Visual Communication Exam 2

Be able to explain "brand culture" and give an example.

-In her book Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture, Sarah Banet-Weiser proposes that brands operate as cultures. Moreover, we live in a brand culture, insofar as aspects of life such as religion, family, and self-identity are now "understood and expressed through the language of branding."2 When a brand operates as a culture, consumers participate in that culture as a way of life. The brand is not just the look and feel of a set of goods produced by a corporation; it is a broad cultural form through which identity and belief are experienced. Yet, BanetWeiser explains, culture and self are not experienced as less authentic because they are structured through brand logic. Rather, "authenticity" is, in effect, branded.3 Consider Toms, a lifestyle brand launched in 2006 with the message that for each pair of shoes purchased the company will donate a pair of shoes to an impoverished child. In 2015 the company website stated that, with each purchase, Toms will "help give" not only shoes, but also "sight, water, safe birth, and bullying prevention services." To wear Toms shoes or glasses, or to drink coffee at a Toms shop, is to participate in a humanitarian brand culture. That culture is experienced as personal and authentic, despite its mediation through consumption. A person expresses his or her identity through self-alignment with the brand and buying the brand's goods. The brand is infused with (or, if we believe Toms's story, born out of) a charity economics culture; that culture is, in return, branded, insofar as it operates through a commercial ethos. This status of the brand as a culture that is both economic and emotional is found inside corporate structure as well, and not just in the culture of commodity circulation. Consider Boeing, a corporation known for producing airplanes that in 2009 described itself as being composed of three areas of practice: products and services, business practices, and community engagement. Since the late twentieth century, corporations including Boeing, Coca-Cola, and Nike increasingly have become involved in the communities in which their factories are located, sponsoring activities and programs that reach beyond the factory and its worker community. Community involvement has become part of the corporation's "personality." As we will discuss further, the linking of humanitarian activity and brands has escalated dramatically with the rise of the Internet and social media in the neoliberal era. Brands exert agency not just in the global business community but also in local communities, where they may hold the status of benefactor and lifestyle purveyor. Corporations sometimes champion fair trade sources or support environmental commitments in regions where plants are situated, even as they exercise questionable labor practices inside their plants. A corporate ethos of giving back to the world of workers and consumers has become a core aspect of corporate image design. Whereas in the twentieth century product branding involved developing packaging and the look and feel of goods, in the neoliberal era brand development includes the look and feel of the corporation as an agent in community life. Brand culture thus becomes integral to community. A brand, Banet-Weiser proposes, has become not just a style attached to commodities but also a relationship: an "intersecting relationship between marketing, a product, and consumers."4 The brand, once strongly associated with the representational mark (such as the trademark, or trade dress), is now a cultural framework for everyday living. -Ex) Apple, Jeep

-is often referred to as collaborative media and, in simple terms, can be described as the collection, analysis, and distribution of news and information provided by the public, or in other words average citizens. It allows members of society to create news content, not just professional journalists. With the advancement of technology and the rise of social media, citizen journalism has continued to become more prominent in our society. Today, almost every adult owns a smartphone with a camera, so most things are either photographed or videoed. Citizen journalists have the ability to record what they see and can publish or share their images or videos to help inform the public and/or bring awareness to a certain problem. There is no way that journalists can be everywhere, all the time; therefore, citizen journalists are very advantageous in providing content and stories that journalists do not get. Due to our society's dependence on technology and social media for news, citizen journalism has become one of the most prominent news sources. Citizen journalism is so important because it allows for citizens' voices to be heard and often brings awareness to issues that are not talked about as much as they should be. It allows for all news to be heard and not just what the media wants you to hear. Additionally, this idea of citizen journalism allows people within the community to build and maintain relationships with the media and makes them feel like they are recognized and that their opinion matters. -In the contemporary media environment, with the rise of social media, definitions of media and audiences have dramatically changed. We can see elements of both the liberatory and damaging qualities of media globalization. On the positive side, the dominance of mainstream media has been challenged by the rise of citizen journalism and web-based media produced by citizen-users. As we discussed in Chapter 1, citizen journalism can be defined as the process by which ordinary citizens participate in the dissemination and production of news. Journalism scholar Jay Rosen writes that citizen journalism is "when the people formerly known as the audience deploy the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another."39 The challenge of citizen journalism to the traditional journalistic construct of experts is significant. This phenomenon is emerging in a context in which the journalism profession, along with its ability to maintain ethical standards, has been gutted through the media industry's turn to freelance and free labor. This trend has crushed many publications and shrunk criticism and genres of practice such as careful, intensive investigative story research, which requires paid work time without the pressure of fast turnaround placed on freelance workers, who are paid by the story. Readers/consumers increasingly turn to the web for news but find fewer resources for vetting the accuracy and reliability of news stories churned out by freelance contributors and "fake news" outlets, and supplemented by crowdsourced commentary. At the same time, in the contemporary context of volatile global politics, journalism poses the risk of political retribution, as in the many cases of journalists assassinated for their political views. Consider the case of Naji Jerf, the Syrian editor-in-chief of the monthly Hentah. Jerf was wellknown for making documentaries describing violence and abuses in Islamic State- controlled territories. He was gunned down in broad daylight in Turkey in late 2015 while walking near a building housing Syrian media outlets. Citizen journalists reported his death, which was one of three journalist assassinations in Turkey in three months.

Citizen Journalism

-a concept that became widely used in the twenty-first century to describe the coming together of previously separate media forms and industries through computing and digital technology.2 Whereas movies were historically made on celluloid (analog) film and screened in movie theaters outside the home, they are now produced and screened digitally and often watched at home on computers, the same device through which we may write and communicate. The digital technology industry and the film industry have thus converged. But convergence did not originate in the digital era. Convergence moments have existed throughout media history. During the first half of the twentieth century, film newsreels sometimes preceded feature films at movie theaters, serving as educational entertainment. In the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, feature films and cartoons produced for movie theaters were sometimes syndicated for television broadcast after their theatrical run. This was a kind of proto-convergence practice, a crossover of film and television industry domains and cultures. Films, used as television programming, expediently filled nonprimetime slots without production costs, and fresh income was thus generated from old media. -In the twentieth century, multiple forms of media converged as never before, facilitated by the digital turn and the rise of the personal computer as a platform for multiple functions previously consigned to different industry areas and different genres of consumption and use. In the twentieth century, movies, radio and television programs, and computer games were consumed via distinct venues and devices. By the twenty-first century, all of these media forms could be stored on digital platforms and consumed via the web. This has been facilitated by increased broadband networks and the creation of vast storage options (known as the "cloud"). Although the cloud implies something ephemeral and immaterial, digital storage (owned by Apple, Google, and other major tech companies) entails the use of vast energy-consuming physical servers spanning multiple geographical sites. These servers extend our computer memory beyond the personal hard drive, storing data for access from many places and supporting activities like streaming videos. Movies and television programs, previously accessible at theaters or through television supported by syndicated programming or home video setups, may be watched on any computing device through subscription services such as Netflix and Hulu. The distribution market converged with production when online distributors like Netflix began to produce original works ("content") such as the series Orange Is the New Black in 2013. -The market in print media and book distribution and film and television media distribution converged when Amazon, which began as an online bookseller, began to sell first video cassettes and then streaming video along with offering products such as household goods, furniture, electronics, clothing, and food. As media industries converge, mediation and consumption become entwined. Amazon took convergence a step further when it entered into television production in 2013 with original series marketed solely through its Prime Video market. These series include Transparent, a situation comedy directed by Jill Soloway that centers on a Los Angeles family whose father is in the process of coming out as a trans woman. Convergence entails not only the intersections of media platforms but also intersections of industry sectors, genres, and media forms. Even family photographs became re-mediated when analog photographs stored in boxes and albums were given a new life as digitized and shared image files, first through CDs, hard drives, and email attachments, and then on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, where they remain archived under licensing agreements that give these companies the rights to collect, store, and use them. Media convergence has escalated in the digital era in ways that are unprecedented in scope and scale.

