friend details

based on data from 299 of 305 friends

Maosen Geng

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NETWORK & COLLECTIVE UNCONCIOUSNESS

As a network, Mobile Brain Bank has a unique character, it is a network held together by commercial opportunities for developers. It is not a social network, nor is it an ideology. From this, I concluded that the study would be incomplete unless I recognize the business aspect, and soon found a perfect anti-thesis: the theory of Network Brand by Teemu Moilanen. These two theories (Castells and Moilanen) provided the theoretical framework, and Mobile Brain Bank the case. I concluded the paper with eight points: This thesis introduced several novel ideas and cross-‐overs to the topic of networks, power, brands, and software developer community. First, two new concepts, a supergatekeeper, and a superhub. Second, the conclusion that an actor imposing rules to the network (either gatekeeper or supergatekeeper) is exercising Networking Power. This power position grows stronger as the network grows. Third, we created a new synthesis where the size of the network, and the position of the one imposing the rules are in interrelation with the network’s brand. Furthermore, fourth, when an actor has established this position – one of a gatekeeper or supergatekeeper controlling the growth and brand of the network – the actor can choose to operate as a programmer, or a switcher. Fifth, the concept of Network Power introduces the importance of standards as ‘protocols of communication’. Pro-

tocols of communication are branding elements. Sixth, a software developer network is theoretically an ideal candidate for Network Brand, and has been tested in practice by the Mobile Brain Bank. Seventh, a small number of active hubs can define the brand of a network. Eight, it would be safe to conclude that a networked way of organizing business services has a greater stimulus on economies and societies than what is their direct, current, economical or fiscal impact. The paper received a good grade, but my professor pointed out that I should have included an insight to Mark Granovetter’s study ”the strength of weak ties”, a pioneering paper on nature of social networks. This could be if I take on further studies on the topic. As concluded in the paper: Changes in democratic societies take place only when crowds shift. An interesting further study would examine the topologies and sizes of various economic networks, and how they impact societies. Finland could prove an ideal testbed for such research, with its small size, clearly identified political actors, employer and employee organizations, and the disruptions from joining the European Union, the success of Nokia, and now emergence of a new entrepreneurial class, the “startup culture”.

source: http://mobilebrainbank. org/2013/01/networks-and-power/

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Networks won’t save us, nor will assemblages. Sometimes we contrast networks and hierarchies in value-laden terms. “Networks good, hierarchies bad!” But like any ontological truth, networks are just what there is. Sadly networks have their hierarchies. There are only networks, but they too have their inequalities, their forms of oppression. It just turns out that hierarchy, of the Platonic or Aristotlean sort with respect to essences, or with respect to the sovereign sort with respect to medieval governance (God-King-Father) turns out to be false. That doesn’t mean that power somehow disappears. In a network, power is called a “hub”. A hub is a point through which a variety of other points in a network must pass to act. Think of airports. You live in a rural region. If you live in a rural region you must travel to this city and then fly to this city in order to get a flight to another city in, say, Europe like London or Paris. That’s a hub. A point of passage. There are hubs all over the places. Sometimes they’re governmental institutions. Sometimes they’re particular resources like oil. Sometimes they’re bosses. At other times they’re airports like LAX or DFW. Sometimes they’re particular figures. Sometimes they’re blogs. Sometimes they’re theoretical movements. So many hubs, so many forms of power. They exercise what I call “gravity”. I think “gravity” is preferable to the term “power” because it intuitively captures how power functions, while deterritorializing it from its humanist reference to social institution. Sure, corporations, governments, signifiers, etc., are all forms of power, can all function as hubs, but so too is the sun a hub.

