Representations of Pain in Art and Visual Culture

Representations of Pain in Art and Visual Culture

Author: Maria Pia Di Bella

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-06-26

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1136213023

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The presentation of bodies in pain has been a major concern in Western art since the time of the Greeks. The Christian tradition is closely entwined with such themes, from the central images of the Passion to the representations of bloody martyrdoms. The remnants of this tradition are evident in contemporary images from Abu Ghraib. In the last forty years, the body in pain has also emerged as a recurring theme in performance art. Recently, authors such as Elaine Scarry, Susan Sontag, and Giorgio Agamben have written about these themes. The scholars in this volume add to the discussion, analyzing representations of pain in art and the media. Their essays are firmly anchored on consideration of the images, not on whatever actual pain the subjects suffered. At issue is representation, before and often apart from events in the world. Part One concerns practices in which the appearance of pain is understood as expressive. Topics discussed include the strange dynamics of faked pain and real pain, contemporary performance art, international photojournalism, surrealism, and Renaissance and Baroque art. Part Two concerns representations that cannot be readily assigned to that genealogy: the Chinese form of execution known as lingchi (popularly the "death of a thousand cuts"), whippings in the Belgian Congo, American lynching photographs, Boer War concentration camp photographs, and recent American capital punishment. These examples do not comprise a single alternate genealogy, but are united by the absence of an intention to represent pain. The book concludes with a roundtable discussion, where the authors discuss the ethical implications of viewing such images.


Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe and the Spanish Americas

Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe and the Spanish Americas

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-01-03

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 9004360689

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Visualizing Sensuous Suffering and Affective Pain in Early Modern Europe and the Spanish Americas is a trans-cultural collection of studies on visual treatments of the phenomena of suffering and pain in early modern culture. Ranging geographically from Italy, Spain, and the Low Countries to Chile, Mexico, and the Philippines and chronologically from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, these studies variously consider pain and suffering as somatic, emotional, and psychological experiences. From examination of bodies shown victimized by brutal public torture to the sublimation of physical suffering conveyed through the incised lines of Counter-Reformation engravings, the authors consider depictions of pain and suffering as conduits to the divine or as guides to social behaviour; indeed, often the two functions overlap.


Algorithms of Anxiety

Algorithms of Anxiety

Author: Anthony Elliott

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2024-07-09

Total Pages: 156

ISBN-13: 1509555447

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Machine learning algorithms are widely presumed to herald a world in which the crippling burdens of anxiety can be left behind. The digital revolution promises a brave new world where individuals, communities and organizations can at last take control of the future – anticipating, designing and commanding the future, possibly even with mathematical exactitude. Yet, paradoxically, algorithms have unleashed widespread fears and forebodings about the impact of digital technologies. Whether it’s worries about unemployment, distress about social media’s harmful effects on teenagers, or the fear of intrusive digital surveillance, we live in an age of turbo-charged anxiety where the prophecies of algorithms are increasingly enmeshed with fundamental disruption and anxieties about the future. In this book, Anthony Elliott examines how machine learning algorithms are not only transforming global institutions but also rewriting our personal lives. He tells this story through a wide-ranging analysis which takes in ChatGPT, Amazon, the Metaverse, Martin Ford, Netflix, Uber, Bernard Stiegler, Squid Game, Kate Crawford, LaMDA, Byung-Chul Han, autonomous drones, Jean Baudrillard and the automation of warfare. Questioning why people often assume that they need to adopt new technologies in order to lead fulfilling lives, Elliott argues that people may be as much entranced as inspired by their outsourcing of personal decision-making to smart machines.


Teaching Visual Culture

Teaching Visual Culture

Author: Kerry Freedman

Publisher: Teachers College Press

Published: 2003-08-22

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780807743713

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Offering a conceptual framework for teaching the visual arts (K-12 and higher education) from a cultural standpoint, the author discusses visual culture in a democracy.


Mobility and Fantasy in Visual Culture

Mobility and Fantasy in Visual Culture

Author: Lewis Johnson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-02-05

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1136747087

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume offers a varied and informed series of approaches to questions of mobility—actual, social, virtual, and imaginary—as related to visual culture. Contributors address these questions in light of important contemporary issues such as migration; globalization; trans-nationality and trans-cultural difference; art, space and place; new media; fantasy and identity; and the movement across and the transgression of the proprieties of boundaries and borders. The book invites the reader to read across the collection, noting differences or making connections between media and forms and between audiences, critical traditions and practitioners, with a view to developing a more informed understanding of visual culture and its modalities of mobility and fantasy as encouraged by dominant, emergent, and radical forms of visual practice.