Media Convergence

-a physical, 3D space that can be mathematically measured -A term that refers to the mathematical mapping of space developed by the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes. Descartes's theory of space came out of a rationalist, mechanistic interpretation of nature. A Cartesian grid composes space through three axes, each intersecting each other at ninety degrees to make up three-dimensional space. Cartesian space is contingent on the idea of a rational human subject whose sensory experience is put to the test of judgment

Cartesian Space

·demonstrated by the goldsmith and architect Filippo Brunelleschi in the early 1400s is widely regarded as a major turning point in perspective's emergence as a dominant way of organizing two-dimensional visual space. ·The earliest known publication was written by the Renaissance scholar Alberti, who described linear perspective first in Latin (in De Pictura, 1435) and then in an Italian version (Della Pittura, 1436) that made the principles of perspective available to artists who were literate but not Latin scholars. ·In Albrecht Durer's Draftsman Drawing a Nude, it depicts an artist using linear perspective to render the human body, but with a twist that would seem to indicate the artist's self-consciousness about the role of perspective in creating a powerful "seeing through."

Linear Perspective

The point marked "V" is the vanishing point toward which the parallel lines of the tiled floor converge, giving the effect that the floor recedes into space.

Vanishing point

·A set of techniques used to make the body appear to recede in space. ·Example - The Lamentation over the Dead Christ, painted by Andrea Mantegna

Anatomical Foreshortening

male window shopper

flaneur

female window shopper

flaneuse

has been criticized as a kitsch and narrowly gendered response to disease demanding of breast cancer patients that they be upbeat and cheery, feminine subjects festooned in an ideology of pink ribbons and merchandise.59 Though the campaigns have been highly successful in raising awareness and funds for research, the narrow scope of their appeal marginalizes women and men who do not identify with the narrowly defined types of breast cancer victim and survivor. As science studies scholar S. Lochlann Jain asks in her essay "Cancer Butch," and in her 2013 book Malignant, in the pink-washed culture of breast cancer, "how can [a butch] maintain her investment in performing toughness, let alone recuperate butchness, in the sea of pink designed to 'heal' by restoring and recuperating a presumed 'lost' femininity?"

"Pink Washing" of Breast Cancer

The idea of the picture as a window we see through.

-Brunelleschi conceived of the picture as a kind of mirror or window frame through which one sees the world. A famous story told about Brunelleschi by his biographer Antonio Manetti concerns perspectival drawing. -Brunelleschi, the story goes, painted a precise drawing onto the surface of a mirror: the outlines of the baptistery of the Florence cathedral, for which he would later design a dome that would be regarded as his most important architectural accomplishment. When he continued the lines beyond the point where the buildings ended, he noted that they converged at the horizon. He had viewers face the baptistery and then peer through the back of his mirror-painting via a small peephole he had drilled into in its center. Another mirror was then positioned facing the viewer, allowing the viewer to see that the painting looked nearly identical to the actual peephole view.8 Brunelleschi's system differed from earlier, more intuitive and empirical forms of perspective in its use of instruments to measure distances with accuracy against the real structure. Not only did a drawing depict a building, the building's plan could be derived and even reproduced from that drawing. Brunelleschi studied classical Greek columns and architectural forms to decipher the measurement system the Greeks used to arrive at what he regarded as perfect designs, like those found in nature.

What are the implications of Durer's view you "must take the head from some, the chest arm, leg, hand and foot from others?"

-Dürer wrote, "One may often search through two or three hundred men without finding amongst them more than one or two points of beauty. You therefore . . . must take the head from some and the chest, arm, leg, hand and foot from others." Thus, for Dürer, realism was achieved not by seeing one body from the fixed perspective of an imagined spectator but by merging different parts of different bodies viewed and sketched at different times and in different places. The history of anatomical rendering thus provides insight about another potential history of modern visuality: that of composites, collage, and remixes. -This raises the question of how the potentially distorting or deceptive aspects of viewing systems have been understood over time. As we noted, some cultures, such as that of ancient Greek philosophy, rejected techniques designed to reproduce what the human eye sees, regarding this approach as trickery and not realism. The Renaissance era embraced the idea that it is art's social function to reproduce human vision through drawing instruments designed to replicate vision. Indeed, Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his diaries, "Have we not seen pictures which bear so close a resemblance to the actual thing that they have deceived both men and beasts?"17 Da Vinci's point about deception is interesting in light of a 1485 drawing in which he experimented with a technique called perspectival anamorphosis, in which an image's perspective can only be read at a given angle. If one holds the drawing perpendicular to one's face, one sees an abstract relationship of marks and lines. But by holding the image at an acute angle leading away from one's face, one can see a drawing of an eye coming into view, its proper perspective made visible by the receding plane of the drawing surface. While we might assume that da Vinci was playing with technique, Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí used anamorphic perspective in some of his paintings to make Surrealist plays on meaning. For Dalí, anamorphosis invokes a kind of mental play as the spectator tries to make sense of contrasting viewing positions.

Role of technology in art in the Renaissance and beyond.

-In the 1890 photographs included in the book How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, Riis used the new technology of flash photography to reveal living conditions in an unlit tenement room typical of those occupied by New York factory workers, who had neither the time nor the income to clean and make repairs. -His work, like that of Hine, is widely noted for its photographic realism. Most of us probably assume that we know "photographic realism" when we see it, but we may not necessarily associate it with scientific objectivity. Rather, we may recognize its roots in an older style of documentation in which conventions such as grainy image texture and black-and-white film, which reflected the filmstock and technology available at the time, tug on our heartstrings and shape our politics through our feelings. -Rationalism and the elevation of science and technology, trends associated with philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, were established as strong ideologies in this time period and would lay the foundations for modernity.

Authentic Relationships (particularly the Dove campaign)

-In the realm of feminism and female empowerment, the combination of branding and social awareness has produced new forms of brand culture. In 2006, the Dove Real Beauty campaign began by posting online a video, Evolution, which was a timelapse of an ordinary young woman being transformed into a model on a billboard, through styling and digital reshaping of her features. The video, which went viral, was the lead-in to the Dove Real Beauty campaign, which uses online videos, social media, and self-esteem workshops to sell its brand as signifying positive self-esteem for girls. The campaign also produced a series of ads featuring "real women" of different sizes and ethnicities, and the company started the Dove Self-Esteem Fund, which aims to be "an agent of change" in educating girls and women about definitions of beauty. As Banet-Weiser writes, Dove consumers are entreated to participate in online self-esteem workshops, testimonials, and other projects. It's easy to criticize such a campaign for the disconnect between the brand (for soap and beauty products) and its social project, but as Banet-Weiser writes, the Dove campaign "builds the Dove brand by 'engaging' consumers and building 'authentic' relationships with these consumers as social activists." She adds, the campaign "is but one example from the contemporary marketing landscape that demonstrates the futility of a binary understanding of culture as authentic versus commercial." -o In this campaign, Dove's meaning is transformed beyond a brand meaning or a product meaning. Dove becomes itself a cultural factor, a force in social activism around young girls' self-esteem. This campaign has inspired numerous other brand campaigns targeted at young girls, a powerful consumer demographic. Most notable is the Always Like a Girl campaign, which features a video produced by documentary filmmaker Lauren Greenfield, who asks older girls, boys, men, and women what it means to do things "like a girl," resulting in an array of sexist stereotypes. Greenfield then asks a group of young girls what it means, and they perform activities of strength and agility. The ad asks what happens to girls' confidence at puberty—this is precisely the group that Procter & Gamble wants to reach with its feminine care products. The video has had a life of its own on social media. Such a campaign participates beyond the brand meaning in a larger cultural and social conversation about gender ideology.

