Visual Futures

Exploring the Past, Present, and Divergent Possibilities of Visual Practice

Tracey Bowen, Brett Caraway, Tracey Bowen, Brett Caraway

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781789384482
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art & Politics

The overall subject of the book is visual culture. What sets it apart and gives it such an original emphasis is its multi-disciplinarity and the range of critical voices, ranging through film studies, architecture, creative practice, biology, pedagogy and media theory, which are brought to bear upon the question of visuality and its relationship to futurity.

In our everyday lives, we navigate across a vast sea of visual imagery. Yet, we rarely pause to question how or why we derive meaning from this sea. Nor do we typically contemplate the impact that it has on our motivations, our assumptions about science and about other people, and our actions as individuals and collectives. This book is a collection of interdisciplinary perspectives, from science to film, from graffiti and virtual environments to architecture and education that examines the ways in which we interact and engage with the visual elements of our environments.

Visual Futures provides an interdisciplinary examination of how we visualize and use visuals to make meaning within our environment. A diverse range of contributions and perspectives from biology, film, virtual reality, urban graffiti, architecture, critical pedagogy and education challenge our current attitudes, norms and practices of looking and seeing, opening up questions about the future. The future is a concept with significant political stakes and the work of rethinking and reimagining possible worlds requires a host of practices, which include the work of seeing, of image-making and of representation – all of which is political work taken up by the book contributors.

Primary readership will be among scholars and students of visual culture, media studies, digital cultures, fine art, architecture, education, science communication and sociology.Clearly aimed at an academic readership, it will also appeal to practising artists, architects, software developers and educators.

1

See and See Again: Mapping the Fractures in Visual Culture

Brett R. Caraway, University of Toronto Mississauga and Penny Kinnear, University of Toronto

Visual studies has weathered questions for some time now regarding its status as an academic discipline, a subset discipline, an interdisciplinary field, or a loose intellectual movement. Its object of study, its approach, and its associated methodologies continue to inspire weighty debates. These discussions are especially germane today given the ascendance of a post-truth political culture in which emotional appeals and repeated soundbites often garner more influence than factual rebuttals and policy discussions. These developments draw attention to the rhetorical aspects of communication practices and technologies. Contemporary media systems are characterized by a variety of modes including video, images, narration, dialogue, score, text, animation, virtual and augmented realities, broadcasting, and interactivity. In each of these, visuality and visual practice play an important role. This is not to suggest that ours is the first age in which visuality has served as an effective conduit for persuasion or the exercise of power. Yet the way in which today’s assemblage of media generates representations, independent of referents—what Metz (1982) refers to as scopic regime—is both historically unique and dynamic. The scopic regime compels us to observe and resist the limits to its own horizon of imagination. Its particularities necessitate an approach to visuality and visual practice that is stubbornly recursive in its investigation of the social conditioning of the visual and the visual conditioning of the social. While the predominance of the visual and ways of seeing in contemporary media are up for debate, ignoring them is not.

In this book, we confront the visual as an instrument of ideology, conditioning our understanding of the world. So conceived, the visual constitutes not just an object to be seen, but a lens through which we perceive and understand the world around us. Ideologies are constituted through these systems of representation. Through them we live out our imaginary relations to the conditions of our existence (Althusser, 2006; Hall, 1985). They are the semiotic systems by which “we represent the world to ourselves and one another” (Hall, 1985, p. 102). Visuality, understood as a means of seeing and being seen, influences culture by fabricating worlds bearing some resemblance to our own. Through them, we are invited to attach meaning (signified) to the sights and sounds (signifiers) we encounter there. Thus, ideology functions to the extent that the link between signified and signifier is successfully managed, allowing a desired range of meanings to be transmitted and reproduced.

