Photos by Jeff Grandy

So, I found myself looking at Anseladams.com and I happened on these photos by Jeff Grandy. The similarities between the two photographers are obvious. The image of the mountains mimicks Adams' interest in contrasting different shades. Both photos portray nature as an extremely powerful creature. Furthermore, the images also idealize nature, much as Adams' photos do. Anyways, I am amazed by both of these images! (even if they are an idealistic view of nature)

The power of an Image

Yesterday, an image surfaced in the media of Barack Obama. The photo, taken 2 years ago on a trip to Somalia, features Obama dressed in what the media has coined "Muslim garb". The Obama campaign is accusing Clinton's staff of leaking the photo to the media in an attempt to portray Obama as a Muslim and thus win over votes. I found this controversy to be a perfect example of the power of a photograph and also the myth of photographic truth. In my opinion, it is ridiculous that this image even created a controversy as Obama was likely just dressed in this clothing as a sign of respect. Despite the fact that Obama has consistently repeated that he is a Christian, this image will likely sway at least a few voters. Perhaps some people will take this image as evidence of the truth, meaning that he is in fact tied to the Muslim religion. If the Clinton campaign was responsible for leaking this image, it would be a disgusting tactic. Campaign 2008 is supposed to be about "change", but the Clinton campaign seems to be interested in continuing the same mud-slinging that is so prevalent in politics. Regardless, this conflict displays the power of a photograph to create such controversy.

Tuesday, February 26

Today, our focus shifted to landscape in photography. Our discussion started with Ansel Adams. Adams, who largely photographed the American west, photographed the landscape in an idealized manner. Many of his images illustrate his focus on contrasting different shades. These images portray the natural environment as extremely powerful. "Nevada Fall", for example, features a powerful waterful which is clearly in contrast to the rocks that it covers. A majority of the images show no signs of human existence and thus portray the notion of a "utopian landscape".

In contrast to Ansel Adams, Robert Adams features the same American west in a much different manner. Robert photographs the lanscape to show the human destruction of the natural environoment. These images evoke a concern for the environment by illustrating the impact that one can have on nature. His photos show that nature is not only beautiful and powerful, but also can be dismal and bleek.

KEY WORDS/PEOPLE
* William Henry Jackson- (1843 -1942) was an American painter, photographer and explorer famous for his images of the American West. Jackson had photographic evidence of western landmarks that had previously seemed fantastic rumor: the Grand Tetons, Old Faithful and the rest of Yellowstone, Colorado's Rockies and the Mount of the Holy Cross, and the uncooperative Ute Indians. Jackson's photographs of Yellowstone helped convince the U.S. Congress to make it the first National Park in March 1872.

*Hudson River School- was a mid-19th century American art movement by a group of landscape painters, whose aesthetic vision was influenced by romanticism. Their paintings depict the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area, as well as the Catskill Mountains, Adirondack Mountains, and White Mountains of New Hampshire.

*sublime- is the quality of greatness or vast magnitude, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation. This greatness is often used when referring to nature and its vastness.

*Landscape art- depicts scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather usually is an element of the composition. In the United States, the Hudson River School, prominent in the middle to late nineteenth century, is probably the best known native development in landscape art.

*Ansel Easton Adams- (1902 –1984) was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West. His is known for the zone system in his images where every really good photograph shows range going from dark to light shades…contrast is important. His images show that we are part of a larger universe. “Moonrise over Hernandez, N.M.” is a famous photo where the sky is pitch black and the moon stands out…this shows the contrasts between shades. He also often follows the rule of thirds where land takes up 1/3 and sky takes up 2/3. A lot of his images show no signs of human life (this is a utopian view of nature).

*Group f/64- was a group of photographers espousing a common philosophy. The group was created in 1932. The original membership included Ansel Adams. The term f/64 refers to the smallest aperture setting on a large format camera, which secures maximum depth of field, rendering a photograph evenly sharp from foreground to background. Such a small aperture implies a long exposure and the selection of relatively slow moving or motionless subject matter, such as landscapes and still life over action and reportage photography.

*Straight photography- straight on, documentary, as objective as you can be, realistic, most think of black and white as dominant accepted mode. Refers to photography that attempts to depict a scene as realistically and objectively as permitted by the medium, renouncing the use of manipulation.
*Zone System- is a photographic technique for determining optimal film exposure and development, formulated by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer in 1941. The Zone System provides photographers with a systematic method of precisely defining the relationship between the way they visualize the photographic subject and the final results. The Zone System is concerned with control of image values, ensuring that light and dark values are rendered as desired.

*Robert Adams- An American photographer who began photographing largely in the 1970s. He shot the American west. He shows the impact of human beings on nature. “Untitled Denver” shows how humans have taken over nature…very different from Ansel Adams…he shows a diminished landscape. He also shows boundary between city and country. His images provoke a “green” feeling. Interestingly, his images show a human presence without including people. Although his photos do not have an obvious meaning, they show that nature can be mundane.

*New Topographics- "New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape" is the title of an exhibition that epitomized a key moment in American landscape photography. The show was curated by William Jenkins at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House in 1975. It had a rippling effect on the whole medium and genre, not only in the USA, but in Europe too where generations of landscape photographers emulated the spirit and esthetic of the exhibition. Since 1975 "New Topographics" photographers such as Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Frank Gohlke, and Stephen Shore have influenced photographic practices regarding landscape around the world. This move was clearly illustrated by the subject matter that the New Topographics chose as well as their commitment to casting a somewhat ironical or critical eye on what American society had become. They all depicted urban or suburban realities under changes in an allegedly detached approach.

*Nature photography- refers to a wide range of photography taken outdoors and devoted to displaying natural elements such as landscapes, wildlife, plants, and close-ups of natural scenes and textures. Nature photography tends to put a stronger emphasis on the aesthetic value of the photo than other photography genres, such as photojournalism and documentary photography.

RANDOM CLASS NOTES
-The pastoral- began with the Greeks. There was a distinction between country life and urban living. The pastoral was idealized country where nature becomes a refuge where people escape to.
-This pastoral tradition leads to people starting to claim nature
-18th century landscape painting shows humans possessing nature

*pantheism- to find god in nature
*Rule of Thirds in Landscape photography- generally, land will take up 1/3 and sky will take up 2/3. This creates tension between negative and positive spaces.

Thursday, February 21

The focus of today’s class was on the role of photography in the 19th century. One of the first photographers that we looked at was William Henry Fox Talbot. Talbot, who photographed in the early 19th century, was important for developing photography as an artistic medium. His photographs, of items as simple as lace, show the power of a photographer to use the camera as an art form.

Roger Fenton, a British photographer, was one of the first to capture war. Fenton photographed the Crimean War and provided ordinary citizens with the reality of war that could not before be seen.
Similarly, Timothy O’Sullivan photographed the American Civil War. O’Sullivan provided Americans with a vivid account of the realities of war. This era was the birth of war photography which changed the relationship between ordinary citizens and war as photographs allowed war to be seen in a whole new light. This is another example of the power of the camera to connect people with realms that were previously unknown.

KEY WORDS/PEOPLE
*Joseph Nicéphore Niépce- (1765 –1833) was a French inventor, most noted as the inventor of photography and a pioneer in the field. He is well-known for taking some of the earliest photographs, more than 180 years ago. He created the first permanent photograph, of the exterior of his home, around 1826. The photograph was made using a camera obscura and a sheet of pewter coated with bitumen of Judea, an asphalt that when exposed to light, hardened permanently.

*William Henry Fox Talbot- (1800 –1877)He worked in England and was the inventor of the negative/positive photographic process, the precursor to most photographic processes of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was also a noted photographer who made major contributions to the development of photography as an artistic medium. His work in the 1850s, on photo-mechanical reproduction led to the creation of the photoglyphic engraving process, the precursor to photogravure. He was interested in forms and shapes. His book, “Pencil of Nature” was the first book to be illustrated entirely with photographs.

*Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre- (1787 –1851) was a French artist and chemist, recognized for his invention of the daguerreotype process of photography. The daguerreotype is an early type of photograph in which the image is exposed directly onto a mirror-polished surface of silver bearing a coating of silver halide particles deposited by iodine vapor. In later developments bromine and chlorine vapors were also used, resulting in shorter exposure times.

*Roger Fenton- (1819-1869) was one of the 1st war photographers. He photographed the Crimean War in the 19th century. At this time, people had to be still in photos so he did not capture in action shots. His photos were influential in showing the British public a realistic account of the war.

*Henry Peach Robinson- (1830-1901) was an English Pictorialist photographer best known for his pioneering of combination printing - joining multiple negatives to form a single image, the precursor to photomontage.

*Peter Henry Emerson (1856–1936) was a Cuban-born photographer. His photographs are early examples of promoting photography as an art form. He is known for taking photographs that displayed natural settings.

*The Reverend Charles Dodgson- (1832 –1898), better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican clergyman, and photographer. He is now considered by many to be one of the very best Victorian photographers, and is certainly the one who has had the most influence on modern art photographers. His subjects also include skeletons, dolls, dogs, statues and paintings, trees, scholars, scientists, old men, and little girls. His notorious (and possibly misunderstood) studies of nude children were long presumed lost, but six have since surfaced, four of which have been published.
*Mathew B. Brady- (1822-1896), was one of the most celebrated 19th century American photographers, best known for his portraits of celebrities and the documentation of the American Civil War. He is credited with being the father of photojournalism. He also captured the American West.