Amy Adler's (law professor) critique of Fair Use laws

-Law professor Amy Adler writes that the fair use argument is ultimately destructive in the context of art styles that copy, borrow, and appropriate all the time. The transformative inquiry, she writes, poses precisely the wrong questions about contemporary art. "It requires the courts to search for 'meaning' and 'message' when the goal of current art is to throw the idea of stable meaning into play."24 Art that aims to destabilize meaning, to provide new ways of seeing, cannot then be seen under the criteria of the transformative test to be creating new meaning. Much contemporary art rejects the concept of newness, Adler argues, "using copying as the primary building block of creativity." -Levine's questions about art and reproducibility were further examined by the artist Amy Adler (unrelated to the law professor cited above) a decade after Levine's project. To make her work After Sherrie Levine (1994), Adler first copied Levine's rephotograph of After Weston in the form of a charcoal drawing. Then she photographed the drawing before destroying it, displaying instead a silver gelatin photographic print from this film documentation. Note that this work is captioned not just as a photograph (which might be digital and might be multiple) but as a "unique gelatin silver print." -Adler's process, which includes decisions about photographic printing options and titling, reminds us that the problem of the copy and its value as an original artwork does not originate with photography and is specific to neither the digital turn nor the entry of photography into the art market. Rather, the problem also applies to the sketch, a form of copying that is relatively transhistorical, predating photography by centuries, but which has never been granted equivalent market or art historical value with, say, the oil painting or other works for which the sketch has traditionally served as a planning tool. The sketch is more typically thrown or filed away and only rarely exhibited, usually as mere ephemera of the artist's work process.

Be able to explain/identify what the realist movement was, particularly what part of "real" they were concerned with.

-Realism has been associated with many different styles and meanings and has been fraught with questions about authenticity. In late nineteenth-century American journalism, the idea of realism was widely embraced as the profession tried to separate itself from politics to show the social conditions of everyday life. -"Realism" then became more strongly associated with a particular pictorial photographic style, social realism, associated in this context with the nineteenth-century photography of humanitarian social reformers such as the social realist photographers Jacob Riis and John Thomson. -Furthermore, definitions of realism change significantly over time. Since the 1980s, we have seen a dramatic rise in the use of computer graphics to modify digital photographs. The convergence of photography and digital imaging has resulted in ethical as well as aesthetic questions in what are by now heavily intersected fields. In the 1980s, designers and computer scientists working in the growing area of computer graphics raised the question of whether or not photographic realism was really the correct standard for the medium.2 There are no universal standards for realism in computer graphics, though there has been much discussion and research about the matter. Color scientist James Ferwerda classifies computer graphics realism into three categories: physical realism, in which the image provides the same visual stimulation as the scene it represents; photorealism, in which the image produces the same visual response as the scene; and functional realism, in which the image provides the same visual information as the scene. But we might also consider how computer imaging references other genres and styles such as action cinema, painting, and flight simulation training programs. Each brings a different set of meanings, memories, and experiences. -The origins and legacies of perspective. In some cases, the same conventions have been linked to different political agendas. In earlier chapters we noted Saussure's dictum that the link between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, shifting, and contextual. Here we demonstrate that it is important to look at the signifier's production—the processes through which codes and conventions emerge in context.

How does perspective change how we interact and connect with video games?

-Realism's codes and conventions continued to change in light of digital visual technologies. Digital imaging presents new modes through which the viewer can experience a multiplicity of perspectives on a multiplicity of virtual worlds within the same screen. Video games brought to the experience of viewing images new kinds of perspectives and interactions with other players and with the technology itself. The emphasis on the phenomenological experience of the producer's body that is so evident in Klein and Pollock's modernist paintings is apparent in video game culture as well. As Raiford Guins notes, we buy video games primarily to play them, not to view or collect them. The video game was introduced after World War II in amusement devices that incorporated the kinds of display screens used in radar technology. In the earliest video games, analog devices were used to control the trajectory of mobile shapes on a screen. Some of these early games featured military themes in which the objective was to maneuver shapes to strike fixed targets literally drawn on the screen. In the early 1970s, coin-operated video games were installed in arcades as a form of popular amusement. -The look of video games is also crucial to the worlds that they help users to imagine. Video games offer many different kinds of perspectives all at once and do not always follow geometric linear perspective conventions. One way of seeing that is built into some video games is isometric, or axonometric, projection, a technique that may be discussed with reference to the various forms of perspective present in the de Chirico painting. Forms rendered in isometric perspective are presented as flattened. The lines describing each plane do not converge; there is no vanishing point. Isometric rendering is often used when one frame is embedded in another, as in some video games, comic books, and graphic novels. -In video games of the early 2000s, isometric perspective was a common feature used to introduce movement through screen space as a new aspect of realism. In The Sims I, for instance, scenes had a flattened effect as one moved through them, especially apparent when viewed from above. Whereas the classical linear perspective of painting granted the viewer a fixed view on a given scene, isometric perspective offered the chance to move around a scene in first-person view and zoom out omnisciently without the distortion that a constantly shifting vanishing point would produce. In later versions of games such as The Sims, one can typically move through a scene maintaining 3D views without distortion even as perspective systems and orientation shift. There is no longer just one standard system for representing space. Because The Sims is a "sandbox" game, Simblrs can also make over the standard figures and default scenes offered in game and expansion packs. In this Black Lives Matter rally pack created by EbonixSimblr, for example, custom content includes figure poses, clothing, hair, and body shape in meshes that can be shared and adapted by other Simblrs. The effect is not just to represent the Black Lives Matter movement but also to make it live in the worlds of The Sims, where other Simblrs may use the custom designs to create their own scenes and adapt the custom meshes to new figures, extending the movement. As Ebonix Simblr writes (quoting Gil Scott-Heron),"the revolution will not be televised. It will be live."

Why the Sear's catalog and billboard ads are important

-The retail catalogue was one of few sources through which rural consumers could engage in "window shopping." Sears billed itself as a global company ("our trade reaches around the world"), bringing a cornucopia of goods to the rural farmhouse and the suburban tract home, prior to the rise of suburban mall culture. These catalogues offered the pleasure of holding the thick, glossy catalog in one's hands, and settling in for leisure time to page through the color photographs, dreaming of owning the items and living the lifestyles depicted. -o ieth century, billboards became a central advertising venue. Although advertisements had been painted in large scale on city buildings for decades, the development of the automobile in the 1910s changed not only the landscape of communities and industries but also the experience of consumerism. Billboards were designed to be viewed on the go from the automobile, a machine connoting individual freedom and mobility. Historian Genevieve Carpio has shown how the perception of the mobile citizen changed with the increased auto-mobility of Mexican Americans, which was viewed by some as a threat to white middle-class culture.

Why was the Brownie camera important?

-Visual reproducibility was a modern imperative, and the mass-produced photographic camera captured that spirit. Photography epitomized the new and modern way of seeing through the form of the print as copy. In the nineteenth century, the camera and film manufacturer Kodak heavily shaped social photography practices. When in 1900 Kodak introduced the $1 Brownie, shipping more than 150,000 in its first year on the world market, the public embraced the easy-to-use camera across generations, classes, and nations. In Forensic Media, Greg Siegel recounts a popular magazine account of the Brownie as a toy that provides a colonial fantasy of global omniscience: "Like the magic carpet of the Arabian Nights tales, [the Brownie] whisks you anywhere and everywhere. . . . But because of it any small schoolboy knows more today about what this earth is like than the wisest of the Greek philosophers." -Kodak's technologies provided a radical new sense of the abundance of images. In the late 1880s, Kodak began manufacturing film rolls with 100 exposures, which, as historian Nancy West writes, "was probably over ten times as many photographs as the average middle-class American family owned at the time."10 This simple technological development, writes West, transformed amateur photography by tapping into the "dominant hope of American culture since the early nineteenth century: effortless abundance."11 Today's proliferation of picture taking and instant picture sharing via Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook has resulted in an unprecedented abundance of images. The idea of the snapshot and the practice of casually documenting one's everyday life through photographs were introduced as global and world-expanding activities more than 100 years ago with the Brownie.

Why window shopping is important?

-Window shopping and browsing thus gained a kind of currency with this new consumer environment as mobility emerged as a key aspect of modern life. Window shopping is in many ways a modern activity, one that is integral to the modern city that is designed for pedestrians, strolling, and crowds. -As window shopping became an important activity with the rise of the department store, the female window shopper, a figure Friedberg calls the flâneuse, began to appear on the industrial city's streets. Gender is thus linked to mobility as a practice that enacts the right to appear in public, and requires a sense of being safe in public—a right and a condition not guaranteed to all women in all places, then or now.

Why was flaneuse an important change?

