Johanna Drucker

Graphic Devices: Narration and Navigation

�� ��� Readings of narrative texts rarely include attention to the graphic devices that structure presentation in print or electronic formats. These devices are rendered largely invisible by habits of reading. But, I would suggest, these graphic elements do more than structure the conditions in which narration is produced. By their hierarchy, arrangement, organization, and other features they contribute to the production of the narrative in substantive ways. In my usage, the term graphic includes all aspects of layout and composition by which elements are organized on a surface, though “surface” is a deceptive term for describing the temporal and spatial complexity of books, comics, and other textual instruments. In an electronic environment, this complexity goes even further‐‐since the screen surface is clearly an illusion concealing a complicated model of narrative possibilities under a fully-rendered visual interface. Navigation, the other term in play here, refers to the active manipulation of features on the level of discourse and presentation. Though many of my examples are drawn from illustrated books or other dramatically visual materials, I would argue that graphic devices play an active role in all instances of textual presentation, not only those in which images or pictorial elements are present. My goal here is to demonstrate that these graphic devices can be read as an integral part of narrative texts. Demonstrating that the graphic devices that appear to constrain discourse functions also contribute to the chronological experience of events (within

Is There a “Digital” Art History?

The field of art history faces unique challenges with regard to digital practice. While access and availability of the art historical corpus have been facilitated by the development of online repositories, tools for analysis or computational processing have been slow to emerge. This paper surveys some of the current directions in “digital” art history and addresses the difficulties that arise with regard to the remediation of images and their availability (and resistance) to techniques of data mining and other computational techniques.

Digital Ontologies: The Ideality of Form in/and Code Storage--or--Can Graphesis Challenge Mathesis?

Digital media gain their cultural authority in part because of the perception that they function on mathematical principles. The relationship between digital images and their encoded files, and in other cases, between digital images and the algorithms that generate them as display, lends itself to a conviction that the image and the file are mutually interchangeable. This relationship posits a connection of identicality between the file and the image according to which the mathematical basis and the image seem to share similar claims to truth. Since the history of images within Western culture is fraught with charges of deception and illusion, the question arises whether the ontological condition of the digital image, its very existence and identity, challenges this tradition. Or, by contrast, does the material instantiation of images, in their display or output, challenge the truth claims of the mathematically based digital file?

Contemporary Feminism: Art Practice, Theory, and Activism—An Intergenerational Perspective

Although in our time a generation seems to be the measure of the life span of a mosquito, it was—a generation ago—agreed upon as the thirty-year span of time during which a person could grow from birth to parenthood. So perhaps it is fitting that, thirty years after the inception of the Womens Liberation Movement and the Feminist Art Movement, a number of panels, forums, and symposia have focused on the history, relevance, and fate of feminism.

Digital Reflections: The Dialogue of Art and Technology

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Collaboration without Object(s) in the Early Happenings

Happenings have found only a minor spot in histories of post-1945 art activity. Overview texts generally find it necessary to mention them in passing, in a “you-had-to-be-there, it was the major party of the decade” mode. But beyond a descriptive gloss, little of the substantial content of the gestures on which the Happenings were based has been considered critically.

Distributed and Conditional Documents: Conceptualizing Bibliographical Alterities