According to Althusser (1971), ideology represents the “imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence,” creating a dichotomy between the abstract and concrete aspects of social relations (p. 162). This dichotomy can be understood partly in terms of structure wherein individual consciousness is, to some degree, conditioned by the social relations in which it finds itself. But the contingent nature of this conditioning speaks to the other side of the dichotomy between abstract and concrete realties. Just as the visual may serve as a conduit of domination, it may also serve as a means of resistance and negotiation. Hall (1999) famously characterized this contingent process of meaning-making as encoding and decoding. Hence, Hall (1985) understood ideology as “indeterminate, open-ended, and contingent” (p. 95). That is to say, there is no necessary correspondence between ideology on the one hand and individual consciousness or social relations on the other. It is our position that visuality exists in the liminal space between encoding and decoding, between structure and agency. Or as Mitchell (2002) argues, images are best understood as both tools for manipulation and autonomous sources of meaning: “This approach would treat visual culture and visual images as go-betweens in social transactions, as a repertoire of screen images or templates that structure our encounters with other human beings” (p. 175). Such an approach deftly avoids reductive and deterministic understandings of visual practice as a raw exercise of domination by envisioning it instead as an open-ended and forward-looking inquiry into the power relations undergirding visual culture.

The attempt to manage visuality and visual practice so as to arrive at a desired range of meanings is what gives structure to the scopic regime. The relative degrees of autonomy between structure and agency register the intensity of the unavoidable contradiction embedded in any ideology. Ideology may alternately withstand a hairline fracture or it may crumble from a comminuted fracture. In either case, it is our task to map these fractures—the points at which the correspondence between encoding and decoding break down. Perhaps the scopic regime loses shape as attempts are made to accommodate a diverse range of perspectives. Or perhaps it finds a way to repeatedly overcome and adapt to its own contradictions. As Fleckenstein (2007) reminds us, multiple scopic regimes may exist simultaneously as “competing ways of seeing clash and contend for organizational power within a culture” (p. 14). Exploring the nonalignment of perspectives provides us with opportunities for both ideological critique and creative response. As Hageman (2013) contends, “contradictions are spaces within ideology where new subjectivities might be produced: new constructions of and relationships between individual subjects and the social totality” (p. 65).

It is in this spirit that the current volume explores visuality and visual practice. The title Visual Futures speaks to this agenda of forward-looking and open-ended investigation of visuality and visual practice. By visuality and visual practice we do not assert a primacy of the visual in contemporary culture. In keeping with Bal (2003), we are concerned instead with particular ways of seeing, the visual quality of objects, and how each of these confront a variety of social constituencies. Our investigations consider the processes by which objects are visually assembled, transmitted, and ultimately reassembled. Yet this collection is also about more than criticism. In critiquing the ways in which visuality and visual practice are put to use, there is an implicit recognition that these processes are implicated in shaping the future. What is happening in the present gives rise to a future—hence the Futures in the title. Here we take inspiration from the field of futures studies, which leaves both terms in the plural, signaling a democratic and inclusive sensibility. Futures studies is a transdisciplinary field with roots in philosophy, sociology, history, psychology, economics, and pedagogy that contemplates not just one kind of future but many (Gidley, 2017). It “makes value judgements about impending futures” and considers how to forestall undesirable outcomes (p. 64); it cultivates “creativity and engagement with multiple perspectives” (p. 69); and it “facilitates empowerment and transformation through engagement and participation” (p. 70). Accordingly, we start with a set of guiding principles regarding the relationship of visuality and visual practice to the future: (1) we believe it is necessary to orientate people in the present so they can start to think about the future; (2) some futures are probable, some are desirable, and some are less desirable; and (3) visions of the future condition both present and future action (Bell, 2017). In this way, the current collection uses critique as a means to orientate readers in the present moment while the open-endedness of the investigations invites normative prescriptions on the best ways forward.