A flaneuse was an important change because in the 1950s, respectable women weren't allowed to stroll alone in the modern streets. As window shopping became an important activity with the rise of the department store, the female window shopper, a figure Friedberg calls the flâneuse, began to appear on the industrial city's streets. Gender is thus linked to mobility as a practice that enacts the right to appear in public, and requires a sense of being safe in public—a right and a condition not guaranteed to all women in all places, then or now.

First used to describe expressionist art in Germany in the period after World War I, the term later became associated with American artists including Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock after World War II through the 1950s. The works of art were viewed as a record of the artist's emotional intensity and physical spontaneity and gesture during the painting process. The compositions that resulted are highly abstract, but compared to the geometric abstraction of cubist paintings, they appear less formally organized and more spontaneous.

Abstract Expressionism

Some of skeuomorphism is nostalgia (like having lightbulbs shaped like flames or LED Edison bulbs), but when we use skeumorphism in the digital world it often serves as an "affordance," something that helps us get oriented to how things work. This blending of reality and the virtual world is, in some ways, a nod towards realism.

Affordance

-· The limits of perspective can be seen too in a sixteenth-century engraving by the German printmaker and painter Albrecht Dürer. It depicts an artist using linear perspective to render the human body, but with a twist that would seem to indicate the artist's self-consciousness about the role of perspective in creating a powerful "seeing through," as Dürer himself described it. -· Albrecht Durer - Draftsman Drawing a Nude, illustration from The Painter's Manual, 1525

Albrecht Durer

·is based on the phenomenon that light rays bouncing off a well-lit object or scene, when passed into a darkened chamber (a box or a room) through a tiny hole, create an inverted projection that can be seen on a surface inside the chamber. ·range in scale from freestanding rooms and tents that a human body can enter and stand in to small boxes like those that early photographers Louis Daguerre and William Fox Talbot adapted into photographic cameras. In the nineteenth century, walk-in camera obscura structures were erected in American and European parks and places of natural beauty so that people could experience the phenomenon of seeing projected images of nature as part of their immersive experience.

Camera Obscura

-Reproducibility moved the artwork away from the centuries-long emphasis on uniqueness and authenticity, and yet the concept of the aura still held strong. Benjamin wrote that "even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be."14 It is precisely this "presence in time and space" that Benjamin refers to as giving the original an aura, which he ties to its authenticity. Traditionally, authenticity refers to that which is true and real. The term also refers to an enduring, timeless quality, such as "authentically" classical beauty, a quality we discuss in Chapter 3 in a discussion about a Keri lotion advertisement and the Ingres painting it references. In Benjamin's terms, the original artwork's authenticity cannot be reproduced. -The idea of the valuable, original artwork remains a foundation of the art market, affirming Benjamin's concept of the aura. Despite the fact that replicas and multiple copies of paintings have existed throughout art history, the valuing of the unique artwork is key to art's financialization. Continuing concerns about forgeries and fakes in museums and private collections highlight the material value of the original in an era dominated by copies. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, connoisseurs were responsible for authenticating artworks, as they were trusted to know the real thing when they saw it. Some authenticators licked, smelled, and touched the painting for evidence of material likeness to other works by the same painter. Sleuthing involved noting depicted elements that are from the era (the wrong style of clothing, for example, would indicate a possible fake). By the middle of the twentieth century, forgery detection entered the domain of laboratory science, with chemical analysis of paint and paper introduced to determine the use of materials from later time periods, and X-ray imaging, CT scanning, and infrared examination used to determine underlying paint layers and structural changes or repairs. -Benjamin noted that an original artwork's meaning changes when it is reproduced, because its subsequent value comes not from its uniqueness but rather from its status as being the original from which copies derive. Reproduction thus plays an essential role in the dissemination of knowledge about an original work and the maintenance of its value. It is commonplace today for famous paintings to be reproduced in art books and on websites, posters, postcards, coffee mugs, and T-shirts.

Authenticity, Reproducibility, and Value

-The reproduction of a charged image can also heighten its original political message. One image that has served as a revolutionary political icon is the 1961 photograph of Latin American revolutionary figure Che Guevara taken by the Cuban photographer Korda (Alberto Díaz Gutíerrez). The photograph of Che looking outward and wearing a beret with a star on it has long been an important symbol in Cuba, where Guevara is a hero for his participation in the 1959 Cuban Revolution. As Ariana Hernández-Reguant explains, Che's image can be tracked to read the broader cultural and political transformation of art and authorship under late socialism in Cuba, from censorship to Cuba's gradual move to a market economy.19 As we explain later, the politics of image ownership and copyright brought new meaning and marketability to a photograph—and to its photographer—that had already taken on a diverse range of forms and meanings for an international public. -The reproduction of Che's photograph has been a crucial aspect of the way in which Guevara became not only a hero of leftist Latin American politics (and a global icon of revolutionary socialist politics) but also a revolutionary martyr. In the original photograph Che is wearing a beret. Although the beret was traditional military gear, it has since the mid-twentieth century had an association with revolutionary politics. For instance, in the 1960s, the Black Panthers, who were very conscious of the role of images in revolutionary politics, wore black berets as a uniform that connected back to Che's style. The single star on Che's beret, which designates his military rank of comandante as a guerrilla in the fight over revolutionary Cuba, is mythologized both as a designation of Che's unique valor and as a symbol of his star power.20 At this point in history, images employing even just the abstract silhouette of Che are widely recognizable as copies of the iconic image. -The famous photograph of Che has been reproduced in many forms. Throughout the world, the Che image has circulated not only as an icon of revolutionary politics but also as a generic countercultural icon. We find the Che image reproduced on tote bags (with the slogan "Chénge the World") and mouse pads. The original specific political associations of the Che image are diminished in these reproductions. Ironically, Che's face has become ubiquitous on those very consumer objects that Che himself might have critiqued for their role in commodity fetishism. -This reproduction of images also raises issues of copyright and ownership. In socialist Cuba, Korda's right to own Che's image was limited. The image was used for many decades without copyright being invoked. In 2000, however, Korda successfully sued the British ad agency Lowe Lintas, which had used the image in a Smirnoff vodka ad. Hernández-Reguant writes that the lawsuit indicated both Cuba's entrance into the global economy and the emergence of a group of elite cultural producers who are able to exercise claims over the value of their work in foreign markets.21 Needless to say, there are multiple ironies in the competing values placed on the reproductions of Che's image (moral values of the revolution, national values of the Cuban state, and commercial values of the global marketplace) in a global economy.

Che Guevara's portrait

How does public viewing, communal viewing, and simultaneous viewing (everybody watching the same show at the same time but in different locations) interpellate viewers as part of a national audience or political movement? What are some examples?

Collective public viewing can thus interpellate viewers as part of a national audience or a political movement. When Anderson wrote of the imagined national community, he stressed the importance of simultaneity, of the sense of experiencing events together at the same time. The fact that television can be transmitted instantaneously across great distances helps to create this sense of national or global community connectedness, and the screening of films outdoors in public creates shared experiences of public space. The public space created by these media is virtual as well as physical.

One of the most helpful concepts in understanding how consumerism creates an abstract world of signs separate from the economic context of production is the idea of commodity fetishism. This refers to the process by which mass-produced goods are emptied of the meaning of their production (the context in which they were produced, such as a factory and the labor that created them) and then filled with new meanings in ways that both mystify the product and turn it into a fetish object. For instance, a designer shirt does not contain within it the meaning of the context in which it is produced. The consumer is given no information about who sewed it, the factory in which the material was produced, or the society in which it was made. Rather, the product is affixed with logos and linked to advertising images that imbue it with abstract meanings, such as coolness, authenticity, or luxury. This erasure of labor and the means of production has larger social consequences. Not only does it devalue labor, making it hard for workers to take pride in their work, it also allows consumers (most of whom are also workers) to remain ignorant of working conditions, the consequences of global outsourcing, and the relationship of brand images to corporate practices.

