Journal articles on the topic 'Photography, Panoramic – History'

Background: Throughout the history of the city, the architecture of Alexandria, Egypt, has been in contact with world cultures, especially those of the Mediterranean sphere. Alexandria is rich with cultural features dating back seven thousand years. In Alexandria, the heritage value of the city has decreased because there is no suitable documentation system for these more recent assets. The development of a new technique for preserving heritage buildings is required. For example, image- based techniques can gather data using photography, panoramic photography, and close-range photogrammetry. In this research, we primarily seek to implement Heritage Digitisation Process Phases (HDPP) and establish new documentation methods in architectural conservation and built-heritage preservation, i.e., Virtual Reality (VR) and Website Heritage Documentation (WHD). Methods: The methodology is designed to preserve and manage cultural heritage using HDPP for the promotion of heritage building preservation in Alexandria. Results: The results show that the application of HDPP has led to the creation of a digital database about the Société Immobilière building, which was chosen as a case study for this research. Conclusions: Implementation of HDPP and usage of new documentation methods i.e., VR and WHD create a digital path to help strengthen its image and connect the place to users, recreational areas are created to communicate and explore the city’s architectural history.

In the last two decades the definition of the term “virtual museum” changed due to rapid technological developments. Using today’s available 3D technologies a virtual museum is no longer just a presentation of collections on the Internet or a virtual tour of an exhibition using panoramic photography. On one hand, a virtual museum should enhance a museum visitor's experience by providing access to additional materials for review and knowledge deepening either before or after the real visit. On the other hand, a virtual museum should also be used as teaching material in the context of museum education. The laboratory for Photogrammetry & Laser Scanning of the HafenCity University Hamburg has developed a virtual museum (VM) of the museum “Alt-Segeberger Bürgerhaus”, a historic town house. The VM offers two options for visitors wishing to explore the museum without travelling to the city of Bad Segeberg, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. Option a, an interactive computer-based, tour for visitors to explore the exhibition and to collect information of interest or option b, to immerse into virtual reality in 3D with the HTC Vive Virtual Reality System.

Yogyakarta in The Impressionism Photography. The creation of photographic works with the title “Yogyakarta in Impressionism Photography” aims to present the scenery of Yogyakarta area using photographic techniques that look like an impressionist painting. The main objects in these photographic works are historical and natural tourist attractions in Yogyakarta area. The intensity of experience and feeling conveyed in this creation of photographic work are the feeling of boredom of the routines that are carried out in photographing, especially taking landscape photography. The method implemented for the photo creation was to have exploration and experimentation in photographing landscapes. Exploration and experimentation are conducted by moving the camera around the object or moving the camera during the image recording process. The result of the creation of this artwork is that photographic works resemble the impressionist paintings. ABSTRAKPenciptaan karya fotografi dengan judul "Yogyakarta dalam Fotografi Impresionisme" bertujuan untuk menampilkan objek pemandangan Yogyakarta yang dikemas dengan teknik fotografi dengan visualisasi berbentuk seperti lukisan impresionisme. Objek utama dalam penciptaan karya fotografi ini adalah tempat wisata bersejarah dan wisata alam di kawasan Yogyakarta. Intensitas pengalaman dan perasaan yang dituangkan dalam penciptaan karya fotografi ini adalah rasa jenuh terhadap rutinitas yang dilakukan dalam memotret, terutama memotret fotografi panorama. Rasa jenuh ini mendorong untuk melakukan eksplorasi dan eksperimentasi dalam memotret panorama. Eksplorasi dan eksperimentasi dilakukan dengan cara melakukan pemotretan memutari objek dan menggerakkan kamera pada saat proses perekaman gambar.Hasil dari penciptaan karya seni ini adalah karya fotografi dengan kesan lukisan impresionisme.

The article examines the representation of the city in rooftopping photography. Methodologically, the research is based on A. Lefebvre’s concept of social space, and also M. de Certeau’s concept of spatial practices as agents of its production. The principal notions in this analytical framework employed in the article are the urban imaginary and the gaze in constructivist understanding, which not only reflects, but also forms the object of vision. Rooftopping photography is considered in the context of the history of the view of the city from above, which has become an important factor in the urban imagination. The expansion of rooftopping photography into the public space and the presentation of cities is associated with the development of new communication and optical representation technologies in the 2010s. The analysis of the rooftoppers’ visualizing of the city carried out in semantic, aesthetic and rhetorical aspects revealed its substantive and aesthetic qualities. Rooftoppers photos capture the moment when a person faces the city as a whole. The city converges with natural and landscape objects. In the night panoramas that make up the bulk of roofer photography, the city is represented as a space of energy flows. In rhetorical terms, in contrast to the metonymy of a promenade, roofer photography is metaphorical. In general, it is concluded that the subject of rooftopper photography is not so much the identity of the city as its universal urban beginning embodied in the centers of the world’s megalopolises. Following D. Nye and his interpreters, the aesthetic mode of the city in roofer visuality is interpreted as urban version of the sublime.

AbstractThomas Ashby was a very well-known British archaeologist of the beginning of last century. He travelled a lot and left to the British School at Rome, of which he was the first student, many albums of photographs. Some of them have been recently published. This article deals with the trip to Libya by sea made in May 1910. He took photographs of Derna, Benghazi and Tripoli with general views of them. Of course, the panorama is now changed, but it is interesting to note some features which are nowadays lost, like the Turkish castle at Benghazi, or the arch of Marcus Aurelius at Tripoli still obstructed by later buildings, or the ‘modern’ technology of the radio masts at Derna.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Today when online satellite images are just a click away, access to geographic information showing the latest images of the globe has dramatically expanded, and historico-geographic research based on such information is flourishing. However, in the study of Chinese history, historical research employing GIS or similar technologies is still in its infancy, since “historical” geographic information with a high degree of precision are lacking. From within the ambit of Chinese geographic information, this report specifically highlights aerial surveys effected during the Republic of China era. To start, we review the history of domestic aerial surveys during R. O. C. period. Then, focusing on Nanjing as an example, we proceed to introduce maps that were actually created based on aerial surveys.</p><p>Chinese aerial surveys date back to around 1930. At the Nationalist Party’s General Assembly in 1929, partisans proposed for the need for aerial surveys. In 1930, the “Aerial Photography and Survey Research Team” was formed within the General Land Survey Department at General Staff Headquarters (National Army of the Republic of China). Consequently, foreign technicians were invited to provide relevant education/training. In June 1931, China’s pioneer initiative in aerial photography took place in Zhejiang province. The aim of aerial surveys in those early days was to create maps for military purposes. Between 1932 and 1939, topographic maps of fortifications located in areas such as the Jiangnan district were prepared. Further, starting from around the same period until the Sino-Japanese War, land registry maps based on aerial surveys were also produced. After the Sino-Japanese War ended, the above-mentioned directorate handed over responsibility for aerial surveys to the Naval General Staff. However, in 1949 the Chinese Communist Party confiscated the maps theretofore produced.</p><p>Although the aerial photographs and the geographic information produced therefrom during the R. O. C. era were seized by the People’s Republic of China, in actuality, some had previously been transferred to Taiwan. The topographic maps of the Nanjing metropolitan area (一萬分一南京城廂附近圖), based on aerial surveys and drawn in 1932, are currently archived at Academia Historica in Taipei. Comprising a total of 16 sheets, these maps were drawn on a scale of 1:10,000 by the General Land Survey Department.</p><p>Similarly, other maps (各省分幅地形圖) produced by the General Land Survey Department, comprising a total of 56 sheets and partly detailing Nanjing, are now in the possession of Academia Sinica in Taipei. There was no information about photographing or making in these maps. But almost the same maps were archived at Library of Congress in Washington D. C. According to those maps at LC, based on aerial photographs taken and surveys conducted in 1933, these topographic maps (1:10,000 scale) were completed in 1936.</p><p>The examples introduced above are topographic maps based on aerial photography. However, starting in 1937, land registry maps were also created. Detailing the outskirts of Nanjing (1:1,000 scale) and comprising a total of 121 sheets, they are now archived at Academia Historica. While the land registry maps were produced in 1937, supplementary surveys were effected following the Sino-Japanese War in 1947.</p><p>Since the geographic information based on aerial surveys during the R. O. C. era in China were precise, they can serve as a source of manifold information. This report only delved into information developed by the Government of the R. O. C., but it is becoming evident that U. S. Armed Forces and Japan also produced geographic information of their own based on aerial surveys. If the comprehensive panorama captured by all three protagonists can be illuminated, further advances in Chinese historico-geographic studies employing geographic information will be forthcoming.</p>

Abstract The following article comes as a result of a Spanish Ministry R&D funded project entitled “Virtual Worlds in Early Cinema: Devices, Aesthetics and Audiences”. Our starting hypothesis is that some of the central ideas that define the metaverse’s virtual imaginary can be found in some of the visual devices and apparatuses from the 17th to the early 20th centuries. The article contextualizes and details how the desire for immersion, three-dimensional images, observation of replicas of our worlds, and living a non-narrative experience are contained in early optical devices such as magic lanterns, stereoscopic photography, panoramas, maréoramas or phantom rides. The main purpose is to illustrate that, despite the technological transformation, we ultimately are part of a long history where equivalences, parallelisms and returns arise between past and present times. The metaverse’s visual culture is no exception, and it gathers the imaginary of virtual worlds figured in some of the optical devices and visual spectacles of the past.

<strong>Abstract</strong><br />This is article about a book of Art history. The book aims have been exploratory rather than critical. The authors, Hugh Honour and John Fleming (1984), referred exposition to interpretation and evaluation, so far as they are separable. The appeal of some works of art in this book is never purely visual, it is<br />just simply to delight our eyes. It is heavy burden to bear in mind that these conceptions are peculiar to the West perspective. It try to vast a large horizon in both time and space, attention on historically prominent periods and areas,<br />which are also those of most basic interest. Chapters are arranged chronogically, across a wide geographical panorama in order to allow crucial events in world history of humankind. This article also focus to history of photography, that was closely allied with both painting and print making, since of its invention in the 1830s. At last, history of art inevitably reflect the feelings and minds of their authors, who have been almost as diverse as the artists about whom they write, as diverse and many-sided as the works of art themselves.<br /><br /><br /><strong>Abstrak</strong><br />Tulisan ini adalah bedah buku tentang sejarah seni. Tujuan buku adalah melakukan penjelajahan daripada bacaan kritis. Penyusunnya, Hugh Honour dan John Fleming, memilih penjelasan terperinci dan sarat penilaian, yang sesungguhnya keduanya dapat terpisah. Karya-karya seni yang ditampilkan pada buku penuh visual, bermaksud untuk menyenangkan amatan pembaca. Beban besar dipikul buku ini, terkait<br />sudut pandang Barat yang rumit. Cakrawala luas ruang dan waktu dibentangkan luas pada buku ini. Penyusunan bab dibuat secara kronologis, merentang panorama geografis teramat lebar dalam rangka menjelaskan peristiwa-peristiwa penting sejarah umat manusia. Tulisan ini juga memusatkan diri pada sejarah fotografi, yang memiliki hubungan erat dengan seni lukis dan cetak mencetak, sejak temuan pada tahun 1830. Pada akhirnya, sejarah adalah cermin dari perasaan dan pikiran penulisnya, yang selalu berbeda-beda seperti halnya seniman yang mereka tulis. Berbeda-beda dan memiliki berbagai sudut pandang seperti halnya karya seni.<br /><br /><br />*) Staf Pengajar Fakultas Pendidikan Seni dan Desain, Universitas Pendidikan

The author suggests to look at media research from a historical perspective and compare the projects of the “golden period”, that is, the 1990s – early 2000s, with the works of recent years. After preliminary contextual explanations, choosing for a more detailed presentation projects of S. Zielinski and J. Parikka, the author shows how the tasks of media studies and their methodology change during the transition from large-scale panoramas claiming to build a new history from the perspectives of media to often fragmented and situational analyses of components of chosen media (for example, the translation of color dispersion into the chemical language of a photograph of a distant star). This was the way by which archaeology, attentive to geological time, turned into archival work being done for “commercial use or machine learning”. This is how the radical approaches to media research characteristic of the first media theorists are leveled, because scientists publishing their works since the second half of the 2010s contribute to the normalization of media theory by bringing it to the long-discussed topics of other disciplines, such as cognitive functions or theories of signs. At the same time, media theory of recent years is being largely politicized, adopting governmental instructions and reducing the “variantology” and multiplicity of media that were developed earlier.

To investigate the prevalence and etiological factors that contribute in midline diastema in Erbil population among different age groups and genders. A sample of (ex: 1021orthodontic patients (537 males and 484 females) were randomly selected from Erbil population attending to orthodontic department of khanzad polyclinic teaching center (General directorate of hawler / Ministry of health/ Kurdistan region- Iraq) during 2018-2019 period. Aged (13-35 years) with mean age ± SD was 19.6 ± 4.8 years, with a median of 19 years. The examination included patient history taking, intraoral examination, photograph, intraoral periapical radiography of incisors area and panoramic radiographic. Diastema consider positive when the space between central incisors is 0.5mm and more, width was measured clinically used digital Vernier calipers at one millimeter above the incisors edge. In this study the prevalence of midline diastema was 23.2%. location was in the maxilla (97%), in mandible (1.3%) and in both was (1.7%). The prevalence of midline diastema differs significantly between the age groups (p < 0.001). The highest prevalence (55.8%) was among patients aged ≥ 30 years, and it was also high (37.7%) among those aged < 15 years. The prevalence among females (26.4%) was significantly higher than the prevalence (20.3%) among males (P= 0.020). The main causes of midline diastema in females was thumb sucking and missing lateral incisors (14.1% and 12.5% respectively) and in males was high labial frenum and super numerally teeth (39.4% and 30.3% respectively). The prevalence of diastema in Erbil City (Kurdistan regional- Iraq) area was 23.2%, the location mostly in maxilla (97%). The prevalence of diastema in females more than males.

The article deals with little-known unrealized projects shaping the image of the socialist Gorky city, its river panoramas, squares and highways in accordance with the first Soviet master plan of 1935-1937, made by the creative collective of Leningrad Giprogor, under theleadership of N.A. Solofnenko. The development of the master plan of alarge city was based on the principles of reconstruction of the General plan of Moscow in 1935. The architecture of a post-avant-garde epoch allowed to clearly demonstrate the architectural searches of the period, identify their characteristics, their mistakes and achievements. A radical reconstruction of an ancient city assumed a demolition of historic buildings. Instead of the lost town­planning dominants - churches that adorned the river facades of the city for many centuries, architects offered new high-rise accents in the form of monumental public buildings. Projects with classical compositions of central squares contributed to the formation of a fundamentally new image of the city. The tendencies of monumentalism appeared under the influence of well-known projects of accomplishment and organization of urban spaces in the capital cities - Moscow and Leningrad. This was an important phase of the new appeal to historicism, namely the development of the classics, which began in the mid 1930-ies and ended in the mid-1950s Archival photographs of 1930-ies complement the history of Russian Soviet architecture and urban planning and disclose the concept of the planned ambitious reforms.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> What remains of Cultural Heritage in Syria? And in particular in Aleppo? Aleppo, according to UNESCO, is the oldest city in the world. The first settlements date back to 12,000 years ago, the first evidence of the city to 8,000. The A. visited the city in October 2018 at the invitation of the Syrian Trust for Development. He previously went to Syria for a photographic tour in 2010. It was a unique opportunity to document some noticeable buildings and monuments, later on affected by the war. When the war began in 2012, the A. retrieved the photographs and gave them to his students, who then ran some 28 projects of Cultural Heritage items. They are small monuments or small projects, neither complete not very accurate, but sometimes they are unique for the monuments that have already disappeared. In 2017 the book <i>Reviving Palmyra</i> was published, whose main author is the Finnish archaeologist Minna Silver. The book shows the results of the surveys of some monuments of Palmyra, including the Roman theater, the temple of Bel, the triumphal arch and the funerary tower of Al-Habel. The A. made an exibition of the these projects in Ancona, Italy, and produced a video of the exibition, which was then published online. Reme Sackr saw the video and invited the A. to visit Syria. She is a Syrian woman of the Syrian Trust for Development, a Syrian NGO for reconstruction of Syria. She is responsible for the Living Heritage Program inside the Trust, in practice responsible for the reconstruction and the restoration of the monuments in Syria. So in October 2018 the A. went to Aleppo, Syria, for a second time. The present paper shows some results and comparisons for same monuments before and after the war. The objects of the survey are some parts of the Citadel walls, the entrance tower of the Citadel, the southern tower, one mosque and the minaret of the Citadel mosque. One of the first monuments to be restored will be the minaret of the Great Omoyyad Mosque in Aleppo. Some monuments, the minority, are apparently in good condition, seemingly untouched by the war. Some are badly damaged and unsafe. They must first be made sade and subsequently restored. Finally, other monuments – and these are the majority – no longer exist because they have been destroyed to their very foundations. It seems that the war, besides the population, has particularly targeted monuments, perhaps because they represent the soul and history of a people and a country. For them the problem arises whether to reconstruct or not, and in case of reconstruction with which instruments and with which technique, if there are previous findings. This is precisely the case of the minaret. Here they will try to reconstruct the monument where it was, as it was and with the same materials, with possibly the same blocks in the same position they were in. For this task, however, their identification is necessary. The minaret is the most important monument in Syria, because it is the symbol of the country. It was built in 1092, and its restoration was completed in 2007. A special commission now follows the restoration work. It is composed by public, religious and technical-scientific authorities. They are the same university professors who carried out the restoration of 2007 and now curate the reconstruction. Work began in February 2018. The minaret stones were placed in the square of the mosque. Using a crane they raised the stones one by one, then photographed them from all positions. They then proceeded to the identification stage. A computer program was created in MATHLAB^® which could carry out the first automatic selection of 6–8 possible candidates. The operator then manually selected the choosen one. Of the 1300 stones of the external face, 40&amp;thinsp;% have already been recognized. The high-resolution photographs of the A. of 2010 will help the identification. It is hoped to reach 70&amp;thinsp;%. Many blocks are no longer usable because they are broken, being limestone and therefore fragile. They no longer have the necessary resistance and will have to be replaced. A museum will be set up for the reconstruction of the minaret and the mosque. It is hoped to complete the work in two years. The surveying technique used by the A. is Spherical Photogrammetry. He published in 2018 <i>The book of Spherical Photogrammetry</i> a collection of related papers and experiences. This technique has been set up by the A. since 2006. It is based on spherical panoramas. These are cartographic representations on planes of spheres, on which the partially overlapping photographs taken from a single shooting point, are projected. Its main feature is the shooting speed. The technique is very much suitable for heritage documentation and the A. hopes to transfer it to the students of the local faculty of architecture. In this last mission, especially for the interiors, the A. made extensive use of Panono, a multi-image camera capable of covering 360°. These results prove undoubtedly that photogrammetry is an essential instrument for the 3D documentation and digital preservation of cultural heritage.</p>