The origins of this book extend back more than a decade. The work contained within is the product of a diverse group of artists, educators, and scholars whose primary objective has been to develop a multidisciplinary research agenda focusing on visuality and visual practice. From 2007 to 2016, this group came together each year at Oxford University in a small gathering where the emphasis was on facilitating intense discussions among individuals from a broad range of academic disciplines and artistic backgrounds. The first gathering was called the Global Conference on Visual Literacies: Exploring Critical Issues. It was limited to only 30 participants, all of whom had answered a call for “Perspectives […] from those engaged in the fields of education, visual arts, fine arts, literature, philosophy, psychology, critical theory and theology […] from any area, profession and vocation in which visual literacy plays a part.” That original call delivered a fortuitous gathering of academics and creators. The most recent gathering was recommenced in 2018, this time as the Visual Futures Through International Perspectives: A Dialogic Compendium on Visuality and Visual Practice symposium, giving rise to this collected volume. The newly inaugurated gathering took place at the University of Toronto’s McLuhan Coach House. Established in 1963, the McLuhan Coach House has a long history of facilitating debate and dialogue about contemporary issues and the impact of technology on culture. Fittingly, participants were asked to focus on one of the following three questions:

1.How are visuality and the visual provoking a new kind of economy or cultural exchange?

2.What are the relationships, intersections, and collisions between visuality and/or visual practices and one (or a combination) of the following: embodiment, spatial literacy, emerging languages, historical reflection, educative practices, civic development, social development, human geographies, indoctrination, spirituality, ecology, wellness, building and construction, migration, and unplugging?

3.How do you visualize the future? This section requires a ‘social imaginary’ reflection concerning possible implications for the future in regard to (but not limited to): education, sociology, psychology, literature, technology, architecture, and philosophy.

A number of interweaving threads emerged from the two days of presentations. The threads came in the form of questions about “seeing.” Who sees? Who can see? What can be seen? What is unseen? What are the images we produce? How do we produce them? What is brought closer and what is obfuscated or erased in those images? What is visual practice? What are the ethics of visual practices? Sometimes these questions confronted the collisions of culture(s), identities, and power. They all challenged our assumptions and definitions of what seeing entails and how it is accomplished. One certainty did emerge—visual practices are more than visual culture or visual literacy. Before we can consider the implications of visual culture or literacy, we must understand how we practice and engage with all of our ways of seeing.

This book attempts to capture some of the spirit of those presentations and dialogues. Fundamentally, it is composed of seven chapters derived from the work of a group of participants in the Visual Futures symposium. But it is also much more than that. We have attempted to replicate the role of “discussant” by including an afterword by Danielle Taschereau Mamers, one of our participants at the gathering. As of this writing, Taschereau Mamers is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Toronto’s Jackman Humanities Institute. Much like the Visual Futures group itself, the Jackman Humanities Institute emphasizes interdisciplinary approaches to understand human experience by generating new networks for research and study. Similarly, this book encapsulates a diverse collection of scholarship, reflecting the content and style of the conference. Moreover, our discussant responds to the synergies created among the chapters and the authors’ perspectives, drawing out questions—questions that we hope will provide momentum to propel us into subsequent Visual Futures symposia.

As a collection, the following chapters are also reflective of some of the larger trends in approaches to information and media literacy. Over the last decade or so, there has been a noticeable rhetorical shift in the discourse surrounding visual literacy. Not too long ago, media literacy programs and initiatives were chiefly concerned with media access as a function of physical infrastructure, technical proficiency, and critical awareness of embedded meanings. Since the advent of the internet, digital content, online social media, and user-generated content, a growing emphasis has been placed on people as active producers of media content. This broadening of our understanding of media literacy is likewise reflected in this book. The important work of decoding the underlying meanings that are part and parcel of visual culture is still front and center. Yet these chapters also move fluidly into analyses of the creative process itself, confronting it both as a domain of struggle against dominant ideology and the scopic regime, and as a domain of contemplation, self-awareness, and empathy.

