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Gaza in plain sight: witnessing in solidarity Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2024-02-22 Mazen Kerbaj, Jana Traboulsi, Zeina Maasri, Hanan Toukan
In this visual essay, Mazen Kerbaj and Jana Traboulsi bear witness to the genocidal violence that has been unfolding in Gaza since 7 October 2023. From Berlin and Lebanon, respectively, Kerbaj and Traboulsi have been chronicling and responding to the harrowing day-to-day news and testimonies from Gaza. Their drawings raise fundamental questions about what it is to bear witness to genocide as it unfolds
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From sublime awe to abject cringe: on the embodied processing of AI art Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Shane Denson
This article urges a reorientation in thinking about AI art (and AI more generally), shifting from the common focus on computational ‘intelligence’ to the embodied, metabolic processing that takes place in our encounters with (moving-image) artworks produced with machine-learning algorithms. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal phenomenology, the article argues that spectators’ bodies act as filters
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Modeling doubt: a speculative syllabus Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Shannon Mattern
In light of increasing artificial intelligence and proliferating conspiracy, technofetishism and moral panics, faith in ubiquitous data capture and mistrust of public institutions, the ascendance of STEM and the ‘deplatforming’ of the arts and humanities, this article considers doubt as an epistemological condition, a political tool, an ethical force, a rhetorical register, and an aesthetic category
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Tarot as affective cartography in the uneven Anthropocene Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Anastasia Murney
In the context of anthropogenic climate change, this article critiques the prevalence of ocularcentric strategies, such as spectacular large-scale artworks and data visualizations, questioning the epistemological assumptions underpinning them. The author proposes Tarot, a dialogical practice unfolding through a deck of cards, often used for divination or occult purposes, as a valuable method for addressing
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Window on the nostalgia box: television and the ambient aesthetics of karaoke in 1980s Japan Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Chelsea Morgen Ward
This article traces the social, technological and legal factors that, from the 1960s onward, transformed karaoke into a televisual medium. The author shows how the incorporation of the television screen into karaoke performance reveals a cross-section of postwar Japanese anxieties surrounding gendered leisure practices, licensing and storage of emerging media formats, and the regulation of the body
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Pictograms for resistance: historicity and militant design research in Amazonian Ecuador Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Nathaly Pinto, Guy Julier, Andrés Tapia
This article focuses on the experiences of developing and using pictograms as visual devices to support Indigenous communities of Amazonian Ecuador. It recognizes the imbalances and contradictions amidst the complex histories and identities of a Latin American state such as Ecuador. The authors emphasize the need to decolonize the design activist imagination and highlight two key issues. The first
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Dust against the Anthropocene: Yhonnie Scarce’s nuclear geo-fictions Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-05-03 Andy Weir
Against the universalizing of the Anthropocene, radioactive dust affects specific communities more than others. At the same time, it carries particles from local sites to cosmic horizons. Uranium d...
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Dirty encounters: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s legacy in David Wojnarowicz’s work Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-05-03 Gian Maria Annovi
One of the last works by celebrated New York artist David Wojnarowicz is a black-and-white photograph of the artist’s face buried in the dirt. The photograph was staged in 1991, less than one year ...
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Infrastructural fugitivity: contraband cellphones, TikTok, and vital media behind bars Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-05-03 Jasmine Ehrhardt, Lisa Nakamura
This article engages with TikToks created by incarcerated people using contraband cellphones. We read the #PrisonTok hashtag as part of a new genre of digital media created by imprisoned people tha...
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‘Words have a charge’: six moments from a dialogue Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-05-03 Homi K. Bhabha, Jae Emerling
This conversation contains ‘moments’ from a dialogue between the esteemed scholar Homi K Bhabha and Journal of Visual Culture editor Jae Emerling that took place at Harvard University on 7 March 20...
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Strategic visibility: architectures of data colonialism in Las Vegas Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-04-03 Isadora Bratton-Benfield
This article articulates the continuity between past and present infrastructural development in Las Vegas by focusing upon the materiality and visual cultural expression of the Google Henderson NV ...
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Inverting resolution: accounting for the planetary cost of earth observation Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-03-21 Stephen Cornford
This article uses the resolutional relationship between digital image and planetary surface in satellite remote sensing as a lens through which to view the reliance of visual culture on mineral res...