Hubs produce what I call a “regime of attraction” within a network or assemblage. That is to say, they organize the relations between other nodes in the network. The other nodes are attracted to the hub and are obligated to pass through the node. Their possibilities or “local manifestations” come to be structured by the nodes. If you’re to build anything, for example, you have to pass through the node of fossil fuels. That’s the network we live in. That’s the hierarchy our social world is structured by. If culture has become “universal” today, it’s become universal in the Marxist sense, as a concrete universal. A concrete universal is a network in which all nodes in a network or assemblage are structured by a particular hub. Culture is universal today not because the signifier structures everything, but because the material world that industry produces affects everything from the molecular structures of inorganic beings like rocks on the surface of the planet, to all bio-life and social existence. Everything on the planet locally manifests itself in terms of the way in which we’ve transformed the biosphere through our modes of production and the flows of energy we use to run these things (fossil fuels). That’s the sense in which culture is universal, not the signifier. This is what it means to say we live in the “anthropocene”. No Lacan, the world is not “the flower of rhetoric” (the signifier), it’s the flower of oil and coal and nuclear energy and contemporary farming practices. The world is a product of the flows of energy that pass through it, not the signifiers that diacritically structure it. There are, of course, different types of

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networks. We see three of them in the diagram to the right above. There are centralized, decentralized, and distributed networks. A centralized network is what we now critique as “transcendent”. It was always a network, never a genuine transcendence (as in the case of Plato or theism), and never fully successful. These networks were the medieval “great chains of being”, the Oedipus, patriarchy, and more recently systems of party politics or the Stalinist state-form. They were machines that required all other nodes in an assemble to pass through one point: God, the king, the father, the dictator, the president, or the party. They were always a network. At the other end of the spectrum we see anarchy or what communism should be. Communism and anarchy are synonyms. Sadly neither has ever been realized except at small scales. This is the dream of all genuine politics: a network without hubs. If you’re advocating a party politics then it’s clear you have no understanding of communism. You’re in a secular and contemporary version of the 12th century. And then there’s what we have today: decentralized networks, where governments, certain privileged signifiers, certain substances like fossil fuels, certain actants like corporations, other actants like parties, etc., function as hubs organizing the gravity that determines the movement and relations of all the other nodes or actants. We have a variety of actants fighting to be hubs, rather than dreaming of fully distributed networks… Except the anarchist/communists, and who listens to them? The aim of being a hub is too enticing.

totalitarian/authoritarian fantasy, a truly distributed network is an anarcho-communist fantasy. Oh well, these would be normative ideals. Normative ideals exercise their gravity as well, so we shouldn’t sniff at them. About politics, we can minimally say this at least: to the same degree that networks will not save us, politics is nonetheless the activity of shifting and demolishing hubs. A politics either aims to reinforce the power of a hub (reaction, authoritarianism, traditionalism), to demolish or produce new hubs (revolution), or to abolish hubs altogether in the name of forming a distributed network (anarcho-communism). There’s really not much more to be said.

It might be that just as a genuinely centralized network is a conservative/

source: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress. com/2012/11/12/networks-3/

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Why did primitive man go to such lengths to describe and interpret the happenings in the natural world, for example the rising and setting of the sun, the phases of the moon, the seasons? Carl Jung believed that the events of nature were not simply put into fairytales and myths as a way of explaining them physically. Rather, the outer world was used to make sense of the inner. In our time, Jung noted, this rich well of symbols – art, religion, mythology – which for thousands of years helped people understand the mysteries of life, had been filled in and replaced by the science of psychology. What psychology lacked, ironically given its borrowing of the ancient Greek term, was an understanding of the psyche, or the self in its broadest terms. For Jung, the goal of life was to see the ‘individuation’ of this self, a sort of uniting of a person’s conscious and unconscious minds so that their original unique promise might be fulfilled. This larger conception of the self was also based on the idea that humans are expressions of a deeper layer of universal consciousness. To grasp the uniqueness of each person, paradoxically we had to go beyond the personal self to understand the workings of this deeper collective wisdom. The collective unconscious Jung admitted that the idea of the collective unconscious “belongs to the class of ideas that people at first find strange but soon come to possess and use as familiar conceptions.” He had to defend it against the charge of mysticism. Yet he also noted that the idea of the unconscious on its own was thought fanciful until Freud pointed to its existence, and it became part of our under-