Commodity Fetishism

-Copyright, taken literally, means "the right to copy." The term refers to not one but a bundle of rights. This bundle includes the rights to distribute, produce, copy, display, perform, create, and control derivative works based on the original. Although the concept would seem to facilitate copying by delineating rights to do so, it was in fact established to protect the rights of an image's owner or producer from others wishing to make copies, if only for a limited period of time. In the United States, this time limit has continually been expanded so that in 2017 it stands, for works created in or after 1978, at the author's life plus 70 years, or 95 years, or 120 years (depending on the nature of authorship) if a corporation is the work's owner. The reasons for this copyright extension has little to do with legal reasoning and a lot to do with the aims of corporations like Disney to maintain ownership over their creations. Disney lobbied hard to maintain copyright of Mickey Mouse, who, under the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act (facetiously called the Mickey Mouse Forever Act), remains under copyright until 2023. -Copyright grants legal protection to the "expression of an idea," and not to the work as object or the idea in itself. The fixed expression is deemed to belong uniquely to someone—the photographer, writer, or painter—who created it and is not transferred when a work is sold. Let us first consider the case of a painting. A painting is owned by its creator unless painted under contract as "work for hire." But we have to ask: In what does the "the painting" consist? Is it the object? Not exactly. When the painting is sold, ownership of the object itself is transferred, but the right to reproduce that object is not. The painter sells the object but not the "expression of the idea" that it contains. The rights to the expression of the idea, as well as rights to reproduce, distribute, and make derivative works from the painting, all remain with the artist (unless there is a separate contract conveying those rights). Within the terms of copyright law, reproductions of the painting are considered reproductions of the expression of the idea (which the painter owns) and not simply reproductions of the physical object, the painting. In other words, authenticity, in legal terms, resides in the painting as a unique expression of the painter's idea and not in the literal uniqueness of the object ("the painting") that is bought and owned.

Copyright and rights

Many scholars have proposed that we think in terms of multiple public spheres and counterspheres, rather than one. Political theorist Nancy Fraser has pointed out that historically women were relegated to the private domestic sphere of the home and elided from the public spaces and discourses of middle- and upper-class European and white men. She defines a women's or a feminist countersphere, among other counterspheres of public discourse and agency.34 A counterpublic understands itself to be subordinate in some way to the dominant public sphere but is still a site from which people can speak up in society. Theorists such as Fraser suggest that we can envision many publics that overlap and work in tension with each other: working-class publics, religious publics, feminist publics, and so forth. Along these lines, feminist media critics such as Lynn Spigel have critiqued the distinction of public and private as it negates women's labor in the domestic sphere as well as the integration of media and domestic space.35 Michael Warner notes that the sexual cultures of gay men and lesbians can be seen as a counterpublic in that they are spaces of discussion, debate, and the circulation of ideas that are structured by alternative dispositions and protocols, "making different assumptions about what can be said or what goes without saying."

Counter sphere and counter public

Created in 2001 to provide a shared archive of images licensed for free public use. Wikipedia (through Wikimedia Commons) has become a repository of Creative Commons images for use with a standardized system of citation and credit. All of these developments have implications for cultural memory, "found" footage, images and the rights and politics of using them, and the role of the personal digital image in the public sphere.

Creative Commons

-is a practice that emerged in the late twentieth century as a form of expression in which artist and consumer activists appropriate mainstream ads to make parodies and send-ups. They post these remakes in public places, inviting viewers to think critically about the product claims and advertising strategies the original ad promotes. Postmodern advertising campaigns appropriated this strategy right back, designing self-parodying ads to show viewers that advertisers know and respect that consumers are savvy individuals who are aware that seduction is at work in advertising, and who even enjoy that play of brand seduction. The message to the consumer is thus "we respect your intelligence" and "we know you engage knowingly and willingly in the seductive branding we offer." -emerged in the late 20th century and is a form of expression in which artists and/or activists criticize and subvert advertisements and consumerism in the mass media by revising and making parodies of well-known ads and/or brand logos. Many of these parodies change the meaning of the original advertisement and encourage viewers to question a brand's values. One example of culture jamming from the book is the Adbusters' culture jam of Nike ads. In figure 7.21, there is an image of what might look to be a Nike ad but is actually a parody of a Nike ad that draws attention to the working conditions in Indonesian Nike factories. Adbusters brings attention to the allegations that Nike abuses their factory workers and the reports of factory workers mysteriously disappearing. Another example of culture jamming is seen with the McDonald's logo, which as we all know has "McDonald's" written at the top with an "M" just below that and the words "I'm lovin' it" at the bottom. An example of a culture jam is an image that parodies the logo and reads "Weight" with an upside down "M" that makes a "W" and the words "I'm gainin' it" at the bottom. This parody urges viewers to think about what they are putting into their bodies while trying to convince them that they will gain weight if they keep eating at McDonald's.

Culture Jamming

The ideas and ways of ordering knowledge that are taken as true and accurate in a given era. The term was used by Michel Foucault, in his book The Order of Things, to describe the dominant mode of organizing knowledge in a given period of history, the ground on which particular discourses can emerge in that time. Each period of history has a different episteme.

Episteme

Copyright debates have largely focused on the ways that copyright law can stifle artistic creativity. In many ways, art has always been about copying, borrowing, and appropriating, whether we are talking about the visual arts or music. In the United States, the Fair Use Doctrine (made law in the Copyright Act of 1976) permits copying without permission of the copyright holder in certain limited cases, such as educational purpose, commentary, criticism, or parody. Fair use is usually the legal basis on which art copyright cases have been argued. A factor in determining fair use is the question of whether the copy promotes or adds something new—whether it is transformative rather than simply derivative of the original. A major question is how the courts determine the difference between transformation and derivation of a work in an era when appropriation and parody are common artistic forms.

Fair Use Doctrine

-Goldsmith and architect who demonstrated the linear perspective -conceived of the picture as a kind of mirror or window frame through which one sees the world. A famous story told about Brunelleschi by his biographer Antonio Manetti concerns perspectival drawing. -He painted a precise drawing onto the surface of a mirror: the outlines of the baptistery of the Florence cathedral, for which he would later design a dome that would be regarded as his most important architectural accomplishment. When he continued the lines beyond the point where the buildings ended, he noted that they converged at the horizon. He had viewers face the baptistery and then peer through the back of his mirror-painting via a small peephole he had drilled into in its center. Another mirror was then positioned facing the viewer, allowing the viewer to see that the painting looked nearly identical to the actual peephole view.8 Brunelleschi's system differed from earlier, more intuitive and empirical forms of perspective in its use of instruments to measure distances with accuracy against the real structure. Not only did a drawing depict a building, the building's plan could be derived and even reproduced from that drawing. Brunelleschi studied classical Greek columns and architectural forms to decipher the measurement system the Greeks used to arrive at what he regarded as perfect designs, like those found in nature.

Filippo Brunellesci

Green marketing was one of the first trends of social awareness advertising, with brand managers equating particular brands with environmental awareness and a "green" lifestyle. Although much of this marketing is in relation to products that are designed to be less harmful to the environment, commodity fetishism makes it easy for advertisers to equate products that have no environmental benefits with greenness— green is an easy signifier to attach to any product. Many green marketing ads, often referred to as "greenwashing" ads, obfuscate the truth about environmental impact. Controversial companies, such as oil companies, have often used social awareness marketing as a kind of image enhancer. The oil company Chevron, for instance, has long sold its brand as socially responsible, with campaigns such as its People Do campaign that for many years equated its logo with environmental projects even though its message was about how individuals (rather than corporations) can make a difference. Such ads allowed Chevron, one of the world's worst environmental offenders, to sell itself as green. Yet, in the current cultural context, such messages are easily hijacked. In 2010, Chevron produced its We Agree campaign, in which newspaper-like posters stating (relatively vague) positive values are stamped "We Agree" as if the company is signing on to them. In this ad, the relatively uncontroversial statement "put technology to work" is accompanied by an employee image suggesting that Chevron does so by supporting the advancement of individual workers in the global industry.

Green Marketing and Green Washing

-· The question of transformation was also at issue in the copyright case of Shepard Fairey v. Associated Press, in which Fairey was accused of copying without permission or attribution the photograph of Associated Press photographer Mannie Garcia for his Obama Hope poster.23 Fairey had downloaded the image from the web. -· His lawyers argued that his style of colorizing, texturing, and reshaping the image transformed the work. Fairey's work can be situated within the longer history of art that appropriates, and this legal case (which was eventually settled out of court) is one of many examples where the use of copyright law to challenge art could be seen as potentially stifling creativity.

