Editorial Introduction “The essays in this pare of the Handbook deal with recent thinking, debate and research in important, substantive areas of modern visual culture. A number of these research areas are both well established in their own right but also known and discussed as top- ics in visual culture studies—fashion, photography, television, and film—while others, like the perceptual basis of material culture, practices of landscape architecture and the recent digitization of consumption, will secm to some readers less familiar. Many of the classic social theorists of cultural change—including Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and Thorstein Veblen among these—have considered the phenomenon of modern fashion as an exemplary sphere both of visual culture and of modern social life. “The very idea of fashion’s obsolescence and its association with the volatility of style and life-style makes it a central topic for visual studies. In more contemporary terms, fashion is pethaps the engine of change in a consumer culture or what has been called postmod- em culture. Malcolm Barnard is thus prescient in underlining the ways in which questions of identity—social, gender, ethnic and so on—have been absolutely central to theories of fashion as a particularly important area of visual culture. This is especially evident in the manifold ways in which clothing styles or dress functions to form and communicate the meaning of appearances and personal identity. While the term ‘fashion’ embraces a range of phenomena where taste or style are at issue, Barnard narrows his focus to the significance of what people wear largely in the context of everyday life, drawing on re- cent forms of fashion studies, which includes the history, sociology, anthropology, cul- tural study of fashion, as well as design history, psychoanalysis, gender and queer studies. He provides a useful outline of the history of fashion studies, the approaches prevailing over the last ewo decades, and finally a summary of its current preoccupations. In his brief history of fashion theory and fashion culture Barnard notes the early in- fluence of art history on thought about dress and fashion with its characteristic emphasis390 PRACTICES AND INSTITUTIONS OF VISUAL CULTURE upon taste, beauty and provenance. During the nineteenth and qwentieth centuries, however, anthropologists began to take an interest in dress, especially in its nonfunc- tional characteristics as decoration, personal adornment and ritual. Sociologists like Thorstein Veblen and Georg Simmel began to pay more attention to the role of fashion and ‘conspicuous consumption’ as mechanisms to establish social standing and status distinctions. Status distinctions indexed by cultural markers like dress became as signifi cant as class distinctions marked by ownership and authority relations. The early days of fashion studies still showed the influence of sociology and anthropology. More recently, however, the impact of cultural studies has been increasingly prominent, both asa label for a liberal, multidisciplinary outlook and as a quasi-discipline in its own right. Perspectives that concentrate on the object have been linked to the outlook of pre- dominantly female academics and curators, who argue that the material details of fabric and dress are vital to understanding their social and cultural meanings. Other approaches have sketched a social history of clothing styles, to which prominent historians like Fer- nand Braudel and Anne Hollander have contributed. Hollander explores how the mean- ings of clothed and unclothed bodies are expressed and mediated by both visual art and the cultural values of artists and spectators. Others, like Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, have stressed that modern expectations and assumptions can be misleading in the interpretation of Renaissance dress codes. Turning to the question of identity, the contention that dress contributes to the so- cial construction of identity has become a commonplace in cultural studies. Identity can be expressed in terms of class position, and Barnard describes several relevant stud- ies by Adrian Forty, Angela Partingron and Diana Crane. There is also an enormous literature on fashion and gendered identities, from which Barnard singles out works by Adolf Loos, Lisa Tickner, Lee Wright, Elizabeth Wilson and Jennifer Craik. Other accounts by Shaun Cole and Katrina Rolley link dress codes with masculine and gay identities. All of these phenomena continue to attract much interest among theorists and researchers. One influential theory of fashion and social subcultures can be found in Dick Heb- dige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style, with its themes of resistance and incorporation. David Muggleton has recently provided an up-date to this study of subcultural styles by introducing ideas from postmodernism, while Emil Wilbckin has explored related issues in the context of a black presence in fashion and cultural life-styles. Barnard observes that age-related identities are somewhat under-represented in fashion studies, the excep- tions being works by Alison Lurie, Cheryl Buckley and Lee Wright. Turning next to theoretical and methodological issues, Barnard outlines the im- portance of semiological approaches to fashion, and the varied ways in which dress codes can be interpreted as ‘language’ or at least ‘language like’, with rather differ- ing contributions from Roland Barthes, Alison Lurie, Ruth P. Rubinstein and Colin Campbell. ‘The specifically visual aspects of fashion are unexpectedly neglected in fashion stud- ies. While work has recently appeared on the cultural and social significance of fashion photographers like Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, Barnard argues that this wholeEDITORIAL INTRODUCTION 391 area, particularly the relationship between ‘high end’ fashion, its dissemination and pho- tography, is in need of greater analytical and critical attention. Something similar could be said of the complex relationships between fashion and the body, although as Barnard notes there are important differences between the relative intractability of the body and the facility with which clothes may be chosen or rejected. He outlines related arguments about whether tattoos for example should be treated as fashion. Concern with globalization is often related to anxieties about the role of fashion in stoking up wasteful, unsustainable overconsumption and more generally environ- mentalist politics. In this context, Barnard mentions recent studies by Margaret May- nard, Colin Gale and