Cleft lip with or without cleft palate (CLP) is considered the most frequent congenital malformations of the head and neck, with cleft individuals exhibiting more chances of presenting abnormalities such as developmental defects of enamel (DDE). Matrix metallopeptidase 2 (MMP2) is a membrane-bound protein with collagen-degrading ability and has important roles in tooth formation and mineralization. The aim of this study was to evaluate the frequency, location, severity and extent of DDE found in the maxillary incisors for groups of individuals born with CLP, as well as understanding their relationship with the cleft side. Besides, this study addresses the hypothesis that DDE can be influenced by variation in the MMP2 genes (rs9923304). Individual samples, clinical history, intraoral photographs and panoramic radiographs were obtained from 233 patients under treatment at the Cleft Lip and Palate Service of the University Hospital Lauro Wanderley at the Federal University of Paraíba. Digital images were examined by the same evaluator using the Classification of Defects According to the Modified DDE Index, and then loaded into the Image Tool software, where two measurements were made: total area of the buccal surface (SA) and the area of the DDE (DA), obtaining the percentage of the surface area affected (%SAD) (ICC = 0.99). Genomic DNA was extracted from saliva samples from 124 participants. Genotyping was carried out using TaqMan chemistry for one marker in MMP2 (rs9923304). Statistical analyses were performed by The Jamovi Project software. The Shapiro-Wilk test was applied, followed by the Student’s t-test and the Mann-Whitney test. Chi-square and Fisher’s exact tests, and odds ratio (OR) with 95% confidence interval (CI) calculations were used to determine Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium and statistically significant differences with an alpha of 0.05. No significant differences in the prevalence and extent of enamel defects were found between male and female individuals born with CLP (p = 0.058256). The frequency of individuals presenting teeth with DDE, in relation to the cleft and non-cleft side, was statistically different (p <0.001; OR = 7.15, CI: 4.674> 7.151> 10.942). However, the averages of %SAD were similar (p = 0.18). The highest means of the %SAD were found in individuals with bilateral cleft lip with or without cleft palate (BCLP) when compared to individuals with unilateral cleft lip with or without cleft palate (UCLP), for the teeth inside (IA) and outside the cleft area (OA) (p <0.001). Regardless of the cleft side, individuals with BCLP were 7.85 times more likely to have more than one third of the tooth surface affected, showing more frequently defects in the three thirds (OA: p <0.001) (IA: p = 0.03), as well as a higher frequency of more than one type of defect (OA: p = 0.000358) (IA: p = 0.008016), whereas in UCLP, defects were isolated and restricted to only one third, more frequently, the incisal third (OA: p = 0.009) (IA: p = 0.001), with greater frequency of milder defects, such as demarcated (p = 0.02) and diffuse (p = 0.008) opacities. A higher frequency of the T allele, less common, was observed in the group of CLP individuals who had all the affected teeth or at least two teeth with %SAD greater than 20% (p = 0.019843). Our results suggest that MMP2 may have a role in the cases that presented DDE and genotyping rs9923304 could serve as the basis for a genomic approach to define risks for individuals born with CLP. Frequency and severity of DDE is strongly related to the CLP phenotype, since the highest values were found for BCLP. However, the extent of the DDE is independent of its relationship with the side of the cleft.

RESUMENLa historia del cristianismo no se entiende sin el complejo fenómeno mariano. El culto mariano ha afianzado la construcción de identidades colectivas, pero también individuales. La figura de la Virgen María estableció un modelo de conducta desde cada contexto histórico-cultural, remarcando especialmente los ideales de maternidad y virginidad. Dentro del imaginario católico, la Europa contemporánea ha estado marcada por la formación de una cultura aparicionista que se ha generadoa partir de diversas apariciones marianas que han establecido un canon y un marco de interpretación que ha alimentado las guerras culturales entre secularismo y catolicismo.PALABRAS CLAVE: catolicismo, Virgen María, cultura aparicionista, Lourdes, guerras culturales.ABSTRACTThe history of Christianity cannot be understood without the complex Marian phenomenon. Marian devotion has reinforced the construction of collective, but also of individual identities. 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Ashes2Art is the integration of research and pedagogy in digital reconstructions of ancient monuments, data retrieval matrices, open source software and intercollegiate collaboration. The program's immediate focus is 4th century BCE Delphi, Greece. A joint effort among faculty and undergraduate students at Coastal Carolina University and Arkansas State University, Ashes2Art combines art history, archaeology, Web design, digital modeling, panoramic photography, animation, video and site-specific travel.

IntroductionI spent five days on the Arizona Utah border, photographing Monument Valley and the surrounding areas as part of a group of eight undertaking a landscape photography workshop under the direction of a Navajo guide. Observing where our guide was taking us, and watching and talking to other tourist photographers, I was reminded of John Urry’s concept of the “tourist gaze” and the idea that tourists see destinations in terms of the promotional images they are familiar with (Urry 1). It seemed that tourists re-created images drawn from the popular imaginary, inserting themselves into familiar narratives of place. The goal of the research was to look specifically at the tourist gaze, that is, the way that tourists see view destinations and then represent that vision in their images. Circle of Representation Urry explained the tourist gaze as a particular way of seeing the world as a series of images created by the tourism industry; images which were then consumed or collected through tourist photography. He saw this as constituting a “closed circle of representation” where the images employed by the tourism industry to attract tourists to particular destinations were reproduced in tourists’ own holiday snaps, and as more tourists sought out these locations, they were increasingly used to represent the destination. Susan Sontag saw travel employed as “a strategy for accumulating photographs” (9) suggesting that the images were the culmination of the journey. Urry also saw the end point of tourism as travellers to a destination “demonstrating that they have really been there by showing their version of the images that they had seen originally before they set off” (140).Talking to the guide, my group, and other tourists about the images we were recording, and reviewing images tagged Monument Valley on Instagram revealed that digital and network technologies had altered tourists’ photographic practices. Tourist impressions of destinations come from a wide range of popular culture sources. They have, even on smartphones, fairly sophisticated tools for creating images; and they have diverse networks for distributing their images. Increasingly, the images that tourists see as representative of Monument Valley came from popular culture and social media, and not simply from tourism promotions. People are posting their travel images online, and are in turn looking to posts from others in their search for travel information (Akehurst 55). The current circle of representation in tourist photography is not simply a process of capturing promotional imagery, but an interaction between tourists that draws upon films, television, and other popular culture forms. Tourist photographs are less a matter of “consuming places” (Urry 259) and more an identity performance through which they create ongoing personal narratives of place by inserting themselves into pre-existing stories about the destination and circulating the new narratives.Jenkins analysed brochures on Australia available to potential tourists in Vancouver, Canada, and determined that the key photographic images used to promote Australia were Uluru and the Sydney Opera House, followed by sandy beaches alongside tropical blue waters. Interviews with Canadian backpackers travelling around Australia, and an examination of the images these backpackers took with the disposable cameras they were given, found a correlation between the brochure images and the personal photographs. Jenkins concluded that the results supported Urry’s theory of a closed circle of representation, in that the images from the brochures were “tracked down and recaptured, and the resulting photographs displayed upon return home by the backpackers as evidence of the trip” (Jenkins 324).Garrod randomly selected 25 tourists along the seafront of Aberystwyth, Wales, and gave them a single-use camera, a brief socio-demographic questionnaire, a photo log, and a reply-paid envelope in which they could return these items. The tourists were asked to take 12 photos and log the reason they took each photograph and what they tried to capture in terms of their visit to Aberystwyth. Nine females and four males returned their cameras, providing 164 photographs, which were compared with 70 postcards depicting Aberystwyth. While an initial comparison revealed similarities in the content of tourist photographs and the picture postcards of the town, Garrod’s analysis revealed two main differences: postcards featured wide angle or panoramic views, while tourist photos tended to be close up or detail shots and postcards included natural features, particularly bodies of water, while tourist photographs were more often of buildings and man-made structures. Garrod concluded that the relationship between tourism industry images and tourist photographs “might be more subtle and complex than simply for the two protagonists in the relationship to mimic one other” (356).MethodIdentifying a tourist’s motivation for taking a particular photograph, the source of inspiration for the image, and the details of what the photographer was attempting to capture involves the consideration of a range of variables, many of which cannot be controlled. The ability of the photographer and the sophistication of their equipment will have an impact on the type of images captured; for example this may explain the absence of panoramas in Aberystwyth tourist photos. The length of the stay and the level of familiarity with the location may also have an impact; on a first visit a tourist may look for the major landmarks and on subsequent visits photograph the smaller details. The personal history of the tourist, the meaning the location has for them, their reasons for visiting and their mood at the time, will all influence their selection of photo subjects. Giving tourists a camera and then asking them to photograph the destination may influence the choice of subject and the care taken with composition, however this does ensure a direct link between the tourist opinions gathered and the images analysed. An approach that depends on seeing the images taken independently by the tourists who were interviewed has logistical problems that significantly reduce sample size.Fourteen randomly selected tourists at the visitors centre in Monument Valley, a random sampling of 500 Instagram images hash tagged Monument Valley, and photographs taken by seven photographers in the author’s group were studied by the author. The tourists were asked what they wanted to take photographs of while in Monument Valley, and why of those particular subjects. The images taken by these tourists were not available for analysis for logistical reasons, and 500 Instagram images tagged #MonumentValley were collected as generally representative of tourist images. Members of the photography workshop group were all serious amateur photographers with digital SLR cameras, interchangeable lenses, and tripods. Motivations, decisions and the evaluation of images were discussed with this group, and their images reviewed in terms of the extent to which the image was felt to be representative of the location.Monument ValleyMonument Valley can be considered a mythic space in that it is a real place that has taken on mythic meanings that go beyond physical characteristics and lived experiences (Slotkin 11). Located on the Navajo Tribal Park on the Arizona Utah border, it is known by the Navajo as Tse'Bii'Ndzisgaii or “Valley of the Rocks.” Monument Valley is emblematic of the Wild West, the frontier beyond which civilization vanishes, a mythology originally derived from the Western Films of director John Ford. Ford's film, Stagecoach, was shot in Monument Valley and Ford returned nine times to shoot Westerns here, even when films (such as The Searchers, set in Texas) were not set in Arizona or Utah. The spectacular desert scenery with its towering rock formations combine epic grandeur with brutal conditions, providing an appropriate backdrop for dramatic oppositions: civilization versus barbarity, community versus wilderness, freedom versus domestication. The mythological meanings attached to Monument Valley were extended in the films, novels, television programs, and advertising that followed. Footage of Monument Valley is used to represent a blend of freedom and danger in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Easy Rider, Thelma & Louise, Marlborough and Chevrolet advertising, the television series Airwolf and episodes of Doctor Who. Monument Valley was the culmination of Forrest Gump's exhaustive run, and the setting for music videos by Kanye West, Madonna and Michael Jackson, each drawing on the themes of alienation and the displacement of the hero. While Westerns are on one level uniquely American, they are consistent with widely known romantic myths and stories, and the universal narratives evoked by Monument Valley have appeal far outside the USA. The iconic images of Monument Valley have been circulated well beyond tourist informational material, permeating a breadth of popular culture forms.Photographing the ValleyPhotography is intrinsically linked with tourism, fulfilling a number of roles. Travel can have as its purpose the collection of images, and as such, photography can function to structure the travel experience, and to evaluate its success (Schroeder; Sontag). Recognisable images of the location provide evidence that travel was undertaken, places were visited, and the traveller has experienced some form of authentic or exotic experience (Chalfen 435). Sharing images is an essential part of the process. The various roles of photography are to an extent dependent on having a shared mental image of what photographs from the travel location would look like. This mental image is derived, in part, from tourism sources such as postcards, brochures, and websites, but also from popular culture, and increasingly from photographs taken by other tourists. Travel images are shared online on sites such as Trip Advisor and Virtual Tourist, as well as travel blogs and photo sharing sites like Flickr and Instagram. People who post images online are likely to look to the same sites to search for travel information from others (Akehurst 55), reinforcing specific images as representative of the place and the experience.At the beginning of our photography-based tour we were asked which locations we wanted to photograph. There was a general consensus, with people looking for vistas and panoramas, “golden hour” light on the rock formations of buttes and mesas, sunrises and sunsets with silhouetted landscape forms, and close-ups of shadow patterns and textures. Our guide added that one day had been set aside for the iconic images, which were described as the “Forest Gump” shot from Highway 163, the Mittens at sunrise, John Ford Point (as most recently seen in The Lone Ranger movie posters), and the vista from Artist’s Point or North Window. When I asked tourists at the visitor information centre the same question about the images they wanted to capture, the responses were uniform with all of them saying the view of The Mittens, which was immediately before them. Seventy-eight percent (N=11) said that they were after a general panorama with the distinctive landforms, and Highway 163 was named by 57 percent (N=8). Few gave more than these three sites. Forty-two percent (N=6) described the John Ford Point image with the Navajo rider as a goal, and the same number said they would like to take some sunrise or sunset images. Twenty-eight percent (N=4) were looking to take images of themselves or their friends and family, with the distinctive landscape as a backdrop. There was a high level of consistency between the images described by the guide as “iconic” and the photographs that tourists wished to capture.Categorising five hundred Instagram images with the hashtag Monument Valley revealed 195 pictures (39 percent) of the Mittens, 58 of which were taken at sunrise or sunset. There were 88 images (18 percent) taken of Highway 163. John Ford Point featured in 26 images (five percent) of images and Artist’s Point was the location in 20 (four percent). Seventy-nine photographs (16 percent) were of other landmarks such as the Three Sisters, Elephant Butte, and Rain God Mesa, all visible from the self-drive circuit. Landmarks which could only be visited accompanied by a Navajo guide, accounted for 48 (nine percent) of the Instagram images. There were 16 images (three percent) of people, meals, and cars without any recognisable landmarks in the frame. The remaining 28 images (five percent) were of landmarks in the Southwest, but not in Monument Valley, although they were tagged as such.As expected, the photography tour group had a fairly wide range of images, which included close-ups of rocks, images of juniper trees, and images taken in places that were accessible only with a high clearance vehicle and a Navajo guide, such as the Totem Pole and Yei Bi Chei, the Valley of the Gods, and the slickrock formations of Mystery Valley. However, in the images selected at the end of the workshop as representative of their experience of Monument Valley, all participants included the iconic images of Highway 163, the Mittens, and the Artist’s Point vista.Very few images were of the Navajo people. Tourists are requested not to photograph the Navajo unless they were at a sign-posted location where a mechanism was available for paying for the privilege. Here the Navajo posed in traditional dress, engaged in customary activities, or as foreground interest in the desert landscape. The few tourists availing themselves of these opportunities seemed self-conscious, hurriedly taking the snap and paying the fee. Gillespie explains this as the effect of the “reverse gaze” where the photographed positions the photographer “as an ignorant and superficial tourist” (349). At the time, only one of the iconic images was featured on one of the official tourist sites, with the Mittens forming the banner image on the Visit Utah Monument Valley page. The Visit Arizona Monument Valley page had a single image (of the Ear of the Wind natural arch), and the Navajo Nation Parks and Recreation Monument Valley page also had a single image, that of the Three Sisters formation.Image and MeaningThe dominant subject in both tourist and tourism industry images is the Mittens. This image is also prominent in popular culture beginning with John Ford's film Stagecoach, through to Kanye West’s Bound 2 music video. This suggests that there is a closed circle of representation in tourist photography, with visitors capturing the images they have previously seen as representative of the destination. However, there may be an additional, more prosaic, explanation. The Mittens can be photographed from the terrace at the visitors centre, from the rooms at the View Hotel, or they can be captured from the car park, meaning that tourists do not have to leave their cars to attach this image to their travel narrative. The second most photographed landscape was that of Highway 163, an image that can be taken without even having to pay the fee and enter the Navajo Park.Garrod’s study of tourist and professional images of Aberystwyth noted that tourists did not have photographs taken from the top of the hill, and while no explanation for this was given, it could be that ease of access was a consideration. While the number of visitors to America’s national parks and recreation areas is increasing each year, the amount of time each visitor spends at the attraction is in decline. The average visit to Yosemite lasts just under five hours, visitors stay for just under two hours in Saguaro National Park in Arizona, and at the Grand Canyon National Park, most visitors spend just 17 minutes looking at the magnificent landscape (Bernstein; de Graaf). In Yosemite National Park many visitors “simply rolled by slowly in their cars, taking photos out the windows” (de Graaf np). So, ease of access to locations familiar from popular culture images is a factor in tourist representations of their destinations.Our photography tour group stayed five days in Monument Valley and travelled further afield to locations only accessible with a Navajo guide, however the images selected as representative of Monument Valley were of the same easily reached landmarks. This suggests that the process around the perpetuation of iconic tourist images is more complex than simple ease of access, or first impressions.What is apparent in looking at both the Instagram images and those photographs selected as representative by the tour group, is that what is depicted is not necessarily contemporary tourist experience, but rather a way of seeing the experience in terms of personal and cultural stories. Photography involves the selection, structuring and shaping of what is to be captured (Urry 260), so that the image is as much the representation of a perception, as a snapshot of experienced reality. In a guide to photographing the southwest of the USA, Matrés regrets the greater restrictions on movement and the increased commercialisation in Monument Valley (170), which reduce the possibility of photographing under good light conditions, and of capturing images without tourist buses, sales booths, and consequent crowds. However, almost all of the photographs studied avoided these. Photographers seemed to have expended considerable effort to produce an idealised image of a Western landscape that would have been familiar to John Ford, as the photographs were not of a commercialised, crowded tourist destination. When someone paid the horseman to ride out to the end of John Ford Point, groups of tourists would walk out too, fussing over the horse, however having people in the image led to those on the photography tour rejecting the image as representative of Monument Valley. For the most part, the landscape images highlighted the isolation and remoteness, depicting the frontier beyond which civilization ceases to exist.ConclusionPhotography is one of the performances through which people establish personal realities (Crang 245), and the reality for Monument Valley tourists is that it is still a remote destination. It is in the driest and least populated part of the US, and receives only 350,000 visitors a year compared, with the five million people who visit the nearby Grand Canyon. On a prosaic level, tourist photographs verify that the location was visited (Sontag 9), so the images must be able to be readily associated with the destination. They are evidence that the tourist has experienced some form of authentic, exotic, place (Chalfen 435), and so must depict scenes that differ from the everyday landscape. They also play a role in constructing an identity based in being a particular type of tourist, so they need to contribute to the narrative constructed from a blend of mythologies, memories and experiences. The circle of representation in tourist images is still closed, though it has broadened to constitute a narrative derived from a range of sources. By capturing the iconic landmarks of Monument Valley framed to emphasise the grandeur and isolation, tourists insert themselves into a narrative that includes John Wayne and Kanye West at the edge of civilization.References2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968.Airwolf. Dir. Donald P. 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AbstractEstablishing and understanding large format paintings are key to provide accurate information about the artist’s palette and developing conservation strategies. Therefore, investigating the artworks of a population offers insight into its culture, history and origins which reveals individual and collective identity through cultural heritage worldwide. Particularly, the ceiling of the Foyer at the National Theatre of Costa Rica (Central America) is decorated with three large format paintings from the nineteenth century made by the Italian painter Vespasiano Bignami. The paintings are known as La Poesía, La Música and La Danza (The Poetry, the Music and The Dance) and have undergone restorations in the past. However, their state of conservation is unknown and thus demands accurate scientific examination in order to document their status and the extent of undocumented previous restoration work. To overcome those issues, we propose the application of a combination of non-invasive and in-situ techniques to carry out a qualitative assessment of the pigments and actual state of conservation. Here, we employed technical photography in the visible and near infrared regions, using panoramic stitching techniques in order to obtain high resolution images of the very large artworks. Several conservation problems were observed such as: detachment of pigments, cracks, stains, and sections with undocumented restorations. In the IR and False Colour Infrared images we observed a very conspicuous behaviour of the red pigment used in the three paintings. Particular areas with the red pigment were fluorescent, and by means of ultraviolet fluorescence imaging we identified the pigment as through its red-coral fluorescence as Madder Lake, by comparison to a historical pigments reference palette. Measurements in five different red pigmented zones using UV–Vis spectroscopy in The Music show bands in the (550–650) nm region. A Lorentz Model nonlinear curve fit to the bands allowed us to correlate the fluorescent pigment in the paintings of Vespasiano Bignami with Madder Lake.