Hope Poster

An artistic style that emerged in the late nineteenth century, primarily in France, characterized by an emphasis on light and color. This work emphasized a view of nature as unstable and changeable. Painters foregrounded the brushstroke and sometimes painted the same scene many times to evoke how it changed with the light. Prominent artists included Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro, and Berthe Morisot. Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Cezanne.

Impressionism

What epistemological changes take place in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance?

In his book The Order of Things, Michel Foucault used the term episteme to describe the way that an inquiry into truth and the real is organized in a given era. An episteme is an accepted, dominant mode of acquiring and organizing knowledge in a given historical period. Understanding the work of signs is one way we can identify an era's episteme or dominant worldview. Each historical period has a different episteme—that is, a different way of ordering things or organizing and representing knowledge about things. Each of these different realisms demonstrates the different epistemes of its context. The episteme of Constructivism ordered art according to a Soviet revolutionary theory of structure as the real basis of a society, prioritizing the value of industrial materials and forms and their signifying power in embodying the meanings of the new society. The episteme of Socialist Realism entailed a belief that returning to the familiar codes, conventions, and materials of traditional pictorial conventions would promote national conformity with the new state ideology. Between these epistemes there was a shift toward dissemination of political ideals and away from innovation of form.

-presented as flattened. The lines describing each plane do not converge; there is no vanishing point. Isometric rendering is often used when one frame is embedded in another, as in some video games, comic books, and graphic novels. ·In video games of the early 2000s, isometric perspective was a common feature used to introduce movement through screen space as a new aspect of realism. ·Whereas the classical linear perspective of painting granted the viewer a fixed view on a given scene, isometric perspective offered the chance to move around a scene in first-person view and zoom out omnisciently without the distortion that a constantly shifting vanishing point would produce.

Isometric perspective

A film style of the late 1940s and 1950s. The people included Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, and Vittorio De Sica, directors who created films commenting through allegory and allusion upon Italy's bleak economy and dire politics after the 1943 fall of Mussolini's Fascist regime. Using untrained actors from the Italian working class and poor and filming on location in the urban ghettoes of Rome and the poverty-stricken rural south, the Italian Neorealist directors introduced new styles of narrative fiction filmmaking that included ironic and farcical political allegory (as in Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1966 Hawks and Sparrows) and stark depictions of poverty and political despair (Roberto Rossellini's 1946 Paisan). These directors shot on grainy black-and-white stock evoking war-era documentary newsreels and shunned the pompous styles of prewar Italian film and literature, the industry studios in Rome, and the happy endings typical of American Hollywood films.

Italian Neorealism

-·A Danish immigrant reporter who used sketches and a camera, after the introduction of flash photography, to reveal immigrant workers' living conditions. In the 1890 photographs included in the book How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, Riis used the new technology of flash photography to reveal living conditions in an unlit tenement room typical of those occupied by New York factory workers, who had neither the time nor the income to clean and make repairs. -·Used the visual medium of photography to raise awareness about the living conditions of the poor through journalism, lectures, and books for a middle-class and wealthy audience. His work is widely noted for its photographic realism.

Jacob Riis and How the Other Half Lives

-Wrote the earliest known publication on linear perspective as a geometric system -De Pictura, 1435 -He described linear perspective first in Latin (in De Pictura, 1435) and then in an Italian version (Della Pittura, 1436) that made the principles of perspective available to artists who were literate but not Latin scholars

Leon Battista Alberti

Terms used historically to refer to the culture and society of the general population, often with negative connotation. Mass society was used to characterize the changes that took place in Europe and the United States throughout the industrialization of the nineteenth century and culminated after World War II, when large numbers of people were concentrated in urban centers. The term implies that these populations were subject to centralized forms of national and international media and that they received the majority of their opinions and information not locally or within their families but from a larger broadcast medium through which mass views were promulgated and reproduced. The culture of this society has been characterized as a mass culture, and this term is often synonymous with popular culture. It implies that this culture is for ordinary people who are subjected to and buy the same messages; hence, this culture is conformist and homogeneous. Both terms have been criticized for reducing specific cultures to an undifferentiated group.

Mass Culture (time frame, what it is, purpose)

·"is an expansive network of persistent, real-time rendered 3D worlds and simulations that support continuity of identity, objects, history, payments, and entitlements, and can be experienced synchronously by an effectively unlimited number of users, each with an individual sense of presence." ·"is a set of virtual spaces where you can create and explore with other people who aren't in the same physical space as you."

Metaverse

A range of techniques for representing space on a 2D plane to create the illusion of depth or to show the dimensionality of forms. Aerial perspective, widely used in Chinese landscape painting, for example, entails representing objects as more diffuse and less detailed as they recede in space. Orthographic perspective, useful for blueprints and measurement, maps 3D views of objects onto 2D space without offering the illusion that the object is receding in space from a figure situated at a particular standpoint. The linear system of perspective, popularized in Italy in the mid-fifteenth century, is emblematic of the Renaissance interest in the fusion of art and science. The central aspect of linear perspective is the designation of a vanishing point (or points), with all objects receding in size toward that point, creating a sense of deep space out of the flat canvas. The introduction of linear perspective was enormously influential in European realist painting styles, in part because it was understood as a scientific and rational way to represent three dimensions in two-dimensional space. Central to the critique of linear perspective is its designation of the viewer as a single, unmoving spectator.

Perspective

another form of realism that served a different political agenda. -an approach to filmmaking during the 1930s that developed in opposition to the narrative film style that prevailed in the mainstream French film industry. Advocates of Poetic Realism felt that French mainstream industry films pandered to a complacent bourgeoisie. The new style, influenced by Surrealism and associated with filmmakers sympathetic to the French Popular Front (an alliance of left-wing political groups), was dark and lyrical. The term realism refers to the fact that films made in this style tended to dramatize the social conditions of the French working class, mostly through fictional stories featuring tragic antiheroes. This movement includes such films as Marcel Carné's Children of Paradise (1945) and Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion (1938) and The Rules of the Game (1939).

Poetic Realism

The quality of immediate experience that has been traditionally contrasted with representation and with those aspects of the world that are the product of human mediation. The quality of being "present" has thus been understood historically to mean that one can be in the world in a way that is direct and experienced through the senses and unmediated by human belief, ideologies, language systems, or forms of representation. Postmodernism criticizes this concept of presence as the illusion that we can actually experience the world in a direct and complete way without the social baggage of language, ideology, and so forth.

Presence

Levine's series was also copied by the artist Michael Mandiberg. His work appeared in digital form on two identical websites, AfterWalkerEvans.com and AfterSherrieLevine .com. Whereas Levine's 1981 exhibition catalog of the series as displayed at New York's Metro Pictures gallery was copyrighted, Mandiberg's digital sites invite browsers to download any image, providing them with certificates of authenticity and ownership. The stated aim of Mandiberg's duplicate copycat sites is to create the possibility for ownership of a physical object with cultural but not economic value. Mandiberg thus quite shrewdly one-ups Sherrie Levine on the issue of reproduction. He uses digital reproduction to restore the Evans photographs, works in the public domain by a famous photographer, to their "original" status as existing in the public domain, as photographic icons of American collective memory and history. It is ironic that Levine's own act of copying has prompted works that copy it in turn, each building on and playing with the meaning of the copy and the original.

Public Domain

A term that originated with German theorist Jürgen Habermas that defines a social space (which may be virtual) in which citizens come together to debate and discuss the pressing issues of their society. Habermas defined this as an ideal space in which well-informed citizens would discuss matters of common public, not private interests. It is generally understood that Habermas's ideal public sphere has never been realized because of the integration of private interests into public life and because it did not take into account how dynamics of class, race, and gender make access to public space unequal. The term has been used more recently in the plural to refer to the multiple public spheres in which people debate contemporary issues.

Public sphere

These diverse cases of copyright, right of publicity, and Fair Use Doctrine claims suggest that reproduction has become an important issue not only because copies and their technologies are increasingly pervasive but also because the proliferation of copies and technologies for making them have made the stakes of owning rights to the original expression of the idea that much higher. In the United States, fair use is always determined by Fair Use Doctrine case law. Yet the proliferation of lawsuits over art and copying in recent decades demonstrates that the law and art practice are sometimes at odds. The question remains: What counts as "original" in an era of technological reproducibility and simulation? There is no easy or general answer to this question, as digital technologies have made it harder to identity what is "the original" and what are the intangibles in the bundle of rights (such as the right to make derivative copies, the right to publish and distribute) that contribute to the "expression of the idea" that copyright is meant to protect.