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Visual lawfare: evidential imagery at the service of military objectives Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-01-03 Maayan Amir
While chemical attacks are rare and deemed an illegitimate form of warfare, the attempt to exploit international law in order to license military action is an eerily common custom. The practice of ...
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Rethinking the Phantasmagoria: an enclosure and three worlds Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-01-03 Francesco Casetti
The Phantasmagoria was not just a spectacle based on projections of images of ghosts and monsters. Relying upon new archival findings, this article claims that the Phantasmagoria was instead an opt...
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The Haitian zombie motif: against the banality of antiblack violence Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-01-03 Darlène Dubuisson
The circulation and consumption of the images of suffering and lifeless black bodies is a longstanding feature of US visual media. Since each archive of suffering and dead black bodies operates wit...
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Trans visibility and trans viability: a Roundtable Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2023-01-03 Marquis Bey, Kara Carmack, Jill Casid, KJ Cerankowski, Sascha Crasnow, Stamatina Gregory, Jack Halberstam, Lex Morgan Lancaster, Cyle Metzger, Kirstin Ringelberg, Cole Rizki, Wiley Sharp, Eliza Steinbock, Susan Stryker
This Roundtable is crafted from the online event held on Saturday 20 November 2021 on Trans Visual Cultures. That event was organized to celebrate the recently published themed issue of Journal of ...
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‘C’est grave’: Raw, cannibalism and the racializing logic of white feminism Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-11-24 Rosalind Galt, Annette-Carina van der Zaag
This article addresses the racializing logic of white feminism and its alignment with white heteronormative registers of human life. It does so by considering Julia Ducournau’s (2017) film Raw in r...
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Performing reparative history in the Andes: Travesti methods and Ch’ixi subjectivities Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-11-01 Maya Wilson-Sanchez
This article explores the Travesti Museum of Peru, a portable and conceptual artwork created by Giuseppe Campuzano that presents Peruvian history through queer, trans, and Indigenous perspectives. ...
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Rupture, not injury: reframing repair for Black and Indigenous youth experiencing school pushout Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-11-01 Jade Nixon, Sefanit Habtom, Eve Tuck
In this article, the authors describe their multi-year youth participatory action research project, Making Sense of Movements (MSOM), with Black and Indigenous high school students in Toronto. Yout...
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Repair in Australian Indigenous art Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-11-01 Susan Best
This article examines artworks by three emerging Australian Indigenous artists who are revitalizing Indigenous cultural traditions. The author argues that their work is reparative in the manner des...
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You and eye in the afterlife of images Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-11-01 Kimberly Juanita Brown
This article examines the fraught photographic afterlife of the Rwandan genocide as the notion of repair looms large in the imagination. The continuing work of mourning, within the boundary of the ...
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Re-processing archival images: artists as darkroom technicians Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-11-01 Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn
This article argues for the need to reflect on how contemporary artists use archival documents as a form of visual reparation. Artists Deanna Bowen, Krista Belle Stewart and Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn...
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Editorial Introduction: Reparation and Visual Culture Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-11-01 Adrienne Huard, Gabrielle Moser
This themed issue of Journal of Visual Culture examines the critical role that art and aesthetics play in processes of reparation. Invoking reparation in its multiple registers – as an act of repai...
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Digital witnessing and the erasure of the racialized subject Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-03-28 Nishat Awan
Humanitarian agencies are relying more frequently on remote sensing, satellite imagery and social media to produce accounts of violence. Their analysis aims at creating more compelling narratives f...
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Collective empiricism and the material witness Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-03-28 Andrew Barry
This article develops two arguments. One follows from the idea that materials can be made into witnesses to environmental violence by drawing together the evidence generated from multiple sensors. ...
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An unbound critical lived-built environment Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-03-28 Helene Kazan
Through engaged analysis of entangled research-based practice, this article argues that thresholds of distinction between environmental or conflict-based violence are unbound across Lebanon’s criti...
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Epilogue: turning around the right to look Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-03-28 Allen Feldman
The forensics of environmental violence transposes habeas corpus from juridically individuated civil subjects to the forensic cartography of the conscripted, militarized and rapidly disappearing co...
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The absence of absence: of ekphrasis and blind witnessing Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-03-28 Mangalika de Silva
The centrality of apparition and disapparition as political manifestation and existential threshold informs enforced disappearance as a political regime that interrupts the existing densities and s...