*Timothy O’Sullivan- An American photographer who photographed in the 19th century. He is best known for his photographs of the American Civil War and of the American west. He captured a photo of the aftermath of Gettysburg and entitled it “Harvest of Death”. He captured the realities of war but it still had an element of art.

*Carleton Watkins- was a 19th century Californian photographer. He photographed the American West and he taps into the mythic notion of the west. His photos capture the majestic view of nature.

*Eadward Muybridge- He was a British photographer who photographed America in the late 19th century. He did a series of photographs that became linked to the formation of film and motion. He did this series of photographs to determine if a horse ever had all four feet off of the ground while running. These photos led to the development of the motion picture camera.

*Pictorialism- largely subscribed to the idea that art photography needed to emulate the painting and etching of the time. Most of these pictures made were black & white or sepia-toned. Among the methods used were soft focus, special filters and lens coatings, heavy manipulation in the darkroom, and exotic printing processes. Pictorialism is interested in sentimentalizing the real. Ex) Albin-Guillot

*The Linked Ring- In May 1892, Robinson founded the Linked Ring, a brotherhood consisting of a group of photographers based in London, pledged to enhance photography as a fine art. Famous members of this brotherhood included Frank Sutcliffe, Frederick Evans, Paul Martin, and Alfred Stieglitz. Though the formation of this group was, as their publicity indicated, "a means of bringing together those who are interested in the development of the highest form of Art of which Photography is capable", it is also very likely that serious photographers were now trying to distance themselves from the growth of photography for all, brought about by the introduction of simple cameras.

*Albumen print- was invented in 1850 by Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard, and was the first commercially exploitable method of producing a photographic print on a paper base from a negative. It used the albumen found in egg whites to bind the photographic chemicals to the paper and became the dominant form of photographic positives from 1855 to the turn of the century.

*Photogravure- is an intaglio printmaking process initially developed in the 1830s by Henry Fox Talbot in England and Nicéphore Niépce in France. Photogravure was developed to provide an archivally permanent way of reproducing a photographic image. Photogravure registers an extraordinary variety of tones.

RANDOM CLASS NOTES
-In 1830s, issues of realism came about.
-photograph was viewed as real by some. The goal was to attempt to copy nature.
-Others realized that photographs could be altered.
-Thus there was a conflict between those who felt that photography should be used for realism and those that felt it should be a sort of self-expressionism.

-beauty was important at first, but 19th century brings about the notion that photography can be more than beauty.

*Straight photography- straight on, documentary, as objective as you can be, realistic, most think of black and white as dominant accepted mode

-In Britain and the United States, the tradition of moving into expressionist photography was known as Pictorialism. For example, Robinson. It became particularly important after 1880s. Alfred Steglitz is an example. This becomes dominant tradition for a while and was in contradiction to realism.

Certain genres develop…
Landscape photography/nature
portrait
war photography
still life (objects arranged within a frame)
Journalistic
Travel
Beginnings of Street Photography

Tuesday, February 19

Today we began our photography unit by comparing and contrasting several photographers. Henri Cartier-Bresson, a French photographer who photographed throughout the 20th century, was discussed. Cartier-Bresson captured humans in various dimensions of everyday life. Among his most famous, “Behind Gare St. Lazare” features a man that appears to be jumping over water on tracks. The photo is striking in that everything, including the man and the background, is mirrored. His photos provide an intimate look into everyday life.

We also looked at Cindy Sherman’s photographs. Sherman only photographs herself, but each photo features her styled to appear as someone else. Many of her photos are modeled after the old “Hollywood glamour” style. In each of these photos, there is something awkward about her appearance. Perhaps her images are meant to make viewers question the way that women are portrayed. Her photography is important for showing the view that photos can be used to portray a deeper message.

Chapter 1 and 2
KEY WORDS/PEOPLE
*Cindy Sherman- An American photographer born in 1954. She started in 1970s as an art student. She is best known for her conceptual self-portraits and her “Untitled Film Stills” where she places herself as an unnamed actress in shots reminiscent of foreign films, Hollywood movies, B-movies, and film noir. In each of these photos, she has a slight look of anxiety. Her more recent work includes images where she poses as a clown. She is interested in the visual identities of women. She is more conceptual and uses photography as an art in an attempt to express a point of view.

*Photography-is the process of recording pictures by means of capturing light on a light-sensitive medium, such as a film or electronic sensor. Traditionally the product of photography has been called a photograph.

*Performance art- is art in which the actions of an individual or a group at a particular place and in a particular time constitute the work. It can happen anywhere, at any time, or for any length of time. Performance art can be any situation that involves four basic elements: time, space, the performer's body and a relationship between performer and audience. Performance art genres include body art, fluxus, happening, action poetry, and intermedia. An example is Yoko Ono.

*Snapshot aesthetic- refers to a trend within fine art photography in the USA from around 1963. The style typically features apparently banal everyday subject matter and accented framing. Subject matter is often presented without apparent link from image-to-image and relying instead on juxtaposition and disjunction between individual photographs.

*Vernacular photography- refers to the creation of photographs by amateur or unknown photographers who take everyday life and common things as subjects. Examples of vernacular photographs include travel and vacation photos, family snapshots, photos of friends, class portraits, identification photographs, etc.

*Environmental Portrait- a portrait executed in the subject’s usual environment, such as their home or workplace, and typically illuminates the subject’s life and surroundings.

*Fine art photography- refers to photographs that are created to fulfill the creative vision of the artist. Fine art photography stands in contrast to photojournalism and commercial photography. We can see this by looking at Ansel Adams' work of Yosemite and Yellowstone. He is one of the least disputed fine art photographers of the 20th century.

*Abjection- literally means "the state of being cast off." The concept of abject exists in between the concept of an object and the concept of the subject, something alive yet not. In contemporary critical theory, it is often used to describe the state of often-marginalized groups, such as people of color, prostitutes, homosexuals, convicts, poor people and handicapped persons. The concept of abject is often coupled (and sometimes confused with) the idea of the uncanny, the concept of something being "un-home-like", or foreign, yet familiar. An example is a corpse, namely that of a loved one.

*Henri Cartier-Bresson- a French photographer who lived from 1908 to 2004. He is considered to be the father of modern photojournalism and the master of candid photography. He helped developed the style of “street photography” that influenced generations to come. Of his most famous, “Behind the Gare St. Lazare”. This photo captures the moving action of a man…it seems random, but also seems to have taken some thought (everything is mirrored). He felt that a decisive moment is when “insight into people at same time that formal elements come together in interesting ways”. He has a great deal of faith in the world and was more of a documentary photographer.

*Documentary Photography- usually refers to a type of professional photojournalism, but it may also be an amateur or student pursuit. The photographer attempts to produce truthful, objective, and usually candid photography of a particular subject, most often pictures of people. The pictures usually depict a certain perspective of the photographer.

*Candid photography- photography that focuses on spontaneity rather than on technique, on the immersion of a camera within events rather than focusing on setting up a staged situation or on preparing a lengthy camera setup. Best described as photography that is un-posed and un-planned.

*Street photography- a type of documentary photography that features subjects in candid situations within public places such as streets, parks, beaches, malls, political conventions, and other settings. Uses techniques of straight photography in that it shows a pure vision of something, like holding a mirror to society. An example is Cartier-Bresson.

*Photojournalism- a particular type of journalism that creates image in order to tell a news story. Photojournalism is distinguished from other close branches of photography by the qualities of timeliness, objectivity, and narrative. Fenton’s images of the Crimean war, for example.

*Magnum Photos -is an international photographic cooperative owned by its photographer-members, with offices located in New York, Paris, London and Tokyo. According to co-founder Henri Cartier-Bresson, "Magnum is a community of thought, a shared human quality, a curiosity about what is going on in the world, a respect for what is going on and a desire to transcribe it visually." It was founded in 1947 in response to World War II experiences.

*Rule of thirds- is a compositional rule of thumb in photography and other visual arts such as painting and design. The rule states that an image can be divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines. The four points formed by the intersections of these lines can be used to align features in the photograph. Proponents of this technique claim that aligning a photograph with these points creates more tension, energy and interest in the photo than simply centering the feature would.

*Golden Ratio- In mathematics and the arts, two quantities are in the golden ratio if the ratio between the sum of those quantities and the larger one is the same as the ratio between the larger one and the smaller. At least since the Renaissance, many artists and architects have proportioned their works to approximate the golden ratio—especially in the form of the golden rectangle, in which the ratio of the longer side to the shorter is the golden ratio—believing this proportion to be aesthetically pleasing.

Election 2008

As you briefly mentioned in class, images are playing an integral role in the campaigning for the 2008 election. The media has been focusing on the potential candidates since early last year. The power of the media and electronic technologies has made this election unlike any other. The internet has become an integral aspect of both Senator Obama and Senator Clinton's campaiging, as they have both placed videos on blogs, taken advanatge of social networking websites (such as Facebook), raised campagain funds, etc. In this case, I feel that the internet provides most Americans, well those with computers or acess to library computers at least, an opportunity to engage in politics. Whether or not this is more democratic or not is another issue, but at least it provides a sense of involvement.