El presente estudio pretende confeccionar diferentes focalizaciones sobre lo que supone el concepto de ruina a través de la imagen fotográfica en el siglo XIX. Determinados discursos que aparecen tanto en el contexto en el que se realizan esas imágenes como en estudios más contemporáneos que han reflexionado sobre el tema permiten indagar qué significa la ruina como elemento estético e iconográfico desde la representación visual. Desde este punto de partida, el artículo aspira a establecer una taxonomía general que sirva para constituir diferentes criterios de percepción respecto a lo que se ha considerado como mero instrumento clave del ideal romántico. A su vez, se intenta ejemplificar como surgen diferentes informaciones de las fotografías amparadas en diversas contextualizaciones científicas y culturales que tienden a hibridarse dentro del panorama receptivo de esas imágenes. Por otro lado, se trata de describir como el concepto de ruina se articula desde una afección temporal ligada a una experiencia estética en la profusión de imágenes que se ampara, en su sentido amplio, dentro de la denominada corriente romántica. Abstract: This study aims to make different focalizations about representing the concept of ruin through the photographic image in the nineteenth century. Certain speeches that appear both in the context in which those images as in more contemporary studies have reflected on the theme allow debris to investigate what means as aesthetic and iconographic element from the visual representation are performed. From this starting point, the article aims to establish a general taxonomy that serves to establish different criteria insight into what has been considered as a key instrument of the romantic ideal number. In turn, attempts to illustrate how different information of the covered pictures emerge in various scientific and cultural contextualization which tend to hybridize within the receptive panorama of those images. On the other hand, it is described as the concept of ruin is built from a temporary condition linked to an aesthetic experience in the profusion of images that protects, in its broadest sense, in the romantic trend called. Palabras clave: Fotografía, ruina, tiempo, estética, siglo XIX. Keywords: Photography; Ruin; Time; Aesthetics; Nineteenth Century.

La Guerra Civil Española supuso un nuevo modo de fotografiar una contienda: se ampliaron tanto la cantidad de imágenes como el repertorio de acontecimientos, adquiriendo la representación de la infancia singular importancia. También en la fotogra-fía doméstica, afianzada a mediados de los años 30, el niño comienza a ocupar un papel central como símbolo de la supervivencia familiar en medio de la catástrofe. Sin embargo, si examinamos el imaginario de la infancia que la guerra nos ha legado constataremos que hoy privilegiamos una serie limitada de imágenes entre las que la fotografía familiar parece no existir o se con-funde con las imágenes de la Historia. El pre-sente artículo se interroga acerca de esta indefinición y esta reducción, explicándolas por dos movimientos aparentemente opues-tos. En primer lugar, un agenciamiento de lo privado con fines políticos e ideológicos y, junto a este, una adecuación de la fotografía privada a códigos establecidos por fotografías de circulación pública, ya fueran informativas o propagandísticas en un paradójico círculo vicioso que ha limitado drásticamente nues-tro panorama visual memorial. Abstract: The Spanish Civil War was a new way of taking pictures in a conflict. It extended both the number of images and the subjects represented, where the childhood took a singular importance. Also, in the family photography at the 30’s, the child started to be symbol of the family survival in the middle of the catastrophe. Although, if we review the childhood’s imaginary, we will prove that today it is limited of a few images. Between all these limited staff, family photography seems not to exist or it is mixed with the historical photography. This paper questions this mixture, which it explains by a paradox: on one hand, it shows how the intimate image it is utilised whit ideological ends. On the other hand, the private images were adapted to the propaganda model of photography.

This study offers a scene-by-scene translation of the works of nineteenth-century experts Julius Maák, Frantiek Kaván, and Antonn Slavek. The mid-twentieth century photographs of the eskomoravská vrchovina (Bohemian-Moravian highlands) by Josef Jambor were used for a comprehensive comparative investigation at the territory level. The relationship between Landscape painting and national and cultural identity will be investigated. The artistic depiction of the landscape has profoundly impacted the establishment of cultural identities in both China and Europe. In China, landscape depiction has a thousand-year history, but in Europe, it has only lately emerged. Shan Shui (landscape art) has always existed. Style- and function-wise, it has changed little since the Song era. Landscape depictions have profoundly impacted the development of social and public character throughout Europe. Identities and informing consumers about their country of origin. Here, Holland, England, Norway, Finland, and China are analyzed to demonstrate how landscape depictions contributed to the formation of their respective nations. Advocates of a particular conception of Chinese culture have had a limited political impact in China, in contrast to the United States. In Europe, landscape art has been developed in several situations, including to express support for various causes, national identity determination, and nationalism. This study intends to use painting as an interpretative tool to demonstrate how our interpretation of a scene has evolved over time. Fine arts faculties require a greater emphasis on the quality and amount of philosophy training, as well as its methodology, under the scope of "art philosophy." In arts education, various procedures and strategies must be utilized, and students must be capable of analyzing and comprehending works of art through multiple lenses. This study examines the contemporary experience of the panorama from historical, political, social, cultural, and aesthetic viewpoints. It contains various levels of significance, as opposed to just referring to gardens and agricultural areas or the Kantian conception of landscape as a distinct category within the field of visual arts. As a result of industrialization, the discovery of new places, and advancements in science, botany, and geography, the landscape began to change in the nineteenth century. In addition to scientific, cultural, and social improvements, the 20th century saw the incorporation of immaterial components. It has become a social construct as an expression of thoughts, memories, imagination, and emotions. As opposed to a static and seen work, the panorama is today understood as an interdisciplinary and collaborative creation. Comparing maps and photographs of the same websites during different time intervals is a common way of determining landscape change. Landscape paintings, which have a lengthy and renowned history in the Czech Republic, can also be rented in this manner.

Resumo Esse artigo tem como objetivo abordar a arte pública como imagem da cidade e meio de representação urbana. A ideia é mostrar e analisar intervencões urbanas em espaços e monumentos tradicionais de Belém do Pará – Brasil, que representem a história e a vida da cidade em seus trânsitos e apropriacões, de maneira à resignificar espaços e lugares que sejam imagens coletivas dos habitantes dessa cidade. Assim sendo, “Arte pública como imagem da cidade: seus trânsitos e apropriações” relaciona-se a um panorama da arte contemporânea de Belém, ou seja, da arte urbana (aqui entendida como arte pública efêmera) e de suas manifestações, na última década, que se relacionam e se imbricam com os monumentos tradicionais (arte pública permanente). Todo o trabalho está fundamentado na obra de três artistas paraenses: Berna Reale, Victor de La Rocque e Murilo Rodrigues, que têm como linguagem artísticas intervenções que acontecem em diferentes lugares e monumentos da cidade porque sua tradição é significativa para construcão da imagem urbana e para seus fluxos. É importante lembrar que esses trabalhos são efêmeros – enquanto performances que se desdobram em videos e fotografias – e participaram em diferentes versões do Arte Pará (Importante Salão de Arte Contemporânea paraense). Abstract Absract: This article aims to present public art as a city’s image and as an urban representation medium. The idea is to present and analyze urban interventions on monuments and spaces that are traditional in Belém do Pará – Brazil, which represent the city’s history and life through its movements and appropriations in a way to bring new meaning to spaces and places that form the collective image of the city’s inhabitants. Therefore, “Public Art as a city’s image: it’s shifts and appropriations” relate to a contemporary art landscape in Belém, in other words, the urban art (understood here as public and ephemeral art) and it’s manifestations on the last decade that relate and add to the traditional monuments (public and permanent art). All the work is based on the work of three artist from Para?: Berna Reale, Victor de La Rocque e Murilo Rodrigues, which have as artistic language interventions that happen in different places and monuments in the city, because their tradition is of significance for the urban image construction and its fluxes. It is important to remember that these works of art are ephemeral – performances that unfold in video and photographs – and that have parti- cipated in different versions of Arte Pará (important exhibition of Pará’s contemporary art).

Introduction The proliferation of electronic images and audiovisual forms, together with the recent expansion of Internet communication makes me wonder about the adequacy of present theoretical apparatus within the humanities and communication disciplines to explain these new phenomena and their effects on human life. As someone working roughly within a cultural and media studies framework, I have long harboured suspicions about the ability of concepts such as text, discourse and representation to give an account of the new media which does not simply reduce them to another version of earlier media forms. Many of these concepts were established during the 1970s and 80s, in the development of poststructuralism and its linguistic bias towards the analysis of literary and print media text. The application of these concepts to an electronic medium based on the visual image rather than the printed word seems somewhat perverse, and needs to be replaced by the application of other concepts drawn from a paradigm more suited for the purpose. In this brief essay, I want to explore some of the issues involved in thinking about a new cultural paradigm based on the photovisual/electronic image, to describe and critique the transformation of culture currently taking place through the accelerated uptake of new televisual, audiovisual and computer technologies. I am reminded here of the existential philosopher Heidegger's words about technology: 'the essence of technology is by no means anything technological' (Heidegger 4). For Heidegger, technology is part of the 'enframing' of the beingness which humans inhabit in various ways (Dasein). But technology itself does not constitute this beingness. This is good news for those of us (like myself) who have only a general and non-technical knowledge of the new technologies currently sweeping the globe, but who sense their profound effects on the human condition. Indeed, it suggests that technical knowledge in itself is insufficient and even inadequate to formulate appropriate questions about the relationship between technology and human being, and to the capacities of humans to respond to, and transform their technologically mediated situations. We need a new way of understanding human being as mediated by technologies, which takes into account the specific technological form in which mediation occurs today. To do this, we need new ways of conceptualising culture, and the specific kind of human subjectivity made possible within a culture conditioned by electronic media. From Material to Virtual Culture The concept of culture, as it has been predominantly understood in the humanities and associated disciplines, is based on the idea of physical presence. That is to say, culture is understood in terms of the various representations and practices that people experience within social and historical contexts defined by the living presence of one human being to another. The paradigm case here is speech-based linguistics in which all forms of communication are understood in terms of an innate subjectivity, expressed in the act of communicating something to someone else. Although privileging the site and moment of co-presence, this model does not require the speakers to be immediately present to each other in face-to-face situations, but asks only that co-presence be the ideal upon which successful acts of communication take place. As French philosopher Jacques Derrida has consistently argued over the last thirty years, all forms of western discourse, in one way or another, have been based on this kind of understanding of the way meanings and expressions of subject identity take place (Derrida 27ff.). A good case in point is the introductory essay by John Frow and Meaghan Morris to their edited text book Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader, where culture is defined as "a contested and conflictual set of practices of representation bound up with the processes of formation and re-formation of social groups" (xx). If culture is defined in terms of the agonistic formation of social groups through practices of representation, then there can be no way of thinking about culture outside the social as the privileged domain of human interaction. Culture is reduced to the social as a kind of paradigm limit, which is, in turn, characterised by the formation of social groups fixed in time and space. Even when an effort is made to indicate that social groups are themselves culturally constituted, as Frow and Morris go on to say, the social is nevertheless invoked again as an underlying presumption: "the social processes by which the categories of the real and of group existence are formed" (xx). In this model, social groups are formed by social processes. The task of representation and signification (the task of culture) is to draw the group together, no matter how widespread or dispersed, to make it coherent and identifiably different from other groups. Under these terms, the task of cultural analysis is to describe how this process takes place. This 'material' approach to culture normalises the social at the expense of the cultural, underpinned by a 'metaphysics of presence' whereby meaning and identity are established within a system of differential values (difference) by fixing human subjectivity in space and time. I argue that the uptake of new communication technologies makes this concept of culture obsolete. Culture now has to be understood in terms of 'virtual presence' in which the physical context of human existence is simultaneously 'doubled' and indeed proliferated into a virtual reality, with effective force in the 'real' world. From this perspective, we need to rethink culture so that it is no longer understood in terms of differential meanings, identities, texts, discourses and representational forms, but rather as a new kind of ontology involving the 'being' of human subjects and their relations to each other in deterritorialised fields of mediated co-presence, where the real and the virtual enmesh and interact. In this case, the laws governing physical presence no longer apply since it is possible to be 'here' and 'there' at the same time. We need a new approach and a new set of analytical terms to account for this new phenomenon. Virtual Culture and the Time of Human Presence In his well known critique of modern culture, Walter Benjamin invents the concept of the 'dialectical image' to define the visual concreteness of the everyday world and its effect on human consciousness. Dialectical images operate through an instantaneous flash of vision which breaks through everyday reality, allowing an influx of otherness to flood present awareness in a transformation of the past into the present: "the past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again" (Benjamin, Theses 255). Bypassing discourse, language and meaning, dialectical images invoke the eternal return -- the affirmation of the present as an ever-constant repetition of temporality -- as the 'ground' of history, progress and the future. Modern technology and its infinite power of reproduction has created the condition under which the image separates from its object, thereby releasing materiality from its moribund state in the past (Benjamin, The Work of Art). The ground of temporality is thus rendered virtual and evanescent, involving a 'deterritorialisation' of human experience from its ego-attachment to the present; an experience which Benjamin understands in repressed mythical terms. For Benjamin, the exemplary modern technology is photography. A photograph 'destroys' the originariness of the object, by robbing it of aura, or "the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be" (Benjamin, The Work of Art 222). The photographic image is thus dialectical because it collapses the distance between the object and its image, thereby undermining the ontological space between the past and the present which might otherwise grant to the object a unique being in the presence of the viewer. But all 'things' also have their images, which can be separated and dispersed through space and time. Benjamin's approach to culture, where time surpasses space, and where the reproduced image takes priority over the real, now appears strangely prophetic. By suggesting that images are somehow directly and concretely affective in the constitution of human temporality, Benjamin has anticipated the current 'postmodern' condition in which the electronic image has become enmeshed in everyday life. As Paul Virilio argues, new communication technologies accelerate the transmission of images to such a rate that the past is collapsed into the present, creating an overpowering sense of immediacy: the speed of new optoelectronic and electroacoustic milieu becomes a final void (the void of the quick), a vacuum that no longer depends on the interval between places or things and so on the world's very extension, but on the interface of an instantaneous transmission of remote appearances, on a geographic and geometric retention in which all volume, all relief vanish. (33) Distance is now experienced in terms of its virtual proximity to the perceiving subject, in which space is no longer understood in terms of Newtonian extension, but as collapsed or compressed temporality, defined by the speed of light. In this Einsteinian world, human interaction is no longer governed by the law of non-contradiction which demands that one thing cannot be something else or somewhere else at the same time, and instead becomes 'interfacial', where the image-double enmeshes with its originary being as a co-extensive ontology based on "trans-appearance", or the effective appearance on a single horizon of two things from different space and time zones: "the direct transparence of space that enables each of us to perceive our immediate neighbours is completed by the indirect transparence of the speed-time of the electromagnetic waves that transmit our images and our voices" (Virilio 37). Like the light from some distant star which reaches earth millions of years after its explosive death, we now live in a world of remote and immediately past events, whose effects are constantly felt in real time. In this case the present is haunted by its past, creating a doppelgänger effect in which human being is doubled with its image in a co-extensive existence across space and time. Body Doubles Here we can no longer speak of the image as a representation, or even a signification, since the image is no longer secondary to the thing from which it is separated, nor is it a sign of anything else. Rather, we need to think of the possibility of a kind of 'image-event', incorporating both the physical reality of the human body and its image, stretched through time and space. French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have developed an entire theoretical scheme to define and describe this kind of phenomenon. At one point in their magnum opus, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, they introduce the concept of haecceity: a body is not defined by the form that determines it nor as a determinate substance or subject nor by the organs it possesses or the function it fulfils. On the plane of consistency, a body is defined by a longitude and a latitude: in other words the sum total of the material elements belonging to it under given relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness (longitude); the sum total of the intensive affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of potential (latitude). (260) This haecceity of the human body, as "trajectory", or "interassemblage" (262) denies the priority of an originating event or substance from which its constitutive elements could be derived. For instance photographs cease to be 'indexes' of things, and become instead part of an assemblage which includes living bodies and other forms of human presence (speech, writing, expressive signs), linked contingently into assemblages through space and time. A photographic image is just as much part of the 'beingness' of something as the thing itself; things and images are part of a perpetual process of becoming; a contingent linking of bricolage with different and diverging material expressions and effects. Thinking along these lines will get us around the problem of non-contradiction (that something cannot be both 'here' and 'there' at the same time), by extending the concept of 'thing' to include all the elements of its dispersal in time and space. Here we move from the idea of a thing as unique to itself (for instance the body as human presence) and hence subject to a logic of exchange based on scarcity and lack, to the idea of a thing as 'becoming', and subject to a logic of proliferation and excess. In this case, the unique phenomenon of human presence anchored in speech can no longer be used as a focal point to fix human subjectivity, its meanings and forms of expression, since there will be many different kinds of 'presencing' of human being, through the myriad trajectories traced out in all the practices and assemblages through time and space. A Practical Approach By thinking of culture in terms of virtual presence, we can no longer assume the existence of a bedrock foundation for human interaction based on the physical proximity of individuals to each other in time and space. Rather we need to think of culture in terms the emergence of new kinds of 'beingness', which deterritorialises human presence in different ways through the mediating power of photovisual and electronic imagery. These new kinds of beingness are not really new. Recent writers and cultural theorists have already described in detail the emergence of a virtual culture in the nineteenth century with the invention of photography and film, as well as various viewing devices such as the stereoscope and other staging apparatuses including the panorama and diorama (Friedberg, Batchen, Crary). Analysis of virtual culture needs to identify the various trajectories along which elements are assembled into an incessant and contingent 'becoming'. In terms of photovisual and electronic media, this can take place in different ways. By tracing the effective history of an image, it is possible to locate points at which transformations from one form to another occur, indicating different effects in different contexts through time. For instance by scanning through old magazines, you might be able to trace the 'destiny' of a particular type of image, and the kinds of meanings associated with it. Keeping in mind that an image is not a representation, but a form of affect, it might be possible to identify critical points where the image turns into its other (in fashion imagery we are now confronted with images of thin bodies suddenly becoming too thin, and hence dangerously subversive). Another approach concerns the phenomenon known as the media event, in which electronic images outstrip and overdetermine physical events in real time to which they are attached. In this case an analysis of a media event would involve the description of the interaction between events and their mediated presence, as mutually effective in real time. Recent examples here include the Gulf War and other international emergencies and conflicts in the Balkans and the 1986 coup in the Philippines, where media presence enabled images to have a direct effect on the decisions and deployment of troops and strategic activities. In certain circumstances, the conduct of warfare might now take place entirely in virtual reality (Kellner). But these 'peak events' don't really exhaust the ways in which the phenomenon of the media event inhabits and affects our everyday lives. Indeed, it might be better to characterise our entire lives as conditioned to various degrees by media eventness, as we become more and more attached and dependent on electronic imagery and communication to gain our sense of place in the world. An analysis of this kind of everyday interaction is long overdue. We can learn about the virtual through our own everyday experiences. Here I am not so much thinking of experiences to be had in futuristic apparatuses such as the virtual reality body suit and other computer generated digital environments, but the kinds of experiences of the virtual described by Benjamin in his wanderings through the streets of Berlin and Paris in the 1920s (Benjamin, One Way Street). A casual walk down the main street of any town, and a perfunctory gaze in the shop windows will trigger many interesting connections between specific elements and the assemblages through which their effects are made known. On a recent trip to Bundaberg, a country town in Queensland, I came across a mechanised doll in a jewellery store display, made up in the likeness of a watchmaker working at a miniature workbench. The constant motion of the doll's arm as it moved up and down on the bench in a simulation of work repeated the electromechanical movements of the dozens of clocks and watches displayed elsewhere in the store window, suggesting a link between the human and the machine. Here I was presented not only with a pleasant shop display, but also with the commodification of time itself, as an endless repetition of an interval between successive actions, acted out by the doll and its perpetual movement. My pleasure at the display was channelled through the doll and his work, as a fetishised enchantment or "fairy scene" of industrialised productivity, in which the idea of time is visualised in a specific image-material form. I can imagine many other such displays in other windows in other towns and cities, all working to reproduce this particular kind of assemblage, which constantly 'pushes' the idea-image of time as commodity into the future, so long as the displays and their associated apparatuses of marketing continue in this way rather than some other way. So my suggestion then, is to open our eyes to the virtual not as a futuristic technology, but as it already shapes and defines the world around us through time. By taking the visual appearance of things as immaterial forms with material affectivity, we allow ourselves to move beyond the limitations of physical presence, which demands that one thing cannot be something else, or somewhere else at the same time. The reduction of culture to the social should be replaced by an inquiry into the proliferation of the social through the cultural, as so many experiences of the virtual in time and space. References Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939.Trans. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1985. Batchen, Geoffrey. "Spectres of Cyberspace." Afterimage 23.3. Benjamin, Walter. "Theses on the Philosophy of History." Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Trans. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1968. 253-64. ---. "The Work of Art in the Age of Electronic Reproduction." Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Trans. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1968. 217-51. ---. One Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter. London: Verso, 1979. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1997. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: MIT P, 1992. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974. Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Frow, John. Time & Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997. Frow, John, and Meaghan Morris, eds. Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1993. Heidegger, Martin. "The Question Concerning Technology." The Question Concerning Technology. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper. 3-35. Kellner, Douglas. "Virilio, War and Technology." Theory, Culture & Society 16.5-6 (1999): 103-25. Sean Aylward Smith. "Where Does the Body End?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.3 (1999). 30 Apr. 2000 <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/end.php>. Virilio, Paul. Open Sky. Trans. Julie Rose. London: Verso, 1997. Zimnik, Nina. "'Give Me a Body': Deleuze's Time Image and the Taxonomy of the Body in the Work of Gabriele Leidloff." Enculturation 2.1 (1998). <http://www.uta.edu/huma/enculturation/>. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Warwick Mules. "Virtual Culture, Time and Images: Beyond Representation." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.2 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/images.php>. Chicago style: Warwick Mules, "Virtual Culture, Time and Images: Beyond Representation," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 2 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/images.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Warwick Mules. (2000) Virtual culture, time and images: beyond representation. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(2). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/images.php> ([your date of access]).