Publicity Rights

The view that true knowledge of the world derives from reason and not from embodied, subjective experience. In the rationalist model, space is knowable through mapping and measuring with tools that aid and correct human perception.

Rationalism

In the case of photography, a technique historically linked to mechanical objectivity, realism is sometimes tied to ethical ideas about whether and how accurately photographs represent events as they occurred. We may expect photojournalists to observe "realist" conventions rather than using the camera in a highly interpretative manner. Realism has been associated with many different styles and meanings and has been fraught with questions about authenticity. In late nineteenth-century American journalism, the idea of realism was widely embraced as the profession tried to separate itself from politics to show the social conditions of everyday life. Growing concern about propaganda and the journalist's status as "untrained accidental witness" operating with "cultural blinders" led some to hope that the mechanical method of photography might provide greater "objectivity" than the written report.1 "Realism" then became more strongly associated with a particular pictorial photographic style, social realism, associated in this context with the nineteenth-century photography of humanitarian social reformers such as the social realist photographers Jacob Riis and John Thomson. Riis was a Danish immigrant reporter who used sketches and a camera, after the introduction of flash photography, to reveal immigrant workers' living conditions. In the 1890 photographs included in the book How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, Riis used the new technology of flash photography to reveal living conditions in an unlit tenement room typical of those occupied by New York factory workers, who had neither the time nor the income to clean and make repairs.

Realism

What constitutes transformation in legal terms? The 1992 court case of Rogers v. Koons demonstrated this question. The professional photographer Art Rogers produced this image, titled Puppies, which was reproduced on postcards and other goods. The American artist Jeff Koons, known for appropriation and oversized kitsch sculptures, sent a copy of a postcard with this image, copyright label removed, to an Italian studio with instructions for its assembly in the form of a statue. The sculpture, which he titled String of Puppies, originally sold for a reported $367,000 (it is now worth millions). When Rogers sued Koons and his gallery for copyright infringement, Koons claimed his work was a parody and therefore was protected under the Fair Use Doctrine. The court determined that Koons's sculpture might be a parody on a general style but that it copies the specific Rogers image. It was not the Rogers artwork that was being parodied, the court explained, but rather a broader style. String of Puppies therefore did not constitute fair use. It was derivative, not transformative. An interesting aspect of this determination is that the sculpture was considered derivative despite its obvious transformation of media (from photography to sculpture) and color (the postcard was black and white, the sculpture is blue and orange).

Rogers v. Koons

The question of transformation was also at issue in the copyright case of Shepard Fairey v. Associated Press, in which Fairey was accused of copying without permission or attribution the photograph of Associated Press photographer Mannie Garcia for his Obama Hope poster.23 Fairey had downloaded the image from the web. His lawyers argued that his style of colorizing, texturing, and reshaping the image transformed the work. Fairey's work can be situated within the longer history of art that appropriates, and this legal case (which was eventually settled out of court) is one of many examples where the use of copyright law to challenge art could be seen as potentially stifling creativity. Law professor Amy Adler writes that the fair use argument is ultimately destructive in the context of art styles that copy, borrow, and appropriate all the time. The transformative inquiry, she writes, poses precisely the wrong questions about contemporary art. "It requires the courts to search for 'meaning' and 'message' when the goal of current art is to throw the idea of stable meaning into play."24 Art that aims to destabilize meaning, to provide new ways of seeing, cannot then be seen under the criteria of the transformative test to be creating new meaning. Much contemporary art rejects the concept of newness, Adler argues, "using copying as the primary building block of creativity."

Shepard Fairey v. Associated Press

It is used "to describe interface objects that mimic their real-world counterparts in how they appear and/or how the user can interact with them. A well-known example is the recycle bin icon used for discarding files. Skeuomorphism makes interface objects familiar to users by using concepts they recognize."

Skeuomorphism

With Social Realism, however, the Stalinist Soviet state used art to promote feelings of nationalism and support for government ideologies to the exclusion of other views and styles. At the height of European and American modernist formalism, this style dominated across the Soviet Union. Under the pictorial realism mandate, it became dangerous for artists working in communist countries to make abstract works, as they were viewed as a disservice to state ideology. Though some artists continued to produce abstract work, they were questioned, persecuted, imprisoned, and exiled to Siberian work camps, risking death for their art. This climate of political opposition continued in the Soviet Union even after Stalin's death in 1953. But "unofficial" art continued to be made and shown despite these prohibitions and dangers. Exhibitions were held covertly in artists' own apartments, at great risk. In this photograph, we see documentation of a covert apartment exhibition of "unofficial" art.

Social Realism

"Realism" then became more strongly associated with a particular pictorial photographic style, social realism, associated in this context with the nineteenth-century photography of humanitarian social reformers such as the social realist photographers Jacob Riis and John Thomson. Riis was a Danish immigrant reporter who used sketches and a camera, after the introduction of flash photography, to reveal immigrant workers' living conditions. In the 1890 photographs included in the book How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, Riis used the new technology of flash photography to reveal living conditions in an unlit tenement room typical of those occupied by New York factory workers, who had neither the time nor the income to clean and make repairs.

Social Realist Photography

Over several decades, Stalin mandated a turn back to a classical pictorial style that had prevailed before the revolution. This revived style became known as Soviet Socialist Realism. Thus, the materials-based, formal abstract realism outlined in the Realistic Manifesto was undercut by another very different, even antithetical approach to realism. Socialist Realism was the official, state-sanctioned art form from the late 1920s until the late 1960s. This shift to pictorial realism is represented here by a 1934 painting by Serafima Ryangina, which uses bright, cheery colors and a pictorial style to depict happy, healthy workers installing cables on an electrical transmission tower high in the Soviet mountains during the post-revolution modernization period.

Socialist Realism

-Winner asked: How do a given technology's structure and function delimit and transform personal experience and social relationships?7 This is an important question to ask as we consider how reproduction technologies are used to different and sometimes contested ends. One example of this is surveillance, which we argued in Chapter 3 is often used to exercise panoptic control, shaping the behaviors of those within its autonomous gaze. Yet, in recent police violence in which technology served as legal evidence, police dashboard and body camera footage has been used to different ends. Dashboard camera footage documenting Jason Van Dyke's killing of teenager Laquan McDonald in Chicago on October 20, 2014, was critical in the jury's verdict that this was an act of murder. -But the footage from which these still images were taken had been concealed from the public and the media for over a year. Once released, it was reproduced widely on social media, where it inspired demonstrations locally and nationally. Protesters demanded not only that police be held accountable for their violence but that future evidence suppression be prevented. In a police state, surveillance is not only a means of social control; it is also a potential source of protection and evidence that citizens may use in defense against police abuse. Instruments such as surveillance cameras can be used to expose injustice and spur political change. Technologies are flexible forms that may be used in unanticipated ways.

Technology and surveillance (and how it fits in the surveillance gaze)

-A court artist in Padua, Italy, painted it (another popular theme among Renaissance painters). This painting of Christ laid out on a marble slab, his genitals covered but his chest and arms left bare, is a classic example of the use of anatomical foreshortening, a set of techniques used to make the body appear to recede in space. This work is widely referenced as an iconic example of the use of perspective to achieve a high level of anatomical realism. -Mantegna's painting shows that depicting the body demands a different set of techniques. Using precise perspectival accuracy to render this human body receding in space would have resulted in the appearance of exaggeration or gross distortion. Is Mantegna's drawing a realist rendering of the body, or is it an exaggerated or subjective view?

The Lamentation over the Dead Christ

o Anything written or created by the US government cannot be copyrighted

U.S. Government documents and copyright

How do we use film and pictures to tell our stories and how has it changed with the transition to digital technology?