Jasbir Kaur, and Sandy Black (for example the work Eco-Chic) ‘The work of Kate Fletcher and the campaigning groups like ‘Adbusters’ seek to raise awareness of the sustainability and ethical problems relating to the production and use of clothing. Margaret Maynard's Dress and Globalisation (2004) represents an im- portant development in more sociologically reflexive accounts of fashion as a global phenomenon. Barnard warns against facile assumptions about the homogenizing effects of global- ization in fashion. While companies like Gap and Nike may be everywhere, their prod- ucts are not necessarily uniform or homogencous. ‘The overpowering of the periphery by the centre cannot be simply assumed. As Margaret Maynard argues, important different local uses and stylistic contexts for global products spring up continually and should not be ignored in either theory or research. Jose Tuenissen and Ted Polhemus have contrib- uted to what Barnard calls the ‘nonbinary account of globalization’. In concluding, Barnard provides suggestions as to likely future avenues of research for fashion studies, proposing the topics of globalization, business and marketing, and ‘green’ and sustainability issues. Methodologically, Barnard advocates empirical, ethno- graphic research into the relationship between fashion and subcultures, combined with more conceptually and hermeneutically sophisticated interpretations of the complex links and mediations berween visual presence and constructed meanings. Like Barnard, Tim Dant is concerned with how we see ‘things’, particularly ‘ma- terial objects’, as the stuff of material culture. Ways of seeing—practices of looking— are embedded firmly within the everyday life-contexts of human beings. The ob- jective of his chapter is to emphasize how the ‘biomechanics of vision’ needs to be supplemented by an account of the contribution of society and culture to seeing un- derstood as the phenomenological ‘apprehending’ of everyday things. To this end he challenges the ‘semiological’ approach that has become widely influential in visual culture studies, a perspective that insists on understanding seeing as the ‘reading’ of discrete signs. For Dant, seeing things is not reducible to a ‘system of language’, but rather is a ‘dynamic, embodied process, where things disclosed by the senses exist only in networks of other things with which our cultural experience has ac- quainted us. Dant commends a productive philosophical resource for understand- ing what happens in concrete perception in the tradition of phenomenology, from William James, Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Alfred Schutz, Don Ihde and Paul Verbeek.392 PRACTICES AND INSTITUTIONS OF VISUAL CULTURE Dant usefully contrasts this phenomenological approach with the kind of semiotic readings that are current in the literature of visual culture studies. These kinds of linguis- tic models would, for example frame dress codes as ways of formulating sociological and ideological ‘statements’. Dant notes, however, that in his later writing, the semi Roland Barthes moved away from treating things as Janguage to the analysis of things as concrete sensory formations, moving in other words from structuralism to an early form of poststructuralism. Barthes’s application of linguistic and structuralist modes of thought co cultural phenomena—for example his Myrhologies—has been enormously influential. Uki- mately, however, the linguistic model does not stand up to scrutiny. ‘There are both common sense and logical differences between meaning in language and meaning in our encounters with material culture. He notes that the anthropological approach thinks of material culture as ‘co-constitutive of social groups along with other cultural processes that include language, economy, religion and consumption’. How something comes to be ‘seen’ depends on a dialectical interplay of social and cultural forces (rituals, social re lations, discourse and so on). ‘The complexity of secing has led theorists to pay more at tention to specifically visual techniques such as drawings, photographs, sound recording and films in sense-making activities. Dant suggests that anthropology both ‘naturalizes the seeing of its subjects, and routinely makes problematic its own practices of seeing. The latter reflexivity points towards a more emphatic concern with the ‘mundane’ pro- cess of seeing things. Dant analyses aspects of everyday seeing, comparing these complex performances with the accounts provided by different theories of visual perception. The notion of an ‘array’ or compositional whole is useful as it suggests the ability of perception to shift from the ‘outline’ of a discrete item to a holistic view in which it is possible to look for contextual clues of various kinds. Michael Craig-Martin’s An Oak Tree (1973) provides an example of a dramatic shift from a straightforward quotidian interpretation of the sight of a glass of water on a shelf to having to confront the possibility of an extraordi- nary interpretation. From the perspective of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment, seeing things is not the result of a synthesis of relatively discrete parts but a single ‘apprehen- sion’ of a body that secs, hears, smells, touches and moves through space. The kinaes- thetic ‘coherence of the body’, and the ways in which we live our needs and interests, are the ultimate root of both the coherence and rich complexity of things seen. Turning to the theme of ‘apperception’, identified in different ways by Edmund Husserl, William James, Alfred Schutz and others, Dant emphasizes the intertwining of ‘thematic relevance’, the ways in which memories, ‘stocks of knowledge’ and our current profile of interests and concerns shape perceptual acts. For the social phenomenolgist Alfred Schutz, perception also includes a sense of ‘reach’ or differential zones of actual or possible attainment with respect to an object or state. Schuwz’s idea of ‘appresentation’ refers to the ways in which something not directly present in immediate perception may—through horizontal awareness or empathy—be indirectly presented. Following ideas from Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology,EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION 393 empathy and a conviction that the other’s perception of the world is roughly like our own make possible not only a philosophical theory of the objective world but also a shared cultural world, specifically a world of shared and meaningful artefacts. From sharedness, rooted in sedimented layers of apperceptions, arise the possibilities