Seeing Clearly: Room 1
13 September - 10:45AM-12:25PM (Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon)
Seeing through the Kaleidoscope: Lisbon’s Story, Pina, and Wim Wenders’s Visual Aesthetics of Peace View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Olivier Delers
In my paper, I will argue that Wim Wenders’s recent films provide an exciting framework to think in new ways about intercultural dialogue. Starting with Lisbon’s Story in 1994, Wenders starts making films that very consciously address the necessity of thinking beyond the limits of generic and national borders. At the same time as he constructs his film as both a love story and a visual essay on the power of cinema, Wenders reflects on the possibilities offered by a borderless and unified European space that makes it possible to think and express ourselves in multiple languages: German, French, English, Portuguese. In subsequent films, he continues to think about the connections between multiple spoken languages and new visual languages. In Pina (2012), he presents Pina Bausch’s dance company as an international group who pays homage to their mentor in their native language while all speaking the common bodily language of contemporary dance. He does so by introducing 3D cinema as a new way of accessing universal emotions and ideas. In Inventing Peace: A Dialogue on Perception, a recent book co-written with the philosopher Mary Zournazi, Wenders theorizes a new visual language of peace, inspired by the films of the Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, and meant to redefine how we engage with others in our own communities. In analyzing Wenders’s films and writings, I attempt to show that intercultural dialogue can never be separated from the modes of expression that enable it.
How Are Images Used for Visual Argumentation? : How Do Images Argue Without Logic? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andreas Schelske
This study shows how images convince through visual argumentation. Images are used to argue without logic and without possibility of negation. Moreover, no culture has elaborated its images as a language or systematically defined them within grammar as countable vocabulary. For this reason, it is astonishing that social knowledge communication through images is based on optically arranged data that, in human interpretation, stabilizes a visual form without any logic. Images have initiated the pictorial turn in the communication of the global network society and thus replaced the linguistic turn. Despite the global flood of images, there is a lack of theoretical and empirical analysis of how syntactic, semantic and pragmatic codes of optically recognizable images are used as visual arguments for scientific, political, economic and cultural decisions. The lecture offers answers to how images convince as visual argumentation in socio-cultural contexts. Images are used to generate insights whose visually communicative arguments are used, for example, in photography, archaeological aerial photography, computer tomography, art and art history. The lecture will work out which pictorial arguments are used and which sign theory or semiotics they follow. It also shows which arguments online reality uses, and how online reality argues about the illusion of architectural signs. The content of the lecture shows the social acquisition of knowledge through visual argumentation. In particular, the emotional, aesthetic and creative persuasiveness of images is examined with regard to their visual argumentation.
“Give Us the Freedom to Smoke, to Dress, to Have Sex, to Run School Affairs”: Oz Magazine as a Sex Education Agent View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ya'ara Gil-Glazer
The British-Australian counterculture magazine Oz (1963-1973) was the brainchild of a group of students who used it as a platform for discussing sex, erotica, and anti-establishment issues. Characterized by a provocative and subversive image-text rhetoric, it is considered the most psychedelic underground publication of the period. Particularly provocative and controversial was the “School Kids Issue” (May 1970), whose teenage guest editors were indicted for obscenity, and later acquitted. From a contemporary perspective, Oz may be characterized as open and activist in the spirit of the social protests of the 1960s and early 70s, but at the same time outright sexist. For example, the front page of “School Kids” features images of free and passionate lesbian sexuality, whereas its inner pages include a comic strip that depicts the violent deflowering of an objectified passive female figure. The trial dwelled on these two examples, but not from a critical feminist standpoint, but from a conservative one disapproving of the explicit discussion and visualization of sexuality as such. The proposed article will discuss the sexual-erotic discourse in Oz from the perspective of critical pedagogy, which considers the mass media and visual culture as educational agents with a major role in shaping perceptions regarding various social issues, including gender and sexuality: Did its outrageous image-text messages educate its young readers to healthy, equal, and objectification-free sexuality, or rather reproduce sexism and misogyny? This question is examined in a contextual approach, given hegemonic and subversive conceptions of sexuality during the period under discussion.
Memory and Image: The Engine of Creativity View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Javier Antón Sancho, Juan Luis Roquette Rodríguez-Villamil, Víctor Larripa Artieda
With due interpretative caution and trying not to fall into simplification or cliché, it could be stated that the "rational" mind learns with "pure concepts" based mainly on the understanding of the essence and attributes of their objects of knowledge. The "logical" mind, on the other hand, learns to unravel the theoretical consequences of a formula within an abstract language. On its side, the "creative" mind of the designer acquires and achieves the object of knowledge -creativity- through a deep understanding of already completed designs. This paper aims to delve into the process of analysis of design examples. A process that could somehow resemble Alchemy, in which the alembic could be the pencil. Drawing is the analytical tool that allows the designer to distil the essence of the studied references departing from the overflow of images that arrive to the eye. With the gathering of different successful design examples, the designers build up a repository stocked in their memory that enlarges their creative capacity when facing new challenges.