standing of why people think and act the way as they do. Freud had assumed the unconscious to be a personal thing contained within an individual. Jung, on the other hand, saw the personal unconscious mind as sitting atop a much deeper universal layer of consciousness, the collective unconscious – the inherited part of the human psyche not developed from personal experience. The collective unconscious was expressed through ‘archetypes’, universal thought-forms or mental images that influenced an individual’s feelings and action. The experience of archetypes often paid little heed to tradition or cultural rules, which suggests that they are innate projections. A newborn baby is not a blank slate but comes wired ready to perceive certain archetypal patterns and symbols. This is why children fantasize so much, Jung believed: they have not experienced enough of reality to cancel out their mind’s enjoyment of archetypal imagery. Archetypes have been expressed as myths and fairytales, and at a personal level in dreams and visions. In mythology they are called ‘motifs’, in anthropology ‘représentations collectives’. German ethnologist Adolf Bastian referred to them as ‘elementary’ or ‘primordial’ thoughts that he saw expressed again and again in the cultures of tribal and folk peoples. But they are not simply of anthropological interest; usually without knowing it, archetypes shape the relationships that matter in our lives.

source:http://www.butler-bowdon.com/ carl-jung-archetypes-collective-unconcious

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10. GLOBAL CULTURE INDUSTRIES; TOWARDS AN UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

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Kaegh Allen Tanya Starchenko Mahedy Al Sraiffe

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ебать keppima qij joder fuck ríða fick ‫ ةنعللا‬씨발 pist caralho fan keppima 他妈的 pisti niquer ファック jebati cazzo เพศสัมพันธ์ faen ‫ ןויז‬souložit γαμώ neuken koyat

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Languages are under extinction. As we accept English as the global language what are we actually letting ourselves in for?

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To d a y t h e r e a r e a r o u n d 6,000 languages and in less than 90 years we can expect less around 600. With a language dying every 2 weeks - this is a little worrying. By 2100, more than half of the more than 7,000 languages spoken on Earth—many of them not yet recorded— m a y d i s a p p e a r, t a k i n g with them a wealth of k n o w l e d g e a b o u t h i s t o r y, culture, the natural environment, and the human brain. But at the same time 8 new people are going online every second. Adding to a mass of a staggering 2,500,000,000. With 82.2% of all these users only using 10 languages English being the outright w i n n e r. What will be the new manifestation of this

worldwide English? slang, texting, memes, spanglish, jargon, bullshit - a new tongue is born through manipulation. English is inherently linked to education, instantly negating access to education to non English speaking people aka the developing south and east a k a t h e p o o r. There are subtleties in language that English can simply not reach. Arabic has hundreds of words for the formations created by sand, Eskimos also have a multitude of words to describe the various states of ice. The most commonly used English word in the world, ‘the’, is inherently weak compared to other languages. It tells you nothing of the gender or number of what you are describing. It is vague, common and powerful- like a cold resitant cockroach, its everywhere. Language is inherently linked to culture - it is perhaps the first gateway into understanding culture.

It is undeniably essental to have a universal language, English fits this role perfectly - it is simple, has a basic alphabet and is commonly understood. It must be understood as a tool of communication rather than a mark of status and education. â&#x20AC;&#x153; We a r e s t u c k i n a speech-doldrums. The ubiquity of English is Pyrrhic: now that we all speak it, nobody remembers its use. The collective bastardization of English is our most impressive achievement; we have broken its back with ignorance, accent, slang, jargon, tourism, outsourcing, and multitasking . . . we can make it say anything we want, like a speech d u m m y. . . . T h r o u g h t h e retrofitting of language, there are too few plausible words left; our most creative hypotheses will never be formulated, discoveries will remain unmade, concepts unlaunched, philosophies muffled, nuances m i s c a r r i e d . . . We i n h a b i t sumptuous Potemkin