0. IntroductionIf we follow the line of much literature surrounding airports and urban mobility, the emphasis often falls on the fact that these spaces are designed to handle the mega-scale and super-human pace of mass transit. Airports have rightly been associated with velocity, as zones of rapid movement managed by enormous processing systems that guide bodies and things in transit (Pascoe; Pearman; Koolhaas; Gordon; Fuller & Harley). Yet this emphasis tends to ignore the spectrum of tempos and flows that are at play in airport terminals — from stillness to the much exalted hyper-rapidity of mobilized publics in the go-go world of commercial aviation.In this photo essay I'd like to pull a different thread and ask whether it's possible to think of aeromobility in terms of “uneven, differential mobility” (Bissell 280). What would it mean to consider waiting and stillness as forms of bodily engagement operating over a number of different scales and temporalities of movement and anticipation, without privileging speed over stillness? Instead of thinking mobility and stillness as diametrically opposed, can we instead conceive of them as occupying a number of different spatio-temporal registers in a dynamic range of mobility? The following is a provisional "visual ethnography" constructed from photographs of air terminal light boxes I have taken over the last five years (in Amsterdam, London, Chicago, Frankfurt, and Miami). Arranged into a "taxonomy of differentiality", each of these images comes from a slightly different angle, mode or directionality. Each view of these still images displayed in billboard-scale light-emitting devices suggests that there are multiple dimensions of visuality and bodily experience at play in these image-objects. The airport is characterized by an abundance of what appears to be empty space. This may be due to the sheer scale of mass transport, but it also arises from a system of active and non-active zones located throughout contemporary terminals. This photo series emphasises the "emptiness" of these overlooked left-over spaces that result from demands of circulation and construction.1. We Move the WorldTo many travellers, airport gate lounges and their surrounding facilities are loaded with a variety of contradictory associations and affects. Their open warehouse banality and hard industrial sterility tune our bodies to the vast technical and commercial systems that are imbricated through almost every aspect of contemporary everyday life.Here at the departure gate the traveller's body comes to a moment's rest. They are granted a short respite from the anxious routines of check in, body scans, security, information processing, passport scanning, itineraries, boarding procedures and wayfaring the terminal. The landside processing system deposits them at this penultimate point before final propulsion into the invisible airways that pipe them into their destination. We hear the broadcasting of boarding times, check-in times, name's of people that break them away from stillness, forcing people to move, to re-arrange themselves, or to hurry up. Along the way the passenger encounters a variety of techno-spatial experiences that sit at odds with the overriding discourse of velocity, speed and efficiency that lie at the centre of our social understanding of air travel. The airline's phantasmagorical projections of itself as guarantor and enabler of mass mobilities coincides uncomfortably with the passenger's own wish-fulfilment of escape and freedom.In this we can agree with the designer Bruce Mau when he suggests that these projection systems, comprised of "openings of every sort — in schedules, in urban space, on clothes, in events, on objects, in sightlines — are all inscribed with the logic of the market” (Mau 7). The advertising slogans and images everywhere communicate the dual concept that the aviation industry can deliver the world to us on time while simultaneously porting us to any part of the world still willing to accept Diners, VISA or American Express. At each point along the way these openings exhort us to stop, to wait in line, to sit still or to be patient. The weird geographies depicted by the light boxes appear like interpenetrating holes in space and time. These travel portals are strangely still, and only activated by the impending promise of movement.Be still and relax. Your destination is on its way. 2. Attentive AttentionAlongside the panoramic widescreen windows that frame the choreography of the tarmac and flight paths outside, appear luminous advertising light boxes. Snapped tightly to grid and locked into strategic sightlines and thoroughfares, these wall pieces are filled with a rotating menu of contemporary airport haiku and ersatz Swiss graphic design.Mechanically conditioned air pumped out of massive tubes creates the atmosphere for a very particular amalgam of daylight, tungsten, and fluorescent light waves. Low-oxygen-emitting indoor plants are no match for the diesel-powered plant rooms that maintain the constant flow of air to every nook and cranny of this massive processing machine. As Rem Koolhaas puts it, "air conditioning has launched the endless building. If architecture separates buildings, air conditioning unites them" (Koolhaas). In Koolhaas's lingo, these are complex "junkspaces" unifying, colliding and coalescing a number of different circulatory systems, temporalities and mobilities.Gillian Fuller reminds us there is a lot of stopping and going and stopping in the global circulatory system typified by air-terminal-space.From the packing of clothes in fixed containers to strapping your belt – tight and low – stillness and all its requisite activities, technologies and behaviours are fundamental to the ‘flow’ architectures that organize the motion of the globalizing multitudes of today (Fuller, "Store" 63). It is precisely this functional stillness organised around the protocols of store and forward that typifies digital systems, the packet switching of network cultures and the junkspace of airports alike.In these zones of transparency where everything is on view, the illuminated windows so proudly brought to us by J C Decaux flash forward to some idealized moment in the future. In this anticipatory moment, the passenger's every fantasy of in-flight service is attended to. The ultimate in attentiveness (think dimmed lights, soft pillows and comfy blankets), this still image is captured from an improbable future suspended behind the plywood and steel seating available in the moment —more reminiscent of park benches in public parks than the silver-service imagined for the discerning traveller.3. We Know ChicagoSelf-motion is itself a demonstration against the earth-binding weight of gravity. If we climb or fly, our defiance is greater (Appleyard 180).The commercial universe of phones, cameras, computer network software, financial instruments, and an array of fancy new gadgets floating in the middle of semi-forgotten transit spaces constitutes a singular interconnected commercial organism. The immense singularity of these claims to knowledge and power loom solemnly before us asserting their rights in the Esperanto of "exclusive rollover minutes", "nationwide long distance", "no roaming charges" and insider local knowledge. The connective tissue that joins one part of the terminal to a commercial centre in downtown Chicago is peeled away, revealing techno-veins and tendrils reaching to the sky. It's a graphic view that offers none of the spectacular openness and flights of fancy associated with the transit lounges located on the departure piers and satellites. Along these circulatory ribbons we experience the still photography and the designer's arrangement of type to attract the eye and lure the body. The blobby diagonals of the telco's logo blend seamlessly with the skyscraper's ribbons of steel, structural exoskeleton and wireless telecommunication cloud.In this plastinated anatomy, the various layers of commercially available techno-space stretch out before the traveller. Here we have no access to the two-way vistas made possible by the gigantic transparent tube structures of the contemporary air terminal. Waiting within the less travelled zones of the circulatory system we find ourselves suspended within the animating system itself. In these arteries and capillaries the flow is spread out and comes close to a halt in the figure of the graphic logo. We know Chicago is connected to us.In the digital logic of packet switching and network effects, there is no reason to privilege the go over the stop, the moving over the waiting. These light box portals do not mirror our bodies, almost at a complete standstill now. Instead they echo the commercial product world that they seek to transfuse us into. What emerges is a new kind of relational aesthetics that speaks to the complex corporeal, temporal, and architectural dimensions of stillness and movement in transit zones: like "a game, whose forms, patterns and functions develop and evolve according to periods and social contexts” (Bourriaud 11). 4. Machine in the CaféIs there a possible line of investigation suggested by the fact that sound waves become visible on the fuselage of jet planes just before they break the sound barrier? Does this suggest that the various human senses are translatable one into the other at various intensities (McLuhan 180)?Here, the technological imaginary contrasts itself with the techno alfresco dining area enclosed safely behind plate glass. Inside the cafes and bars, the best businesses in the world roll out their biggest guns to demonstrate the power, speed and scale of their network coverage (Remmele). The glass windows and light boxes "have the power to arrest a crowd around a commodity, corralling them in chic bars overlooking the runway as they wait for their call, but also guiding them where to go next" (Fuller, "Welcome" 164). The big bulbous plane sits plump in its hangar — no sound barriers broken here. It reassures us that our vehicle is somewhere there in the network, resting at its STOP before its GO. Peeking through the glass wall and sharing a meal with us, this interpenetrative transparency simultaneously joins and separates two planar dimensions — machinic perfection on one hand, organic growth and death on the other (Rowe and Slutsky; Fuller, "Welcome").Bruce Mau is typical in suggesting that the commanding problem of the twentieth century was speed, represented by the infamous image of a US Navy Hornet fighter breaking the sound barrier in a puff of smoke and cloud. It has worked its way into every aspect of the design experience, manufacturing, computation and transport.But speed masks more than it reveals. The most pressing problem facing designers and citizens alike is growth — from the unsustainable logic of infinite growth in GDP to the relentless application of Moore's Law to the digital networks and devices that define contemporary society in the first world. The shift of emphasis from speed to growth as a time-based event with breaking points and moments of rupture has generated new possibilities. "Growth is nonlinear and unpredictable ... Few of us are ready to admit that growth is constantly shadowed by its constitutive opposite, that is equal partners with death” (Mau 497).If speed in part represents a flight from death (Virilio), growth invokes its biological necessity. In his classic study of the persistence of the pastoral imagination in technological America, The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx charted the urge to idealize rural environments at the advent of an urban industrialised America. The very idea of "the flight from the city" can be understood as a response to the onslaught of technological society and it's deathly shadow. Against the murderous capacity of technological society stood the pastoral ideal, "incorporated in a powerful metaphor of contradiction — a way of ordering meaning and value that clarifies our situation today" (Marx 4). 5. Windows at 35,000 FeetIf waiting and stillness are active forms of bodily engagement, we need to consider the different layers of motion and anticipation embedded in the apprehension of these luminous black-box windows. In The Virtual Window, Anne Friedberg notes that the Old Norse derivation of the word window “emphasizes the etymological root of the eye, open to the wind. The window aperture provides ventilation for the eye” (103).The virtual windows we are considering here evoke notions of view and shelter, open air and sealed protection, both separation from and connection to the outside. These windows to nowhere allow two distinct visual/spatial dimensions to interface, immediately making the visual field more complex and fragmented. Always simultaneously operating on at least two distinct fields, windows-within-windows provide a specialized mode of spatial and temporal navigation. As Gyorgy Kepes suggested in the 1940s, the transparency of windows "implies more than an optical characteristic; it implies a broader spatial order. Transparency means a simultaneous perception of different spatial locations" (Kepes 77).The first windows in the world were openings in walls, without glass and designed to allow air and light to fill the architectural structure. Shutters were fitted to control air flow, moderate light and to enclose the space completely. It was not until the emergence of glass technologies (especially in Holland, home of plate glass for the display of commercial products) that shielding and protection also allowed for unhindered views (by way of transparent glass). This gives rise to the thesis that windows are part of a longstanding architectural/technological system that moderates the dual functions of transparency and separation. With windows, multi-dimensional planes and temporalities can exist in the same time and space — hence a singular point of experience is layered with many other dimensions. Transparency and luminosity "ceases to be that which is perfectly clear and becomes instead that which is clearly ambiguous" (Rowe and Slutsky 45). The light box air-portals necessitate a constant fluctuation and remediation that is at once multi-planar, transparent and "hard to read". They are informatic.From holes in the wall to power lunch at 35,000 feet, windows shape the manner in which light, information, sights, smells, temperature and so on are modulated in society. "By allowing the outside in and the inside out, [they] enable cosmos and construction to innocently, transparently, converge" (Fuller, "Welcome" 163). Laptop, phone, PDA and light box point to the differential mobilities within a matrix that traverses multiple modes of transparency and separation, rest and flight, stillness and speed.6. Can You Feel It?Increasingly the whole world has come to smell alike: gasoline, detergents, plumbing, and junk foods coalesce into the catholic smog of our age (Illich 47).In these forlorn corners of mobile consumption, the dynamic of circulation simultaneously slows and opens out. The surfaces of inscription implore us to see them at precisely the moment we feel unseen, unguided and off-camera. Can you see it, can you feel it, can you imagine the unimaginable, all available to us on demand? Expectation and anticipation give us something to look forward to, but we're not sure we want what's on offer.Air travel radicalizes the separation of the air traveller from ground at one instance and from the atmosphere at another. Air, light, temperature and smell are all screened out or technologically created by the terminal plant and infrastructure. The closer the traveller moves towards stillness, the greater the engagement with senses that may have been ignored by the primacy of the visual in so much of this circulatory space. Smell, hunger, tiredness, cold and hardness cannot be screened out.In this sense, the airplanes we board are terminal extensions, flying air-conditioned towers or groundscrapers jet-propelled into highways of the air. Floating above the horizon, immersed in a set of logistically ordained trajectories and pressurized bubbles, we look out the window and don't see much at all. Whatever we do see, it's probably on the screen in front of us which disconnects us from one space-time-velocity at the same time that it plugs us into another set of relations. As Koolhaas says, junkspace is "held together not by structure, but by skin, like a bubble" (Koolhaas). In these distended bubbles, the traveler momentarily occupies an uncommon transit space where stillness is privileged and velocity is minimized. The traveler's body itself is "engaged in and enacting a whole kaleidoscope of different everyday practices and forms" during the course of this less-harried navigation (Bissell 282).7. Elevator MusicsThe imaginary wheel of the kaleidoscope spins to reveal a waiting body-double occupying the projected territory of what appears to be a fashionable Miami. She's just beyond our reach, but beside her lies a portal to another dimension of the terminal's vascular system.Elevators and the networks of shafts and vents that house them, are to our buildings like veins and arteries to the body — conduits that permeate and structure the spaces of our lives while still remaining separate from the fixity of the happenings around them (Garfinkel 175). The terminal space contains a number of apparent cul-de-sacs and escape routes. Though there's no background music piped in here, another soundtrack can be heard. The Muzak corporation may douse the interior of the elevator with its own proprietary aural cologne, but at this juncture the soundscape is more "open". This functional shifting of sound from figure to ground encourages peripheral hearing, providing "an illusion of distended time", sonically separated from the continuous hum of "generators, ventilation systems and low-frequency electrical lighting" (Lanza 43).There is another dimension to this acoustic realm: “The mobile ecouteur contracts the flows of information that are supposed to keep bodies usefully and efficiently moving around ... and that turn them into functions of information flows — the speedy courier, the networking executive on a mobile phone, the scanning eyes of the consumer” (Munster 18).An elevator is a grave says an old inspector's maxim, and according to others, a mechanism to cross from one world to another. Even the quintessential near death experience with its movement down a long illuminated tunnel, Garfinkel reminds us, “is not unlike the sensation of movement we experience, or imagine, in a long swift elevator ride” (Garfinkel 191).8. States of SuspensionThe suspended figure on the screen occupies an impossible pose in an impossible space: half falling, half resting, an anti-angel for today's weary air traveller. But it's the same impossible space revealed by the airport and bundled up in the experience of flight. After all, the dimension this figures exists in — witness the amount of activity in his suspension — is almost like a black hole with the surrounding universe collapsing into it. The figure is crammed into the light box uncomfortably like passengers in the plane, and yet occupies a position that does not exist in the Cartesian universe.We return to the glossy language of advertising, its promise of the external world of places and products delivered to us by the image and the network of travel. (Remmele) Here we can go beyond Virilio's vanishing point, that radical reversibility where inside and outside coincide. Since everybody has already reached their destination, for Virilio it has become completely pointless to leave: "the inertia that undermines your corporeity also undermines the GLOBAL and the LOCAL; but also, just as much, the MOBILE and the IMMOBILE” (Virilio 123; emphasis in original).In this clinical corner of stainless steel, glass bricks and exit signs hangs an animated suspension that articulates the convergence of a multitude of differentials in one image. Fallen into the weirdest geometry in the world, it's as if the passenger exists in a non-place free of all traces. Flows and conglomerates follow one another, accumulating in the edges, awaiting their moment to be sent off on another trajectory, occupying so many spatio-temporal registers in a dynamic range of mobility.ReferencesAppleyard, Donald. "Motion, Sequence and the City." The Nature and Art of Motion. Ed. Gyorgy Kepes. New York: George Braziller, 1965. Adey, Peter. "If Mobility Is Everything Then It Is Nothing: Towards a Relational Politics of (Im)mobilities." Mobilities 1.1 (2006): 75–95. Bissell, David. “Animating Suspension: Waiting for Mobilities.” Mobilities 2.2 (2007): 277-298.Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Paris: Les Presses du Reel, 2002. Classen, Constance. “The Deodorized City: Battling Urban Stench in the Nineteenth Century.” Sense of the City: An Alternate Approach to Urbanism. Ed. Mirko Zardini. Baden: Lars Muller Publishers, 2005. 292-322. Friedberg, Anne. The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge: MIT P, 2006. Fuller, Gillian, and Ross Harley. Aviopolis: A Book about Airports. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2005. Fuller, Gillian. "Welcome to Windows: Motion Aesthetics at the Airport." Ed. Mark Salter. Politics at the Airport. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 2008. –––. "Store Forward: Architectures of a Future Tense". Ed. John Urry, Saolo Cwerner, Sven Kesselring. Air Time Spaces: Theory and Method in Aeromobilities Research. London: Routledge, 2008. 63-75.Garfinkel, Susan. “Elevator Stories: Vertical Imagination and the Spaces of Possibility.” Up Down Across: Elevators, Escalators, and Moving Sidewalks. Ed. Alisa Goetz. London: Merrell, 2003. 173-196. Gordon, Alastair. Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure. New York: Metropolitan, 2004.Illich, Ivan. H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness: Reflections on the Historicity of Stuff. Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1985. Kepes, Gyorgy. Language of Vision. New York: Dover Publications, 1995 (1944). Koolhass, Rem. "Junkspace." Content. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.btgjapan.org/catalysts/rem.html›.Lanza, Joseph. "The Sound of Cottage Cheese (Why Background Music Is the Real World Beat!)." Performing Arts Journal 13.3 (Sep. 1991): 42-53. McLuhan, Marshall. “Is It Natural That One Medium Should Appropriate and Exploit Another.” McLuhan: Hot and Cool. Ed. Gerald Emanuel Stearn. Middlesex: Penguin, 1967. 172-182. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. London: Oxford U P, 1964. Mau, Bruce. Life Style. Ed. Kyo Maclear with Bart Testa. London: Phaidon, 2000. Munster, Anna. Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics. New England: Dartmouth, 2006. Pascoe, David. Airspaces. London: Reaktion, 2001. Pearman, Hugh. Airports: A Century of Architecture. New York: Abrams, 2004. Remmele, Mathias. “An Invitation to Fly: Poster Art in the Service of Civilian Air Travel.” Airworld: Design and Architecture for Air Travel. Ed. Alexander von Vegesack and Jochen Eisenbrand. Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Museum, 2004. 230-262. Rowe, Colin, and Robert Slutsky. Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal. Perspecta 8 (1963): 45-54. Virilio, Paul. City of Panic. Trans. Julie Rose. Oxford: Berg, 2005.