Using an abstract graph model we describe a hypothetical transformation of a literary entity through the active connections in the graph. First, we weakly define a set of transformations (“morphology”) over a particular entity as a series of the recent activities distinguishing them into categories according to their effect on the entity. Second, to our conjecture, the emerging paths of forms are slowly abandoning the original “birth context”, shaping a decreased, cleaned set of entities, to replace the gap with entities derived from the dynamic set of “recipient context”. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/2182-8830_4-2_4In this interview Joao Luis Lisboa talks about the History of the Book as a discipline, and about the forms and uses of books.My article proposes an exercise of archeophony – or voice archeology – focusing, on this occasion, on the possibility of establishing the complex figure and imagining of the ‘avatar’ as a comparandum of the notion and representation of the ‘cyborg’. The gains of this comparison allow us to debate different objects, such as ‘the voice of the avatar’, the ‘voice as avatar’ and, finally, the archive of the vocal representations, ‘avatars of the voice’. Case studies under concise scrutiny include Spike Jonze’s feature film Her ; fragments of the Bernardo Soares/Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet ; lastly, the digital simulation of John Donne’s voice, accessible online as a result of the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project: A Digital Re-Creation of John Donne’s Gunpowder Day Sermon , based at the North Carolina State University.The present article aims to discuss the materiality of the book through graphic design. It begins with two different ways of looking at the object: the emotional design approach by Donald Norman (complemented by Antonio Damasio’s affects theory) and the production of presence approach by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. To understand how those theories can be related and how they can apply to books, one of the sections is dedicated to describing the haptic qualities of three books. By contrasting a traditional book with two books whose design explores their tactile materiality, this article tries to understand how the physical embodiment of the book influences our perception of art through affective interactions.In general, the article seeks to understand the production of a specific area of media art focused on a variant of Environmental art (tentatively called ecomedia aesthetics) that could contribute to technological resilience and ethical formulations concerned about the future of humanity and the planet. Therefore the research is divided into two areas: on the one hand, artists, collectives and designers involved in research on unconventional computing systems, alternative infrastructures and green energy; on the other hand, relations established between ecomedia artistic production and philosophical concepts applied to a theory of responsibility. This article combines two branches of philosophy (ethics and aesthetics) and, in particular, covers areas such as computer science, ecology, renewables, among others.Recensao critica a obra de Stefan Herbrechter, Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis. London: Bloomsbury, 2013, 239 pp. ISBN 978-1-7809-3606-2 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/2182-8830_4-2_19Review of Johanna Drucker, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production , Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2014. 215 pp. ISBN 978-0-674-72493-8 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/2182-8830_4-2_14Review of Lori EMERSON, Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound , Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2014, 225 pp. [1a ed.]. ISBN 978-0-8166-9125-8Recencao critica a Siegfried Zielinski, [… After the Media] News from the Slow-fading Twentieth Century . Minneapolis, Minnesota: Univocal, 2013. 276 pp. ISBN 9781937561161. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/2182-8830_4-1_16Review of Jussi PARIKKA, What is Media Archaeology?, London: Polity, 2012, 200 pp. ISBN 978-0745650265.Review of Alexander Starre, Metamedia: American Book Fictions and Literary Print Culture after Digitization . Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2015, 316 pp. ISBN 978-1-60938-359-6 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/2182-8830_4-2_17half a door and clown right clasp, your knobck ck ck l icks un g ate sleep inside the hoseyr Faucet vapor eats my end raw nor meatThe expansion of practices for sharing cultural artifacts made possible by digitization and communication networks has led researchers to apply the notion of commons to the field of intellectual property – in cases such as open-source software, Wikipedia, and open-access scientific publication, for example. This article deals with linguistic and terminological issues raised by this concept and its translations (in particular, into Portuguese); examines common sources of misunderstanding, such as the conflation of the legal, economic, and theological meanings of “commons”; reviews similar words and phrases in other languages; and discusses the merits and disadvantages of the existing options in Portuguese – mainly the option for “common goods” [“bens comuns”].Recensao critica a obra de Martin Paul Eve, Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future . Cambridge University Press, 2014, 209 pp. ISBN 978-1107484016. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/2182-8830_4-2_21

Who's Afraid of Visual Culture?

Contemporary artists are increasingly producing works that mimic fashion photography, derive from television, or otherwise struggle to compete with the production values of the entertainment industries. This is hardly news. But the theoretical discussion of fine art as a cultural practice is still largely dependent on outmoded ideas that “art” defines itself in critical opposition to mass culture.

Making Space: Image Events in an Extreme State

In our image-saturated culture, can works of imaginative art have any impact? If so, then what is the critical concept within which their effect can be understood? This article makes use of a systems-theory approach in relation to a longer history of modernist criticism, proposing the idea of refamiliarization as an associative reading that resituates images within networks and scenes of knowledge. The idea is proposed as a task of recovery, rather than alienation, and suggests a line between the shock-effect approach of exposure, predicated on a belief in a false surface to be unmasked, and the totalized concepts of simulacral virtuality that forecloses lived experience. The space made by image events is that space of interpretative activity. The works of a number of key contemporary artists offer an insight into the ways refamiliarization relates to the crises in the identity and impact of fine art and documentary images.

Species of Espaces and other spurious concepts addressed to reading the invisible features of signs within systems of relations

ABSTRACT This article proposes that signs and signage systems be understood as part of enunciative systems. These in turn perform according to different models of cultural space that are layered into the built environment. Signs might be conceived in terms of circulation, movement, spatial ordering, point of view and sight lines, as well as ideas about how social relations are spatially organized, how privacy is understood, where legal and personal boundaries exist and why, and also notions of style, scale and all the many cultural notions of power and control that these embody. Reading signs back into patterns of cultural life reveals more than their value as icons or material artifacts; it reveals the ways models of cultural order were constituted through their material, spatial, expression. The piece lays out a multi-part framework for thinking about the various scopic regimes within which space has been understood and signage established: monumental space, navigational approaches, civic notions of public address, bibliographic concepts, cartographic, theatrical, moral reform, political action, models of traffic flows and circulation, and other spatialized schemes of linguistic and visual enunciation.