Hooks, B. (1992) Black Looks: race and representation. Boston, MA ,
Southend Press.
In this book with 12 essays Bell Hooks opens up a dialogue about feminism, race and freedom between African American men, women and white americans, “images of black people that reinforce and re-inscribe white supremacy.” The dig takes her across, rather than down, the broad face of American film, advertisement, and literature, to “decolonize” the mind and locate “Revolutionary Attitude.”
Bell Hooks proposes a feminist reconstruction of black masculinity, a discussion of “hot pussy” in the marketplace, and a conjuring of the renegade alliance between blacks and Native Americans.
In “A Feminist Challenge” (subtitle: “Must We Call Every Woman Sister?”), hooks asks not whether Anita Hill is a black feminist hero—her answer is no—but what justice Hill expected from the Senate Judiciary Committee when she brought her naive albeit poised testimony to their table.
Madonna, “Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister?,” is hooks’ other woman, in a surprisingly dry analysis after such a fabulous title. “Though I often admire and, yes at times, even envy Madonna because she has created a cultural space where she can invent and reinvent herself and receive public affirmation and material reward, I do not consider myself a Madonna fan.” Too high to go over, too low to go under: must we all position ourselves in relation to la M?
essays on film that moor the book, and where hooks hits stride. “Is Paris Burning?,” a very rough read of white consumption, presses the question of whether a film is de facto radical because its subject matter is. In “Micheaux’s Films,” hooks gingerly unfolds Oscar Micheaux’s celebration of a complex image of blackness in his movies of the ’20s. The tour de force is “The Oppositional Gaze,” which locates black female spectatorship beyond the pain of the offensive black images that Hollywood is so good at, to include pleasure. In perhaps the most subversive maneuver of the book, hooks looks for pleasure in every situation—for recovery of a private, personal joy that a lot of living in America can take away.
Something of a tender tyrant is hooks, teaching the politics of self-liberation as bound by a rather rigid authorial presence that overwhelms equally as it withholds.
In “Loving Blackness as Political Resistance,” she writes to those who already understand what it is to love blackness, becoming an exercise in flaunting, defiance, or else wants detail, more explanation.
In this book 20 essays present research on subjects such as noise acoustics, music, phonography, silence, the book presents very good research on studies, sound matters and sound problems. Each writer has their own intellectual, cultural history, political discourse anthropological, social, and sound studies they suggest. The book suggests further studying on the philosophical debates about defining and classifying the conceptualizing of sound.
Each of the essays presents detailed descriptions of sound as well as new research. For example Acoustemology, joins the term “acoustics” and “epistemology” to theorize sound as a way of knowing.
Acoustics designates the branch of physics that's concern with sound not just the body of knowledge but it's also physical of acoustics.
Body. The body begins with a sound and with your sound the body is the sound of the other. but is also the sound of the same. Psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva causes the “Chora” -- the space of continuity or sensations, shapes and sounds that don't belong to anyone they simply are.
Deafness. The broad spectrum has replaced deaf/ hearing binary in biomedical and cultural realms. This means that the audiometric categories of hearing impairment don't fit the deaf identities. It all depends on the technology and the results with individuals with audiograms and or different types of impairment.
Echo. It’s a facsimile of an original sound, it is a reflection of time that has passed by. In research historians write about echoes when they analyzed the sounds of the past.
Hearing. It’s the relationship between hearing and what they hear and the mutual effects of sound. It's all human nature and human history, it is intersubjective and when we started hearing we hold all its elements in tension with one another.
Image. This is a “visualism” that is a symptom of a history of thought it is a metaphor of development of vision between what you can see or trace and the high intellectual history of visualization.
Language overlaps with other sounded modes of signification. Some studies can be a critical dialogue with intellectual history that has emphasized cognitive properties and sonic enactments. In one hand language is associated with structuralism that everything is language, and on the other it's universality language as a vague -like music language.
Listening is to hear attentively to pay attention. Listening uses a variety of modes and qualities of auditory attention. a person can hear another and at the same time be distracted and deconcentrated.
Music is an idea, and it has presence aesthetics and social life of sound. Music is organized sound with either an experimental composer, anthropologist sound or composed music sounds.
Noise comes from the Latin root of the word nausea which means sea sickness to, capture the basic disorientation of the term. It is a subject that is across disciplinary areas of history anthropology, music, literature, philosophy, urban studies, media studies, studies of science and technology. It is used for communication and cultural networks, musical aesthetics.
Phonography combines the Greek “phone” sound /voice with “graph” or writing. It's related to something that has been written and it means sound writing or voice writing. Phonography is defined as a practice of inscription of what is perceived around to capture the sound.
Radio presents a range of musical, media, audio commercial broadcasting, compositional, conceptual horizons and wireless sound. After the military used it in 1920s it became world known for everybody. Radio has been used for telegraphy, telephony Internet, networking and all transmitted through radio waves.