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Life of crops: notes on investigative memorialisation Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-03-28 Philipp Sattler, Dubravka Sekulić, Milica Tomić
At Aflenz an der Sulm in south-eastern Austria, digging into the soil to see what material evidence of recent history it holds reflects a broader process of investigation. It uncovers the entanglem...
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The memory of earth and land dispossession in Urabá Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-03-28 Oscar Pedraza, Hannah Meszaros Martin
In this article, the authors discuss their work in Coquitos from 2019–2021 with the Colombian Truth Commission and Forensic Architecture. They consider conflicts around land tenure, violent land di...
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Themed Issue Introduction: Testifying to Violence Environmentally: Knowing, Sensing, Politicizing Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2022-03-28 Eray Çaylı
Over the past decade, a growing number of scholars in the social sciences and the humanities have come to approach political violence as an environmental phenomenon, and conceptualize environmental injustices as violence (e.g. Barca, 2014; Buell, 2017; Gray and Sheikh, 2018; Lee, 2016; Nixon, 2011; Sharpe, 2016). Concurrently, material (including visual) cultural practitioners and theorists grappling
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Review: Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics and Jessica Gerschultz, Decorative Arts of the Tunisian École: Fabrications of Modernism, Gender, and Power Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2021-12-01 Katarzyna Falęcka
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Review: Charles L Leavitt IV, Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2021-12-01 David Escudero
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The art of touch: lending a hand to the sighted majority Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2021-09-27 Georgina Kleege
This article describes three collaborative projects designed to explore tactile and haptic encounters with visual art. As a blind person, the author takes advantage of touch tours offered in many of the world’s museums. As rewarding as these can be, she often leaves feeling that there is something missing. She is aware that people who witness a touch tour for blind people, both companions who might
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Paper, glass, algorithm: teleprompters and the invisibility of screens Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2021-09-27 Neta Alexander, Tali Keren
The teleprompter, invented in 1948 as a memory aid for show business, has become a ubiquitous technology in modern politics. Yet, the hidden ways in which this device shapes our understanding of performance, newscasting, and political rhetoric are rarely studied by media scholars. Recognizing this lacuna, this article traces the evolution of the teleprompter from a cumbersome, human-operated device
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On nesting Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2021-09-27 Julietta Singh, Chase Joynt
Writer Julietta Singh talks to filmmaker Chase Joynt about their unfolding collaborative work on a feature-length hybrid documentary, The Nest. Taking a majestic home in central Canada as its focus, the documentary looks to architecture as a portal through which to tell unexpected histories of Westward expansion, Indigenous uprising, ecopolitical activism, domestic violence, and the racialization of
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Blue like the Mediterranean: the work of the monochrome in the Atlas Group Archive Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2021-09-27 Katerina Korola
In the prologue to Walid Raad’s Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (2001), the speaker asks that his words appear against a grey background. Or, he continues after a pause, ‘use a blue background . . . blue just like the Mediterranean’. Beginning with this colourful riddle, this article investigates the work of the monochrome in the Atlas Group Archive. With this attention to the monochrome as a format, the
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‘Architecture is forever unfinished’ Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2021-04-26 Frida Escobedo
In this interview, the celebrated Mexican architect Frida Escobedo explains the intricacies of her design practice and her longstanding interests in Minimalism, Mexican Modernism, and the socio-political concerns facing architecture. The interview provides an insightful mid-career look at one of the most creative and compelling architects working in the world today. Escobedo and Gardner engage in a
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Safety Orange Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2021-04-26 Anna Watkins Fisher
Safety Orange first emerged as a legal color standard in the US in the 1950s in technical manuals and federal regulations; today, it is most visible in the contexts of terror, pandemic, and environmental alarm systems; traffic control; work safety; and mass incarceration. The color is a marker of the extreme poles of state oversight and abandonment, of capitalist excess and dereliction. Its unprecedented
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The media turn in African environmentalism: the Niger Delta and oil’s network forms Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2021-04-26 Cajetan Iheka
African ecologies and the various media forms devoted to them remain marginal in the bourgeoning discourse of ecomedia studies despite the implication of the continent in mineral extraction, wildlife conservation, and the dumping of toxic wastes, just to mention a few examples. Turning to media focusing on Nigeria’s Niger-Delta region, the author argues that African cultural forms are crucial for extending