of in- tersubjectivity and the phenomenon of ‘co-presence’,a belief that we are looking at the ‘same thing’. These kinaesthetic reciprocities also enables the ego to imagine how an- other ego might react to the sight of a particular thing. Husserl makes clear that appre- sentation is not a step-by-step cognitive process but ‘happens in a glance’, and he calls the connection between the self’s perception and that of the other ‘pairing’, something which depends to a large extent on a common stock of knowledge or ‘co-perception’. By creatively extending Husser!s ideas about apperception and appresentation Schutz created tools to explain mediated cultural experience, a ‘communicative common envi- ronment’ of meaningful artefacts, including predominantly ‘visual’ ones. Schutz dis- tinctive notion of the ‘symbol’ is that it forms part of a pairing with a realm of meaning beyond the everyday, for example in such ‘provinces of meaning’ as science and religious belief. Dant concludes by noting important revisions to phenomenological theory by Ihde and Verbeek, suggesting a more active role for things in their relationships with people. Dant defends a position that points beyond the work of Merleau-Ponty and Schutz by stressing the role of holistic embodiment and an enhanced sensitivity to ‘mediated and symbolic sub-universes’ in their relationship with the orienting reality of everyday life. While critics have argued that carly phenomenology paid insufficient attention to dif- ferences in power, Dant suggests that phenomenology has the advantage of explicitly addressing the question of a shared world in which such differences exist, and in which they might be challenged. Taken together, the descriptive accounts of the meaning and perception of things provided by the phenomenological tradition are more plausible and richer than those of semiotics and other language-based approaches. If phenomenology tries to defamiliarize everyday experience and to uncover its com- plex meaning ‘genesis’, so technologies like photography and film may also function as ‘bracketing’ techniques. For example a black-and-white landscape photograph by the artist Willie Doherty, on which captions have been superimposed, might call into ques- tion the ways in which we usually make sense of photographs. For Fiona Summers this image highlights how the interpretation of photographs, rather than being obvious or unproblematic, is always undertaken from a point of view with particular perceptual and ideological dimensions. The appearance of digital photographic technology not- withstanding, work on photography within visual culture studies, by for example Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, Victor Burgin, John Tagg and Stuart Hall, has thus continually emphasized the artefactuality and conventionality of the photographic image, and, more especially, its social or political meanings and uses. Summers points out that the introduction of digital photography has not seriously threatened the ‘mimetic’ aura of photography generally. The conventions of analogue photography remain in force, despite the superseding powers of digital coding: in- deed these conventions might be self-consciously used to introduce ‘imperfections’ or394 PRACTICES AND INSTITUTIONS OF VISUAL CULTURE ‘graininess’ to the digital image to enhance its documentary connotations. Conversely, ‘perfect’ digital imagery has come to be associated with notions of hyper-reality. The role of ubiquitous photography as a medium for the production of circulation of visual im- ages has shaped the culture of modern life. Ranging from public displays (advertising displays, journalism, photo-sharing Web sites) through to intimate family snaps, we find a complex set of relationships and connections between photography and everyday life. As Vivian Sobchack and others have pointed out, ‘the way in which we sce and make sense of ourselves as subjects is fundamentally transformed by photographic visuality. Through photographs we present ourselves to others and ourselves in a variety of differ- ent ways, all of which may be reviewed in terms of the veracity or desirability of what is shown. Much of visual culture studies is about the role of photography in recognition and misrecognition, the power of the gaze, and the influence of photography on visual presentations of self. Unlike film, photographs arrest movement and freeze time, pro- ducing an ‘object of vision’, and thus lending an uncanny aura of veracity to the image. Yet as Roland Barthes points out, there can be no coincidence between a photograph and the ‘real self” With family photography, the image captures the active presentation of being a fam- ily’, of bringing out and strengthening real and/or imagined ties. Digital technology and image-sharing Web sites have continued the traditions of family analogue photography. Danish ethnographer Jonas Larsen argues that as family structures become more com- plex and fluid, family photography may evolve to emphasize longevity and consistency. He further points our that holiday, leisure and cultural locations, together with cameras, draw people together into enactments of ‘familyness’. ‘Turning to the new phenomenon of digital sharing, Summers reports the view of Jose van Dijk that the digital camera is being used not just to record important events in the context of everyday life but much more casually, often as a means or enhancement of mundane social interaction. Communal photographic exchange via Web sites like Flickr does not so much displace the contribution to memory as to provide new patterns and opportunities for its distribution. Novel aesthetic and ‘interest’ communities may be the result. ‘The ‘rhizomatic’ effects of the causal, multiple ‘labelling’ of images on Flickr has pro- duced what Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis call folksonomy’, a shifting, flexible, collaborative organization of content. In the context of Flickr, labelling is important in that it creates finite collections of images among multiplicity of images too vast to be seen. These collections are typically viewed in sequence, thus departing from the largely static imagery familiar to earlier writers on photography. Digital technology also erodes the ‘aura’ of analogue images, replacing it with a sense of ‘disposability and immediacy’ Summers argues, however, that the placing of photographs in online archives lends them importance and permanence. Turning to the documentary uses of photography, Summers suggests that despite widespread scepticism about the veracity of such images the recording or memorializ- ing