suburbs of weasel terminologies. Aberrant linguistic ecologies sustain virtual subjects in t h e i r c l a i m t o l e g i t i m a c y, help them survive . . . Language is no longer used to explore, defend, express, or to confront but t o f u d g e , b l u r, o b f u s c a t e , apologize, and comfort . . . it stakes claims, assigns victimhood, preempts debate, admits guilt, fosters consensus. Entire organizations and/ or professions impose a descent into the linguistic equivalent of hell: condemned to a wordlimbo, inmates wrestle with w o r d s i n e v e r- d e s c e n d i n g spirals of pleading, lying, bargaining, flattening . . . a Satanic orchestration of the meaningless . . .â&#x20AC;? References:

Junkspace, Rem Koolhaas National Geographic - http:// ngm.nationalgeographic. com/2012/07/vanishinglanguages/johnsonphotography#/2 A day in the life of the Internet - h t t p : / / w w w. t h e c u l t u r e i s t . com/2013/05/09/how-manypeople-use-the-internet-morethan-2-billion-infographic/

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Tanya Starchenko

GLOBAL CULTURAL INDUSTRY: BRANDING THE CITY. written by Starchenko Tatiana

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“GLOBAL IDENTITY BECOMES MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER BEFORE. BUSINESSES AND CORPORATIONS USE BRANDING TO REACH THIS GOAL. REMARKABLY, THEY ARE NOT THE ONLY ONES – MORE AND MORE CITIES AND EVEN COUNTRIES ASPIRE TO EMPLOY STRATEGIC BRANDING TACTICS OF COMPANIES TO SET THEIR CLAIM ON THE GLOBAL STAGE.”

European Place Brand Map by Evert Ypma. Place branding as global design culture. Gwangju Design Biennale 2011 Evert Ypma has been invited by Ai WeiWei and Seung H-Sang (artistic directors) and Brendan McGetrick (curator) to contribute a design research project about place branding to the Gwangju

Global culture is an amazingly wide concept that envelops both Tchaikovsky and Coca Cola. Cultural environment today incorporates art, media, economy, business, politics as well as architecture and urbanism. Global culture creates a framework for many trends shaping our cities and our everyday lives. During the 20th century, the age of industrialization, the notion of culture changed with the times, coming under the influence of industrial principle. Cultural objects were increasingly perceived as commodities, products of culture industry. In the 21st century we are dealing with global culture industry, shaped by technology and globalization. It is global not only internationality, but also in its omnipresent state. Culture is completely integrated in our life: in information, media products, in branded objects. All these entities create the cultural environment that we experience. Emerging from the principles of global culture, “branding” has become of great influence. Brand is a tool to create identity, distinction, value for a specific product or service. Brand is a quintessence of symbolic features and real characteristics: it must communicate the enclosed idea to the world. We are totally surrounded by brands. They have become an important part of the global culture. Brands and advertising are the language of the market. And although brands are immaterial, they rule over both media and manufactured goods. However in order to succeed in the local market, the global brands should establish a local identity still. It is especially relevant in the case of developing markets in the countries with strong local cultural identity. In the globalization era, local cultures also strive to establish themselves in the global cultural framework. Global identity becomes more important than ever before. Businesses and corporations use branding to reach this goal. Remarkably, they are not the only ones – more and more cities and even countries aspire to employ strategic branding tactics of companies to set their claim on the global stage. There are different strategies in city branding. Many cities already have an established identity, the particular association, like education in Oxford, religion in Jerusalem, antique architecture in Athens. But in order to attract investments, human capital and prestige, image alone is not enough. Branding creates a whole culture around the iconic landmark or main association.