Religion is based on moral skepticism in regards to sonority, sounds and gesture accompanied with religious observances and worship. Religion suggest that modern history is silent in order to have an auditory suspicion of the institutions that regulate the place and the meaning of religion sound discourse. Also attunement, sound making, flow of community, and the secular.
Resonance. Roland Barthes. in his article “listening” talks about listening for signification for a given code signifying and listening that produces new signifiers. In the humanities more recently it has become “metaphorally” and it seeks to replace the binaries of structuralism thought.
Silence. Andres Newman in his novel “El Viajero del Siglo” comments that silence does not exist. As John cage's ideas of silence. Silence is a political language an active politics of domination and non-participation. Having a voice is rendering a sign of identity as presence to the subject. Silence is the opposite but can be made into politics.
Space. Sound and space are phenomenologically and ontologically intermixed. Sound as motion have an intimate relationship. There will be no sound without space. Space and sound research within sounding territory and in circulation.
Synthesis. It's a consolidation of parts of a whole in experimental music culture it's the sound of the synthesizer or electronic musical instrument but it can go into the concept of seeing seeing synthesis as a cultural field
Transduction sound is transmitted through a medium that moves between an amplifier to an ear or light or water. In Latin it translates as to lead across to transfer. In the xx century the human ear came itself to be described as a transducer.
Voice is the sound produced by our vocal organs its consider a phenomena, a fact that fuses literal basic notion of voice signal of identity. It can be classified as characteristic of a specific person or animal. The essay studies voices, technical, technological mediation, as voicing, as performance, as materiality, as western cultural imagination and voice as female voices.
Crow, D. (2010) Visible Signs: an introduction to semiotics in the visual arts. 2nd ed. Lausanne, AVA Academia.
Visible Signs resolves the problem of introducing semiotics in a practical easy way. It describes theories and concepts, signs and signifiers, language and speech, as they are used in publishing and communications.
Each essay provides an overview of a particular facet of semiotic theory, with inspiring examples from graphic design, typography, illustration, advertising and art to illustrate the ideas discussed in the text.
Each essay provides an overview of a particular facet of semiotic theory, with inspiring examples from graphic design, typography, illustration, advertising and art to illustrate the ideas discussed in the text.
Visible Signs features new material from international designers and new creative exercises to accompany each chapter. This new edition also features a new design and layout.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1:
Chapter 1:
Components. What is Theory?
In the 1900’s Ferdinand Saussure, a Swiss professor of linguistics was working on the signified and signifier. During the same time, Charles Sanders Peirce was developing a study of science that he called semiotics. Although they were independently there are a lot of similarities in their research.
Ferdinand's Sassure proposed that our language was built of small units called phonemes. These are the sounds we use as combinations to make words in different languages. Since we are children, we learn about the connection between the signified and the signifier and their relationship.
There must be an agreement among a group of people that one thing will stand for another. This group become the “linguistic community”.
In 1967 Jacques Derrida introduced the term “grammatology.” which described the study of writing as a form of representation. This new approach he called deconstruction. In deconstructing the relationship between speech and writing speech does not represent reality.
Chapter 2:
How Meaning is Formed. Categories of Sign; Value.
Meaning is formed in the sign Saussure and Pierce agreed that to extract the meaning from a sign we needed to understand the structure of the sign.
Appears defy the three categories of signs, the icon, the index, and the symbol. The icon resembles the sign the index is a link between the sign and the object, and the symbol is a connection between the sign and what it means. Saussure was not interested in index signs; he was concerned with words in the iconic and the arbitrary.
Chapter 3:
Reading the Sign: The Reader; Convention and Motivation.
Reading the signs as part of language becomes an issue between Saussure and Pierce. Saussure is only interested in language itself, as where Pierce want to know the effects of the signifier to the signified. Roland Barthes used denotation and connotation as part to describe the connection of language to the theory of semiotics. He uses denotation as a signification of analyzing the signified in the object, and the second level of signification he called connotation. It is when the meaning is affected by the meaning of the viewer.
Conventions is an agreement about how we should respond to a sign. Motivation is used to denote how much the signifier describes the signified.
Chapter 4:
Text and Image: Digital and Analogue Codes; Advertising Writing;
In text and image, the most important to analyze our digital and analog codes. Digital codes are paradigms which are units in the set different from each other like an alphabet. An analog code are paradigms in which the distinctions between units are not clear, for example the musical notation of sound.
In advertising writing Roland Barthes says the signification is always intentional. He presents three methods to decipher and or build advertising writing.
There are three messages for reading text-image combinations. The first message is the linguistic message, which is the text itself like a caption or a slogan to the image. The second message is the coded iconic message, it's a symbolic message that works at the level of connotation. And the third message is a non-coded iconic message, for example a photograph could be described as a message without a code.