Elizabeth Peden kicks things off with an examination of the visual construction of race. In her chapter, “In between whiteness: Pierre Bourdieu and Rudolph Valentino, an unlikely pairing,” Peden asks how individuals seen as racially ambiguous navigate these social constructions to achieve recognition and success. In doing so, she illuminates the means by which ideology becomes naturalized and unseen, making it all the more potent. Peden employs Bourdieu’s work on systems of classification to show how individuals and groups have navigated and struggled over racial divisions, vying for social recognition. She focuses on the large population of Southern Italians who immigrated to the United States during the early twentieth century. There was considerable apprehension about race and immigration during this period, and Southern Italians were often perceived as racially ambiguous. The boundaries of whiteness were—and perhaps still are—dynamic and an object of struggle. It was not immediately clear whether Southern Italian immigrants should be considered white or nonwhite. Peden shows how the inconsistency in social categorization implied by racial ambiguity is evidence of the contingent nature of systems of social control. Peden notes the important role of Hollywood silent film in the early twentieth century and reveals how it served as an arena of racial domination and contestation. Using Southern Italian immigrant and Hollywood star Rudolph Valentino as a case study, Peden shows how the famous actor was able to cut across racial lines while navigating his own racial ambiguity. She argues that silent film mediated between individual agency and social constraint for people seen as racially ambiguous. Peden illuminates the political and social mores of the time, while giving us much to consider about the visual representation of race in contemporary contexts.

Charudatta Navare usefully draws our attention to the ways in which meaning has been embedded in visual content at the intersection of art and science in his chapter “Ink to inkling: Artful messages in the visuals of biology.” Using discourse analysis, Navare inquires into the latent meanings of biology illustrations. He uses common coding theory and research on color psychology to analyze 55 images drawn from biology textbooks. In doing so, he shows how rhetorical communication functions subtly yet effectively in biology discourse. As far back as the fifteenth century, illustrations have been critical to the advancement of scientific knowledge. Because science often relies on representation to give shape to unseen phenomena, Navare argues that we must give careful consideration to the role of visualizations and diagrams in scientific discourse. He demonstrates how pointed and curbed shapes are used to depict implicit or explicit motion, denoting an underlying dichotomy of agency and passivity. He also shows how warm and cooler colors are used to the same effect. His examples speak to the importance of investigating the pedagogical and social implications of the visual rhetoric of biology and science more broadly.

In her chapter, “Visualizing gentrification: Resistance and reclamation through the writing on the walls,” Tracey Bowen discusses the visual activism of graffiti and mural artists in the Mission District of San Francisco and Chicano Park in San Diego. Bowen delves into how these artists carve out space for alternative voices and histories in the peripheries of economic development. As cities like San Francisco and San Diego are reformed to appeal more broadly to middle-class tastes, an inevitable tension arises within the communities being displaced by gentrification. Bowen’s contribution provides us with a compelling account of the efforts of artists to elevate the visibility of cultural histories and injustices and to reclaim the public spaces and collective imagination of their communities. As municipal governments increasingly affiliate themselves with the global movement of creative cities, they promote forms of creativity that are amenable to investment and business interests. Thus, creative economies and their attendant infrastructures are built on foundations of displacement, alienation, exploitation, and precarity. Nowhere are these tensions more evident than in the official legitimization/delegitimization of urban art. Bowen shows how graffiti abatement programs often pit mural artists against graffiti artists. These programs promise to deliver social stability and innovation to investors, businesses, and citizens without substantial engagement with the underlying issues of race and wealth disparity. Through open defiance of imposed renovations of the urban visual landscape, unsanctioned murals and graffiti visually transform neighborhoods while reasserting aesthetic control. In this way, cultural spaces emerge as terrains of resistance and pedagogical incubators for struggle. Bowen’s depiction of San Francisco’s Clarion Park and San Diego’s Chicano Park provides us with confirmation of the power of collective action to illuminate cultural histories and lived experiences, even under the threat of immanent erasure.

In their chapter “Intentional viewing: Decoding, learning, and creating culturally relevant architecture,” Matthew Dudzik and Marilyn Corson Whitney explore how visual literacy skills can aid architects and designers. They explore how the cultural relevancy of design projects is related to three aspects of creativity: mind’s eye envisioning, digital technology, and cultural understandings of the visual. The authors make the case that cultural data derived from investigation, contemplation, and iterative inquiry can be used to develop ...