VISUAL CULTURES

Its history is one of hybridisation, evolution, innovation

Image over word

• As primary source of information, thus analysis

• World as text (Western domination) vs. world as picture (non-Western)

• Postmodern world is visuals, complex, rapid, startling images shaping consciousness, culture and ways of making sense the world

Content of visual cultures

• Still images: painting, sculpture, fashion, graphic images, media studies (ad, flyer, poster, slogan), architecture, murals, graffiti

• Moving images: film, cinema, TV, commercial• Recent development: museum studies,

monuments, anatomy and medicine, and internet designs

Rapid progress of visual cultures

• Moving from traditional artistic base of images (visual arts) to all aspects of images as constructed across media

• Visual cultures shape different intellectual process and engaging: reading a film from visual studies is different than reading a film from film studies

• Che Quevara Tees, Vercace renaissance motifs, commercial ad using Andy Warhol’s painting these to subvert merely images

Andy Warhol’s

Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulations

• A copy without the original• Disneyfication• Chicago gangster in the movies

Jean Baudrillard Example of the Empire and the map

• If the fable were to be revived today, the territory would be rotting, not the map, because of the precession of simulacra -the map now precedes the territory.

• In contemporary society the simulated copy has replaced the original object just like the map came to precede the geographic territory.

Jean Baudrillard Example of the Empire and the map

• According to Baudrillard, we are living in the map (the simulation of reality) and reality is decaying because it has been abandoned.

• He used this same idea later to argue that the first Gulf War did not occur. The image of war preceded real war.

Jean BaudrillardHyperreal and Imaginary

• “Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation.”

• The imaginary world is what is supposed to make it successful, but it is made successful through its miniaturized social representation of “real” America.

Jean BaudrillardHyperreal and Imaginary

• Disneyland is supposed to make its visitors believe that adults and the “real” world are elsewhere.

• It is meant to hide the fact that real childishness is everywhere.

• Los Angeles and the rest of America are only a network of continuous, unreal circulation.

• Hyperreal: Lebih dari realita, Majalah Perempuan, Pornografi

• Imaginary: Nasionalisme ala Anderson Imagined Communities

Consumption as appropriation and resistance

• Using ethnographic method – what individuals and groups make of and do with the objects they consume how objects are made meaningful in the processes of their consumption

• Cycle of commodification: where producers make new products or different versions of old products as a result of consumers’ activities

• Appropriation: where consumers make those products meaningful, sometimes making them achieve a new “register” of meaning that affects production in some way. There’s a dialogue between production and consumption

• Bricolage – literally the activity of self-consciously mixing and matching any disparate elements that may be to hand – can cut across given social divisions to produce new cultural identities

• Media electronic – still place, while walkman allows us to escape from the confinement of space (urban environment) – imposing soundscape on the surrounding aural environment thereby domesticating the external world empowering or liberating technology that allows a person to escape the formal confines of planned city

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