Posts tagged visual studies

CFP: Internet Memes and Visual Culture (due Jan 15)

This special issue of the Journal of Visual Culture will organize a conversation among cultural scholars, artists, activists, journalists and Internet content producers regarding the social, historical, and aesthetic significance of Internet memes. Our move to “take memes seriously” as communicative and aesthetic objects is especially timely, as memes’ linguistic tropes, visual styles and means of transmission gain increasing visibility beyond their origins in online subcultural spaces such as 4chan or 9gag.

Abstracts due Jan 15, 2013

TOPICS

  • how memes figure in a broader history of performative, humor-based, conceptualist, retro, or contemporary digital art practices
  • the formal aesthetics of different meme types and the technological infrastructures that undergird them (300x300 macros, supercuts, GIFs, screengrabs, photobombs, snowclones, etc.)
  • meme production in non-Western locations (particularly as they may be tied to political risk or Internet censorship)
  • meme transmission across national and cultural borders
  • how (if?) memes have enabled creative producers (particularly queer people and people of color) to contest presumptions of homogenous Western whiteness on the Internet
  • how memes have served as vehicles for political protest and resistance

Read full call (pdf).

New Book: The Visual Worlds of Social Network Sites

The central form of communication on social network sites is the communication with and through images. This book studies images and image-based communication on social network sites such as Facebook.

Table of contents and introduction

ABOUT - First, the authors analyze the two central image categories in depth – profile images and photo albums. What follows is the portrayal of dramaturgical and staging strategies of the (semi) professional photography on the nightlife platforms, which leads to an evaluation of the importance of the international glamour photography as a parameter of private photographic self-expression.

Other questions that the authors ponder in the volume are: Which functions and meanings do images have for the communications between users on social network sites? To what extent could certain design characteristics in the image-based communication on sns establish themselves as prototypical staging patterns? Which staging traditions are followed thereby? Which staging strategies are followed on different online platforms by the users’ (self) visualizations?

Purchase the book on Amazon