functions of photography continue to matter immensely. As an example, she turns to Alison's Young's work on photography and the terrorist attacks on the World TradeEDITORIAL INTRODUCTION 305 Centre in 2001, which shows how personal photographs of absent people and the build- ings operated in sites of mourning, Summers suggests that photographic imagery still attracts a conflation of secing with knowing, perhaps as a response to an event that was difficult to comprehend. David Campany interprets the plate photographs of Ground Zero by Joel Meyerowitz as almost an attempt to ‘rescue’ memory, and the memorial functions of photography itself, from a welter of images and information. This point connects to the use of photography in the context of archiving and mu- sums. Susan Sontag had already noted that photographs of particular events are often taken to encapsulate an entire historical event or even period, and that museums of vari- ous kinds are heavily reliant on photography. Asan example, Summers cites Darren New- bury’s work on the role of photography in two South African museums, showing how particular documentary images associated with violent episodes in the struggle against apartheid have shaped postapartheid national memory. However, Newbury’s work also raises questions about the power of the photographic cliché ‘congealing’ around a prob- lem, sometimes obstructing more complex and constructive insights. Rachel Hughes has drawn attention to the use of photographs to represent nations or historical episodes in the particular case of Cambodi 1 prison during the genocide of the 1970s. Portraits of incoming prisoners have been used worldwide to document and encapsulate Pol Por’s Kampuchea, largely as a result of the cataloguing and conser- vation work of the American Photo Archive Group. Yet even in the case of grotesque atrocities, the preservation and distribution of the material images does not eliminate questions about the formation and uses of historical memory. In conclusion, Summers argues that the advent of digital technologies has not re- duced the importance of photography, but ‘activated and built on photography’s ability to mutate in order to become crucial to the networked societies in which it is ar- gued we (as global citizens) live, work and connect’. She notes the continued power of individual images to elicit a range of powerful feeling, articulated in public and private settings. Digital technology has done nothing to change the capacity of photographs to be both transient and enduring. As Walter Benjamin observed, the camera can record what might have been seen, causing us to look at the photograph not only for what was ‘there’ but unobserved, but also for what was ‘yet to come’. Amid the complexity, pro- fusion and chaos of a digital visual culture, photography still offers this hope of ‘seeing better’ or even secing at all. With the appearance of new media technologies like permanently streamed digital photography and film (especially through social networking sites and multimedia plat- forms), a whole new range of issues becomes researchable. Here the configuration of topics not only includes traditional issues of the content and structure of the medium but also its social production, dissemination and appropriation in social and cultural terms. Kristyn Gorton explores television as one such global visual medium, emphasiz- ing not just ‘what appears on screen’ but also che more intangible practices that occur around and through this global medium. ‘The new era for television, sometimes called ‘TV 3’, dating from around the mid- 1990s, is one in which digital-satellite broadcasting bypasses national boundaries and396 AND INSTITUTIONS OF VISUAL CULTURE confronts a global environment, with radical consequences for older national institu: tional and organizational structures. Television has become part of the background of people’ lives, but this does not necessarily mean that its influence on ideas and outlooks is continuous and emphatic. There are times when viewers actively engage with the vi- sual message, and others when they allow the flow of meanings to wash over them asa kind of ubiquitous background to their normal activities and lives. Plurality of screen technologies and convergence between the Internet, television and film have led to new patterns of viewing, raising the larger question of whether television is more or less central to modern life. Anna McCarthy is concerned with the publie pres- ence of television, what human acts it reinforces or interprets. For example is ‘waiting’ integral co its structure, and what feeling and needs does ‘passing the time’ address? The availability and placing of screens in public spaces like bars and restaurants are impor- tant to understanding what viewing practices are taking place. John Sinclair, Elizabeth Jacka and Stuart Cunningham argue that signs of the com- ing globalized media future began to appear in the 1970s, accompanied by trade liberalization, increased international competition and the declining power of the national state. Satellite broadcasting, they say, acted as a “Trojan Horse’ for media deregulation. Burgconing private programming led not only to more dependence on American imports but also new ‘geolinguistic regions’, often based around common languages, for example the popularity of South American ‘telenovellas’ in Spain and Southern Europe. Reviewing the development of the debate, initiated in the 1960s by Herbert Schiller about media and cultural ‘imperialism’, Gorton suggests thar there has been a recent re- surgence of interest within global television studies, despite two decades of critique and ision. However, the ways immigrant groups and travellers actually use globalized con- tent for their own, often unexpected, purposes has been increasingly researched. Ameri- can cultural products cannot be assumed to make their consumers think like Americans. For example Lisa Parks has studied the use of satellite dishes by Aboriginal Australians, discovering that the selection and viewing of programmes are strategically restructured to give them shape and relevance for an indigenous audience. In thinking about media globalization, the idea of ‘flow’ has become more impor- tant, a more plausible alternative to the older notion of a radiating centre dominating a periphery. Reviewing Raymond Williams’ early work with the notion of flow, Lynn Spigel draws attention to the way it highlights a continuity of form and emotional tone in American television running across different programmes and advertisements. Albert Moran suggests that ‘flow’ is the unity of ‘carriage and content’, a more accurate way of thinking about global television than separating medium from message. Different researchers have noted the power of telev programmes to purchase for large national and international communities, and hence to influence production. Edward S. Herman and Robert McChesney focus on the emer- gence of transnational media corporations, while Michael Curtin argues that the growth of ‘media capitals’ like Bombay, Cairo and Hong Kong, dominating production, fi- nance and distribution, is more important to the new global configuration than national executives to decide whatEDITORIAL INTRODUCTION 397 constraints. In some ways this makes branded content more important in attracting and retaining audiences than control of distribution. This means that consolidated media corporations must focus more on a broadening of emotionally compelling content within an overall brand image. Toby Miller has suggested that in a neo-liberal globalized world questions of belong- ing become more urgent and more difficult. For Gorton, this raises the question of how audiences become emotionally engaged with what they watch. Henry Jenkins identifies a new ‘convergence culture’ in which content flows across different media, accompanied by migratory audiences in search of their desired entertainment experiences. Coining the term ‘affective economics’, he argues that production and distribution increasingly cater for specialist tastes via different media platforms, evidence of the exploitation of the emotional involvement of audiences with particular programmes. Other researchers, influenced by the ‘theory of reflexive modernization’ of Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernscheim, have investigated television cul- ture in the light of a ‘new individualism’, which stresses ‘choosing, changing and trans- forming’. Lauren Berlant describes the arrival of an ‘intimate public sphere’, saturating television with scenes and techniques of intimacy, from the ‘confessional’ to therapy and self-help. Rachel Moseley argues that ‘makeover’, talent shows and ‘reality television’ generally have eroded the distinction between public and private. Researchers like Anita Biressi, Heather Nunn and Charlotte Brunsdon demonstrate how reality programmes supplement a ‘didactic’ element with a crucial moment of ‘revelation’, bearing on a dis- play of the protagonist succeeding or failing in his or her transformational efforts. Many such programmes stress the obligation of choice and change, the designing and execu- tion of a life. “The emphasis on ‘choice’ affects both what is watched and how it is watched. David Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin argue that, because of the structure of financing, tele- vision is even more oriented to the immediate gratification of audiences than film, re- lentlessly pursuing as a consequence proven formulae for positive emotional response. Derek Johnson has studied the ‘interactive’ involvement of enthusiastic viewers in pro- gramme design, arguing that producers enjoy ‘free labour’ but also keep firm control over what gets made Gorton notes the ambivalence in audiences who are both reflexively critical but also emotionally engaged; ‘critical knowledge’ does not inevitably negate ‘viewing pleasures’ ‘As Helen Piper has pointed out, much reality and life-style programming both invites empathic identification with participants, but also elicits judgement. For Gorton, such judgement is another expression of ‘choosing, changing and transforming’ with respect to a social role or identity. Finally, Gorton summarizes recent television research focussed around debates over ‘carriage’ and ‘content’. The ‘culture of production’ is as important as the ‘production of culture’. In particular, new research has changed our understanding of ‘how television is made and received in one culture and understood in another’ or the flows between mak- ets, sellers, buyers and watchers of television. In a complex, plural marketplace the ca- pacity of programmes, under certain viewing conditions, to evoke emotions has become398 PRACTICES AND INSTITUTIONS OF VISUAL CULTURE critical to the formation and retention of audiences, hence the importance of ‘content streaming’ and ‘aesthetics’ to further research. Gorton concludes by arguing that the ‘liveliness and immediacy’ of television imagery, often watched in intimate, domestic settings, provides many people with a sense of the world in which they live and influ- ences life-styles and identities, and as such research into television will remain important to the study of contemporary visual culture. Andrew Spicer explores a related area of contemporary visual culture. He begins by noting that the appearance of new visual media and global forms of digitalization have threatened a crisis for film studies as a disciplinary research arca within visual culture studies, heralding a new era of ‘post-cinema’, or a ‘cinema of interactions’ in which films are still made and watched, but in new forms and more actively in a variety of locati Hollywood—the Hollywood industrial system—no longer prevails over an integrated system of production, distribution and exhibition. In a similar vein, researchers like Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams endorse a‘re- invention’ of film studies, revising it fundamentally in the light of this new postmodern, globalized environment. For David Rodowick, digital technology means that film is no longer the ‘pre-eminent modern medium’. For other film theorists, this new situation pro- vides additional opportunities for revising the history of film as one episode in a longer, more diverse history of audiovisual ‘moving images’. Focusing selectively on key accounts of the perceived ‘crisis’, Andrew Spicer sets out to explore debates about the ‘nature of film itself” film’ relationship with other practices of looking, and finally with visual culture. Recent film history has examined film’ contribution to the social and cultural changes associated with the rise of modernity. New visual technology, restless move- ment and urban spectacle were combined by early cinema, and regarded as quintessen- tially modern. Indeed the appearance of regulated ‘industrialized time’ and capitalist work practices formed the background to the cinema's capacity to capture and organize the ephemeral and the quotidian. Studies by Tom Gunning, Vanessa Schwartz and Ben Singer locate early cinema amidst the emerging ‘society of the spectacle’ and a newly mobilized sensory environ- ment of ‘shocks, fragmentation and