Most of the times these campaign prove to be very efficient. However recently cities are increasingly employing “formal branding” campaigns. For example Hong Kong, facing the competition from other emerging global cities in the region developed a brand of “Asia’s World City” in 2001. Especially efficient approach is through cultural branding, that emphasizes cultural identity of the city and aims to position a city among the top cultural destinations. This is usually done through creating a new landmark or cultural development. The process is known as “Bilbao effect”. Bilbao is truly an amazing example of how a cultural landmark (Guggenheim Museum Bilbao) transformed industry-base struggling city in the North-West of Spain into the global culture 177 city in less than two decades. Other strategy uses grand international events as a gateway to creation of the global brand. Global events like FIFA World Cup or Olympics could fuel urban transformation and create a new attractive image for a city, establishing it as an important destination. The example of this trend is Rio de Janeiro. Despite the well-established “festive” brand, the city is betting on several global events such as FIFA World Cup 2014 and Summer Olympics 2016 to boost the local economy. However the effects of sporting event may not be immediate and it is not always possible to predict the success or failure of particular investments, within the huge branding strategy, connected to the global event. Applied accurately, and addressing diverse sectors, place branding can bring multiple benefits: attract inward investments, new residents and tourists as well as activate community development and reinforce local identity. However it is very important to tailor each strategy to the local mentality. All the global trends could only be successful if they represent the local cultural identity. For example Guggenheim Bilbao can be seen as an expression of Basque national spirit and local development of the city of Bilbao, not simply as an imported product. While in the case of Hong Kong, initial branding was too engaged with creating an image for the western world, therefore it was not very successful among local citizens. However the brand was revived in 2010 with the new guidelines to engage more with local culture. This is the global culture industry. It is based on collaboration of global trends and local cultures.

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Mahedy Al Sraiffe

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GLOBAL CULTURE INDUSTRIES TOWARDS

UNIVERSAL

LANGUAGE

Globalization and Contemporary Art ‘‘Contemporary art is perhaps for the first time in history truly an art of the world. It comes from the whole world, and frequently tries to imagine the world as a differentiated yet inevitably connected whole. This is the definition of diversity: it is the key characteristic of contemporary art, as it is of contemporary life, in the world today’’. Terry Smith

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Figure 1: Globalization in the 19 century dissemination of art and culture through world´s fair.

Mahedy al Sraiffe

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‘‘With the collapse of the Communist governments in Europe in the years around 1990, free-market capitalism gained untrammeled access not only to new sources of material and labor throughout the world, but also to new markets. American models of conspicuous consumption of goods and services were widely emulated. New technologies promoted the growth of networks of economic, political, and cultural power that reach everywhere in the world today. These processes are known as globalization5. Remodernist and Sensationalist artists have absorbed these energies into their art such that it now flourishes on a spectacular scale’’. Terry Smith

Figure 2: Globalization in the 20 century dissemination of art and culture American models of conspicuous consumption of goods.

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‘‘The most recent generation of contemporary artists has inherited this daunting complexity. Their responses have been cautious, devoted to displaying concrete aspects of this complexity to those who would see it, and to helping to reshape the human capacity to make worlds on small, local scales. For all its modesty, and pragmatism, theirs is a hope-filled enterprise. Their efforts allow us to hope that contemporary art is becoming—perhaps for the first time in history—truly an art of the world. Certainly, as I will show, it comes from the whole world, and it tries to imagine the world as a whole’’. 183

Terry Smith

Figure 3: Globalization in the 21 century dissemination of art and culture through 3d printing.