The proliferation of personal images' public display on websites, blogs, social media, and photo platforms such as Flickr has also produced a new relationship between the personal image, commercial photography, and public space. Millions of personal snapshots proliferate on the web, available for public consumption and security searches. Programs offer systems for tagging images and connecting them, allowing us to make new classifications and histories. We assume the role of image connoisseurs and curators as we download images and link to them on sites like Pinterest, but those sites archive our choices for commercial research about taste. This sharing of images essentially transforms not only the means by which people use images to publicly tell their personal stories but also the relationship of archives and image institutions to the vast range of online visual resources. While the selling of generic images through stock photography companies and the business of image rights and permissions continues to thrive, there is an increasing number of open-access online digital archives. The Library of Congress uploaded part of its image collection to Flickr in 2008 so that its historical images could become part of that site's image environment and a source of user comments and connections in the public domain. Creative Commons was created in 2001 to provide a shared archive of images licensed for free public use. Wikipedia (through Wikimedia Commons) has become a repository of Creative Commons images for use with a standardized system of citation and credit. All of these developments have implications for cultural memory, "found" footage, images and the rights and politics of using them, and the role of the personal digital image in the public sphere.

Trademark Identifying charcaterisitcs Ex) apple logo, name of a company, a few sounds such as NBC sound -A word, name, symbol, or device that is used in trade with goods to indicate the source of the goods and to distinguish them from the goods of others." (PTO) -Prevents consumer confusion -Ex) Guy in NYC wants to sell you a $25 Louis, which is a trademark violation -Make it clear who is being represented -Registered trademark ® is not the same as ™ -® has been registered with the government -Genericized trademark: synonymous with product -Ex) Aspirin

Trademark and Registered Trademark

-Transformation is a factor in determining fair use is the question of whether the copy promotes or adds something new—whether it is transformative rather than simply derivative of the original. -A major question is how the courts determine the difference between transformation and derivation of a work in an era when appropriation and parody are common artistic forms. -What constitutes transformation in legal terms? The 1992 court case of Rogers v. Koons demonstrated this question. The professional photographer Art Rogers produced this image, titled Puppies, which was reproduced on postcards and other goods. The American artist Jeff Koons, known for appropriation and oversized kitsch sculptures, sent a copy of a postcard with this image, copyright label removed, to an Italian studio with instructions for its assembly in the form of a statue. The sculpture, which he titled String of Puppies, originally sold for a reported $367,000 (it is now worth millions). When Rogers sued Koons and his gallery for copyright infringement, Koons claimed his work was a parody and therefore was protected under the Fair Use Doctrine. The court determined that Koons's sculpture might be a parody on a general style but that it copies the specific Rogers image. It was not the Rogers artwork that was being parodied, the court explained, but rather a broader style. String of Puppies therefore did not constitute fair use. It was derivative, not transformative. An interesting aspect of this determination is that the sculpture was considered derivative despite its obvious transformation of media (from photography to sculpture) and color (the postcard was black and white, the sculpture is blue and orange).

Transformative Doctrine/Transformative

-Was propaganda in Nazi Germany as it was intended to win over the masses for the Nazi cause in its depiction of Hitler as a charismatic leader of a proud, energetic, and beautiful populace -Throughout most of the Cold War period, communication scholars critiqued mass media for its production of propaganda, focusing particularly on authoritarian and totalitarian regimes' effective use of this strategy. The quintessential example is the use of film and poster art to support the rise of Nazism in Germany prior to World War II. For example, German film director Leni Riefenstahl produced propaganda films designed to enlist the German masses in the Nazi Party ethos. Her 1935 film Triumph of the Will documents a 1934 Nazi rally in Nuremberg that she attended and documented. This film is one of the most powerful examples of the use of time-based images to instill political beliefs in its audience. The 1934 rally was planned as a mass visual spectacle. Adolf Hitler, who served as the film's executive producer, had the rally choreographed and filmed with aerial photography, telephoto lenses, multiple cameras, and an elaborate tracking-shot system. His strategy was to use staging, framing, and camera movement to give the impression that the whole nation was united behind him, when in fact at this moment his party had just experienced a major challenge from the National Socialist Party. The film is composed of shots featuring imposingly dramatic compositions. Hitler figures centrally in most of the shots. He is either the implied master eye behind god's-eye point of view shots that convey a totalizing gaze, or he is at the center of the composition, immersed in a sea of admiring subjects whose eyes all point to him. The film opens with grand aerial tracking footage of Hitler's plane swooping in over the city, intercut with shots of the city from the plane's-eye view as Hitler scopes out his domain. We later see many shots of Hitler in the crowds, taken from a low camera angle that makes the spectator literally look up to him, emphasizing his stature and charisma. Triumph of the Will is an example of the ways that practices of looking can uphold nationalism and idolatry in real time (staged events) as well as through images and recordings that involve editing and framing. The concept of the media as propaganda is one approach to understanding the mass media's historic ties to the promotion of mass ideology. By analyzing the composition and orchestration of sets, performances, and film texts such as this, we can better understand how a populace may be crafted into an undifferentiated mass audience.

Triumph of the Will

-These issues were of particular interest to Walter Benjamin, a twentieth-century German critic whose work remains remarkably influential today. In his 1936 essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin proposed that in photography and motion picture film, there is no truly unique image. Rather, there are copies (prints), each of which stands equally in the place of the singular original. Benjamin criticized the prior emphasis on the original for reifying the artwork as commodity in a capitalist system. With reproducibility an integral feature of the medium, the capitalist system of the valued singular object could be challenged. Reproducibility was a potentially revolutionary quality of art practice because it freed art from its market status as revered unique artifact. Art, newly understood as existing in reproducible and broadly circulating forms, could be a democratizing force and could now be used for a more fluid socialist politics that included reception by the masses. Reproduction no longer lessened the value of replicas or faked copies. Inherently reproducible forms could become much more pervasively recognized and valued in their own right, transforming art-making and art-marketing practices dramatically. -Reproducibility moved the artwork away from the centuries-long emphasis on uniqueness and authenticity, and yet the concept of the aura still held strong. Benjamin wrote that "even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be."14 It is precisely this "presence in time and space" that Benjamin refers to as giving the original an aura, which he ties to its authenticity. Traditionally, authenticity refers to that which is true and real. The term also refers to an enduring, timeless quality, such as "authentically" classical beauty, a quality we discuss in Chapter 3 in a discussion about a Keri lotion advertisement and the Ingres painting it references. In Benjamin's terms, the original artwork's authenticity cannot be reproduced.

Walter Benjamin and Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

-The idea of a "global media event" emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It was largely based on a concept of television as a unifying force. Interestingly, one of the most iconic global moments in television was the turn of the millennium on New Year's Eve of 1999 into the year 2000, when television coverage began with the dawn of the new millennium in the Pacific (at the International Date Line) and followed the beginning of the millennium through Asia, Africa, Europe, and North and South America. This was a reminder that the day of the world begins in the Pacific, which has enormous implications for financial markets that were certainly not envisioned by the nineteenth-century governments which thought that putting the international date line in the Pacific would affirm the centrality of Greenwich, England, as the center of time. Sports events such as the World Cup and the Olympics are constructed as global media events, as are some royal weddings (British in particular) and funerals of important heads of state. Yet moments of crisis have constituted the most global news events. As Anderson notes in his book Imagined Communities, simultaneity is a key factor in the sense of participating in a nation and the media play a key role in this simultaneity and connectivity. Comparing two moments of crisis—the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, in which television coverage was a key factor, and the Parisian terrorist attacks in November 2015, in which social media was a key factor—reveals changing media forms, audiences, and messages in the global mediascape. -The attacks of 9/11 were a global media event of unprecedented proportions in which millions of viewers throughout the world saw images of the twin towers hit and falling, if not live, then within a very short period of time. It was also an event of immense spectacle—the image of the second tower exploding has been commonly referred to as the equivalent of a "movie," due to the unreality of the spectacle. It is important to note that one of the primary aspects of spectacle is that it overshadows and erases the actual violence behind it—in this case, the spectacle of the explosion erases the people who were incinerated within it. The images of the twin towers exploding and falling were recorded by photographic, digital, and video cameras and disseminated via television, websites, newspapers, magazines, and email prior to the cell-phone camera era. -ex) 9/11, Jan 2016 ISIS video of beheadings in Syria

global media event