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The crystal reveals the whole: medieval dreamscapes and cinematic space as virtual media Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2021-04-26 Alison Griffiths
This article examines the rich visual culture of the medieval period in order to better understand dreaming as a kind of visual thought experiment, one in which ideas associated with cinema, such as embodied viewing, narrative sequencing, projection, and sensory engagement, are palpable in a range of visual and literary works. The author explores the theoretical connections between the oneiric qualities
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Where Blackness dies: the aesthetics of a massacre and the violence of remembering Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2021-04-26 Xiomara Verenice Cervantes-Gómez
This article focuses on the presence of ‘Blackness’ in Latin America, and the role/location of ‘Blackness’ in the necropolitics of Mexico, in particular, as a visual mode of aestheticizing violence in the aftermath of the 2010 Tamaulipas massacre of 72 undocumented migrants. As an act of remembering the victims, Mexican journalists, writers, and activists created a digital altar: 72 Migrantes. Focusing
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Jan Baetens, Une fille comme toi and The Film Photonovel: J A Cultural History of Forgotten Adaptations, reviewed by Susana S Martins Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2021-04-01 Susana S Martins
Imagine you open a thin, large-format book in your hands, eager to discover the story it tells. The title, Une fille comme toi, is not particularly revealing. After a discreet white cover, you suddenly encounter an uncanny visual archive: on the second page, a colour-saturated Brigitte Bardot looks you in the eye, and you recognize old visual codes. It looks like the cover of a popular vintage magazine
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Christoph Cox, Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics, reviewed by Dann Disciglio Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2021-04-01 Dann Disciglio
This book consists of a mostly philosophical effort to make sense of what art theorist Christoph Cox describes as a ‘sonic turn in . . . arts and culture’ (p. 1). Through careful readings of various philosophical concepts (duration, ontology, materialism), artists (for example, Max Neuhaus, Christian Marclary, Alvin Lucier), and thinkers (Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm
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Julia Adeney Thomas and Geoff Eley (eds), Visualizing Fascism: The Twentieth-Century Rise of the Global Right, reviewed by Mark Antliff Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2021-04-01 Mark Antliff
As the introductory essay to Visualizing Fascism makes clear, the primary goal of this anthology is to alert scholars in the field of history to the role of aesthetics and visual culture in fascist movements, while simultaneously defining fascism as a global phenomenon. Edited by two eminent historians – one a scholar of 20th-century Japan, the other of Nazi Germany – the volume has much to offer due
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Introduction: touch, click and motion: archaeologies of fashion film after digital culture Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2020-12-01 Caroline Evans, Jussi Parikka
This article functions as the introduction to the Themed Issue on Archaeologies of Fashion Film. The text introduces fashion film as a genre and as an historically dynamic form of audiovisual expression that we approach through fashion history, media archaeology and new film history. While introducing key concepts and approaches, the authors propose a form of ‘parallax historiography’, a term emerging
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Excavating fashion film: a media archaeological perspective Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2020-12-01 Marketa Uhlirova
In the emerging ‘video-first world’ of the last decade, global fashion brands have made the moving image an integral component of their digital marketing strategies. As a result, both the industry and popular perceptions of fashion film have been increasingly colonized by the notions of branding and promotion. Recent scholarship on fashion film too has put the fashion brand at the centre of analysis
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Sewing machines and weaving looms: a media archaeological encounter between fashion and film Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2020-12-01 Wanda Strauven
This article proposes thinking of media archaeology as an operating table upon which historical, material and technological interconnections between fashion and film are made. By exploring how early cinema and digital film can be coupled to textile as technology, more specifically through the mechanisms of the sewing machine and the Jacquard loom, it extends the historical span from the mid-1890s,
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Screenic fashion: horizontality, minimal materiality and manual operation Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2020-12-01 Marie-Aude Baronian
Focusing on a one-minute ‘fashion film’ by the Dutch fashion designer Alexander van Slobbe for the retrospective exhibition on his work in Utrecht’s Centraal Museum in 2010, this article investigates the interconnectedness of film and fashion through their mutual concern with the processes of crafting and dressing. A close reading of Van Slobbe’s film highlights a current return to a minimal design
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Colour, movement and modernity in Sonia Delaunay’s (1926) fashion film Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2020-12-01 Lucy Moyse Ferreira