The recent announcement that the Costanera Center building in Santiago will finally open in 2012 is the latest episode in the building’s troubled history, during which it has been both the emblem of Chile’s booming economy and the grand symbol of its downturn in the context of the global recession. The mixed-use development –which includes what will be South America’s tallest building, standing 300 meters high— will feature a shopping mall with a number of restaurants and a cinema, two hotels, two shopping markets and office space.The previous chapter in its history was much less optimistic: during most of 2009 the project in the financial district of Santiago (colloquially known as Sanhattan) sat half-finished, its exposed concrete and reinforcement bars contrasting with a banner at the site that read Icono del Desarrollo Latinoamericano (“Icon of Latin American development”). Once a symbol of Chile’s soaring copper driven economy, the Costanera Center became an emblem of its decline, an all too visible manifestation of the dramatic downturn of the construction sector that saw dozens of projects like this coming to a halt and caught in a temporary-but-possibly-permanent state of suspension. According to the Corporación de Bienes de Capital (CBC), an institute that monitors private investment in Chile, a total of 105 projects at different stages of planning or construction were delayed, suspended or scrapped last year. Even though works at the Costanera Center slowly started again during December 2009, the massive earthquake that affected Chile at the end of February 2010 created new doubts about the development. The engineers in charge finally announced that the construction would continue at a rhythm of two and a half floors per month. At every level, height appears to be the measure of achievement: Chile is on its way of having the continent’s highest building, and the workers involved in the construction will see their pay rise as they literally climb higher and higher in their daily job. The destructive nature of the earthquake can be compared to the explosive and unchecked character of Santiago’s frenetic development and, indeed, the relationship between both phenomena goes beyond the metaphorical (and not just because the recently elected president Sebastian Piñera named a number of high profile businessmen in the construction sector as the new local authorities for the five worst affected regions, arguing that their expertise would be key to the success of the reconstruction). The earthquake swept away not the very old, but the very new in Santiago and other major Chilean cities like Concepción, generating a temporal displacement in which rise and fall, birth and decline simultaneously appear at the construction site. Halted projects like the Costanera Center and the newly-finished-but-already-ruined buildings both express a frozen form of architecture that cannot be expended, enjoyed or consumed.Paradoxically, and in spite of their evident fragility, these buildings present themselves as having a solid, uni-dimensional meaning rather than a contingent quality; they stand still, maintained as they are, waiting either for an order of demolition or the reactivation of works. To this extent, these constructions represent a notion of waste that does not appear to be generative, but rather, seems to be suspended and vacant. Even though they might have radically different fates, in their present state both halted projects and half-ruined buildings refer to the same condition of waste. These examples of development and decline are inscribed within the larger processes of speculative construction and economic control that have shaped Chile’s urban landscape from the 1970s onwards. These processes echo the experiences of other countries but are also particular to Chile’s history, its rapid modernisation, its troubled recent political past, and its vulnerability to natural disasters. The suspended landscape created by these buildings appears to limit the potentialities that otherwise contingent spaces could have. The work of the British architect Cedric Price, for instance, addresses the endless capacity of buildings to maintain themselves in a condition of openness, without any reference to past or future functions. In his understanding, the interval—manifested, for example, in the period in which a structure is yet-to-be-built, or in the moment in which the construction is paralysed due to economic or regulation constraints (which is, indeed, the present state of these Chilean buildings)—is an opportunity to be free from any limitation from the past or any aspiration to future glory, a condition of potentiality that generates new processes of exchange. But Price’s projects—which vary from very simple design solutions to buildings in a more conventional sense—could only work if they are able to engage with the present of the construction without privileging any particular outcome. In contrast, the examples of architecture coming to a standstill in Chile (due to the fragility of the country’s economy and the foundations of its flashy construction) can be seen as static monuments that do not commemorate a past event but rather refer to a future that is already out of date. Rather than generating new uses while these projects are halted, they remain encircled, in arrested development; limiting the transformable aspects that might be derived from their current uncertain position. From the 1970s Chile abandoned its old state-centred policies in favour of a virtually unregulated free-market economy. Indeed, recent accounts of the earthquake metaphorically recall Milton Freedman’s doctrine of shock (the imposition of capitalism without any softening of its sharp edges) as a discursive figure: the American economist was advisor to General Pinochet during his dictatorship and a whole generation of highly influential Chilean professionals received a first-hand education from Friedman at the University of Chicago. ‘The Chicago Boys,’ as the group is commonly known in Chile, exerted a direct influence over the complete re-organisation of the country’s public health and education systems, alongside the transformation of its material infrastructure in a process not dissimilar to the changes wrought by earthquake and tsunami. Santiago, in particular, is a city that has transformed its old urban fabric like no other in Latin America. The city is an extreme example of the boom-and-bust development process: plans get approved, buildings get ready and constructions become dated within an incredibly short life-span. Development opportunities in the city centre are rapidly becoming scarce, and construction companies now look to demolish whole buildings to source their land. Other companies buy any property that remains in the wealthier neighborhoods without concrete plans to build anything; these properties are laid to waste, with their gardens unkempt, masses of weeds covering the walls. Consumer sites dedicated to urbanism and architecture such as www.plataformaurbana.cl suggest that the earthquake has provided new opportunities for land speculation and rapid demolition. In Talca (another city badly damaged by the earthquake), construction companies offer new, cheap houses on the city fringe in exchange for damaged properties near the historic centre.Among the endless images of destruction reproduced after the earthquake, the most notorious depict recently built constructions in complete ruins. In Santiago, at least 23 apartment buildings were abandoned and/or received demolition orders in the aftermath of the quake. The development known as Condominio Don Tristan (which, split in half and severely inclined towards one side, became the most emblematic image of the catastrophe) still has the signs reading Visite Departamento Piloto (“Come and Visit the Showroom Apartment”).Interestingly, this type of destruction generated significantly less international attention and media coverage than in the case of Haiti, since Chile presented an image of coping well with the disaster. TV and press images did not communicate a total collapse but rather a sensation of time frozen, or stillness. Analysing the media images, it is salient to note that there is not much rubble in these pictures or people excavating the debris; rather, most of them depict buildings with no one around, empty, standing still. Unlike the images of Haiti, where the devastation took the form of endless piles of rubbish and unsorted rubble, the visual face of the catastrophe in Chile is that of halted construction.In spite of the discrepancy between a building destroyed by disaster and one left unfinished, Chile’s architectural landscape betrays no substantial difference between those structures half-finished and those half-ruined in either the terms of their use (or rather their lack of function, since they cannot be inhabited, used, or enjoyed) or in the bareness of the limbo in which they find themselves. These structures are dumping grounds, not of traditional waste, but of useless forms of architecture. As dumping sites they are void spaces within the city, monitored places that people surround but do not pass through. Paradoxically, they are also the most expensive sites in the city, in terms of both the money spent on them and land prices. They are luxurious dumps. It is the apparent stillness and temporal displacement of Chile’s developments that distinguish these buildings laid to waste from other types of contemporary ruins. Without aiming for it some of these constructions have been ruined before even having been built. There is, however, no ‘ruin value’ here as there was, for instance, in Albert Speer’s ideal of building projects that would decay in an aesthetically pleasant way. In spite of the desire for novelty that animated their creators, the buildings have fallen into a condition of sameness.The artist Robert Smithson made a similar observation in relation to his native New Jersey when he remarked that the city, unlike its cosmopolitan sister New York, gave up any desire to become part of the “big events” of history. In two essays dedicated to his home state Smithson suggests that the unused bridges and dated water pipes dismantle time in their total lack of aspiration. However, in his appreciation of these obsolete artefacts he is not arguing for a romantic redemption of the industrial ruin, nor is his aim to give them an aesthetic quality as objects of venerable decay.That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is, all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the “romantic ruin” because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built. This anti-romantic mise-en-scene suggests the discredited idea of time and many other “out of date” things (“A Tour” 72). According to Smithson, everything seems to be declining in a present, even time. New Jersey’s suburban monuments are cheap and flat and embrace a future already outdated, as do Chile’s suspended buildings. Smithson does not seek to redeem the abandoned or unnoticed industrial landscapes of New Jersey (which, unlike Chile’s wasted buildings, inhabit the periphery rather than the centre of the city) but rather to stress how they embrace, through their vacant character, a total immanence.Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future. … They are not built for the ages but rather against the ages. They are involved in a systematic reduction of time down to fractions of seconds, rather than representing the long spaces of centuries. Both past and future are placed into an objective present (“Entropy” 11).According to Smithson, the suburbs are privileged in comparison with big cities because they are uninterested in making history. The flaws and holes of their streets enact more clearly the immanence he is trying to argue for: “those holes are monumental vacancies that define, without trying, the memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures” (“A Tour” 72). It is interesting how the artist expresses similar concerns when writing about erosion, entropy and natural disasters, not least because they relate the wasted products of architecture with geological destruction, a connection that can also be observed in the case of Chile.Written in 1966 before the rise of the ecological movement, a text like “Entropy and the New Monuments” links conditions of disorder and decay with a new kind of monumentality embodied in the undistinguished landscape of suspension. Smithson presents entropy as an irreversible and evolutionary process, yet not an idealistic one; even though these spaces were animated by evolutionary and modernisation processes, they now offer nothing but suspension. It is here that Smithson’s writings seem most pertinent in relation to Chile’s voided spaces. Unlike organic dumps, where refuse products rot and transform, Chile’s developments these express their entropic character in their stillness, in their absence of generative energy.Recent critical theory has given significant attention to industrial ruins and has revaluated their cultural importance, arguing, from diverse perspectives, that processes of destruction could release new layers of meaning or generate different forms of knowledge. The writings of Dylan Trigg, for instance, make use of ruins to construct a philosophical critique of the notions of temporality and progress. Chilean born photographer Camilo José Vergara proposes to convert the failed modernity of Detroit’s buildings into a space of playful awareness. Tim Edensor vindicates ruins with particular enthusiasm, refuting the notion of an industrial wasteland and re-imagining ruins as spaces of leisure, shelter, creativity and alternative public life (21). This unpredictable unfolding of new meanings does not seem to be present in Chile’s suspended architecture. These buildings are yet to be consumed, and therefore they somehow pervert architecture’s cycle of novelty and obsolescence, while remaining in a state of suspension, waiting to be demolished.ReferencesEdensor, Tim. Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005.Smithson, Robert. “Entropy and the New Monuments”. Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Ed. Jack Flam. Berkeley and London: U of California P, 1996. 10–23.———. “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey”. Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Ed. Jack Flam. Berkeley and London: U of California P, 1996. 68–74.Trigg, Dylan. The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia and the Absence of Reason. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006. Vergara, Camilo Jose. The New American Ghetto. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1997.

