Visuality/Materiality: Images, Objects and Practices

A collection of essays I edited with Divya Tolia-Kelly is just out from Ashgate.  It’s called Visuality/Materiality: Images, Objects and Practices, and has chapters by Mimi Sheller, Mark Jackson, Mike Crang, Nirmal Puwar, Caren Yglesias, Judith Tsouvalis with Clare Waterton and Ian Winfield, Jane M Jacobs with Stephen Cairns and Ignaz Strebel, Karen Wells and Paul Frosh.  Its Ashgate page is here.

In its introduction, Divya and I write that “the collection privileges how visual and material concerns are attended to in contemporary research through a focus on practice. Practice is what humans do with things. Some of the effects of some those doings is to make things visible in specific ways, or not, and this approach thus draws attention to the co-constitution of humans subjectivities and the visual objects their practices create. This is somewhat different from enquiries based on looking, seeing, analysing and writing text; instead, it considers the (geo)politics of embodied, material encounter and engagement.”

All of the chapters talk about how specific materialities are made visible – visualised – through social practices.  They’re quite a mix of case studies, looking at, for example, aluminium, algae, walls, warehouses, ships, tv screens and memorials.  They all contribute towards understanding visuality as performative, as something done between people and objects, which creates complex fields of visibility, invisibility, and states that are not quite either.  Very few of them address art objects, or do anything resembling art criticism.  Journal of Visual Culture, take note!

why I love my mac number 348

The link to this site was in an email that did the rounds a few days ago on The Open University’s mac users’ list – it’s a list of icons to use on mac computers.  (Just the kind of email that Friday afternoons were made for.)  The icons it shows are just so… so… cool!!!!  awesome!!!  They are leg!!!!!!!! (The imitation of my 12 year old daughter’s love of exclamation marks is deliberate of course – and for those of you without such handy shortcuts to Youth, leg is short for legendary, not some weird anatomical metaphor.  Nor indeed a typo, more likely than a metaphor from me this late on a Friday).  I mean, I could put all my admin files in a folder in the shape of a Dalek, or a purple slobbery monster, or a weird spider/book hybrid thing from the Matrix film I haven’t seen…  cool!!!!!!!!! etc…

these icons come from http://iconfactory.com/freeware/preview/stkr1

There is also a (slightly) interesting aspect of this, though, in relation to visual culture.  Why can these fifty sets of icons be neatly categorised into just three visual types by the Appstorm website: ‘Metallic and Professional’, ‘Photorealistic’ and ‘Sketch and Cartoon’?  What counts as good visual style in the world of mac users is really very limited.  And they all do share an aura of ‘good design’, hard to describe but pretty recognisable and powerful in maintaining the Apple brand, I think.   Second question: interesting that this website deploys a standard qualitative method – thematic coding, in effect – to group their icons.  Would a researcher do it differently?  Better?  Third question – is any of this really very important?

messing around with drawing software

I’ve had a Bamboo tablet for ages – I picked it up at our local Lidl supermarket very cheaply a year or so ago – but I’ve never worked out which software I should use with it.  I recently heard Autodesk Sketchbook Pro recommended by someone on my university mac users email list, though, and  I’ve just spent a happy few minutes installing it and working out how I can incorporate text layers into the drawings that it creates.  Fab.  Looking forward to learning more – I might even post some efforts here.  Looks like I’m going to add Sketchbook to my list of fave softwares (others include Zotero, a reference manager, and Prezi, a non-linear way of making multimedia presentations).

a new sort of research film?

Since my visit to Queen Mary a few weeks ago, I’ve continued to ponder about the use of films as a social science research strategy.  A conversation with my colleague Bradon Smith provoked the idea that when most of us see a film (anthropologists excepted, perhaps), we watch it comparing it to the films we see elsewhere, on tv or at the cinema.  So we expect it to have high production values; we expect it to be filmed and edited very skilfully; we expect eloquent voice-overs and carefully-chosen music; we expect a beginning, a middle and an end; we expect to watch it concentrating on it and it alone; and we expect it to speak for itself, that is, we expect to ‘get’ it just by watching it.

Clearly, those are exceptionally high standards for your average academic to achieve, if they haven’t gone to film school or studied visual anthropology.  In the age of YouTube, iMovie and smartphones, maybe we should rethink those expectations and in so doing invent a new kind of film genre which fits both the changed contexts in which films can now be made, distributed and viewed.

So here is a list of possibilities for making and watching a new kind of social science film now:

• the film should be very clear what it’s trying to do.  This may involve a long title and probably a voice-over too.
• the film should have been made using a tripod and a videocamera with a decent external microphone, but don’t expect panoramavision with surroundsound.  It will probably have been edited using software from Apple or Microsoft, so again, make allowances.
• the film might well be pretty short, say ten minutes, so it can be uploaded to a video-sharing website and an academic webpage.  But there could be a series of films to be watched.
• online screening means that you can read some stuff about the film too; its paratext could, and perhaps probably will, be be lot more extensive than the posters and reviews that we’re used to.  In fact, I think this is really important for a film that wants to make a social-scientific argument/statement; I think viewers need to be told explicitly what the film is trying to say.
• online distribution will affect the spaces in which it’s seen.  This will probably no longer be the darkened lecture theatre – though it may be – but it might also be screened on a smartphone.  This means its visual scale might be quite crude: simple, uncluttered images work better on small screens.  (I remember after I watched Essential Killing thinking that it would look fine on an iPad: all those shots of one man in various landscapes).
• online distribution could also allow audiences to leave comments, for future viewers to see as part of watching the film.  The commenting would also be part of the film’s paratext.

So, a film in this new genre might well be fairly small, watched in chunks, accompanied by other materials, and a little rough around the edges; and it would include a fair bit of voice, either written or spoken, some of which would be outwith the film text itself.

The only thing is, I don’t know any films being made like that.  Does anyone else?