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Global Culture Collage

‘‘Transnational visual cultures show us what the world is like in all of its neocolonialist variety, manifesting the conflicted diversity of contemporary life’’. Terry Smith

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11. THE OBJECT AND IDEOLOGY

Jennifer Wichtowski Agata Majcherska

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Jennifer Wichtowski

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“NYC Skyliine.” 11 November 2011. Jennifer Wichtowski

“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” -Frederic Jameson and Slovoj Žižek

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W AY

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the object and ideaology

No Way Out? A Critical Review of Mark Fisher’s “Capitalist Realism”

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The majority of us alive today are products of the postmodern condition and, according to Mark Fisher, have accepted capitalism as the only possible and viable system. Both Frederic Jameson and Slovoj Žižek are attributed with having said, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” The youth and young adults of Europe and North America, in particular, were not alive during a time when options other than capitalism were discussed or even considered viable . This generation will grow up without questioning and will proliferate the tenants of capitalism as if it is the only option. Many theorists hold that the spread of capitalism throughout the world was a primary engine for the rise of postmodernism as the western world gave way to a consumer culture of mass produced commodities. The resulting postmodernist era is characterized by a celebration of functionalism and popular culture, and according to noted postmodernist theorist, Frederic Jameson, breeds a sense of cultural disorientation and alienation. In the philosophical realm, postmodernism is typified by the themes of skepticism, negativity, and a pervasive deconstructivist view of cultural evolution. In his work, Mark Fisher responds specifically to the postmodern conditions of the capitalist world, which is termed late capitalism, and refers to the period from about 1945 and the end of the Second World War onwards. Capitalism, in general, is characterized as a flexible and adaptive economic structure that is capable of withstanding times of great unrest and turmoil, such as two World Wars and several economic recessions. Critics of the system, however, see these rises and falls in economic stability within the capitalist world as a flaw inherent in the system, in fact, even caused by the system itself.

Fisher sites the work of Lacan in his discussion of the Real vs. ‘reality.’ Lacan asserts, and Fisher applies to capitalism, that the reality is a false façade that the capitalist system creates in order to hide the Real. These Reals, as Fisher also argues, take the form of a number of other societal dysfunctions including an alarming increase in mental health disorders, especially amongst young adults, the systematic plunder of our planet’s natural and human resources, and a pervasive sense of apathy and detachment in the education system of the western world.

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One such Real that Fisher expounds is that of ‘reflexive impotence’ which effects both mental health and the educational system. There is a pervasive feeling amongst the youth in the western, capitalist world that “…things are bad, but more than that, they know they can’t do anything about it. But that ‘knowledge’, that reflexivity, is not a passive observation of an already existing state of affairs. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.” This apathetic condition of hopelessness has led to an endemic of mental health disorders, and cases of clinical depression are at an all time high. As is the case with the supposed ‘American Dream,’ capitalism teaches us that we can achieve anything, and perhaps this was more the case in the period immediately following the Second World War, when much of Europe and North America were experiencing historic levels of economic growth, but the reality now is something much different. And the feeling the let down that we have not achieved as much material wealth and status as we are conditioned to expect under a capitalist system leads to apathy and a low opinion of self worth.

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Capitalism and postmodernism are fundamentally flawed in an environmental sense, in that in order to sustain itself, capitalism must continually grow, produce, and consume. Naturally, over-accumulation occurs within a system that is solely based on production and consumption, and David Harvey argues that this happens on a cyclical basis. In this case, production must be shifted into another venture that is not already oversaturated. Because capitalism requires continued production, it has great detrimental effects on our environment and sustainability. We tend to make the “presupposition that resources are infinite, that the earth itself is merely a husk which capital can at a certain point slough off like a used skin, and that any problem can be solved by the market.” In order to sustain itself, capitalism requires an endless source of natural resources, which could, and Fisher argues will, mean the total destruction of our planet.

Sources

Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester, UK: 0 Books. Harvey, David. 1985. The Urbanization of Capital: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell Ltd. Jameson, Frederic. 1991. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. New York, NY: Picador Publishing.

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Agata Majcherska

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12. NEWS, PROPAGANDA, THE ART OF WAR AND THE IMAGE OF TERROR

Ivan Thung Michael Zhang Peng Zhao

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Ivan Thung

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Michael Zhang

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Peng Zhao

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