Chapter 5:
Official and Unofficial Language: Habitus; The Production of Legitimate Language; The Competition for Cultural Legitimacy; Unofficial Language.
According to Bordeaux the choice between territories where individuals take positions is the choice, or “habitus” within the language. It is accomplished without consciousness in every situation.
The production of legitimate language. An official language is the one that imposes itself within a territorial limit in a field of cultural production. With graphic design, grammar, and content like in a book.
Deleuze explores the relationship between identity and difference. Traditionally difference is the derivative of identity. This changes the perception of language, even in minor languages or authorized languages.
The unofficial language brings a subcultural group within no identity outside, categories of class, race or occupation. They bring a new semiotic package with a different content. They also create a visual dialect of graffiti and post-modern work.
Chapter 6:
Symbolic Creativity: Hyperinstitutionalisation; Play and Identity;
Paul Willis comments that high art is currently only in the institutions of exclusion which have no relationship to young people and their lives. These institutions promote a fear of cultural decay in order to control hyperinstitutionalization. The situation of anesthetics where people don't understand the uncultured, the lack of a code to understand. It is a way of high art to distance itself from educational knowledge play an identity. William Morris said “dignity and labor in art equals work and pleasure.”
Willis separates symbolic creativity from material production. Element needed for symbolic work: primary communication of language the active body of science and symbols the drama rolls and rituals which we perform with others I'm the practice of symbolic production.
Willis separates symbolic creativity from material production. Element needed for symbolic work: primary communication of language the active body of science and symbols the drama rolls and rituals which we perform with others I'm the practice of symbolic production.
Chapter 7: The political Context of Signs. Semiotics of Postmodernism.
In Europe modernism was about speed and progress through signifiers and signified it encompassed engineering and industrial design. In Japanese modernism focused on signifiers of freedom political progress for young women and a change and separation from patriarchal society.
The politics of pictograms: Otto Neurath and Mary Neurath begin work on a new pictorial language system so everybody could access signage through symbols. They called it an isotype or international system of typographic picture education. Today the pictograms have become isotype symbols derived into emoticons of cultural context. A Unicode consortium.
The politics of the alphabet : The colonial logotypes and their new forms based on Asian and Arabic calligraphy and Latin typography changed to a non-western culture type of signs and symbols
Chapter 8:
Junk and Culture.
Dirt is a symbolic system of signs which has clear categories that are used to organize designs into hierarchy of importance or use. Dirt is essentially disorder made of a selection of elements patterns. Disorder is the enemy of pattern, in rubbish theory the visual constructions are based on collected material with no use and that's why we consider it rubbish. Reverse theory identifies semiotic categories of objects, the transient cultural objects, the durable cultural objects. They have lifespan and the brand advertising, the resource is important in the protection or play using the artifact and cultural heritage.
Allie Martin is a PhD Candidate at Indiana University in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. Her dissertation project explores the musical and sonic dimensions of gentrification in Washington, DC, using a combination of ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and soundscape recordings. Originally from the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, she received her BAs in music performance and audio production from American University.
Since the 1970s sound walking has emerged as a critical method for studying sound research and practice artistic sound Vanessa Valdez explored conceptions of different sound around her an alternate history or sound working that were before 1970s.
Allie Martin began sound Waking in Washington DC as part of her dissertation project. The thesis explores musical and Sonic dimensions of gentrification in Washington DC the process studies poor and marginalized populations while amplifying the privileged in DC developers and councils. Gentrification displaces musicians public spaces in the city and it is a transforming experience.
conducting soundwalking for this artist as an African American woman in a gentrifying neighborhood was difficult. It was very interesting and as a result some works for the larger project of the dissertation involves acoustic recording in the neighborhood, Their methodology it's creating soundscape recordings over a long period of time. black feminism amplifies the knowledge, and it makes it more objective as she continued to walk she also tries to do it in Mississippi besides in the hometown in Washington DC.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. (2015). How to See the World. Pelican Books. Penguin Random Books UK.
How do we see the world? Mirzoeff offers the book as a toolkit tor thinking about visual culture:
All media our social media will use them to be picked ourselves to others.
Seeing is actually a system of sensory feedback from the hole body not just the eyes.
Visualizing by contrast, uses airborne technology depict the world as a space for war.
Our bodies are now extensions of Data networks, clicking, linking and taking selfies.
We render what we see and understand on the screens that go everywhere with us.
This understanding is the result of a mixture of seeing and learning not to see.
Visual culture is something we engage in as an active way to create change, not just to to see what is happening.
This book is about researching how we see our world through the last millennials. the changes through technology, neurology, industry and progress, land devastation and deteriorating environment. And it concludes in researching visual activism as a form of change. Nicholas Mirzoeff proposes that visual activism is the interaction of pixels and actions to make change. Pixels are words & images and actions are performances.