The media also has a greatly deal of power with regards to the fact that only a select few candidates have received substantial coverage. During the Democratic debates, the networks often stood Clinton, Edwards, and Obama side by side and focused the camera solely on them (leaving out a number of candidates). The media thus has the power to greatly persuade who the front-runners are. Because Dennis Kucinich, for example, received little attention, few people know anything about his policies or even who he is. However, if the media would have chosen to focus more coverage on him, it would be a different story.

With regards to images, Senator Obama has greatly benefited. He has a very powerful presence and the ability to give "moving" speeches. This is evident through the fact that he even won a grammy for the audio version of his book. I find it interesting that Obama focuses less on issues at his rallies and more on giving firey speeches about "how he will bring about change for America". Senator Clinton certainly offers more concrete plans for the future, but is not nearly as charismatic. I must say that I have found myself swayed by Obama simply by hearing his voice. This interaction with the media is an advantage for candidates that was certainly not available before the advent of technology.

Focusing more on what you mentioned in class, I think that is very interesting that the international community is intrigued with the prospect of Obama as president. The media/images/internet are all the reason that the international community is able to view news that is happening across the globe. However, I wonder if the damage done by Bush in the recent years is irreversible. (we can only hope!)

Thursday, February 12

Chapter 8 Notes from reading

-Because scientific imagery often comes to us with confident authority behind it, whether we view it through the press or through professional work and study, we often assume it represents objective knowledge. But, scientific looking is as culturally dependent as the other practices of looking we have examined.

*positivism- a philosophic position that is strongly scientific in inspiration and that assumes that meanings exist out in the world, independent of our feelings, attitudes, or beliefs about them. It assumes that the factual nature of things can be established by experimentation and that facts are free of the influence of language and representational systems.

-Photographic images are highly subjective cultural and social artefacts that are influenced by the range of human belief, bias, and expression.

*discourse- in general, the socially organized process of talking about a particular subject matter. According to Michel Foucault, discourse is a body of knowledge that both defines and limits what can be said about something. While there is no set list of discourses, the term tends to be used for broad bodies of social knowledge, such as the discourses of economics, the law, medicine, politics, sexuality, technology, etc.

-In addtion to the initial explosion of portrait photography in the mid-19th century, photography was taken up by scientists and in medical institutions to provide a visual record of experments, to document diseases, and to register scientific data. In modernity, the idea of seeing farther, better, and beyond the human eye had tremendous currency; photography was the quintessential modern medium adied in this quest.

-Scientific images are thus understood as providing the capacity to see “truths” that are not available to the human eye.
-Hospitals, mental institutions, and government agencies all employed photography to catalog subjects, diseases, and ctizens in the late 19th century.

-“The races of man”, written in 1862 by John Beddoe argued that there is a difference, both physical and intellectual, between those in Britain with protruding jaws and those with less prominent jaws.
-The sciene of eugenics, which was devoted to the practie of both studying and controlling human reproduction as a means of improving the human race was founded by Sir Francis Galton…he used measurement and the new method of statistics to read medical and social pathology off the surface of the body.
-In the 19th century, Duchenne de Boulogne, a French physician, used photographs to document his experiments of applying electronic shock to subjects’ faces in order to create a system for understanding facial expression. His aim was to establish the universality of human expression and photography was the essential tool.
-These examples all prove that the creation of images of the “other” was enabled by the use of the camera in the name of scientific inquiry.

*colonialism- the policy of a nation by which it extends its power over another people or territory. The term is used primarily to describe the colonization by European countries of Africa, India, Latin North America, and the Pacific region from the16th through the 20th century. Colonization was motivated by the potential exploitation of 3rd world peope and resources by 1st world nations.

-the role of images in science and as evidence is caught up in the debate about what empirical evidence is and how it can be established.

*empiricism- the science-inspired philosophy that assumes that things exist independent of language and other forms of representation, and can be known unambiguously as positive truths independent of any specific context. An empirical methodology relies on experimentation and data collection to establish particular truths, and is in opposition to theories that see facts and truths as dependent on the context and language system in which they take on meaning.

*direct cinema-closely related to cinema verite, direct cinema involved recording synchronized sound and footage of real-life action spontaneously, as it unfolded before the camera and crew. This technique broke with the use of voice-over narrative that had continued in some of the work of the work of directors like Jean Rouch. Their focus was primarily people in everyday institutions and their inhabitants, from famous political figures to students and teachers, prison inmates and guards.

-There are two different traditions of interpreting visual data. The most immediate one is the history of film analysis. Since the 1970s, film theorists have conducted analyses of motion pictures in which indiviudal frames of the continuous flow of 16 or 35 millimeter images are slowed and selectively frozen. These frames are reproduced as stills and subjected to comparative analysis to discern aspects of meaning lost to the viewer during the images’ rapid and fleeting production. The idea is that we can scientifically break down, abstract, and decode the discrete elements of a visual text in order to arrive at meanings embedded in a film’s textual structure.
-The second method started at the turn of the century. Scientists in physiology and other fields used photographs and motion picture film to conduct frame analyses in order to reveal aspects of a living or moving entity. The idea was that by breaking down and freezing moments in the flow of a body’s or a machine’s continuous process, we might learn something new about its function-something imperceptible to the eye and imperceptible in the unaltered footage.

-In the late 19th century, Eadweard Muybridge used photography in a now-famous study of animal locomotion. Muybridge set up elaborate systems of cameras and trip wires to take a series of images of animals and humans in motion in order to study locomotion.

-Whereas scholars trained in visual analysis would see these techniques as ways of changing meanings, those trained in scientific imaging techniques often regard image manipulation as essential to the process of allowing evidence to emerge.
-In the case of the Rodney King Trial, the reduction of moving images to stills by the defense took it to another level of distortion, precisely because of the way each still could be made to tell an individual narrative.

-Images do not embody truth, but always rely on context and interpretation for their meanings.

-The process through which images change meaning according to variations in context, presentation, textual narrative, and visual re-framing is well illustrated in the history of the x-ray image.
-The xray image, essentially a picture of bone density, suggested to some that the xray gave is practioners superhuman powers
-ultrasound images provide another example of a kind of medical looking that has been invested with public meaning and cultural desires.

*ultrasound- a technique now used in medical diagnosis that uses sounds waves to map soft tissue in the body, and which produces an ultrasound image. Ultrasound is derived from the technology of sonar devices that can measure objects in water

-fetal sonogram serves a purpose beyond machine, in other words, it is not simply a scientific image but a cultural image

-Medical images like ultrasounds and MRIs have also been integrated into nonmedical ads to signify special care of the body or to evoke the authority of scientific knowledge.

-Throughout the history of Western science, the idea that science is a separate social realm, one unaffected by ideologies or politics, has been a central doctrine of the hard sciences. Scholarship in science studies of the last few decades has forcefully pointed out, on the contrary, that what science signifies depends on social, political, and cultural meanings, and what kind of science is practiced and rewarded is a highly political issue

-In Michael Foucault’s terms, we can analyze how the discourses of science, like all discourses, change over time, allowing for new subject positions to emerge and new ways of speaking about science to come into being.

*subject positions-a term used to define those ways that images, whether as films or paintings, etc., designate an ideal position for their intended spectators. For instance, it can be said that particular films offer to their viewers an ideal subject position. There is an ideal spectator of the action film, regardless of how any particular viewer might make personal meaning of the film, and the subject position of a traditional landscape painting is that of a spectator who luxuriates in the fantasy of ownership of sublime and bountiful nature.

-In “The Silent Scream”, ex-abortion doctor Bernard Nathanson mounts a case against the practice of abortion through various tactics including showing the viewer what he describes as real-time ultrasound images of a 12-week “unborn child”, an abortion, and images supposedly of aborted fetuses.

-A rebuttal tape made by Planned Parenthood reveals that “the silent scream” consistently uses older fetuses to give the impression of a bodily form, and manipulates time and motion to make the ultrasound image of an abortion appear to produce the image of it “screaming”
-Whereas “the silent scream” banks on the power of images to reveal the truth, “response to the silent scream” makes the argument that images are easily manipulated and can seduce people into believing things that are not true.

-In his book “Enjoy your symptom”, cultural critic Slavoj Zizek explains that consumers of popular media are not dupes of the media industry; they know they are participating in systems of ideology that work against their interests, but they participate all the same-and they enjoy this participation, as they should.

-In the 1960s, Lennart Nilsson released the 1st fetal images

-The idea that truth lies beneath the surface and needs to be seen to be fully understood, has predominated in Western culture since that time of the Greeks
-French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote “Birth of the Clinic”, an account of the creation of hospital-based teaching and research in 1790s France, is pertinent to discussions of science and visuality, though its particular focus is the clinic and not obstetrics or law. Foucault describes the replacement of traditional methods of diagnosis by reading the surface symptoms of an illness with the practice of anatomical dissection and looking for empirical evidence beyond the physical surfaces of the body. He was also interested in the identification of signs and symptoms, specifically how the “medical gaze” elicited truths hidden within bodies, rather than through direct self-evidence of pathology.