History is not over and that includes media history. Jay Rosen (Zelizer & Allan 33) The media in their reporting on terrorism tend to be judgmental, inflammatory, and sensationalistic. — Susan D. Moeller (169) In short, we are directed in time, and our relation to the future is different than our relation to the past. All our questions are conditioned by this asymmetry, and all our answers to these questions are equally conditioned by it. Norbert Wiener (44) The Clash of Geopolitical Pundits America’s geo-strategic engagement with the world underwent a dramatic shift in the decade after the Cold War ended. United States military forces undertook a series of humanitarian interventions from northern Iraq (1991) and Somalia (1992) to NATO’s bombing campaign on Kosovo (1999). Wall Street financial speculators embraced market-oriented globalization and technology-based industries (Friedman 1999). Meanwhile the geo-strategic pundits debated several different scenarios at deeper layers of epistemology and macrohistory including the breakdown of nation-states (Kaplan), the ‘clash of civilizations’ along religiopolitical fault-lines (Huntington) and the fashionable ‘end of history’ thesis (Fukuyama). Media theorists expressed this geo-strategic shift in reference to the ‘CNN Effect’: the power of real-time media ‘to provoke major responses from domestic audiences and political elites to both global and national events’ (Robinson 2). This media ecology is often contrasted with ‘Gateholder’ and ‘Manufacturing Consent’ models. The ‘CNN Effect’ privileges humanitarian and non-government organisations whereas the latter models focus upon the conformist mind-sets and shared worldviews of government and policy decision-makers. The September 11 attacks generated an uncertain interdependency between the terrorists, government officials, and favourable media coverage. It provided a test case, as had the humanitarian interventions (Robinson 37) before it, to test the claim by proponents that the ‘CNN Effect’ had policy leverage during critical stress points. The attacks also revived a long-running debate in media circles about the risk factors of global media. McLuhan (1964) and Ballard (1990) had prophesied that the global media would pose a real-time challenge to decision-making processes and that its visual imagery would have unforeseen psychological effects on viewers. Wark (1994) noted that journalists who covered real-time events including the Wall Street crash (1987) and collapse of the Berlin Wall (1989) were traumatised by their ‘virtual’ geographies. The ‘War on Terror’ as 21st Century Myth Three recent books explore how the 1990s humanitarian interventions and the September 11 attacks have remapped this ‘virtual’ territory with all too real consequences. Piers Robinson’s The CNN Effect (2002) critiques the theory and proposes the policy-media interaction model. Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan’s anthology Journalism After September 11 (2002) examines how September 11 affected the journalists who covered it and the implications for news values. Sandra Silberstein’s War of Words (2002) uncovers how strategic language framed the U.S. response to September 11. Robinson provides the contextual background; Silberstein contributes the specifics; and Zelizer and Allan surface broader perspectives. These books offer insights into the social construction of the nebulous War on Terror and why certain images and trajectories were chosen at the expense of other possibilities. Silberstein locates this world-historical moment in the three-week transition between September 11’s aftermath and the U.S. bombings of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime. Descriptions like the ‘War on Terror’ and ‘Axis of Evil’ framed the U.S. military response, provided a conceptual justification for the bombings, and also brought into being the geo-strategic context for other nations. The crucial element in this process was when U.S. President George W. Bush adopted a pedagogical style for his public speeches, underpinned by the illusions of communal symbols and shared meanings (Silberstein 6-8). Bush’s initial address to the nation on September 11 invoked the ambiguous pronoun ‘we’ to recreate ‘a unified nation, under God’ (Silberstein 4). The 1990s humanitarian interventions had frequently been debated in Daniel Hallin’s sphere of ‘legitimate controversy’; however the grammar used by Bush and his political advisers located the debate in the sphere of ‘consensus’. This brief period of enforced consensus was reinforced by the structural limitations of North American media outlets. September 11 combined ‘tragedy, public danger and a grave threat to national security’, Michael Schudson observed, and in the aftermath North American journalism shifted ‘toward a prose of solidarity rather than a prose of information’ (Zelizer & Allan 41). Debate about why America was hated did not go much beyond Bush’s explanation that ‘they hated our freedoms’ (Silberstein 14). Robert W. McChesney noted that alternatives to the ‘war’ paradigm were rarely mentioned in the mainstream media (Zelizer & Allan 93). A new myth for the 21st century had been unleashed. The Cycle of Integration Propaganda Journalistic prose masked the propaganda of social integration that atomised the individual within a larger collective (Ellul). The War on Terror was constructed by geopolitical pundits as a Manichean battle between ‘an “evil” them and a national us’ (Silberstein 47). But the national crisis made ‘us’ suddenly problematic. Resurgent patriotism focused on the American flag instead of Constitutional rights. Debates about military tribunals and the USA Patriot Act resurrected the dystopian fears of a surveillance society. New York City mayor Rudy Guiliani suddenly became a leadership icon and Time magazine awarded him Person of the Year (Silberstein 92). Guiliani suggested at the Concert for New York on 20 October 2001 that ‘New Yorkers and Americans have been united as never before’ (Silberstein 104). Even the series of Public Service Announcements created by the Ad Council and U.S. advertising agencies succeeded in blurring the lines between cultural tolerance, social inclusion, and social integration (Silberstein 108-16). In this climate the in-depth discussion of alternate options and informed dissent became thought-crimes. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s report Defending Civilization: How Our Universities are Failing America (2002), which singled out “blame America first” academics, ignited a firestorm of debate about educational curriculums, interpreting history, and the limits of academic freedom. Silberstein’s perceptive analysis surfaces how ACTA assumed moral authority and collective misunderstandings as justification for its interrogation of internal enemies. The errors she notes included presumed conclusions, hasty generalisations, bifurcated worldviews, and false analogies (Silberstein 133, 135, 139, 141). Op-ed columnists soon exposed ACTA’s gambit as a pre-packaged witch-hunt. But newscasters then channel-skipped into military metaphors as the Afghanistan campaign began. The weeks after the attacks New York City sidewalk traders moved incense and tourist photos to make way for World Trade Center memorabilia and anti-Osama shirts. Chevy and Ford morphed September 11 catchphrases (notably Todd Beamer’s last words “Let’s Roll” on Flight 93) and imagery into car advertising campaigns (Silberstein 124-5). American self-identity was finally reasserted in the face of a domestic recession through this wave of vulgar commercialism. The ‘Simulated’ Fall of Elite Journalism For Columbia University professor James Carey the ‘failure of journalism on September 11’ signaled the ‘collapse of the elites of American journalism’ (Zelizer & Allan 77). Carey traces the rise-and-fall of adversarial and investigative journalism from the Pentagon Papers and Watergate through the intermediation of the press to the myopic self-interest of the 1988 and 1992 Presidential campaigns. Carey’s framing echoes the earlier criticisms of Carl Bernstein and Hunter S. Thompson. However this critique overlooks several complexities. Piers Robinson cites Alison Preston’s insight that diplomacy, geopolitics and elite reportage defines itself through the sense of distance from its subjects. Robinson distinguished between two reportage types: distance framing ‘creates emotional distance’ between the viewers and victims whilst support framing accepts the ‘official policy’ (28). The upsurge in patriotism, the vulgar commercialism, and the mini-cycle of memorabilia and publishing all combined to enhance the support framing of the U.S. federal government. Empathy generated for September 11’s victims was tied to support of military intervention. However this closeness rapidly became the distance framing of the Afghanistan campaign. News coverage recycled the familiar visuals of in-progress bombings and Taliban barbarians. The alternative press, peace movements, and social activists then retaliated against this coverage by reinstating the support framing that revealed structural violence and gave voice to silenced minorities and victims. What really unfolded after September 11 was not the demise of journalism’s elite but rather the renegotiation of reportage boundaries and shared meanings. Journalists scoured the Internet for eyewitness accounts and to interview survivors (Zelizer & Allan 129). The same medium was used by others to spread conspiracy theories and viral rumors that numerology predicted the date September 11 or that the “face of Satan” could be seen in photographs of the World Trade Center (Zelizer & Allan 133). Karim H. Karim notes that the Jihad frame of an “Islamic Peril” was socially constructed by media outlets but then challenged by individual journalists who had learnt ‘to question the essentialist bases of her own socialization and placing herself in the Other’s shoes’ (Zelizer & Allan 112). Other journalists forgot that Jihad and McWorld were not separate but two intertwined worldviews that fed upon each other. The September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center also had deep symbolic resonances for American sociopolitical ideals that some journalists explored through analysis of myths and metaphors. The Rise of Strategic Geography However these renegotiated boundariesof new media, multiperspectival frames, and ‘layered’ depth approaches to issues analysiswere essentially minority reports. The rationalist mode of journalism was soon reasserted through normative appeals to strategic geography. The U.S. networks framed their documentaries on Islam and the Middle East in bluntly realpolitik terms. The documentary “Minefield: The United States and the Muslim World” (ABC, 11 October 2001) made explicit strategic assumptions of ‘the U.S. as “managing” the region’ and ‘a definite tinge of superiority’ (Silberstein 153). ABC and CNN stressed the similarities between the world’s major monotheistic religions and their scriptural doctrines. Both networks limited their coverage of critiques and dissent to internecine schisms within these traditions (Silberstein 158). CNN also created different coverage for its North American and international audiences. The BBC was more cautious in its September 11 coverage and more global in outlook. Three United Kingdom specials – Panorama (Clash of Cultures, BBC1, 21 October 2001), Question Time (Question Time Special, BBC1, 13 September 2001), and “War Without End” (War on Trial, Channel 4, 27 October 2001) – drew upon the British traditions of parliamentary assembly, expert panels, and legal trials as ways to explore the multiple dimensions of the ‘War on Terror’ (Zelizer & Allan 180). These latter debates weren’t value free: the programs sanctioned ‘a tightly controlled and hierarchical agora’ through different containment strategies (Zelizer & Allan 183). Program formats, selected experts and presenters, and editorial/on-screen graphics were factors that pre-empted the viewer’s experience and conclusions. The traditional emphasis of news values on the expert was renewed. These subtle forms of thought-control enabled policy-makers to inform the public whilst inoculating them against terrorist propaganda. However the ‘CNN Effect’ also had counter-offensive capabilities. Osama bin Laden’s videotaped sermons and the al-Jazeera network’s broadcasts undermined the psychological operations maxim that enemies must not gain access to the mindshare of domestic audiences. Ingrid Volkmer recounts how the Los Angeles based National Iranian Television Network used satellite broadcasts to criticize the Iranian leadership and spark public riots (Zelizer & Allan 242). These incidents hint at why the ‘War on Terror’ myth, now unleashed upon the world, may become far more destabilizing to the world system than previous conflicts. Risk Reportage and Mediated Trauma When media analysts were considering the ‘CNN Effect’ a group of social contract theorists including Anthony Giddens, Zygmunt Bauman, and Ulrich Beck were debating, simultaneously, the status of modernity and the ‘unbounded contours’ of globalization. Beck termed this new environment of escalating uncertainties and uninsurable dangers the ‘world risk society’ (Beck). Although they drew upon constructivist and realist traditions Beck and Giddens ‘did not place risk perception at the center of their analysis’ (Zelizer & Allan 203). Instead this was the role of journalist as ‘witness’ to Ballard-style ‘institutionalized disaster areas’. The terrorist attacks on September 11 materialized this risk and obliterated the journalistic norms of detachment and objectivity. The trauma ‘destabilizes a sense of self’ within individuals (Zelizer & Allan 205) and disrupts the image-generating capacity of collective societies. Barbie Zelizer found that the press selection of September 11 photos and witnesses re-enacted the ‘Holocaust aesthetic’ created when Allied Forces freed the Nazi internment camps in 1945 (Zelizer & Allan 55-7). The visceral nature of September 11 imagery inverted the trend, from the Gulf War to NATO’s Kosovo bombings, for news outlets to depict war in detached video-game imagery (Zelizer & Allan 253). Coverage of the September 11 attacks and the subsequent Bali bombings (on 12 October 2002) followed a four-part pattern news cycle of assassinations and terrorism (Moeller 164-7). Moeller found that coverage moved from the initial event to a hunt for the perpetrators, public mourning, and finally, a sense of closure ‘when the media reassert the supremacy of the established political and social order’ (167). In both events the shock of the initial devastation was rapidly followed by the arrest of al Qaeda and Jamaah Islamiyah members, the creation and copying of the New York Times ‘Portraits of Grief’ template, and the mediation of trauma by a re-established moral order. News pundits had clearly studied the literature on bereavement and grief cycles (Kubler-Ross). However the neo-noir work culture of some outlets also fueled bitter disputes about how post-traumatic stress affected journalists themselves (Zelizer & Allan 253). Reconfiguring the Future After September 11 the geopolitical pundits, a reactive cycle of integration propaganda, pecking order shifts within journalism elites, strategic language, and mediated trauma all combined to bring a specific future into being. This outcome reflected the ‘media-state relationship’ in which coverage ‘still reflected policy preferences of parts of the U.S. elite foreign-policy-making community’ (Robinson 129). Although Internet media and non-elite analysts embraced Hallin’s ‘sphere of deviance’ there is no clear evidence yet that they have altered the opinions of policy-makers. The geopolitical segue from September 11 into the U.S.-led campaign against Iraq also has disturbing implications for the ‘CNN Effect’. Robinson found that its mythic reputation was overstated and tied to issues of policy certainty that the theory’s proponents often failed to examine. Media coverage molded a ‘domestic constituency ... for policy-makers to take action in Somalia’ (Robinson 62). He found greater support in ‘anecdotal evidence’ that the United Nations Security Council’s ‘safe area’ for Iraqi Kurds was driven by Turkey’s geo-strategic fears of ‘unwanted Kurdish refugees’ (Robinson 71). Media coverage did impact upon policy-makers to create Bosnian ‘safe areas’, however, ‘the Kosovo, Rwanda, and Iraq case studies’ showed that the ‘CNN Effect’ was unlikely as a key factor ‘when policy certainty exists’ (Robinson 118). The clear implication from Robinson’s studies is that empathy framing, humanitarian values, and searing visual imagery won’t be enough to challenge policy-makers. What remains to be done? Fortunately there are some possibilities that straddle the pragmatic, realpolitik and emancipatory approaches. Today’s activists and analysts are also aware of the dangers of ‘unfreedom’ and un-reflective dissent (Fromm). Peter Gabriel’s organisation Witness, which documents human rights abuses, is one benchmark of how to use real-time media and the video camera in an effective way. The domains of anthropology, negotiation studies, neuro-linguistics, and social psychology offer valuable lessons on techniques of non-coercive influence. The emancipatory tradition of futures studies offers a rich tradition of self-awareness exercises, institution rebuilding, and social imaging, offsets the pragmatic lure of normative scenarios. The final lesson from these books is that activists and analysts must co-adapt as the ‘War on Terror’ mutates into new and terrifying forms. Works Cited Amis, Martin. “Fear and Loathing.” The Guardian (18 Sep. 2001). 1 March 2001 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4259170,00.php>. Ballard, J.G. The Atrocity Exhibition (rev. ed.). Los Angeles: V/Search Publications, 1990. Beck, Ulrich. World Risk Society. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 1999. Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. New York: Vintage Books, 1973. Friedman, Thomas. The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999. Fromm, Erich. Escape from Freedom. New York: Farrar & Rhinehart, 1941. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992. Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Kaplan, Robert. The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War. New York: Random House, 2000. Kubler-Ross, Elizabeth. On Death and Dying. London: Tavistock, 1969. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964. Moeller, Susan D. Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War, and Death. New York: Routledge, 1999. Robinson, Piers. The CNN Effect: The Myth of News, Foreign Policy and Intervention. New York: Routledge, 2002. Silberstein, Sandra. War of Words: Language, Politics and 9/11. New York: Routledge, 2002. Wark, McKenzie. Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events. Bloomington IN: Indiana UP, 1994. Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1948. Zelizer, Barbie, and Stuart Allan (eds.). Journalism after September 11. New York: Routledge, 2002. Links http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0 Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Burns, Alex. "The Worldflash of a Coming Future" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/08-worldflash.php>. APA Style Burns, A. (2003, Apr 23). The Worldflash of a Coming Future. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/08-worldflash.php>