Sonia Delaunay is best known for her abstract and colourful style which is manifested across her artwork, fashion, textile and interior designs alike. In 1926, this culminated in a fashion film, titled ‘L’Elégance’. Shot using the Keller-Dorian colour process, the film features a succession of Delaunay’s simultaneous fashion and textile designs. This article explores the implications and origins of
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After fashion film: social video and brand content in the influencer economy Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2020-12-01 Nick Rees-Roberts
Luxury and designer fashion brands today produce as much digital content and branded entertainment as they do design and product. Online video is a key part of that production. In this article, the author questions whether the use of the generic term ‘fashion film’ is still relevant to discussions of the moving image in the digital age. He does this by examining a range of promotional uses of the moving
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Review: Alice Gorman, Dr Space Junk vs. the Universe: Archaeology and the Future Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2020-12-01 Hannah Goodwin
When we look into the night sky, we look into the past. The light that reaches our eyes from stars has traveled for years, rendering everything we see a trace of how things were at some other point in time. This raises the question of how our own planetary past is preserved and cast outward, a question that has stirred excitement among science fiction writers, astronomers, and archaeologists alike
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Review: Dan Karlholm and Keith Moxey (eds) Time in the History of Art: Temporality, Chronology and Anachrony Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2020-12-01 Ian Verstegen
Art historians have long reflected on space – how does an image fit into a book or altarpiece from which it’s been detached? But time has also not been neglected. Heinrich Wölfflin (1941), for example, argued it was incorrect to imagine Renaissance sculptures reflecting a single moment in time. Indeed, the reconstruction of space and time would be standard dual aims of historicist art history. Nevertheless
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Review: Frances Guerin (ed.), On Not Looking: The Paradox of Contemporary Visual Culture Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2020-12-01 Devapriya Sanyal
Frances Guerin’s book is a finely curated labour of love. For a book on visual culture, this is saying something since there are already so many books about this field. However, what distinguishes her book from the others is the fact that she is dealing with ‘not looking’ rather than ‘looking’. The book consists of 11 essays that are divided into 4 pertinent sections, covering diverse topics such as
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Review: Gilles Deleuze, Letters and Other Texts, David Lapoujade (ed.), trans. Ames Hodges Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2020-12-01 Jae Emerling
This book is an odd collection of Deleuze ephemera: letters, some ink drawings, reviews, interviews, and a few writings from early (1940s–1950s) in his academic career. These materials are epiphenomena: archival remnants that present us with a certain ambivalence. On one hand, these remnants will entertain Deleuze scholars, whose scholia will value Deleuze’s exam and course preparation materials on
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Decolonizing objecthood through 2SQ Indigenous art: Dayna Danger and Jeneen Frei Njootli’s performance, ‘Chases and Tacks’ Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2020-08-01 Sebastian De Line
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Review: Dominic Johnson, Unlimited Action: The Performance of Extremity in the 1970s Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2020-08-01 Yetta Howard
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Chasing Charley, finding Reed: reaching toward the ghosts of the archive Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2020-08-01 KJ Cerankowski
The archive consists of memories, documents, and images waiting to be curated into a story. In this article, the author collates archival object encounters into a transgender ‘ghost story’ that marks the impossibility of a straightforward history of the subject, relying instead on embodied encounters with archive objects, or the remnants (ghostly and tangible) of archival subjects. Following the materials
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‘I’m a person who loves beautiful things’: Potassa de Lafayette as model and muse Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2020-08-01 Kara Carmack
In January 1977, Potassa de Lafayette visited Andy Warhol’s studio wearing a black velvet and taffeta evening gown. The Dominican model sat for sketches by visiting artist Jamie Wyeth and photographs taken by Warhol that together reveal the sequence in which Potassa raised her skirt and lowered her stockings to expose her penis. This contribution explores Potassa’s strategies of self-presentation amid
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The diversity of the middle: mythology in intersectional trans representation Journal of Visual Culture (IF 0.537) Pub Date : 2020-08-01 Sascha Crasnow
This article examines the use of mythological hybrid figures in works by two non-binary queer contemporary artists of color. For these artists, the intersection of their ethnic/religious identities and their queer identities leads them to experience a hindrance to full belonging in each of these communities. This results in a feeling of liminality or ‘in-betweenness’. In considering this ‘in-betweenness’