-Increasingly, digital rather than analog technology is being used to map the body, such as the MRI image, and this means in turn that cultural concepts of the body begun to reflect concepts of the digital.

-Just as 19th century scientific practices of measurement were used to shore up ideologies of racial difference, gene therapy is used to map differences among human subjects and has the potential to be used to designate those who are outside the “norm in profoundly troubling ways.

-Dorothy Nelkin and Susan Lindee explain that with the shift to a genetic model had emerged as a new and deeply problematic marker of biological and cultural difference, taking the place of 19th century physiognomy.

-some feel that genetics constructs the “truth” of the body as a secret that science cannot readily see

-As Jose Van Dijck explains, during the same period that Marshall McLuhan espoused the view that the medium is the message, geneticists minded his communications theory for metaphors to describe the body as a medium of communication

-In other words, science does not necessarily become freer of ideology but finds new ways to make that ideology less evident and therefore more embedded and inisidious.
-The visual technique of morphing, for instance, makes it difficult to distinguish between one person and another, thus, collapsing the boundaries between bodies that were once considered inviolable.
-Artist Nancy Burson has been a major force in the development of morphing not only in the art world, but in the crossover between art, science, and the broader culture. In the late 1980s, Burson was instrumental in developing computer software that contributed to the ability to take a photograph of an individual and make it “age”-that is, to create a virtual rendering of the person as they could be predicted to look many years after the photograph was taken.

-Mona Hatoum, a Lebanese artist living in exile in Britain, uses the body as a metaphor for social struggle. Hatoum turns the feminist phrase “the personal is political” to an investigation of the body as a site of contested meanings and political struggle.

*cyborg- a term originally proposed by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in 1960 to describe “self-regulating man-machine systems” or cybernetic organisms. Since that time, the cyborg has been theorized, most famously by Donna Haraway, as a means to consider the relationship of human subjects to technology, and the subjectivity of late capitalism, biomedicine, and computer technology.

-The cyborg has its roots in early computer science. It was prominently theorized by cultural and science studies theorist Donna Haraway in her essay “The Cyborg Manifesto” as a means to think about the transformation of subjectivity in a late capitalist world of science, technology, and biomedicine.

-Haraway wrote the body-technology relationship as one filled with potential for imagining and building new worlds.

-The genre of science fiction in literature, film, and television has had an important influence on the popular imagination of science and scientific practices.

-Science and the popular and news media, then, work in complexly interwoven ways to forge new ways of looking, and new ways of receiving these new ways of looking.

Chapter 9 notes from reading

*globalization-a term used increasingly toward the end of the 20th century to describe a set of conditions escalating since the postwar period. The conditions include increased rates of migration, the rise of multinational corporations, the development of global communications and transportation systems, and the decline of the sovereign nation state, and the “shrinking” of the world through commerce and communication.

*convergence-a term that refers to the increased combination of media together into one point of access. The potential combination of communication technologies such as computers, t.v., film, fax, and telephone into one interconnected multimedia system is the vision of media convergence of many proponents of new technology.

*synergy-a term used in industry to describe the ways that corporate conglomerates own aspects of cultural production, programming, and distribution across many media and into many geographic locales. Synergy thus refers to the capacity of corporations that own across many media such as broadcast networks, cable television, movie studios, film distribution companies, magazines and other publishing entities, to both vertically integrate across programming and distribution and horizontally market products globally.

-With the wiring of the world, the rapid development of wireless communications, and the rise of multinational corporations, many critics feel there has been a collapse of geographic distance and national boundaries-hence a globalization of economics, technology, and culture.

*hybridity- a term referring to anything of mixed origins that has been used in contemporary theory to describe those people whose identities are derived simultaneously from many cultural origins and ethnicities. Hybridity has been used to describe diasporic cultures that are neither in one place or the other but of many places.

-The media have been important forces in the changing status of the nationstate and the move toward a global economy.

*diaspora- the existence of various communities, usually of a particular ethnicity, culture, or nation, scattered across places outside of their land of origin or homeland. There are, for instance, large diasporic communities of Jews throughout the world, and of East Indians in England.

*World Wide Web-the internet information server that uses hypertext as its primary navigation tool. The World Wide Web includes multimedia: images, graphics, audio, and video in the form of web sites and pages that can be accessed and downloaded by viewers through browsers

*Third world-a term coined in the post-World War II period, which refers to the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This was in response to the concept in political theory of the world divided into West and East with two major super powers, USA, and USSR. These countries established themselves as a third world rather than taking sides with Eastern or Western superpowers.

-T.v., the internet, the world wide web have been extolled for erasing national boundaries and creating cross-cultural exchange.

*global village-a term coined by Marshall McLuhan to refer to the ways that media can connect people from all over the world into communities, hence to give the collective sense of a village to groups that are separated geographically. McLuhan stated that the global village was created by instant electronic communication.

-The globalization of media and industry has also been criticized for facilitating unchecked capitalist interests at the expense of communities.
-Media scholars Herbert Schiller and James Ledbetter hold that the new digital media are in fact the tools of big business. Their argument is that the corporate expansion of the late 20th century is not dissimilar to the political practice of colonialism that existed in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

-Disney-Capital cities is a global enterprise is capable of creating, packaging, and distributing entertainment, news, and sports programming in the USA and oversees

-Schiller makes the case that the global expansion of corporations hardly translates into access to media production and information for 3rd world countries. What corporations are seeking is cheap labor, natural resources, and new audiences or consumers for their services and goods.

-T.v. emerged in 3rd world countries not because of local popular or market demands, but because of smart global marketing plans on the part of mostly American and European industrial interests.
-By the mid-1970s, every country of the 3rd world with a population over 10 million had introduced t.v.

-global media including t.v., marketing, and the web ignore the laws of borders

-There are several frameworks that we can use to understand the circulation of images around the world. One framework is the concept of cultural imperialism.

*cultural imperialism-refers to how ways of life are exported into other territories through cultural products and popular culture. Because it is the center of the production of global pop culture and has economic power, the U.S. is often accused of cultural imperialism

-Communications theorists including Armand Mattelart and Herbert Schiller argue that t.v. is a means through which world powers like the USA and the USSR invade the cultural and ideological space of a country with images and messages, in place of an all-out military invasion.

-In 1985, the Reagan administration instituted Radio Marti…this was intended to provide a message of democracy to Cuba
-According to some critics, t.v. marti violated the spirit, if not the word, of the 1982 International Telecommunications Convention that determined that a country’s air space, like its land, was a part of its domestic property and hence these boundaries must not be violated.

-Communication scholar Armand Mattelart and cultural critic Ariel Dorfman wrote a scathing analysis of the role played by the seemingly innocuous figure of Donald Duck in promulgating US imperialism in Latin America, titled “How to read Donald duck”. They argue that Donald Duck and various other innocent Disney characters and stories presumably aimed at child audiences in fact were targeted also at adult viewers; that the narratives of these cartoons modeled for their adult 3rd world viewers a relationship of dutiful respect for and submission to US paternal authority.

-They believe that in a postcolonial world where overt measures of domination were no longer feasible, the innocuous visual images of Donald Duck and his cartoon cohorts were ideal venues for charming unwitting Latin American audiences into submission and conformity, making their adoption of US ideology palatable and even pleasurable.

*postcolonialism- a term that refers to the cultural and social context of countries that were formerly defined in relationships of colonialism, in the contemporary mix of former colonies, neocolonialism, and continuing colonialism. The term refers to the broad set of changes that have affected these countries, and in particular to the mix of identities, languages, and influences that have resulted from complex systems of dependence and independence.

-The growth of multinationals and the related emergence of a global information system to carry ads and other information results in homogenization-a collapse of borders and distances, and of differences of taste, language, and meaning. But they also result in the emergence of specific cultural and national identities under the sign of the brand, rather than under the sign of an empire.
-The local has also emerged as a marketable concept. Many ads attach the meaning of local regions to their products to give them a folksy connotation and counter their meaning of local regions to their products to give them a folksy connotation and counter their image as distant corporate conglomerates

-Many contemporary theorists have analyzed the global movement of people and commodities as indicative of the ways that the model of 3rd and 1st world divisions no longer make sense, if they ever did

-One model for rethinking the distinctions between cultures undergoing globalization has been suggested by anthropologist Arjun Appadural. He uses the suffix “scapes”, derived from the geographical metaphor of landscapes as a framework for thinking about particular sorts of global flows. Ex) Ethnoscapes are groups of people of similar ethnicities who move across borders in roles such as refugees, tourists, exiles, and guest workers. This allows for a critique of the different power relations within these cultural and economic movements and exchanges of products, people, and capital.

-While the dominance of cultural producers in creating and disseminating messages to varying markets of consumers is evident, it is also the case that cultural difference may allow for a broad range of responses to images.

-French anthropologist Jean Rouch produced a series of films in the 1950s in which he tried to get Western audiences to see the world through the eyes of the African people he filmed, inviting these subjects to participate with him in the scripting process and training them in film production.

-For diasporic and exiled peoples, t.v. programming aired across national boundaries and narrowcast to their own communities can be a vital lifeline.
-Telemundo and Univision similarly offer programming in Spanish with cultural issues and formats meant to appeal to geographically and even culturally broad groups of people.

