VISUAL CULTURES Its history is one of hybridisation, evolution, innovation

Image over word As primary source of information, thus analysis World as text (Western domination) vs. world as picture (non-Western) Postmodern world is visuals, complex, rapid, startling images shaping consciousness, culture and ways of making sense the world

Content of visual cultures Still images: painting, sculpture, fashion, graphic images, media studies (ad, flyer, poster, slogan), architecture, murals, graffiti Moving images: film, cinema, TV, commercial Recent development: museum studies, monuments, anatomy and medicine, and internet designs

Rapid progress of visual cultures Moving from traditional artistic base of images (visual arts) to all aspects of images as constructed across media Visual cultures shape different intellectual process and engaging: reading a film from visual studies is different than reading a film from film studies Che Quevara Tees, Vercace renaissance motifs, commercial ad using Andy Warhol’s painting  these to subvert merely images

Andy Warhol’s

Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulations A copy without the original Disneyfication Chicago gangster in the movies

Jean Baudrillard Example of the Empire and the map If the fable were to be revived today, the territory would be rotting, not the map, because of the precession of simulacra -the map now precedes the territory. In contemporary society the simulated copy has replaced the original object just like the map came to precede the geographic territory.

Jean Baudrillard Example of the Empire and the map According to Baudrillard, we are living in the map (the simulation of reality) and reality is decaying because it has been abandoned. He used this same idea later to argue that the first Gulf War did not occur. The image of war preceded real war.

Jean Baudrillard Hyperreal and Imaginary “Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation.” The imaginary world is what is supposed to make it successful, but it is made successful through its miniaturized social representation of “real” America.

Jean Baudrillard Hyperreal and Imaginary Disneyland is supposed to make its visitors believe that adults and the “real” world are elsewhere. It is meant to hide the fact that real childishness is everywhere. Los Angeles and the rest of America are only a network of continuous, unreal circulation.

Hyperreal: Lebih dari realita, Majalah Perempuan, Pornografi Imaginary: Nasionalisme ala Anderson  Imagined Communities

Consumption as appropriation and resistance Using ethnographic method – what individuals and groups make of and do with the objects they consume  how objects are made meaningful in the processes of their consumption Cycle of commodification: where producers make new products or different versions of old products as a result of consumers’ activities Appropriation: where consumers make those products meaningful, sometimes making them achieve a new “register” of meaning that affects production in some way. There’s a dialogue between production and consumption

Bricolage – literally the activity of self-consciously mixing and matching any disparate elements that may be to hand – can cut across given social divisions to produce new cultural identities Media electronic – still place, while walkman allows us to escape from the confinement of space (urban environment) – imposing soundscape on the surrounding aural environment thereby domesticating the external world  empowering or liberating technology that allows a person to escape the formal confines of planned city

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