superabundance of sensation, Miriam Hansen points out both the specificity of classical Hollywood film, and its success as the first ‘global sensory vernacular’, an aesthetic counterpoint to the experience of mass indus- rial society, Anne Friedberg sets cinema in the context of a ‘mobilized virtual gaze’, a characteristic perceptual form of modernity and ultimately of postmodernity. Replacing an earlier unqualified enthusiasm for new media, recent studies have stressed the complex interplay between analogue and digital technologies. Both main- stream and experimental films have been made using digital formats, for reasons of both cost and aesthetic potential, with the latter often focussed on post-production editing, While the Hollywood blockbusters, characterized by expensive action sequences and special effects, are still globally important, other forms of cinema have arisen, hence the interest of film studies in a new, decentred multinational system for film. Hamid Naficy notes the rise to prominence of ‘accented cinema’, produced by displaced or diasporic communities and circulated across national boundaries. s.EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION 399 ‘The ways in which movies are seen and appropriated have also changed. Cinema going remains popular, but is just one way of viewing, displaced by a vari formats and forms in which a film might exist, from DVD to the Internet. ‘Home cin- ema’ may well become a predominant form of film consumption, catering for new ways of being a fan or a connoisseur. Some observers argue that the interactive potential of digital technology is leading to the empowerment of audiences, or at least to a greater market voice. Laura Mulvey has suggested that the ease with which moving images may now be frozen restores to film the ‘weighty presence of passing time’ that André Bazin and Ro- land Barthes associated with the epistemology of the photograph. Turning to the aesthetic impact of digital film technology, Spi Manovich’s analysis of the changing ontology of the moving image. fluence of computing and media technologies, digital film should be understood as an ‘expressive, graphic medium’, akin to painting, or ‘a particular case of animation that uses live-action footage as one of its many elements’. Analogue film’s technique of mon- tage and cut has been replaced by digitalized composition and morphing. Spicer suggests that the surface detail made possible by digitalization and the com- bination of computer-generated imagery (CGI) and live action have been exploited co blur the difference between ‘immediacy’ and ‘hyper-mediacy’, the ‘real’ and spectacle in an aesthetics of ‘surface play and immersive spectacle rather than intelligibility’. More radical experiments with digital aesthetics arc conducted by avant-garde prac- tices bringing together different cultural locations: filmmaking, music, video, street art, club events and video installations in galleries. Digital technologies lend themselves to eclectic hybridization and the forging of new connections. Among the better-known di- rectors creating new work across different platforms are David Lynch and Peter Green- away, but Spicer also points to the success of ‘The Matrix’ franchise, not so much a film genre as an ‘evolving cultural entity’, an instance of ‘metacinema’. What this demon- strates, according to Spicer, is that while a particular form of cinema may be over, in its new, multiple forms film ‘continues to be a crucial component of art and popular cul- ture in the digital age’. Digital visual images may be as important to the visual experience of postmoder- nity as analogue cinema was to the representation of modernity. However, do changes in moving image technology and practices of viewing amount to the end of film as a coherent cultural form, offering to the spectator distinctive features and qualities, as David Rodowick has suggested? As digital images seem more remote and are less de- pendent on the prior existence of material, temporal things, they may discourage the “sensuous exploration of the physical world and the material structure of everyday life’ that were important to photography and film. However the ‘crisis’ of film is mirrored by related crises elsewhere in the wider culture; indeed the very term ‘digital’ often seem a designation of ‘crisis and transition’. Arguments about the integrity of film studies or its submergence in a new visual culture studies giving precedence to digital visuality are another expression of current uncertainties. For Spicer, the opening of film studies to a broader, more inclusive historical, technical and aesthetic context is of screen t discusses Lev jituated at the con-400 PRACTICES AND INSTITUTIONS OF VISUAL CULTURE important for research into film specifically, but also to the quality of a dynamic, in- terdisciplinary visual culture. In conclusion, Spicer argues that film and film studies are experiencing a ‘threshold moment’, with researchers having to confront and question fundamental presupposi- tions. Some of the most useful work is examining in empirical and experiential detail how new technologies operate and what practices of viewing they stimulate. In light of the declining centrality of the Hollywood system, we should also expect new stud- ies of transnational or global cinema, as well as work on film as one component of complex, multiple and rapidly changing forms and networks made possible by digital media. Connecting directly with the practice and theory of landscape architecture, as well as more broadly addressing the social and aesthetic impact of the built environment, Kathryn Moore argues for a nced to change prevailing approaches to perception itself, particularly with respect to traditional assumptions about the role of visual perception in social life. In the context of design practice, Moore suggests that there has been a growing awareness that the natural and built environment has a profound effect upon economic growth and upon many aspects of the quality of life. This recognition is also evidenced in the policies of governments internationally, with Moore citing as examples enlight- ened housing and landscape projects in the Netherlands, the Midlands area of the UK and Costa Rica. Italso informs projects that cut across the conventional divide between the artistic and ecological, as well as democratic political initiatives furthering the idea of ‘landscape rights’. Here the traditional separation of environment, architecture, acs- thetics and human experience has become blurred. Moore argues that by neglecting landscape, landscape architecture