-While many critics see the internet as a new, more democratic mode of communication, others see it as a form through which corporations are taking control of public dialog and global markets

-The internet was originally designed as a communications system that would not break down in the event of a nuclear war.

-One early on-line model that demonstrates the internet’s potential for democratic exchange is Usenet. Started in 1979 by two grad students, its founders thought the system would be use to raise discussions about computer operating systems, but it evolved into an anarchic body of newsgroups far from academic interests.
-Usernet was the prototype for the use of the internet as a public space of communications open to everyone, not just to academics and military personnel.

-It is precisely because of its decentralized technology, which has allowed it to be a truly international medium with a global reach, that the internet is extremely difficult to regulate.

-The development of computer imaging, multimedia, and hypertext made possible the emergence of the web as a commercial entity in the early 1990s.
-The ethos of universality and the idea of a web-like structure that would make all information universally available are widely regarded as having originated with computer pioneer Vannevar Bush, who wrote of a “memex”, a conceptual machine that could store vast amounts of information in trails of links of related text and illustrations.

*graphical user interface-the design in computer software and in the world wide web that allows users to make choices, enact commands, and move around through the use of graphics and images rather than text.

-The web has facilitated a broad range of expressive activities including new kinds of publications, ones that are cheap to make with access to the software, and which have potential global audiences. It can thus be said that the internet and wwweb have dramatically changed the power relations between producers and consumers in the mass media.

-one area of the web in which issues of regulation, access, and rights is played out with great force is on-line pornography.

*phenomenology- a philosophical position that centers on the dimensions of subjective human experience in how we react bodily and emotionally as well as intellectually to the world around us. It emphasizes the importance of the lived body in how we experience and make meaning of the world.

Images by Michael Ray Charles

Michael Ray Charles' images (specifically the ones on "Artnet") are amazing! The images, which mainly portray African American stereotypes, provoke the viewer to contemplate deep issues. By painting the stereotypes in a "silly" manner, such as the "Dress Your Best" painting which features a young black male dressed in baggy clothing, it portrays the message that it is absurd to think that these stereotypes are in fact reality. (It doesn't hurt that Charles is an amazing artist!)

Thursday, February 7

Chapter 7 Reading Notes

-For French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, simulation is the new image paradigm that replaces representation.
-Simulacra stand on their own without requiring recourse to real objects or worlds elsewhere. Within Baudrillard’s terms, the hyperreal overtakes the real and simulacra rise, partly through new media forms, as the new forms of postmodern existence.

*hyperreal-a term coined by French theorist Jean Baudrillard that refers to a world in which codes of reality are used to simulate reality in cases where there is no referent in the real world. Hyperreality is thus a simulation of reality in which various elements function to emphasize their “realness”.

-Postmodernism dispels the idea that surface does not contain meaning in itself, or that structures lie beneath the mask of surface appearances.

*surface-the idea in postmodernism that objects have no depth or profound meaning, but instead exist only at the level of surface. This is in contrast to the idea in modernism that the real meaning or something is below the surface and can be found through acts of interpretation.

-It is hard to identify a precise origin for postmodernism, though most critics associate it with the period after 1968.
-Some theorists have used the term “postmodern” to describe the postwar “cultural logic of late capitalism”, a phrase famously used by cultural critic Fredric Jameson as the subtitle of his 1991 book on postmodernism.

*globalization-a term used increasingly toward the end of the 20th century to describe a set of conditions escalating since the postwar period. These conditions include increased rates of migration, the rise of multinational corporations, the development of global communications and transportation systems, and the decline of the sovereign nation-state, and the shrinking of the world through commerce and communication.

-It is widely agreed that there is no precise moment of rupture between the modern and the postmodern.
-It is important to remember that aspects of postmodernism and modernism have coexisted throughout and since the last decades of the 20th century.

~Modernism~
-German scholar Jurgen Habermas explains that the concept of the modern has been used over and over again by societies since as long ago as the late 5th century. In these uses, the term expresses the self-consciousness of an epoch that relates itself to a past in antiquity, in order to view itself as the result of a transition from old to new or to model itself on a classical past.
-Modernity reached its height in the 19th century and into the early 20th century, with the increased movement of populations from rural communities into cities and the escalation of industrial capitalism.

-The feeling that life was undergoing a revolutionary change also produced a general cultural anxiety. The breaking down of traditions allowed for people to have a sense of infinite possibilities, yet also generated fears about the loss of the security of those traditions.
-Modernism was based on the traditional idea of the human subject. The subject is understood in this context as self-knowing, unified, and whole.
-This concept of the subject was revised by a broad array of contemporary thinkers during the period of modernity. (Freud wrote about the subject as an entity governed by the forces of the unconscious. Marx emphasized that human beings were collectively the products of and in the control of the forces of labor and capital. Foucault saw the subject as an entity produced within and through the discourses and institutional practices of the Enlightenment)

*discourses-in general, the socially organized process of talking about a particular subject matter. According to Michel Foucault, discourse is a body of knowledge that both defines and limits what can be said about something.

*repression-a term in psychoanalytic theory that refers to the process by which the individual relegates to and keeps within the unconscious those particular thoughts, feelings, memories, or desires that are too difficult to deal with. Freud postulated that we repress that which produces fear, anxiety, shame, or other negative emotions within us, an that this repression is active and ongoing.

-Foucault took Freud’s idea that we repress emotions, desires, and anxieties unconsciously in order to keep them in check, and proposed instead that repression does not result in leaving things unsaid or in inaction. Instead, repression is productive of activities, meanings, and sexualities.

*pastiche-a style of plagiarizing, quoting, and borrowing from previous styles with no reference to history or a sense of rules. In architecture, a pastiche would be a mixing of classical motifs with modern elements in an aesthetic that does not reference the historical meanings of those styles. Pastiche is an aspect of postmodern style.

-In art, modernism was characterized by radical styles that questioned traditions of representational painting.

*Abstract expressionism-a style of abstract art, which prevailed in the post-World War II era until the mid-1950s in the U.S. and Europe, that was characterized by an emphasis on abstraction as expressive of contemporary anxiety.

-Concept, process, and performance were essential aspects of many modern artists’ practices, and were the source of categories designating subtypes of modern art.

*conceptual art- a style of art that emerged in the 1960s that focused on the idea of concept over material object. An attempt to counter the increased commercialism of the art world, conceptual art presented ideas rather than art works that could be bought and sold , and thus worked to shift the focus to the creative process and away from the art market.

*sublime-a term in aesthetic theory, specifically in the work of 18th century theorist Edmund Burke, that sets out to evoke experiences so momentous that they inspire intense venerations in the viewer or listener.

-an emphasis on form in modernism was also expressed as a kind of reflexivity in which the artwork comments on itself and its own process of production.

*reflexivity-the practice of making viewers aware of the material and technical means of production by featuring those aspects as the “content” of a cultural production. Reflexivity is both a part of the tradition of modernism, with its emphasis on form, and of postmodernism with its array of intertextual references and ironic marking of the frame of the image and its status as a cultural product.

*cinema verite-a movement of documentary cinema in the 1960s, in some contexts referred to as direct cinema, that promoted a naturalistic, supposedly unmediated recording of reality through the use of long takes with minimal editing, hand-held cameras, and the rejection of voice-over narration and scripts.

*direct cinema-closely related to cinema verite, direct cinema involved recording synchronized sound and footage of real-life action spontaneously, as it unfolded before the camera and crew.

~Postmodernism~
-postmodernism describes a set of conditions and practices occurring in late modernity.
-Modernism and postmodernism are not concepts that are strictly period-specific.
-The term “postmodernity” refers to the experience of living in a postmodern culture, and the upheaval of modernist principles and frameworks that involves.

-Postmodernism is often described as a questioning of the master narratives of society.

*Master narratives-a framework that aims to comprehensively explain all aspects of a society or world. Examples include religion, science, Marxism, etc. that intend to explain all facets of life.

-French theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard characterized postmodern theory as profoundly skeptical of these metanarratives, their universalism, and the premise that they could define the human condition.
-One could say that postmodernism’s central goal is to put all assumptions under scrutiny in order to reveal the values that underlie all systems of thought, and thus to question the ideologies within them that are seem as natural. This means that the idea of authenticity is always in question in postmodernism.

*presence-the quality of immediate experience that has been traditionally contrasted with representation and with those aspects of world that are the product of human mediation. The quality of being “present” has thus been understood historically to mean that one can be in the world in a way that is direct and experienced through the senses, and unmediated by human belief, ideologies, language systems, or forms of representation.

-Postmodernism asserts that there is no such thing as a pure, unmediated experience.

*polysemy-the quality of having many potential meanings. A work of art whose meaning is ambiguous is polysemic because it can have many different meanings to different viewers

-postmodernism emphasizes irony and a sense of one’s own involvement in low or popular culture.

*parody-cultural productions that make fun of more serious works through humor and satire while maintaining some of their elements such as plot or character.

~Reflexivity~
-self-awareness of one’s inevitable immersion in everyday and popular culture has led some postmodern artists to produce works which reflexivity examine their own position in relation to the artwork.
-The early work of photographer Cindy Sherman is a good example of this approach. Sherman produced a series of photographs in which she struck poses evoking actresses in film stills.
-Rather than taking a critical stance from outside the image and its mode of production, Sherman inserts herself not only into the image but into the process of its production.
-Her double position as both producer of the scene and object of the gaze, introduces an edge of irony and reflexivity that sets her work apart from its more popular counterparts.