Augmented Reality—The Liminal Zone Within the larger context of the post-desktop technological philosophy and practice, an increasing number of efforts are directed towards finding solutions for integrating as close as possible virtual information into specific real environments; a short list of such endeavors include Wi-Fi connectivity, GPS-driven navigation, mobile phones, GIS (Geographic Information System), and various technological systems associated with what is loosely called locative, ubiquitous and pervasive computing. Augmented Reality (AR) is directly related to these technologies, although its visualization capabilities and the experience it provides assure it a particular place within this general trend. Indeed, AR stands out for its unique capacity (or ambition) to offer a seamless combination—or what I call here an effect of convergence—of the real scene perceived by the user with virtual information overlaid on that scene interactively and in real time. The augmented scene is perceived by the viewer through the use of different displays, the most common being the AR glasses (head-mounted display), video projections or monitors, and hand-held mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets, increasingly popular nowadays. One typical example of AR application is Layar, a browser that layers information of public interest—delivered through an open-source content management system—over the actual image of a real space, streamed live on the mobile phone display. An increasing number of artists employ this type of mobile AR apps to create artworks that consist in perceptually combining material reality and virtual data: as the user points the smartphone or tablet to a specific place, virtual 3D-modelled graphics or videos appear in real time, seamlessly inserted in the image of that location, according to the user’s position and orientation. In the engineering and IT design fields, one of the first researchers to articulate a coherent conceptualization of AR and to underlie its specific capabilities is Ronald Azuma. He writes that, unlike Virtual Reality (VR) which completely immerses the user inside a synthetic environment, AR supplements reality, therefore enhancing “a user’s perception of and interaction with the real world” (355-385). Another important contributor to the foundation of AR as a concept and as a research field is industrial engineer Paul Milgram. He proposes a comprehensive and frequently cited definition of “Mixed Reality” (MR) via a schema that includes the entire spectrum of situations that span the “continuum” between actual reality and virtual reality, with “augmented reality” and “augmented virtuality” between the two poles (283). Important to remark with regard to terminology (MR or AR) is that especially in the non-scientific literature, authors do not always explain a preference for either MR or AR. This suggests that the two terms are understood as synonymous, but it also provides evidence for my argument that, outside of the technical literature, AR is considered a concept rather than a technology. Here, I use the term AR instead of MR considering that the phrase AR (and the integrated idea of augmentation) is better suited to capturing the convergence effect. As I will demonstrate in the following lines, the process of augmentation (i.e. the convergence effect) is the result of an enhancement of the possibilities to perceive and understand the world—through adding data that augment the perception of reality—and not simply the product of a mix. Nevertheless, there is surely something “mixed” about this experience, at least for the fact that it combines reality and virtuality. The experiential result of combining reality and virtuality in the AR process is what media theorist Lev Manovich calls an “augmented space,” a perceptual liminal zone which he defines as “the physical space overlaid with dynamically changing information, multimedia in form and localized for each user” (219). The author derives the term “augmented space” from the term AR (already established in the scientific literature), but he sees AR, and implicitly augmented space, not as a strictly defined technology, but as a model of visuality concerned with the intertwining of the real and virtual: “it is crucial to see this as a conceptual rather than just a technological issue – and therefore as something that in part has already been an element of other architectural and artistic paradigms” (225-6). Surely, it is hard to believe that AR has appeared in a void or that its emergence is strictly related to certain advances in technological research. AR—as an artistic manifestation—is informed by other attempts (not necessarily digital) to merge real and fictional in a unitary perceptual entity, particularly by installation art and Virtual Reality (VR) environments. With installation art, AR shares the same spatial strategy and scenographic approach—they both construct “fictional” areas within material reality, that is, a sort of mise-en-scène that are aesthetically and socially produced and centered on the active viewer. From the media installationist practice of the previous decades, AR inherited the way of establishing a closer spatio-temporal interaction between the setting, the body and the electronic image (see for example Bruce Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor [1970], Peter Campus’s Interface [1972], Dan Graham’s Present Continuous Pasts(s) [1974], Jeffrey Shaw’s Viewpoint [1975], or Jim Campbell’s Hallucination [1988]). On the other hand, VR plays an important role in the genealogy of AR for sharing the same preoccupation for illusionist imagery and—at least in some AR projects—for providing immersive interactions in “expanded image spaces experienced polysensorily and interactively” (Grau 9). VR artworks such as Paul Sermon, Telematic Dreaming (1992), Char Davies’ Osmose (1995), Michael Naimark’s Be Now Here (1995-97), Maurice Benayoun’s World Skin: A Photo Safari in the Land of War (1997), Luc Courchesne’s Where Are You? (2007-10), are significant examples for the way in which the viewer can be immersed in “expanded image-spaces.” Offering no view of the exterior world, the works try instead to reduce as much as possible the critical distance the viewer might have to the image he/she experiences. Indeed, AR emerged in great part from the artistic and scientific research efforts dedicated to VR, but also from the technological and artistic investigations of the possibilities of blending reality and virtuality, conducted in the previous decades. For example, in the 1960s, computer scientist Ivan Sutherland played a crucial role in the history of AR contributing to the development of display solutions and tracking systems that permit a better immersion within the digital image. Another important figure in the history of AR is computer artist Myron Krueger whose experiments with “responsive environments” are fundamental as they proposed a closer interaction between participant’s body and the digital object. More recently, architect and theorist Marcos Novak contributed to the development of the idea of AR by introducing the concept of “eversion”, “the counter-vector of the virtual leaking out into the actual”. Today, AR technological research and the applications made available by various developers and artists are focused more and more on mobility and ubiquitous access to information instead of immersivity and illusionist effects. A few examples of mobile AR include applications such as Layar, Wikitude—“world browsers” that overlay site-specific information in real-time on a real view (video stream) of a place, Streetmuseum (launched in 2010) and Historypin (launched in 2011)—applications that insert archive images into the street-view of a specific location where the old images were taken, or Google Glass (launched in 2012)—a device that provides the wearer access to Google’s key Cloud features, in situ and in real time. Recognizing the importance of various technological developments and of the artistic manifestations such as installation art and VR as predecessors of AR, we should emphasize that AR moves forward from these artistic and technological models. AR extends the installationist precedent by proposing a consistent and seamless integration of informational elements with the very physical space of the spectator, and at the same time rejects the idea of segregating the viewer into a complete artificial environment like in VR systems by opening the perceptual field to the surrounding environment. Instead of leaving the viewer in a sort of epistemological “lust” within the closed limits of the immersive virtual systems, AR sees virtuality rather as a “component of experiencing the real” (Farman 22). Thus, the questions that arise—and which this essay aims to answer—are: Do we have a specific spatial dimension in AR? If yes, can we distinguish it as a different—if not new—spatial and aesthetic paradigm? Is AR’s intricate topology able to be the place not only of convergence, but also of possible tensions between its real and virtual components, between the ideal of obtaining a perceptual continuity and the inherent (technical) limitations that undermine that ideal? Converging Spaces in the Artistic Mode: Between Continuum and Discontinuum As key examples of the way in which AR creates a specific spatial experience—in which convergence appears as a fluctuation between continuity and discontinuity—I mention three of the most accomplished works in the field that, significantly, expose also the essential role played by the interface in providing this experience: Living-Room 2 (2007) by Jan Torpus, Under Scan (2005-2008) by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Hans RichtAR (2013) by John Craig Freeman and Will Pappenheimer. The works illustrate the three main categories of interfaces used for AR experience: head-attached, spatial displays, and hand-held (Bimber 2005). These types of interface—together with all the array of adjacent devices, software and tracking systems—play a central role in determining the forms and outcomes of the user’s experience and consequently inform in a certain measure the aesthetic and socio-cultural interpretative discourse surrounding AR. Indeed, it is not the same to have an immersive but solitary experience, or a mobile and public experience of an AR artwork or application. The first example is Living-Room 2 an immersive AR installation realized by a collective coordinated by Jan Torpus in 2007 at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts FHNW, Basel, Switzerland. The work consists of a built “living-room” with pieces of furniture and domestic objects that are perceptually augmented by means of a “see-through” Head Mounted Display. The viewer perceives at the same time the real room and a series of virtual graphics superimposed on it such as illusionist natural vistas that “erase” the walls, or strange creatures that “invade” the living-room. The user can select different augmenting “scenarios” by interacting with both the physical interfaces (the real furniture and objects) and the graphical interfaces (provided as virtual images in the visual field of the viewer, and activated via a handheld device). For example, in one of the scenarios proposed, the user is prompted to design his/her own extended living room, by augmenting the content and the context of the given real space with different “spatial dramaturgies” or “AR décors.” Another scenario offers the possibility of creating an “Ecosystem”—a real-digital world perceived through the HMD in which strange creatures virtually occupy the living-room intertwining with the physical configuration of the set design and with the user’s viewing direction, body movement, and gestures. Particular attention is paid to the participant’s position in the room: a tracking device measures the coordinates of the participant’s location and direction of view and effectuates occlusions of real space and then congruent superimpositions of 3D images upon it. Figure 1: Jan Torpus, Living-Room 2 (Ecosystems), Augmented Reality installation (2007). Courtesy of the artist. Figure 2: Jan Torpus, Living-Room 2 (AR decors), Augmented Reality installation (2007). Courtesy of the artist.In this sense, the title of the work acquires a double meaning: “living” is both descriptive and metaphoric. As Torpus explains, Living-Room is an ambiguous phrase: it can be both a living-room and a room that actually lives, an observation that suggests the idea of a continuum and of immersion in an environment where there are no apparent ruptures between reality and virtuality. Of course, immersion is in these circumstances not about the creation of a purely artificial secluded space of experience like that of the VR environments, but rather about a dialogical exercise that unifies two different phenomenal levels, real and virtual, within a (dis)continuous environment (with the prefix “dis” as a necessary provision). Media theorist Ron Burnett’s observations about the instability of the dividing line between different levels of experience—more exactly, of the real-virtual continuum—in what he calls immersive “image-worlds” have a particular relevance in this context: Viewing or being immersed in images extend the control humans have over mediated spaces and is part of a perceptual and psychological continuum of struggle for meaning within image-worlds. Thinking in terms of continuums lessens the distinctions between subjects and objects and makes it possible to examine modes of influence among a variety of connected experiences. (113) It is precisely this preoccupation to lessen any (or most) distinctions between subjects and objects, and between real and virtual spaces, that lays at the core of every artistic experiment under the AR rubric. The fact that this distinction is never entirely erased—as Living-Room 2 proves—is part of the very condition of AR. The ambition to create a continuum is after all not about producing perfectly homogenous spaces, but, as Ron Burnett points out (113), “about modalities of interaction and dialogue” between real worlds and virtual images. Another way to frame the same problematic of creating a provisional spatial continuum between reality and virtuality, but this time in a non-immersive fashion (i.e. with projective interface means), occurs in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Under Scan (2005-2008). The work, part of the larger series Relational Architecture, is an interactive video installation conceived for outdoor and indoor environments and presented in various public spaces. It is a complex system comprised of a powerful light source, video projectors, computers, and a tracking device. The powerful light casts shadows of passers-by within the dark environment of the work’s setting. A tracking device indicates where viewers are positioned and permits the system to project different video sequences onto their shadows. Shot in advance by local videographers and producers, the filmed sequences show full images of ordinary people moving freely, but also watching the camera. As they appear within pedestrians’ shadows, the figurants interact with the viewers, moving and establishing eye contact. Figure 3: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Under Scan (Relational Architecture 11), 2005. Shown here: Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom, 2008. Photo by: Antimodular Research. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 4: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Under Scan (Relational Architecture 11), 2005. Shown here: Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom, 2008. Photo by: Antimodular Research. Courtesy of the artist. One of the most interesting attributes of this work with respect to the question of AR’s (im)possible perceptual spatial continuity is its ability to create an experientially stimulating and conceptually sophisticated play between illusion and subversion of illusion. In Under Scan, the integration of video projections into the real environment via the active body of the viewer is aimed at tempering as much as possible any disparities or dialectical tensions—that is, any successive or alternative reading—between real and virtual. Although non-immersive, the work fuses the two levels by provoking an intimate but mute dialogue between the real, present body of the viewer and the virtual, absent body of the figurant via the ambiguous entity of the shadow. The latter is an illusion (it marks the presence of a body) that is transcended by another illusion (video projection). Moreover, being “under scan,” the viewer inhabits both the “here” of the immediate space and the “there” of virtual information: “the body” is equally a presence in flesh and bones and an occurrence in bits and bytes. But, however convincing this reality-virtuality pseudo-continuum would be, the spatial and temporal fragmentations inevitably persist: there is always a certain break at the phenomenological level between the experience of real space, the bodily absence/presence in the shadow, and the displacements and delays of the video image projection. Figure 5: John Craig Freeman and Will Pappenheimer, Hans RichtAR, augmented reality installation included in the exhibition “Hans Richter: Encounters”, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013. Courtesy of the artists. Figure 6: John Craig Freeman and Will Pappenheimer, Hans RichtAR, augmented reality installation included in the exhibition “Hans Richter: Encounters”, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013. Courtesy of the artists. The third example of an AR artwork that engages the problem of real-virtual spatial convergence as a play between perceptual continuity and discontinuity, this time with the use of hand-held mobile interface is Hans RichtAR by John Craig Freeman and Will Pappenheimer. The work is an AR installation included in the exhibition “Hans Richter: Encounters” at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in 2013. The project recreates the spirit of the 1929 exhibition held in Stuttgart entitled Film und Foto (“FiFo”) for which avant-garde artist Hans Richter served as film curator. Featured in the augmented reality is a re-imaging of the FiFo Russian Room designed by El Lissitzky where a selection of Russian photographs, film stills and actual film footage was presented. The users access the work through tablets made available at the exhibition entrance. Pointing the tablet at the exhibition and moving around the room, the viewer discovers that a new, complex installation is superimposed on the screen over the existing installation and gallery space at LACMA. The work effectively recreates and interprets the original design of the Russian Room, with its scaffoldings and surfaces at various heights while virtually juxtaposing photography and moving images, to which the authors have added some creative elements of their own. Manipulating and converging real space and the virtual forms in an illusionist way, AR is able—as one of the artists maintains—to destabilize the way we construct representation. Indeed, the work makes a statement about visuality that complicates the relationship between the visible object and its representation and interpretation in the virtual realm. One that actually shows the fragility of establishing an illusionist continuum, of a perfect convergence between reality and represented virtuality, whatever the means employed. AR: A Different Spatial Practice Regardless the degree of “perfection” the convergence process would entail, what we can safely assume—following the examples above—is that the complex nature of AR operations permits a closer integration of virtual images within real space, one that, I argue, constitutes a new spatial paradigm. This is the perceptual outcome of the convergence effect, that is, the process and the product of consolidating different—and differently situated—elements in real and virtual worlds into a single space-image. Of course, illusion plays a crucial role as it makes permeable the perceptual limit between the represented objects and the material spaces we inhabit. Making the interface transparent—in both proper and figurative senses—and integrating it into the surrounding space, AR “erases” the medium with the effect of suspending—at least for a limited time—the perceptual (but not ontological!) differences between what is real and what is represented. These aspects are what distinguish AR from other technological and artistic endeavors that aim at creating more inclusive spaces of interaction. However, unlike the CAVE experience (a display solution frequently used in VR applications) that isolates the viewer within the image-space, in AR virtual information is coextensive with reality. As the example of the Living-Room 2 shows, regardless the degree of immersivity, in AR there is no such thing as dismissing the real in favor of an ideal view of a perfect and completely controllable artificial environment like in VR. The “redemptive” vision of a total virtual environment is replaced in AR with the open solution of sharing physical and digital realities in the same sensorial and spatial configuration. In AR the real is not denounced but reflected; it is not excluded, but integrated. Yet, AR distinguishes itself also from other projects that presuppose a real-world environment overlaid with data, such as urban surfaces covered with screens, Wi-Fi enabled areas, or video installations that are not site-specific and viewer inclusive. Although closely related to these types of projects, AR remains different, its spatiality is not simply a “space of interaction” that connects, but instead it integrates real and virtual elements. Unlike other non-AR media installations, AR does not only place the real and virtual spaces in an adjacent position (or replace one with another), but makes them perceptually convergent in an—ideally—seamless way (and here Hans RichtAR is a relevant example). Moreover, as Lev Manovich notes, “electronically augmented space is unique – since the information is personalized for every user, it can change dynamically over time, and it is delivered through an interactive multimedia interface” (225-6). Nevertheless, as our examples show, any AR experience is negotiated in the user-machine encounter with various degrees of success and sustainability. Indeed, the realization of the convergence effect is sometimes problematic since AR is never perfectly continuous, spatially or temporally. The convergence effect is the momentary appearance of continuity that will never take full effect for the viewer, given the internal (perhaps inherent?) tensions between the ideal of seamlessness and the mostly technical inconsistencies in the visual construction of the pieces (such as real-time inadequacy or real-virtual registration errors). We should note that many criticisms of the AR visualization systems (being them practical applications or artworks) are directed to this particular aspect related to the imperfect alignment between reality and digital information in the augmented space-image. However, not only AR applications can function when having an estimated (and acceptable) registration error, but, I would state, such visual imperfections testify a distinctive aesthetic aspect of AR. The alleged flaws can be assumed—especially in the artistic AR projects—as the “trace,” as the “tool’s stroke” that can reflect the unique play between illusion and its subversion, between transparency of the medium and its reflexive strategy. In fact this is what defines AR as a different perceptual paradigm: the creation of a convergent space—which will remain inevitably imperfect—between material reality and virtual information.References Azuma, Ronald T. “A Survey on Augmented Reality.” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 6.4 (Aug. 1997): 355-385. < http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/knowledge_base/ARfinal.pdf >. Benayoun, Maurice. World Skin: A Photo Safari in the Land of War. 1997. Immersive installation: CAVE, Computer, video projectors, 1 to 5 real photo cameras, 2 to 6 magnetic or infrared trackers, shutter glasses, audio-system, Internet connection, color printer. Maurice Benayoun, Works. < http://www.benayoun.com/projet.php?id=16 >. Bimber, Oliver, and Ramesh Raskar. Spatial Augmented Reality. Merging Real and Virtual Worlds. Wellesley, Massachusetts: AK Peters, 2005. 71-92. Burnett, Ron. How Images Think. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. Campbell, Jim. Hallucination. 1988-1990. Black and white video camera, 50 inch rear projection video monitor, laser disc players, custom electronics. Collection of Don Fisher, San Francisco. Campus, Peter. Interface. 1972. Closed-circuit video installation, black and white camera, video projector, light projector, glass sheet, empty, dark room. Centre Georges Pompidou Collection, Paris, France. Courchesne, Luc. Where Are You? 2005. Immersive installation: Panoscope 360°. a single channel immersive display, a large inverted dome, a hemispheric lens and projector, a computer and a surround sound system. Collection of the artist. < http://courchel.net/# >. Davies, Char. Osmose. 1995. Computer, sound synthesizers and processors, stereoscopic head-mounted display with 3D localized sound, breathing/balance interface vest, motion capture devices, video projectors, and silhouette screen. Char Davies, Immersence, Osmose. < http://www.immersence.com >. Farman, Jason. Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media. New York: Routledge, 2012. Graham, Dan. Present Continuous Past(s). 1974. Closed-circuit video installation, black and white camera, one black and white monitor, two mirrors, microprocessor. Centre Georges Pompidou Collection, Paris, France. Grau, Oliver. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. Translated by Gloria Custance. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: MIT Press, 2003. Hansen, Mark B.N. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, 2001-2012. < http://www.etymonline.com >. Manovich, Lev. “The Poetics of Augmented Space.” Visual Communication 5.2 (2006): 219-240. Milgram, Paul, Haruo Takemura, Akira Utsumi, Fumio Kishino. “Augmented Reality: A Class of Displays on the Reality-Virtuality Continuum.” SPIE [The International Society for Optical Engineering] Proceedings 2351: Telemanipulator and Telepresence Technologies (1994): 282-292. Naimark, Michael, Be Now Here. 1995-97. Stereoscopic interactive panorama: 3-D glasses, two 35mm motion-picture cameras, rotating tripod, input pedestal, stereoscopic projection screen, four-channel audio, 16-foot (4.87 m) rotating floor. Originally produced at Interval Research Corporation with additional support from the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Paris, France. < http://www.naimark.net/projects/benowhere.html >. Nauman, Bruce. Live-Taped Video Corridor. 1970. Wallboard, video camera, two video monitors, videotape player, and videotape, dimensions variable. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Novak, Marcos. Interview with Leo Gullbring, Calimero journalistic och fotografi, 2001. < http://www.calimero.se/novak2.htm >. Sermon, Paul. Telematic Dreaming. 1992. ISDN telematic installation, two video projectors, two video cameras, two beds set. The National Museum of Photography, Film & Television in Bradford England. Shaw, Jeffrey, and Theo Botschuijver. Viewpoint. 1975. Photo installation. Shown at 9th Biennale de Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris, France.

