Our latest open issue! (Vol. 18, Issue 2, August 2019)
In this issue:
- Eric Triantafillou investigates the image of the social pyramid to reveal how it serves as an obscuring agent of the abstract forms of domination that characterize late-stage capitalism. He also reflects on how the recent efforts of social movements to update the structure of the pyramid reveal the potential and limitations of a visual epistemology for anti-capitalist praxis in the present.
- Katarzyna Bojarska interviews Laurent Berlant on her new collaborative book (with Kathleen Stewart), The Hundreds (Duke University Press), the genre of the theoretical poem, ways of thinking with images, and Berlant's approach to affect theory.
- Vanessa Chang studies two cases of recent digital performance, Ghostcatching and as.phyx.ia to reflect on the repercussions of motion capture and the infiltration of computer technologies in the inter-subjective relationships between performers, technology and spectators.
- Tanushree Gosh compares the photographic work of WW Hooper and Sunil Jamah during the 1870s Madras Famine and the 1940 Bengal famine, to complicate our imaginaries of photo documentation practice as creating fixed hierarchical relationships between observer and observed subjects.
- Erika Balsom examines the unfinished footage of Harun Farocki's Moving Bodies, a project the filmmaker was working on at the time of his death in 2014, to chart the inchoate propositions of a final installation that we will never see.
- Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich looks at the work of the anonymous Syrian film collective Abounaddara, to reflect on how it subverts the media coverage of the Syrian conflict, using a complex combination of discourse and form that raises contentions discussions on representation, media ethics, and the circulation of graphic images.
- Jae Emerling charts a new route for understanding the role of reviews in accounting for the multiple forms of intellectual production that characterize our visual cultures, and invites our community of readers to respond thereby giving shape to a renewed understanding of a what an academic journal’s Reviews section is capable of being and doing!
Contents
Eric Triantafillou
To make what is vertical horizontal: picturing social domination
Lauren Berlant
The Hundreds, observation, encounter, atmosphere, and world-making
Vanessa Chang
Catching the ghost: the digital gaze of motion capture
Tanushree Ghosh
Witnessing famine: the testimonial work of famine photographs and anti-colonial spectatorship
Erika Balsom
Moving bodies: captured life in the late works of Harun Farocki
Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich
Abounaddara and the global visual politics of the ‘right to the image’
ReviewsJae Emerling
Reviews Section: Provocation