*referent-In semiotics, a terms that refers to the object itself, as opposed to its representation.

-Postmodern theory sees the surface as the primary element of social life, as opposed to the idea that the true meaning is hidden underneath.
-Bertolt Brecht, a well known German Marxist playwright and critic of the 1920s and 30s, proposed the concept of distanciation as a technique for getting viewers to extract themselves from the narrative in order to see the means through which it gets us to buy into ideology.

~The Copy, pastiche, and institutional critique~
*replicas- a copy of an art work that was produced by the original artist or under his/her supervision. A replica of a painting therefore would be another painting that had been made to be as close to it as possible. A replica is not an exact copy or a reproduction.

-One of the foundational texts of postmodernism is Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas, a 1977 book that takes readers through a tour of the architectural appropriations that line the glitzy, sordid, consumer-oriented streets of Las Vegas at the low end of popular architectural culture.

-Postmodern architecture can be seen as a kind of plagiarizing, quoting, and borrowing of previous and current styles.
-In modernism, style follows a linear course. In postmodernism, styles can be mixed with no sense that we are moving toward something better.
-The notion that perhaps nothing new can be made, which implies to a certain degree that the idea of something completely new is a fallacy, is a fundamental aspect of postmodern art. Here, then, not only does the copy have the same value as the original, it often functions to completely undermine the idea of original value and authenticity.

-Much postmodern art is not concerned with representing reality but with rethinking the function of art and emphasizing the role of institutional context in producing meaning.

~Popular culture: parody and reflexivity~
*intertextuality-the referencing of one text within another. In popular culture, intertextuality refers to the incorporation of meanings of one text within another in a reflexive fashion.

-in advertising, intertextuality means to tap into consumers’ memories of other ads, and to speak to consumers as savvy viewers.

~Addressing the postmodern consumer~
*metacommunication-a discussion or exchange in which the topic is the exchange taking place itself. In pop culture, this refers to ads or television shows in which the topic is the viewer’s act of viewing the cultural product.

-metacommunication can be thought of as a postmodern strategy of addressing viewers/consumers, in that it appears to address viewers as more sophisticated and knowing.

*commodity sign- a term that refers to the semiotic meaning of a commodity that is constructed in an advertisement. The representation of a commodity, or the product itself, and its meaning together form the commodity sign.

*hyperrealism-a term coined by French theorist Jean Baudrillard that refers to a world in which codes of reality are used to simulate reality in cases where there is no referent in the real world. Hyperreality is thus a simulation of reality in which various elements function to emphasize their “realness”. In postmodern style, hyperrealism refers to the use of naturalistic effects to give an advertisement , for example, the look of a realist documentary yet which is understood to be a construction of the real.

-In general, postmodern anti-ads discuss their products little if at all. Instead, they do the work of establishing a tone which will then be associated with their brand name.

-Postmodernism addresses viewers as both complex readers and media and image conscious individuals.
-Postmodernism is also about acknowledging the overlap between the categories of art, commerce, news, and advertising.
-Postmodernism signals the rise of a generalized self-consciousness, which can be seen in both the reflexivity and the metacommunication of postmodern style and in the constant questioning of traditional metanarratives in all facets of everyday life.

KEY TERMS
*postmodernism- Art, architecture, or literature that reacts against earlier modernist principles, as by reintroducing traditional or classical elements of style or by carrying modernist styles or practices to extremes.

*postmodernism (Wikipedia)- a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding, modernism, which is equally esoteric. Largely influenced by the disillusionment induced by the Second World War, postmodernism tends to refer to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, and interconnectedness or interreferentiality.

*Popular culture- Low (as opposed to high) culture, parts of which are known as kitsch and camp. With the increasing economic power of the middle- and lower-income populace since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, artists created various new diversions to answer the needs of these groups. These have included pulp novels and comic books, film, television, advertising, "collectibles," and tract housing.

*conceptual art- a style of art that emerged in the 1960s that focused on the idea of concept over material object. An attempt to counter the increased commercialism of the art world, conceptual art presented ideas rather than art works that could be bought and sold , and thus worked to shift the focus to the creative process and away from the art market.

*Found art (the ready made)- describes art created from the undisguised, but often modified, use of objects that are not normally considered art, often because they already have a mundane, utilitarian function. Marcel Duchamp was the originator of this in the early 20th-century.

*Assemblage -is an artistic process in which a three-dimensional artistic composition is made from putting together found objects.

*Appropriation- To appropriate something involves taking possession of it. In the visual arts, the term appropriation often refers to the use of borrowed elements in the creation of new work. The borrowed elements may include images, forms or styles from art history or from popular culture, or materials and techniques from non-art contexts.

*Sampling in Music- In music, sampling is the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or element of a new recording.

*Dada- is a cultural movement that began in neutral Zürich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1920. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature (poetry, art manifestoes, art theory), theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti war politic through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works.

*Surrealism- An art movement of the early 20th century in both literature and the visual arts that focused on the role of the unconscious in representation and in dismantling the opposition between the real and the imaginary. The Surrealists were interested in unlocking the unconscious and working against the rational.

*Marcel Duchamp- Marcel Duchamp- (1887 – 1968) was a French artist (he became an American citizen in 1955) whose work and ideas had considerable influence on the development of post-World War II Western art, and whose advice to modern art collectors helped shape the tastes of the Western art world. While he is most often associated with the Dada and Surrealism movements. His works include dubbing a urinal “art” and naming it The Fountain.
*Sherrie Levine- (1947 in Hazleton, Pennsylvania) is a photographer and conceptual artist. Much of her work is in the form of very direct image appropriation. Levine is best known for the work shown in "After Walker Evans," her 1981 solo exhibition at the Metro Pictures gallery. The works consist of famous Walker Evans photographs, rephotographed by Levine out of an Evans exhibition catalog, and then presented as Levine's artwork with no further manipulation of the images.
*Michael Ray Charles (1967- ) is an African American painter born in Lafayette, Louisiana. His graphically styled paintings investigate racial stereotypes drawn from a history of American advertising, product packaging, billboards, radio jingles, and television commercials. Charles lives in Texas and teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. Of his most recent works, The Three Graces is a sculpture that draws up the KKK.

Thursday, January 31

Chapter 6 Notes from Reading

-Images are not free. Images have a primary role in the functioning of commerce through advertisements. This means that images are a central aspect of commodity culture and of consumer societies dependent upon the constant production and consumption of goods in order to function.

*commodity-goods marketed to consumers in a commodity culture.

-Ads present social values and ideologies about what the “good life” is.

*abstraction-the quality of being conceived apart from concrete realities. In advertising, the term is used to describe the fantasy world that is created by ads, in which they abstract us as viewers away from out everyday world, suspend its normal laws, and offer us instead a space of desire defined by imagination.

*strategy- a term used by French theorist Michel de Certeau to describe the practices by which dominant institutions seek to structure time, place, and actions of their social subjects.

*tactics-a term used by French theorist Michel de Certeau to indicate those practices deployed by people who are not in positions of power to gain some control over the spaces of their daily lives. De Certeau defined tactics as the acts of the weak which do not have lasting effect.

-In the world of advertising, images can be presented as art, science, documentary evidence, or personal memories.

~Consumer Society~
-Advertising is one of the primary means through which the exchange of goods is promoted in capitalism.
-In a consumer society, there are great social and physical distances between the manufacture of goods and their purchase and use.
-Increased industrialization and bureaucratization in the late 19th century meant a decrease in the number of small entrepreneurs and an increase in large manufacturers; this in turn resulted in people traveling longer distances to work. As places filled with mobile crowds, mass transit and city streets became forums for advertising.

-In Marxist theory, it is understood that capitalism is dependent upon the overproduction of goods and the need for workers to be consumers and spend large sums on mass-produced goods.
-In a consumer society, a large segment of the population must have discretionary income and leisure time.
-During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the department store announced itself as a site of both commerce and leisure.

-Charles Baudelaire (French poet) wrote about 19th century urban landscapes as the visual terrain for the flaneur, a man who strolled the streets as an observer, never quite engaging in his surroundings but taking an interest in them.

*flaneur-A French term 1st popularized by 19th century poet Charles Baudelaire that refers to a person who wanders city streets, taking in the sights, especially those of consumer society.

-Walter Benjamin also wrote about the flaneur and the complex shopping arcades of 19th century Paris.
-Friedberg introduces the concept of the flaneuse. As window shopping became an important activity, this allowed for the flaneuse, as a window shopper to emerge in more contemporary contexts.

*flaneuse-The flaneur was traditionally male, but criticism has caused theorists to develop the concept of the flaneuse as the female equivalent.

-One of the fundamental changes in the turn-of-the-century Euro-American societies that was integral to the rise of consumer culture was the emergence of what historian T.J. Jackson Lears calls the “therapeutic ethos”. These societies shifted over a period of time from valorizing a Protestant work ethic, civil responsibility, and self-denial to legitimating ideas of leisure, spending, and individual fulfillment.
-As a result, the idea that everyone was potentially inadequate and in need of improvement took hold.
-Modern advertisements were able increasingly to speak to problems of anxiety an identity crisis.

