Streetscapes (Asynchronous - Online Only)
A 'Disabling' Culture: Perpetuating Social Discrimination through Art and Culture View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Berube Patricia
What impact does the cultural model of disability have on the way we acknowledge and address representational issues in museums? Also, how do these representational issues materialize in disability imagery and art? For some, the binary between disabled and non-disabled seems to be transposed to the museum in the form of a dominant culture (or ‘disabling culture) vs. a disability culture. As such, one of the observations that can be made is that the portraiture of disability is often either ignored, or stereotyped. While museums have always played a role in the social triage of its visitors, the role of the representational critique, along with the amazing work carried by curatorial activists (such as Amanda Cachia), are representative of a need for change.
-dividual Monuments: Digital Contrapposto and Figural Politics View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Young Tack Oh
The research investigates the relationship between monuments and public spaces, to encourage increased representation, and to rethink the way we honor or commemorate our heroes. A survey of monuments in Detroit, a majority black city, revealed that most were dedicated to historic white European figures. Urban experience is conditioned by image and such statues or monuments project complex and contradictory meanings that precede the history of the city itself. These “moral figures” also territorialize public spaces to which they don’t historically or culturally belong. When the body is an agent in the production of urban history, culture, and policy those few statues dedicated to people of color were partial bodily representations that lacked the same physical realism and weren’t interpreted under the same criteria. Consequently, current works are not reflective of the local community that once thrived on these lands and neighborhoods. No matter when such monuments were made, the public outgrows their accepted meanings. Their very permanence makes it vulnerable to erasure- it can only be either rejected or accepted. It begs monuments to retain more mutability or ephemerality and allow opportunities to evolve and change. Digitizing monuments can preserve narratives and oral histories of communities. Using a simplified system of photogrammetry, digital monuments are generated as sites of protest that shift the curatorial power of space-making and spatial stewardship from authorities to the people - modern subjectivities can be overlaid at will.
Worüber man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man memen - Whereof One Cannot Speak, Thereof One Must Meme: The Promises, Problems, and Potentialities of Transnational Visual Modes of Communication View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Maggie Rosenau, Kelly Drumright
In this study, we examine how image and language are used today via the internet meme, a multimodal object with global (even extra-terrestrial ––see Elon Musk’s recent shenanigans) circulation. Pithy, continuously remixed and recirculated around the globe, memes rely on a tension between text and image, enhancing visual literacy while often encapsulating complicated subjects. They are, however, not an isolated phenomenon unique to the digital age. By reframing the meme in broader historical and theoretical contexts of communication technologies, we demonstrate how this highly consumable object can be understood as a development on postwar visual language projects associated with concrete poetry. During the early 1950s, inspired by then-modern technological innovations (e.g., the speed of transportation, automation, advertisement, mass media), concrete poets around the world announced it was time poetry established greater visual impact in society by delivering information quickly through the fewest words possible. Through extreme reduction of language and the visual relationship of graphic elements, the concrete poem claimed to be both a universalizing aesthetic and supranational language. Similar to, yet arguably more successful than the concrete poem due to global tech infrastructure and interconnectivity, the internet meme has immeasurable capacities to transcend borders, languages, and cultures. Indeed, its form is doing some heady political and ideological work as it proliferates on social media and image boards like 4chan and 8chan. Drawing on canonical and contemporary theorists alike, from Eugen Gorminger to Legacy Russell, we discuss the visual/cultural language of the meme, focusing on parallels, problems, promises and potentialities.
Art in the Streets in the Context of Quarantine: Covid-19 Street Art View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Heather Shirey
Artists and writers creating work in the streets are in a unique position to respond quickly and effectively in a moment of crisis. Street art’s ephemeral nature often serves to reveal very immediate and sometimes fleeting political responses in a manner that can be raw and direct. At the same time, the context of a crisis, street art also has the potential to transform urban space and foster a sustained political dialogue, reaching a wide audience, particularly when museums are galleries are shuttered. For all of these reasons, it is not surprising to see an explosion of street art around the world created in response to the Covid-19 global pandemic, even as our movement in public spaces is limited due to public health concerns. The Urban Art Mapping Covid-19 Street Art database (https://covid19streetart.omeka.net/), the foundation of this paper, documents examples of Covid-19 related street art from around the world. After presenting the reasons, methods, and challenges of creating a digital street art archive, this study draws on images in the database to discuss the role of graffiti and street art in the context of a global health crisis in relation to politics on a global scale. This paper argues that street art, using a variety of visual and textual approaches, is uniquely positioned to provide a critical assessment of the structural inequities and human rights issues that are exacerbated in a time of crisis.
Archiving and Recovering the Image: A Project to Improve the Tagging Metadata in the George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art Database View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jason Burnett
Since its creation in June 2020, the George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art database has collected photographs of over 2000 pieces of graffiti and street art created during and after the protests following the killing of George Floyd. When I had the opportunity to work with this archive, I noticed that the metadata was inconsistent because of the large number of people inputting items. I started a project to improve the metadata by analyzing the tags attached to images and attempting to regularize the vocabulary used so that images could be effectively organized and retrieved. A literature review into the organization of street art archives revealed concentration on collection methods, with much less attention to organization. It was thus necessary to construct a tailored tagging scheme based on generalized metadata best practices. The database was unsuitable for a controlled vocabulary, but an uncontrolled vocabulary had resulted in inability to accurately search the archive. My solution was to develop a semi-controlled vocabulary, where guidelines regularize usage of the more common tags and steer users into best practices. These tags enable encoding of not just the physical characteristics of images but also the content, thus textualizing the images for future retrieval. By creating didactics educating all stakeholders in the semi-controlled tagging vocabulary, I have enabled a process where the metadata should be regularized as it is entered, creating a useful dataset for researchers without requiring archivists to extensively re-edit the metadata. I believe this method would be adaptable to other image-based archives.