and architectural practice overlook an important dimension of modern life, its experiential value or ‘lived’ quality. In coming to terms with these complexities visual culture studies can learn from the emergent holistic strategies addressing the challenges of ‘industrialization, urbaniza- tion, energy, demographic shifts and changing patterns of work and habitation, as well as climate change, the depletion of natural resources, de/forestation, problems relating to food production, biodiversity, heritage, a host of issues relating to the quality of life and other aspects of land use change and development’. Blocking such changes, in Moore's view, reflects weaknesses in the philosophical basis of design practice, and more particularly a misunderstanding of the centrality of percep- tion and lived experience in architectural praxis. The individual and collective factors involved in the making of good design have been subject to a misleading dichotomy, between ineffable subjectivity on the one hand and techno-scientific problem solving on the other. Moore's critique from the point of view of design practice raises questions about ideas of perception prevailing in visual studies. Moore thus recommends a ‘prag- matic, holistic approach to consciousness and perception’. Moore argues that sense perception, or the kind of organized awareness and reflec- tion that takes place at least partly through the medium of seeing and looking, has been subject to contradictory assessments. In some accounts it is seen as primitive, instinctiveEDITORIAL INTRODUCTION 401 and unpredictable when compared with, say, the cool rationalism of verbal thinking. Often this view is connected to the idea of sensory specialization, which Moore argues is obviously fallacious when it comes to unified character of everyday perception. As the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey observes, to think of ‘sensory inputs’ as, ‘synthesized’ is already co have made a fundamental mistake. For Moore, the isolation of the senses encourages not only an overestimation of the ‘sovereign’ powers of vision, bur eventually also ‘ocularphobia’ in which vision is accused of a wide variety of cogni- tive and ethical failures. ‘The underlying problem of the aesthetic, according to Moore, is the inevitable fail- ure of the aspiration to ‘see’ beauty directly and without presuppositions, and the conse- quent descent of critical judgement into forms of subjective preference. This has many harmful implications for art and design pedagogy, which Moore describes. Following the American neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty and others, Moore argues that mistakes, problems and disputes about the visual and so-called visual thinking can be simply removed by refusing to divide consciousness into different modes or concep- tual spheres: ‘all chinking, whether in the arts or sciences is therefore interpretative and metaphorical’, and hence ‘linguistic’. Presumably, however, the notion of ‘language’ at work here would privilege neither oral speech nor written text along the lines of received understandings of language. Moore suggests that refusing to separate awareness of the world into insular spheres of consciousness solves many intractable problems and helps secure a more robust, common-sense realism. Moore outlines some of the consequences of rethinking perception, discussing in particular truth, visual skills, aesthetics and objectivity. Turning to the design process, she reviews the implications for theory and the generation of form (a key design skill) and the basis of design discourse. In conclusion, Moore emphasizes how theorists can learn from practice, specifically a practice that avoids compartmentalizing its different aspects. The ambition of design practice should be to bring to bear all aspects of the social and cultural context for land- scape and architecture. However, the resources offered by current discourse may well be deficient. Certainly Moore thinks that the language available for talking about public spaces needs a more ‘differentiated vocabulary’. Abandoning current ideas about percep- tion will improve design teaching and practice, enabling designers to ‘connect special strategies to real places’ through the development and application of new ideas. “The research theme that Martin Hand sets out to explore rests on the view that we live in an increasingly visualized culture, not simply because of the ubiquity and power of images and imaging technology but because of the use of images and visual artefacts in the production and mobilization of commodities. Consumer culture is thus thor- oughly pervaded by social relations of design, marketing and branding. Wich the coming of modern consumer culture there is an increasingly more em- phatic connection between visual culture and the consumption of commodities. In very general terms, ‘consumerism’ has replaced ‘productionism’ in the logic of contemporary capitalism, and as a consequence, social-cultural life has been ‘aestheticised’. Not sur- prisingly most work focussing on consumption in visual culture has been preoccupied402 PRACTICES AND INSTITUTIONS OF VISUAL CULTURE by advertising, and this relates to what Hand sees as the central question of al social-sci- entific studies of consumer culture: the capacity of consumers to act as agents. He sug- gests thar studies of consumer culture and visual culture have much to offer one another, although both confront new theoretical and methodological challenges emerging from processes of global digitalization. ‘The idea that contemporary culture is a ‘consumer culture’ has become a common- place of modern sociology. Application of semiotics encouraged the idea that the con- sumption of things was secondary to the consumption of images built into products by sophisticated designers, marketeers and advertisers, and that such consumption pat terns had become indispensable to the formation and projection of identities. The re- sule of this sociological and cultural turn was that the empirical study of consumption has tended to be predominantly culturalist. More recent consumer theory is the re- sult of three shifts. First, commodities are now visualized in new ways. This is particu- larly evident in the exponential growth of the advertising industry. Second, changes in marketing and branding have to some extent undermined the priority of the visual. ‘Third, digitalization has affected consumption profoundly, for some even threatening the ‘death’ of advertising. Hand argues that analyses of ‘visual consumption’ and approaches to consumption generally