~Commodity culture and commodity fetishism~
-The concept of commodity culture is intricately allied with the idea that we construct our identities, at least in part, through the consumer products that inhabit our lives.

*commodity self-a term, coined by Stuart Ewen, that refers to how we construct our identities, at least in part, through the consumer products that inhabit our lives. The concept of commodity self implies that our selves, if not our subjectivities, are mediated and constructed in part thorough our identification with commodity signs.

-Advertising encourages consumers to thing of commodities as central means through which to convey their personalities.

-Communication theorist Michael Schudson has argued that the ability of advertising to sell specific products is much overrated. Advertisers are more often than not guessing rather than accurately assessing consumer desires and attitudes.

*exchange value-the monetary value that gets assigned to a commodity in a consumer culture. When an object is seen in terms of its exchange value, its economic worth is more important than what it can be used for.

*use value-the practical function originally assigned to an object, in other words, what it does. This is in contrast to its exchange value, which is what is paid for it. Marxist theory critiques the emphasis in capitalism on exchange value over use value.

*commodity fetishism-the process through which commodities are emptied of the meaning of their production and filled instead with abstract meaning. In Marxism, commodity fetishism is the process of mystification that exists in capitalism between what things are and how they appear. It also describes the process by which special life powers are attributed to commodities rather than to other elements in social life.

*reification- a term from Marxist theory that describes the process by which abstract ideas are rendered concrete. This means, in part, the material objects, such as commodities, are awarded the characteristics of human subjects, while relations between human beings become more objectified.

*connotative meaning- In semiotics, all the social, cultural, and historical meanings that are added to a sign’s literal meaning. Connotative meanings rely on the cultural and historical context of the image and its viewers’ lived, felt knowledge of those circumstances.

-The Frankfurt school theorists saw commodities as hollowed out objects which propagated a loss of identity and eroded our sense of history.

~Addressing the Consumer~
*appellation-the process in advertising by which an ad speaks directly to the viewer/consumer. This many occur in the use of the term “you” in text or spoken workds, or may be implied in the address of the ad.

*pseudoindividuality-a term used in Marxist theory to describe the way that mass culture creates a false sense of individuality in cultural consumers. It refers to the effect of pop culture and advertising that addresses the viewer/consumer specifically as an individual, while it is speaking to many people at once.

-it can be said that advertising asks us not to consumer commodities but to consume signs in the semiotic meaning of the term.

-a brand is a product name that we know about whether or not we own or ever intend to purchase the product.
-The strategy of repeating a motif in an advertising campaign can be used not only to establish familiarity with a product for viewers, but also to keep viewers’ attention by varying the elements within a motif.

*presumption of relevance-in advertising, the manner of speaking that makes the presumption that the issues presented are of utmost importance.

*equivalence-a term used in applications of semiotics to refer to the establishment in an image of a relationship between elements within the frame or between a product and its signifier.

*differentiation- in advertising, the strategies to differentiate or distinguish wualities of one product or one brand from another.

~Images and Text~
*photographic truth-as images produced by the mechanical device of a photographic camera, photographs have the power to project images of the truth and to be seen as unmediated copies of reality. The myth of photographic truth means that photographs are understood to be evidence of actual people, events, and objects of the past, even through they are relatively easy to manipulate.

-Text can often have a powerful effect in establishing the meaning of an advertisement, and changing the meaning of the photograph or image presented.

*connoisseur- a person who is particularly skilled at discerning quality in a particular art. The term connoisseur is a class-based concept that has been traditionally used to refer to those with “discriminating” taste, i.e. those of an upper-class status.

-The enviable world of advertising is thus presented to viewers as a fantasy of what their lives could be, and it entices consumers to believe that this life is attainable through the act of consumption.

*docile bodies- a term used by Michel Foucault to describe the process by which social subjects submit bodily to social norms.

*lack- a term used in psychoanalysis by Jacques Lacan to describe an essential aspect of the human psyche. According to Lacan, the human subject is defined by lack from the moment of birth and his or her separation from the mother. The subject is lacking because it is believed to be a fragment of something larger and more primordial. The human sense of always wanting something that is out of reach or unattainable is a result of lack.

~Belonging and difference~
-ads sell both concepts of belonging and difference.

*counter-hegemony- the forces in a given society that work against dominant meaning and power systems, and keep in constant tension and flux those dominant meanings.

*Bricolage-the practice of working with whatever materials are at hand. As a cultural practice, it refers to the activity of taking consumer products and commodities and making them one’s own by giving them new meaning.

-Fashion designers and advertisers use a form of counter-bricolage to appropriate styles which have reconfigured commodities. They repackage the youth styles that use bricolage to change the meaning of commodities and resell those ideas to mainstream consumers.
*counter-bricolage-the practice used by advertisers and marketers of manufacturing and selling as commodities aspects of bricolage style. For example, counter-bricolage occurs when certain youth styles are created to change the meaning of commodities and those styles are then appropriated by manufacturers and packaged and sold to consumers.

~The Brand~
-philosopher Jean Baudrillard has suggested that the late 19th century saw the emergence of a commodity culture in which the distinction between objects and images eroded. Instead of a real world of objects to which ads refer, we see the emergence of a culture in which the image itself is what we live through and consume. Identity is no longer the signifier of a product. Rather, identity is the pure product that we consumer, either as information or as image.

~Anti-ad practices~
-artist Hans Haacke has created a whole series of works that use the codes of advertising as forums for political critique. In 1978, he reworked a series of advertisements for Leyland Vehicles in which he incorporated info about the company’s practices in South Africa during apartheid, and created new slogans for the company such as “a breed apart”

KEY WORDS
*Sigmund Freud- (1856 –1939), was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the defense mechanism of repression. He is also renowned for his redefinition of sexual desire as the primary motivational energy of human life which is directed toward a wide variety of objects; as well as his therapeutic techniques, including his theory of transference in the therapeutic relationship and the presumed value of dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires.

*Jacques Lacan - (1901 –1981) was a French psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and doctor, who made prominent contributions to the psychoanalytic movement. Lacan's ideas centered on Freudian concepts such as the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego, focusing on identifications, and the centrality of language to subjectivity.
Lacan on desire- Lacan follows Spinoza in arguing that "desire is the essence of man." Desire is simultaneously the heart of human existence and the central concern of psychoanalysis. However, when Lacan talks about desire, it is not any kind of desire he is referring to, but always unconscious desire.

*John Peter Berger- (born 1926) is an art critic, novelist, painter and author. The best-known among his many works include the novel G., winner of the 1972 Booker Prize, and the introductory essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing.

*Madonna- (born 1958) is an American pop singer-songwriter, musician, dancer, record producer, film producer, actress and author. She is known for the use of sexual, social and religious themes in her work. Madonna has cited her Catholic and Italian background as major influences in her life and career.

Tuesday, January 29th

Chapter 5 Reading Notes
-we tend to experience the mass media as a system that operates whether or not we are watching.
*Mass media= has been used to define those media designed to reach large audiences perceived to have shared interests. Refers to forms and texts that work in unison to generate specific dominant or popular representations of events, people and places. The primary mass media are radio, t.v., the cinema, and the press including newspapers and magazines. Also, the internet and digital multimedia.

*digital- representing data by means of discrete digits, and encoding that data mathematically. Digital technologies involve a process of encoding information in bits and assigning each a mathematical value.

-John Fiske- argues that radio and t.v. changed the dynamic of the flow of information by making more info directly available to non-literate people, thus making a more democratic flow.

*appropriation-the act of borrowing, stealing, or taking over others’ meanings to one’s own ends. Cultural appropriation is the process of borrowing and changing the meaning of commodities, cultural products, slogans, images, or elements of fashion.

*post-colonialism- a term that refers to the cultural and social context of countries that were formally defined in relationships to colonialism, in the contemporary mix of former colonies, neocolonialism, and continuing colonialism. The term postcolonial refers to the broad set of changes that have affected these countries, and in particular to the mix of identities, languages, and influences that have resulted from complex systems of dependence and independence.

*medium- a form in which artistic or cultural products are made. In art, a medium refers to the art materials used to create a work. In communication, medium refers to a means of mediation or communication- an intermediary form through which messages pass. The term medium also refers to specific technologies through which messages are transmitted (for ex- radio or t.v.)
-media is the plural form of medium
-The medium itself has a major impact on the message it conveys
-There is no such thing as a message without a medium

*phenomenology- a philosophical position that centers on the dimensions of subjective human experience in how we react bodily and emotionally as well as intellectually to the world around us. It emphasizes the importance of the lived body in how we experience and make meaning of the world. Its main theorists are Edmund Husserl and Maruice Merleau-Ponty.

Raymond Williams wrote about…
*Television flow- the concept that viewers’ experience of t.v. involves an ongoing rhythm that incorporates interruption (such as changes b/w programs and commercials)

-masses is a term that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries to describe shifts in the way people live in Western Industrialized countries.
-the rise in mass media occurred during modernity

*Mass society- describes social formations in Europe and the U.S. that began during the early period of industrialization and culminated after WWII
-The rise of mass culture- relates to the rise of urban populations after the war

*Broadcast media- media that are transmitted from one central point to many different receiving points
-mass society receives a majority of info from broadcast media

In the 1980s and 1990s, narrowcast media rose and mass media is less pervasive
*narrowcast media- media that have a limited range through which to reach audiences and hence are capable of carrying programming tailored to audiences that are more specific than broadcast media.