IntroductionIt has been nearly half a century since the appearance of Susan Sontag’s landmark essay “The Imagination of Disaster.” The critic wrote of the public fascination with science fiction disaster films, claiming that, on the one hand “from a psychological point of view, the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ from one period in history to another [but, on the other hand] from a political and moral point of view, it does” (224). Even if Sontag is right about aspects of the imagination of disaster not changing, the types, frequency, and magnitude of disasters and their representation in media and popular culture suggest that dynamic conditions prevail on both counts. Disaster has become a significantly urban phenomenon, and highly publicised “worst case” scenarios such as Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake highlight multiple demographic, cultural, and environmental contexts for visualising cataclysm. The 1950s and 60s science fiction films that Sontag wrote about were filled with marauding aliens and freaks of disabused science. Since then, their visual and dramatic effects have been much enlarged by all kinds of disaster scenarios. Partly imagined, these scenarios have real-life counterparts with threats from terrorism and the war on terror, pan-epidemics, and global climate change. Sontag’s essay—like most, if not all of the films she mentions—overlooked the aftermath; that is, the rebuilding, following extra-terrestrial invasion. It ignored what was likely to happen when the monsters were gone. In contrast, the psychological as well as the practical, social, and economic aspects of reconstruction are integral to disaster discourse today. Writing about how architecture might creatively contribute to post-conflict (including war) and disaster recovery, for instance, Boano elaborates the psychological background for rebuilding, where the material destruction of dwellings and cities “carries a powerful symbolic erosion of security, social wellbeing and place attachment” (38); these are depicted as attributes of selfhood and identity that must be restored. Similarly, Hutchison and Bleiker (385) adopt a view evident in disaster studies, that disaster-struck communities experience “trauma” and require inspired responses that facilitate “healing and reconciliation” as well as material aid such as food, housing, and renewed infrastructure. This paper revisits Sontag’s “The Imagination of Disaster,” fifty years on in view of the changing face of disasters and their representation in film media, including more recent films. The paper then considers disaster recovery and outlines the difficult path that “creative industries” like architecture and urban planning must tread when promising a vision of rebuilding that provides for such intangible outcomes as “healing and reconciliation.” We find that hopes for the seemingly positive psychologically- and socially-recuperative outcomes accompanying the prospect of rebuilding risk a variety of generalisation akin to wish-fulfilment that Sontag finds in disaster films. The Psychology of Science Fiction and Disaster FilmsIn “The Imagination of Disaster,” written at or close to the height of the Cold War, Sontag ruminates on what America’s interest in, if not preoccupation with, science fiction films tell us about ourselves. Their popularity cannot be explained in terms of their entertainment value alone; or if it can, then why audiences found (and still find) such films entertaining is something that itself needs explanation.Depicted in media like photography and film, utopian and dystopian thought have at least one thing in common. Their visions of either perfected or socially alienated worlds are commonly prompted by criticism of the social/political status quo and point to its reform. For Sontag, science fiction films portrayed both people’s worst nightmares concerning disaster and catastrophe (e.g. the end of the world; chaos; enslavement; mutation), as well as their facile victories over the kinds of moral, political, and social dissolution the films imaginatively depicted. Sontag does not explicitly attribute such “happy endings” to wish-fulfilling phantasy and ego-protection. (“Phantasy” is to be distinguished from fantasy. It is a psychoanalytic term for states of mind, often symbolic in form, resulting from infantile wish-fulfilment, desires and instincts.) She does, however, describe the kinds of fears, existential concerns (like annihilation), and crises of meaning they are designed (purpose built) to allay. The fears are a product of the time—the down and dark side of technology (e.g. depersonalisation; ambivalence towards science, scientists, and technology) and changes wrought in our working and personal lives by urbanisation. In short, then as now, science fictions films were both expressions of deep and genuine worries and of the pressing need to inventively set them to rest.When Sontag claims that “the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ” (224) from one period to another, this is because, psychologically speaking, neither the precipitating concerns and fears (death, loss of love, meaninglessness, etc.), nor the ways in which people’s minds endeavour to assuage them, substantively differ. What is different is the way they are depicted. This is unsurprisingly a function of the political, social, and moral situations and milieus that provide the context in which the imagination of disaster unfolds. In contemporary society, the extent to which the media informs and constructs the context in which the imagination operates is unprecedented.Sontag claims that there is little if any criticism of the real social and political conditions that bring about the fears the films depict (223). Instead, fantasy operates so as to displace and project the actual causes away from their all too human origins into outer space and onto aliens. In a sense, this is the core and raison d’etre for such films. By their very nature, science fiction films of the kind Sontag is discussing cannot concern themselves with genuine social or political criticism (even though the films are necessarily expressive of such criticism). Any serious questioning of the moral and political status quo—conditions that are responsible for the disasters befalling people—would hamper the operation of fantasy and its production of temporarily satisfying “solutions” to whatever catastrophe is being depicted.Sontag goes on to discuss various strategies science fiction employs to deal with such fears. For example, through positing a bifurcation between good and evil, and grossly oversimplifying the moral complexity of situations, it allows one to “give outlet to cruel or at least amoral feelings” (215) and to exercise feelings of superiority—moral and otherwise. Ambiguous feelings towards science and technology are repressed. Quick and psychologically satisfying fixes are sought for these by means of phantasy and the imaginative construction of invulnerable heroes. Much of what Sontag says can straightforwardly be applied to catastrophe in general. “Alongside the hopeful fantasy of moral simplification and international unity embodied in the science fiction films lurk the deepest anxieties about contemporary existence” (220). Sontag writes:In the films it is by means of images and sounds […] that one can participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself. Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects in art. In science fiction films disaster is rarely viewed intensively; it is always extensive. It is a matter of quality and ingenuity […] the science fiction film […] is concerned with the aesthetics of disaster […] and it is in the imagery of destruction that the core of a good science fiction film lies. (212–13)In science fiction films, disaster, though widespread, is viewed intensively as well as extensively. The disturbances constitutive of the disaster are moral and emotional as well as material. People are left without the mental or physical abilities they need to cope. Government is absent or useless. We find ourselves in what amounts to what Naomi Zack (“Philosophy and Disaster”; Ethics for Disaster) describes as a Hobbesian second state of nature—where government is inoperative and chaos (moral, social, political, personal) reigns. Science fiction’s way out is to imaginatively construct scenarios emotionally satisfying enough to temporarily assuage the distress (anomie or chaos) experienced in the film.There is, however, a tremendous difference in the way in which people who face catastrophic occurrences in their lives, as opposed to science fiction, address the problems. For one thing, they must be far closer to complex and quickly changing realities and uncertain truths than are the phantastic, temporarily gratifying, and morally unproblematic resolutions to the catastrophic scenarios that science fiction envisions. Genuine catastrophe, for example war, undermines and dismantles the structures—material structures to be sure but also those of justice, human kindness, and affectivity—that give us the wherewithal to function and that are shown to be inimical to catastrophe as such. Disaster dispenses with civilization while catastrophe displaces it.Special Effects and Changing StorylinesScience fiction and disaster film genres have been shaped by developments in visual simulation technologies providing opportunities for imaginatively mixing fact and fiction. Developments in filmmaking include computer or digital techniques for reproducing on the screen what can otherwise only be imagined as causal sequences of events and spectacles accompanying the wholesale destruction of buildings and cities—even entire planets. Indeed films are routinely promoted on the basis of how cinematographers and technicians have advanced the state of the art. The revival of 3-D movies with films such as Avatar (2009) and Prometheus (2012) is one of a number of developments augmenting the panoramas of 1950s classics featuring “melting tanks, flying bodies, crashing walls, awesome craters and fissures in the earth, plummeting spacecraft [and] colourful deadly rays” (Sontag 213). An emphasis on the scale of destruction and the wholesale obliteration of recognisable sites emblematic of “the city” (mega-structures like the industrial plant in Aliens (1986) and vast space ships like the “Death Star” in two Star Wars sequels) connect older films with new ones and impress the viewer with ever more extraordinary spectacle.Films that have been remade make for useful comparison. On the whole, these reinforce the continuation and predictability of some storylines (for instance, threats of extra-terrestrial invasion), but also the attenuation or disappearance of other narrative elements such as the monsters and anxieties released by mid-twentieth century atomic tests (Broderick). Remakes also highlight emerging themes requiring novel or updated critical frameworks. For example, environmental anxieties, largely absent in 1950s science fiction films (except for narratives involving colliding worlds or alien contacts) have appeared en masse in recent years, providing an updated view on the ethical issues posed by the fall of cities and communities (Taylor, “Urban”).In The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and its remakes (1956, 1978, 1993), for example, the organic and vegetal nature of the aliens draws the viewer’s attention to an environment formed by combative species, allowing for threats of infestation, growth and decay of the self and individuality—a longstanding theme. In the most recent version, The Invasion (2007), special effects and directorial spirit render the orifice-seeking tendrils of the pod creatures threateningly vigorous and disturbing (Lim). More sanctimonious than physically invasive, the aliens in the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still are fed up with humankind’s fixation with atomic self-destruction, and threaten global obliteration on the earth (Cox). In the 2008 remake, the suave alien ambassador, Keanu Reeves, targets the environmental negligence of humanity.Science, including science as fiction, enters into disaster narratives in a variety of ways. Some are less obvious but provocative nonetheless; for example, movies dramatising the arrival of aliens such as War of the Worlds (1953 and 2005) or Alien (1979). These more subtle approaches can be personally confronting even without the mutation of victims into vegetables or zombies. Special effects technologies have made it possible to illustrate the course of catastrophic floods and earthquakes in considerable scientific and visual detail and to represent the interaction of natural disasters, the built environment, and people, from the scale of buildings, homes, and domestic lives to entire cities and urban populations.For instance, the blockbuster film The Day After Tomorrow (2004) runs 118 minutes, but has an uncertain fictional time frame of either a few weeks or 72 hours (if the film’s title is to taken literally). The movie shows the world as we know it being mostly destroyed. Tokyo is shattered by hailstones and Los Angeles is twisted by cyclones the likes of which Dorothy would never have seen. New York disappears beneath a mountainous tsunami. All of these events result from global climate change, though whether this is due to human (in) action or other causes is uncertain. Like their predecessors, the new wave of disaster movies like The Day After Tomorrow makes for questionable “art” (Annan). Nevertheless, their reception opens a window onto broader political and moral contexts for present anxieties. Some critics have condemned The Day After Tomorrow for its scientific inaccuracies—questioning the scale or pace of climate change. Others acknowledge errors while commending efforts to raise environmental awareness (Monbiot). Coincident with the film and criticisms in both the scientific and political arena is a new class of environmental heretic—the climate change denier. This is a shadowy character commonly associated with the presidency of George W. Bush and the oil lobby that uses minor inconsistencies of science to claim that climate change does not exist. One thing underlying both twisting facts for the purposes of making science fiction films and ignoring evidence of climate change is an infantile orientation towards the unknown. In this regard, recent films do what science fiction disaster films have always done. While freely mixing truths and half-truths for the purpose of heightened dramatic effect, they fulfil psychological tasks such as orchestrating nightmare scenarios and all too easy victories on the screen. Uncertainty regarding the precise cause, scale, or duration of cataclysmic natural phenomena is mirrored by suspension of disbelief in the viability of some human responses to portrayals of urban disaster. Science fiction, in other words, invites us to accept as possible the flight of Americans and their values to Mexico (The Day After Tomorrow), the voyage into earth’s molten core (The Core 2003), or the disposal of lava in LA’s drainage system (Volcano 1997). Reinforcing Sontag’s point, here too there is a lack of criticism of the real social and political conditions that bring about the fears depicted in the films (223). Moreover, much like news coverage, images in recent natural disaster films (like their predecessors) typically finish at the point where survivors are obliged to pick up the pieces and start all over again—the latter is not regarded as newsworthy. Allowing for developments in science fiction films and the disaster genre, Sontag’s observation remains accurate. The films are primarily concerned “with the aesthetics of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, in making a mess” (213) rather than rebuilding. The Imagination of Disaster RecoverySontag’s essay contributes to an important critical perspective on science fiction film. Variations on her “psychological point of view” have been explored. (The two discourses—psychology and cinema—have parallel and in some cases intertwined histories). Moreover, in the intervening years, psychological or psychoanalytical terms and narratives have themselves become even more a part of popular culture. They feature in recent disaster films and disaster recovery discourse in the “real” world.Today, with greater frequency than in the 1950s and 60s films arguably, representations of alien invasion or catastrophic global warming serve to background conflict resolutions of a more quotidian and personal nature. Hence, viewers are led to suspect that Tom Cruise will be more likely to survive the rapacious monsters in the latest The War of the Worlds if he can become less narcissistic and a better father. Similarly, Dennis Quaid’s character will be much better prepared to serve a newly glaciated America for having rescued his son (and marriage) from the watery deep-freezer that New York City becomes in The Day After Tomorrow. In these films the domestic and familial comprise a domain of inter-personal and communal relations from which victims and heroes appear. Currents of thought from the broad literature of disaster studies and Western media also call upon this domain. The imagination of disaster recovery has come to partly resemble a set of problems organised around the needs of traumatised communities. These serve as an object of urban governance, planning, and design conceived in different ways, but largely envisioned as an organic unity that connects urban populations, their pasts, and settings in a meaningful, psychologically significant manner (Furedi; Hutchison and Bleiker; Boano). Terms like “place” or concepts like Boano’s “place-attachment" (38) feature in this discourse to describe this unity and its subjective dimensions. Consider one example. In August 2006, one year after Katrina, the highly respected Journal of Architectural Education dedicated a special issue to New Orleans and its reconstruction. Opening comments by editorialist Barbara Allen include claims presupposing enduring links between the New Orleans community conceived as an organic whole, its architectural heritage imagined as a mnemonic vehicle, and the city’s unique setting. Though largely unsupported (and arguably unsupportable) the following proposition would find agreement across a number of disaster studies and resonates in commonplace reasoning:The culture of New Orleans is unique. It is a mix of ancient heritage with layers and adaptations added by successive generations, resulting in a singularly beautiful cultural mosaic of elements. Hurricane Katrina destroyed buildings—though not in the city’s historic core—and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, but it cannot wipe out the memories and spirit of the citizens. (4) What is intriguing about the claim is an underlying intellectual project that subsumes psychological and sociological domains of reasoning within a distinctive experience of community, place, and memory. In other words, the common belief that memory is an intrinsic part of the human condition of shock and loss gives form to a theory of how urban communities experience disaster and how they might re-build—and justify rebuilding—themselves. This is problematic and invites anachronistic thinking. While communities are believed to be formed partly by memories of a place, “memory” is neither a collective faculty nor is it geographically bounded. Whose memories are included and which ones are not? Are these truly memories of one place or do they also draw on other real or imagined places? Moreover—and this is where additional circumspection is inspired by our reading of Sontag’s essay—does Allen’s editorial contribute to an aestheticised image of place, rather than criticism of the social and political conditions required for reconstruction to proceed with justice, compassionately and affectively? Allowing for civil liberties to enter the picture, Allen adds “it is necessary to enable every citizen to come back to this exceptional city if they so desire” (4). However, given that memories of places and desires for their recovery are not univocal, and often contain competing visions of what was and should be, it is not surprising they should result in competing expectations for reconstruction efforts. This has clearly proven the case for New Orleans (Vederber; Taylor, “Typologies”)ConclusionThe comparison of films invites an extension of Sontag’s analysis of the imagination of disaster to include the psychology, politics, and morality of rebuilding. Can a “psychological point of view” help us to understand not only the motives behind capturing so many scenes of destruction on screen and television, but also something of the creative impulses driving reconstruction? This invites a second question. How do some impulses, particularly those caricatured as the essence of an “enterprise culture” (Heap and Ross) associated with America’s “can-do” or others valorised as positive outcomes of catastrophe in The Upside of Down (Homer-Dixon), highlight or possibly obscure criticism of the conditions which made cities like New Orleans vulnerable in the first place? The broad outline of an answer to the second question begins to appear only when consideration of the ethics of disaster and rebuilding are taken on board. If “the upside” of “the down” wrought by Hurricane Katrina, for example, is rebuilding of any kind, at any price, and for any person, then the equation works (i.e., there is a silver lining for every cloud). If, however, the range of positives is broadened to include issues of social justice, then the figures require more complex arithmetic.ReferencesAllen, Barbara. “New Orleans and Katrina: One Year Later.” Journal of Architectural Education 60.1 (2006): 4.Annan, David. Catastrophe: The End of the Cinema? London: Lorrimer, 1975.Boano, Camillo. “‘Violent Space’: Production and Reproduction of Security and Vulnerabilities.” The Journal of Architecture 16 (2011): 37–55.Broderick, Mick, ed. Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film. London: Kegan Paul, 1996.Cox, David. “Get This, Aliens: We Just Don’t Care!” The Guardian 15 Dec. 2008 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2008/dec/15/the-day-the-earth-stood-still›. Furedi, Frank. “The Changing Meaning of Disaster.” Area 39.4 (2007): 482–89.Heap, Shaun H., and Angus Ross, eds. Understanding the Enterprise Culture: Themes in the Work of Mary Douglas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992. Homer-Dixon, Thomas. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006.Hutchison, Emma, and Roland Bleiker. “Emotional Reconciliation: Reconstituting Identity and Community after Trauma.” European Journal of Social Theory 11 (2008): 385–403.Lim, Dennis. “Same Old Aliens, But New Neuroses.” New York Times 12 Aug. 2007: A17.Monbiot, George. “A Hard Rain's A-gonna Fall.” The Guardian 14 May 2004.Sontag, Susan. “The Imagination of Disaster” (1965). Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Dell, 1979. 209–25.Taylor, William M. “Typologies of Katrina: Mnemotechnics in Post-Disaster New Orleans.” Interstices 13 (2012): 71–84.———. “Urban Disasters: Visualising the Fall of Cities and the Forming of Human Values.” Journal of Architecture 11.5 (2006): 603–12.Verderber, Stephen. “Five Years After – Three New Orleans Neighborhoods.” Journal of Architectural Education 64.1 (2010): 107–20.Zack, Naomi. Ethics for Disaster. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009.———. “Philosophy and Disaster.” Homeland Security Affairs 2, article 5 (April 2006): ‹http://www.hsaj.org/?article=2.1.5›.FilmographyAlien. Dir. Ridley Scott. Brandywine Productions, 1979.Aliens. Dir. James Cameron. Brandywine Productions, 1986.Avatar. Dir. James Cameron. Lightstorm Entertainment et al., 2009.The Core. Dir. Jon Amiel. Paramount Pictures, 2003.The Day after Tomorrow. Dir. Roland Emmerich. 20th Century Fox, 2004.The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dir. Don Siegel. Allied Artists, 1956; also 1978 and 1993.The Invasion. Dirs. Oliver Hirschbiegel and Jame McTeigue. Village Roadshow et al, 2007.Prometheus. Dir. Ridley Scott. Scott Free and Brandywine Productions, 2012Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm, 1977.Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm, 1983.Volcano. Dir. Mick Jackson. 20th Century Fox, 1997.War of the Worlds. Dir. George Pal. Paramount, 1953; also Steven Spielberg. Paramount, 2005.Acknowledgments The authors are grateful to Oenone Rooksby and Joely-Kym Sobott for their assistance and advice when preparing this article. It was also made possible in part by a grant from the Australian Research Council.