within the symbolic, to the detriment of a more nuanced account in which visuality is treated as one element among other material and sensory features and practices. As with Dant’s argument about the challenges faced by material culeure, Hand suggests that we need new ways of thinking in dealing with the materiality of everyday life. To this end he turns to well-known critiques of consumer culture, typically decrying its supposed visual emphasis through which anxious, avaricious consumers are created, and a shallow culture of images frustrates the promise of a society based on authen- tic human values. For Hand, research in visual consumption remains dominated by a monolithic idea of the technologically or economically determined disappearance of ual studies have overemphasized the importance of the visual and ‘reality’ into ‘spectacle’ Researchers have recognized the changing social significance of the commodity-sign. While the capacity of consumers to interpret the class and status connotations of com- modities seems to have become more important, the bewildering array of choices and messages makes competence problematic, resulting in what Zygmunt Bauman has called a world of awed consumers. “The advent of digitalization, particularly the digital photograph and the proliferation of ‘Virtual’ images whose relationship with their objects is uncertain, is taken to widen the gap between viewer and the world. A key idea here is the notion that goods have a predominantly ‘visual face’, the presentation of which has been primarily photographic. Hence, photography has been the most important visualizing tool employed by adver- tisers and marketeers. It has also been argued that the image of a commodity now often precedes its production, with brand management seeking to orchestrate product identi- ties and meanings. Hand reviews changes in advertising research, with more recent accounts stressing the active consumer, the possibility of different consumption practices, and the inescapableEDITORIAL INTRODUCTION 403 problems of choice and possible error, with consequences for the construction and presen- tation of consuming selves. While much visual advertising invokes an active, rational agent as its addressee, critics suggest that the range of choices on offer is narrow and predeter- mined according to corporate interests. While there are well-known theoretical and meth- odological difficulties in proving the direct power of advertising over consumer behaviour, nevertheless Hand concludes that advertising shapes the ‘visual terrain of consumption by encouraging consumers to identify with particular images of lifestyle. “The history of advertising formats provided by William Leiss, Stephen Klein and Sut Jhally usefully charts the development of advertising in relation co socioeconomic change. While early advertisers stressed the self-evident value of the product or its pro- gressive, modern characteristics, ‘totemic’ or ‘narcissistic’ life-style connotations pervade later commodity images. The late-twentieth century saw the rise of global branding where product-imagery and personalized life-style formulae combine to constitute the more differentiated (or perhaps fragmented) ‘postmodern consumer’. Advertisers reflec- tively acknowledge and incorporate what consumers ‘know’, their cultural and aesthetic competencies in the context of a highly fluid and rapidly changing ficld that branding tries to ‘manage’. As Celia Lury has pointed our, brands become not only ‘practices’ but also ‘new media objects’, replacing products and consumers. In this context visual ap- pearances become one dimension of an array of sensory and textual features, including material qualities and characteristics, to create identities, presence and the experiential effects of life-style and ‘authenticity’. Hand turns next to the relationship between visual aspects of consumption and di talization, Much research concerned with the impact of digital technology appears to accept that contemporary society has become pervasively cultural and ‘visual’. Modern and postmodern life has been thoroughly aesthericized. The image has become not only the means but also the end of consumption. With economic globalization the com- mercial penetration of an increasingly visual culture has been accelerated and deepened through the new digital technologies. However, while some theorists stress the ‘demate- rialized! image, others propose the appearance of | ly’ and interactive media formats. Global digitalization facilitates the ‘voluntaristic production of visual culture by con- sumers’, with blogging Web sites, YouTube and user-generated photographic archives like Flickr being prominent platforms. Researchers have drawn attention to the erosion. of the boundary between amateur and professional image-making, the development of ‘user-friendly’ creative software, and the potential of digital equipment for a growing ‘craft’ orientation among ordinary, nonspecialist image practitioners. “These changes produce contradictory phenomena. On the one hand the new geo- ecology of proliferating, mutating images makes it difficult to know ‘who’ produces, distrib- utes or owns an image. On the other hand image rights have become critical for maintain- ing older producer-consumer relations and profit margins. Digital imaging as an instance of mobile and convergent media combine with other digitalized data flows and raise profound theoretical, practical, ethical and commercial problems, prompting a radical questioning of visual culture as a ‘field of representation’. Hand also notes the paradox of increasing con- sumer participation on the one hand alongside the commercial use of software that sorts, classifies and codes behaviour into different life-style categories on the other.404 PRACTICES AND INSTITUTIONS OF VISUAL CULTURE Hand concludes his survey by arguing that theory and research in the field of vi sual culture has hitherto elided the diversity and specificity of consumption practic Faced with the inadequacy of these models we need more realistic accounts of actual consumption patterns, especially ‘a more nuanced consideration of the ways in which images are acquired, interpreted, used, and increasingly co-created by situated consum- ets, in relation to historically and socioeconomically defined contexts’. In moving away from traditional models of representation and commoditization, and towards emergent forms of co-production or ‘prosumption’, theory is simply responding to the changing practices of consumers, or what Hand refers to as the ‘rematerialization of culture in digital terms.