-The term, “the media”, as a singular entity can be used to describe the effect of media forms as a whole upon the formation of a mass or public culture.
-one of the most important roles of the media in contemporary culture is to facilitate social spheres for public debate and action.
-we most fully influence broadcast media in the ways we use it, not at the levels of its production or distribution.

*multidirectional communication- media that operate in several directions, in contrast to broadcast media that transmit in one direction only. Ex) internet
*one-way broadcasting- centralized networks and producers transmit media texts to vast numbers of listeners or viewers over a broad geographical region.

-broadcast media allows for global communications
-narrowcast media is community based t.v.

-rise of cable in 1970s allowed for a reemergence of narrowcast with channels geared towards certain communications.

~Critiques of Mass Media~
-mass media has a great deal of power and is thus often critiqued
-some have said that mass broadcasting fostered conformity to dominant ideas about politics and culture
-current critics argue that electronic technologies are powerful new tools for propaganda
-one critical perspective understands the mass media inherently to be forms of propaganda …ex) nazi films

*Representation- the act of portraying, depicting, symbolizing, or presenting the likeness of something. Language, the visual arts, and media are systems of representation that function to depict and symbolize aspects of the real world.

*Spectacle-a term that generally refers to something that is striking or impressive in its visual display. The term was used by Guy Debord in his book Society of the Spectacle to describe how representations dominate contemporary culture and all social relations are mediated by and through images.

*Futurism-an Italian avant-garde movement that was inspired by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto”. The Futurists were interested in breaking free of tradition, and embraced the idea of speed and the future.

*Surrealism-an art movement of the early 20th century in both literature and the visual arts that focused on the role of the unconscious in representation and in dismantling the opposition between the real and the imaginary.

-Guy Debord- in 1967, he wrote “Society of the Spectacle”. He was a founding member of situationist international. This group sought to blur the distinction b/w art and life, and called for a constant transformation of lived experience. In his book, he describes how the social order of the late 20th century global economy exerts its influence through representations. He later wrote about the concept of integrated spectacle, which exerts greater control over the spectacle.
-Jean Baudrillard- made the case that the experience of simulation in realms like cyberspace transcends that of the real. Simulacra are copies without originals.

*simulation-refers to a sign that does not clearly have a real-life counterpart. The term “simulation” is often used to describe aspects of post-modern culture in which copies and realities get blurred.

-The idea of hypodermic effect of the mass media refers to an increased passivity in viewers “drugged” by media texts with less explicitly political messages than the overtly propagandistic media text.

-The concept of a narcotic effect refers to the way that time spent with the media replaces actual participation in organized action. This view holds that the increasing dependency of the mass population on television for political news fosters the growth of political malaise.

*Frankfurt School-a group of scholars and social theorists, working 1st in Germany in the 1930s and then primarily in the U.S., who were interested in applying Marxist theory to the new forms of cultural production and social life in 20th-century capitalist societies. The Frankfurt school scholars rejected Enlightenment philosophy, stating that reason did not free people but rather became a force in the rise of technical expertise, the expression of instrumental reason divorced from wider goals of human emancipation, and the exploitation of people, making systems of social domination more efficient and effective.

-The Frankfurt School includes Walter Benjamin and others who published a series of essays criticizing the capitalist and consumerist orientation of postwar entertainment and popular media forms including popular movies, television, and advertising. According to the Frankfurt School, the culture industry is an entity that both creates and caters to a mass public that, tragically, can no longer see the difference b/w the real world and the illusory world that these popular media forms collectively generate. According to the Frankfurt school view, the real conditions of existence-the fact that class oppression and domination are unfair and not a natural aspect of everyday life- are distorted by a mass ideology that generates myths about the good life under capitalism.

*culture industry-a term used by the members of the Frankfurt school to indicate how capitalism organizes and homogenizes culture, giving cultural consumers less freedom to construct their own meanings.

-Since the late 1980s, critics have questioned the high art/mass culture divide, suggesting that our experiences with the media during the late 20th century are too complex and varied to be adequately characterized in sweeping categories such as mass consciousness or mass culture.

~The mass media and democratic potential~
-There is also a counter-view that regards the mass media as a promising tool for democratic ideals. This view sees communications technologies as wonderful new tools for use by the mass citizenry that will promote an open flow of information and exchange of ideas, thereby strengthening democracy.
-Ex, the 2-way model of media communication on the internet has been seen by many of its users as highly democratic in this sense.
-The view of media as potentially democratic challenges the very idea of a mass media or a mass society. It stresses instead the potential of individual media forms for the development of community and identity on a much smaller scale.

-Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan, who wrote most influentially in the 1950s through the 1970s has had the most widespread impact. He argued that t.v. and radio were like natural resources, waiting to be used for the benefit of increasing mankind’s collective and individual experiences of the world. He also stated that the media were simply extentions of our natural senses, helping us better to hear, see, and know the world and, moreover, helping us to connect ourselves to geographically distant communities and bodies.

*Technologically determinist-a position that sees technology as the most important determining factor in social changes, positing technology as somehow separate from social and cultural influence. In this view, people are merely observers and facilitators of technology’s progress. (has been largely discredited)

*Guerrilla television-a term used by video artists and activists to describe alternative video practices begun in the late 1960s that used the medium of television to produce videotapes that were oppositional to the styles of mainstream television.

~Television and the question of sponsorship~
-An important paradox about practices of looking is embedded in this model: consumers watch television primarily to see programs, but what keeps television afloat is viewers’ not-so-incidental exposure to the products advertised through these programs.

~Media and the Public Sphere~
*public sphere-a space, a physical place, social setting, or media arena, where citizens come together to debate and discuss the pressing issues of their society.

-German theorist Jurgen Habermas postulated that the public sphere that was participated in by the liberal middle class of the 19th century was destroyed in the 20th century by various forces including the rise of consumer culture, the rise of mass media, and the intervention of the state in the private sphere of the family and the home. He believed that the public sphere was a public space where private interests were inadmissible, hence a place where true public opinion could be formulated.

-Walter Lippmann (U.S. journalist) proposed, in the 1920s, that the public sphere was nothing more than a phantom-that it was not possible for average citizens to keep abreast of political issues and events and give them due consideration given the chaotic pace of industrial society.

-contemporary attempts to understand how the public converges and functions have proposed the idea of multiple public spheres and counterspheres. For instance, political theorist Nancy Fraser puts forth the useful alternative theory of a woman’s and a feminist countersphere, among other counterspheres of public discourse and agency.

-In these multiple and overlapping public spheres, debate and discussion is fostered through many media, including newsletters, journals, etc.
-One of the forms of traditional mass media that can be seen as a force in public spheres and the formation of public opinion is television.
-J.F.K. used television to speak to the nation and garner support for his administration’s actions.
-J.F.K. and Princess Diana’s funerals (t.v. coverage) created a sense of community at local, national, and global levels.
-T.V. is also a forum for airing of controversial issues, in particular in the context of television talk shows.

~New Media Cultures~
-the contemporary media environment means that the distinctions among media are less definable and there are less opportunities for media to be less monolithic and centralized.

*Cultural imperialism-refers to how ways of life are exported into other territories through cultural products and popular culture.

KEY WORDS
*Mass media- has been used to define those media designed to reach large audiences perceived to have shared interests. Refers to forms and texts that work in unison to generate specific dominant or popular representations of events, people and places. The primary mass media are radio, t.v., the cinema, and the press including newspapers and magazines. Also, the internet and digital multimedia.

*Modernism-An art movement characterized by the deliberate departure from tradition and the use of innovative forms of expression that distinguish many styles in the arts and literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

*Post-colonialism- a term that refers to the cultural and social context of countries that were formally defined in relationships to colonialism, in the contemporary mix of former colonies, neocolonialism, and continuing colonialism. The term postcolonial refers to the broad set of changes that have affected these countries, and in particular to the mix of identities, languages, and influences that have resulted from complex systems of dependence and independence.

*Subculture- in sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, a subculture is a group of people with a culture (whether distinct or hidden) which differentiates them from the larger culture to which they belong.

*Propaganda- is a concerted set of messages aimed at influencing the opinions or behavior of large numbers of people. Instead of impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense presents information in order to influence its audience.

*Television Flow- In television programming, flow is how channels and networks try to hold their audience from program to program, or from one segment of a program to another. Thus, it is the "flow" of television material from one element to the next.

*Frankfurt School-a group of scholars and social theorists, working 1st in Germany in the 1930s and then primarily in the U.S., who were interested in applying Marxist theory to the new forms of cultural production and social life in 20th-century capitalist societies. The Frankfurt school scholars rejected Enlightenment philosophy, stating that reason did not free people but rather became a force in the rise of technical expertise, the expression of instrumental reason divorced from wider goals of human emancipation, and the exploitation of people, making systems of social domination more efficient and effective.

*Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911 –1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar — a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a communications theorist. McLuhan's work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory. McLuhan is known for coining the expressions "the medium is the message" and the "global village".