Defaced

Defaced

Author: Valentin Groebner

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-03-02

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Understanding late medieval pictorial representations of violence. Destroyed faces, dissolved human shapes, invisible enemies: violence and anonymity go hand in hand. The visual representation of extreme physical violence makes real people nameless exemplars of horror--formless, hideous, defaced. In Defaced, Valentin Groebner explores the roots of the visual culture of violence in medieval and Renaissance Europe and shows how contemporary visual culture has been shaped by late medieval images and narratives of violence. For late medieval audiences, as with modern media consumers, horror lies less in the "indescribable" and "alien" than in the familiar and commonplace. From the fourteenth century onward, pictorial representations became increasingly violent, whether in depictions of the Passion, or in vivid and precise images of torture, execution, and war. But not every spectator witnessed the same thing when confronted with terrifying images of a crucified man, misshapen faces, allegedly bloodthirsty conspirators on nocturnal streets, or barbarian fiends on distant battlefields. The profusion of violent imagery provoked a question: how to distinguish the illegitimate violence that threatened and reversed the social order from the proper, "just," and sanctioned use of force? Groebner constructs a persuasive answer to this question by investigating how uncannily familiar medieval dystopias were constructed and deconstructed. Showing how extreme violence threatens to disorient, and how the effect of horror resides in the depiction of minute details, Groebner offers an original model for understanding how descriptions of atrocities and of outrageous cruelty depended, in medieval times, on the variation of familiar narrative motifs.


Pathology and Visual Culture

Pathology and Visual Culture

Author: Natasha Ruiz-Gómez

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2024-05-01

Total Pages: 509

ISBN-13: 0271098198

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this book, Natasha Ruiz-Gómez delves into an extraordinary collection of pathological drawings, photographs, sculptures, and casts created by neurologists at Paris’s Hôpital de la Salpêtrière in the nineteenth century. Led by Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893) and known collectively as the Salpêtrière School, these savants-artistes produced works that demonstrated an engagement with contemporary artistic discourses and the history of art, even as the artists/clinicians professed their dedication to absolute objectivity. During his lifetime, Charcot became internationally famous for his studies of hysteria and hypnosis, establishing himself as a pioneer in modern neurology. However, this book brings to light the often-overlooked contributions of other clinicians, such as Dr. Paul Richer, who created “scientific artworks” that merged scientific objectivity with artistic intervention. Challenging conventional interpretations of visual media in medicine, Ruiz-Gómez analyzes how these images and objects documented symptoms and neuropathology while defying disciplinary categorization. Grounded in extensive archival research, Pathology and Visual Culture targets an international audience of historians and students of art, visual culture, medicine, and the medical humanities. It will also captivate neurologists and anyone interested in fin-de-siècle French history and culture.


Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime

Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime

Author: Temenuga Trifonova

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-22

Total Pages: 479

ISBN-13: 1315299135

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the course of its long and tumultuous history the sublime has alternated between spatial and temporal definitions, from its conceptualization in terms of the grandeur and infinity of Nature (spatial), to its postmodern redefinition as an "event" (temporal), from its conceptualization in terms of our failure to "cognitively map" the decentered global network of capital or the rhizomatic structure of the postmetropolis (spatial), to its neurophenomenological redefinition in terms of the new temporality of presence produced by network/real time (temporal). This volume explores the place of the sublime in contemporary culture and the aesthetic, cultural, and political values coded in it. It offers a map of the contemporary sublime in terms of the limits—cinematic, cognitive, neurophysiological, technological, or environmental—of representation.


Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels

Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels

Author: Golnar Nabizadeh

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-04-16

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 131706609X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book analyses the relationship between comics and cultural memory. By focussing on a range of landmark comics from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the discussion draws attention to the ongoing role of visual culture in framing testimony, particularly in relation to underprivileged subjects such as migrants and refugees, individuals dealing with war and oppressive regimes and individuals living with particular health conditions. The discussion is influenced by literary and cultural debates on the intersections between ethics, testimony, trauma, and human rights, reflected in its three overarching questions: ‘How do comics usually complicate the production of cultural memory in local contents and global mediascapes?’, ‘How do comics engage with, and generate, new forms of testimonial address?’, and ‘How do the comics function as mnemonic structures?’ The author highlights that the power of comics is that they allow both creators and readers to visualise the fracturing power of violence and oppression – at the level of the individual, domestic, communal, national and international – in powerful and creative ways. Comics do not stand outside of literature, cinema, or any of the other arts, but rather enliven the reciprocal relationship between the verbal and the visual language that informs all of these media. As such, the discussion demonstrates how fields such as graphic medicine, graphic justice, and comics journalism contribute to existing theoretical and analytics debates, including critical visual theory, trauma and memory studies, by offering a broad ranging, yet cohesive, analysis of cultural memory and its representation in print and digital comics.


Surveillance, Race, Culture

Surveillance, Race, Culture

Author: Susan Flynn

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-07-31

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 3319779389

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This collection of essays engages with a wide range of disciplines including art, performance, film and literature, to examine the myriad effects of contemporary surveillance on our cultural psyche. The volume expertly articulates the manner in which cultural productions have been complicit in watching, seeing and purporting to ‘know’ race. In our increasingly mediated world, our sense of community is becoming progressively virtual, and surveillant technologies impact upon subjectivity, resulting in multiple forms of artistic and cultural expression. As such, art, film, and literature provide a lens for the reflection of sociocultural concerns. In Surveillance, Race, Culture Flynn and Mackay skilfully draw together a diverse range of contributions to investigate the fundamental question of exactly how surveillant technologies have informed our notions of race, identity and belonging.