Journal of Visual Culture is an international refereed journal that welcomes compelling, critically engaged contributions that explore and expand trans-disciplinary global visual cultures.


April 2020: VR Themed Issue and new initiatives in uncertain times

A recent article by Noah J. Kim published in The Atlantic highlights how the ‘Spanish Flu’ undermined many of the social bonds of communities, as a result of the quarantine imposed on American cities to curb the epidemic. Kim describes the sense of isolation, anxiety, boredom and tension that proliferated in the accounts of the experience, one that in the world of 1918 was primarily private.

Just over a hundred years later, while preparing our latest issue, the world was hit with the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic, an event of unprecedented proportions, best described in the following lines, taken from a publishing initiative we have recently started in collaboration with the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin:

‘The SARS-Cov-2 crisis is, will be, and will have been so many things – a disastrous event of unknown scale, an individual and collective tragedy, a historical turning point, a huge biopolitical experiment, and so much more.

At the same time, attempts to act responsibly, caringly, solidarily in the face of this global catastrophe are overwhelming. The planetary dimension of the crisis seems to put everything into question, likewise affecting the knowledge production, visual practice, critical theory, political organizing, scholarly enterprises, research communities to which we are committed (and which are experiencing existential and epistemological shockwave after shockwave on a daily basis).’
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We at Journal of Visual Culture are looking into ways of responding to the current moment, not only by means of intellectual production, but also by fostering opportunities for engagement and for keeping alive our communities of thought. We believe this is an important moment to cultivate solidarity, to find forms of staying together through the resources of our practice, and to think creatively about offering meaningful content and platforms for engagement to our extended community.

In this way we are progressively rolling out a number of collaborations and initiatives, and supporting the continuation of existing ones:


Over the years, JVC has had the privilege to count on an exceptional team of editors and supporters that have led and animate the many fields crossed by visual cultures and visuality. In this spirit, we welcome two new additions to the Editorial Group: Dr. Irene Chien, who is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media & Communication at Muhlenberg College; and Dr. Rahul Mukherjee, who is Dick Wolf Assistant Professor of Television and New Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

They join what is now the largest and most diverse Editorial Group in Journal of Visual Culture’s history, and we look forward to this new team initiating a new period of evolution and expansion. 
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As we approach rapidly our 20th anniversary, we’re putting ourselves to the task of rethinking our role in leading transversal academic and intellectual discussions beyond disciplinary boundaries across the Arts and Humanities.

As part of this effort, Journal of Visual Culture co-hosted two events at Tate Modern in December: a day-long workshop on the future of academic publishing, and a launch party for the latest issues of JVC and Tate Papers. The workshop brought together editors of Art History, {{em_rgencia}; Ekphrasis: Nordic Journal of Visual Culture, Journal of Visual Arts Practice, Open Humanities Press, Radical Philosophy, Third Text, and View: Theories and Practices of Visual Culture, as well as editors of prestigious academic publishing houses, and students on Arts and Humanities Research Council doctoral training programmes (including TECHNE, Chase, and the London Doctoral Training Partnership), along with their senior staff. 
IAVC 2020 deadline extension
In response to the current situation of the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic, the International Association of Visual Culture has extended the deadline for submitting proposals to the IAVC 2020 Conference: ‘Architectures of Vision’.  The new deadline for submissions is May 1st, 2020 and the conference is planned to take place as stated, on September 10 - 12, 2020 at the University of Rijeka, Croatia. 

Click here to read the entire call for papers, plus confirmed guests and other updates.

Keep watching this space for updates on these and other new initiatives at JVC. ​
APRIL 2020 THEMED ISSUE
Virtual reality: immersion and empathy, guest edited by Brooke Belisle and Paul Roquet

We are also celebrating the release of an exciting themed issue on virtual reality. As mentioned in the guest editors’ Introduction: "[m]any of us are “over” virtual reality (VR), even if it has yet to happen in the way we imagine it. Always about to arrive, VR has exhausted any sane sense of anticipation." Through the many cycles of anticipation and faded excitement, a number of developments have taken place in VR technologies, which are finally proliferating as a viable consumer technology, and as a result, they are rapidly reshaping our engagement with images and media. Therefore, as addressed by Belisle and Roquet, a serious effort in inter and post-disciplinary scholarship is required to account for such transformations in contemporary media and mediated experiences broadly. ‘Virtual reality: immersion and empathy’ offers contributions from the perspective of visual studies, game studies, film and media studies, software studies, and science and technology studies.

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Guest Editors’ Introduction: Virtual reality: immersion and empathy

Virtual/reality: how to tell the difference
Janet H. Murray looks beyond the predictions made at advent of VR on its effects, and attempts to situate VR as an emerging medium that continues on the course towards developing new media conventions to support sustained interaction and immersion, based on an active creation of belief.

Empathy and nausea: virtual reality and Jordan Wolfson’s Real Violence
Grant Bollmer and Katherine Guinness analyze ‘Real Violence’, a VR piece by artist Jordan Wolfson, aiming to identify and inhabit the complex contradictions present in any discussion of empathy, transgressive confrontation, and the social function of art and VR today.

Feeling good about feeling bad: virtuous virtual reality and the automation of racial empathy
Lisa Nakamura problematizes the branding of VR as an anti-racist and anti-sexist technology through the examination of titles created by white and European producers who represent the lives of black and Middle Eastern women and girls in Lebanon, Nairobi, and Paris.

Empathy for the game master: how virtual reality creates empathy for those seen to be creating VR
Paul Roquet shows how empathetic identification ultimately tends to target the architect of the VR experiences, and how this situation points to the need to ensure a broader range of people have opportunities to take up the role of VR game master for themselves.

The aesthetics of reality media
Maria Engberg and Jay David Bolter discuss the tension between transparency and reflectivity in 360° video and 360° VR through two contrasting examples: the Danish company Makropol’s Anthropia (2017) and Arora and Unseld’s The Day the World Changed (2018), to understand the creative tension between established forms and new ones that underscore new aesthetic and narrative experiences in VR and 360° formats.

Developing the ‘best practices’ of virtual reality design: industry standards at the frontier of emerging media
Michael LaRocco discusses VR design standardization practices, in particular the Oculus Best Practices Guide (OBPG), to argue how they mitigate the weaknesses in such technology to better conform with VR’s idealized, hypothetical presentation in fiction and marketing rhetoric.

Whole world within reach: Google Earth VR
Brooke Belisle questions the implications of how Google Earth VR stages ‘worlding’ as a provisional, dimensional coordination, and what the disorienting experience it offers suggests about contemporary entanglements of perception and representation, body and world, the individual here-and-now and a global everywhere-at-once.

Reviews section includes titles by Brian Massumi, Zeuler RM de A Lima, Leah Elisabeth von Samsonow and Giorgio Agamben.