Session 8: Visual Literacy as Identity

Session 8: Visual Literacy as Identity
Chair: Joe Grixti

Club Visuals as Liminal Art
Holger Briel
Management, Communication and IT, Management Center Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

In the history of moving images, auditive elements were only introduced in the 1920s with the technological invention of sound film. Conversely, and much more recently, sound has begun insisting on visual enhancement as well. Although there were attempts to combine sound and vision as early as 1941 with The Panoram Soundie in the USA, it took until the 1981 introduction of MTV to mainstream such efforts. Since then, new hybrid audiovisual forms have begun to inform events such as club nights, music festivals and visual art fêtes, for instance sound:frame (Vienna) and vision’r (Paris). And while much has been written about music videos (e.g. Frith et al. (1993), Sound and Vision; Vernallis (2004), Experiencing Music Video) and video art (e.g. Cubbitt (1993), Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture), the academic engagement with club visuals is virtually non-existent.
In my contribution, I will briefly outline the rise of club visuals and then examine two seminal works by acidgfx and Rioichi Kurokawa. In doing so, I will attempt to answer the following questions: What is the epistemological position of club visuals versus sound? How does the reception situation impinge on their semiotic analysis? What is the relationship between live and pre-recorded elements? How do club visuals describe the move from multimediality to transmediality and how does this affect their readability?

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Playing Indian” for My People The Sioux: Luther Standing Bear’s Literary Fancy Dancing and America’s Imperial Imagination
Ryan Burt
Department of English, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, United States of America

In 1902, touring with the Buffalo Bill Cody show in London, the Brule Sioux writer Luther Standing Bear danced in front of the King of England. Describing the event in his autobiography, My People The Sioux (1928), Standing Bear recalled an initially stoic King Edward the Seventh observing the performance. However, as soon as Standing Bear “got down to doing [his] fancy steps and gave a few Sioux yells, [the King] had to smile in spite of himself.”
Standing Bear, a remarkable historical figure, was part of the first generation of American Indians to attend the Carlisle Boarding School, which functioned, in the words of its founder, to “civilize the savage and save the man;” he was also one of the first native writers to compose his own autobiography. I use the above anecdote from his London performance to demonstrate one of my fundamental arguments about Sioux writers like Standing Bear: their writing was dynamically linked to models of visual performances non-native audiences desired from an “Indian,” particularly at the dawn of the 20th century. These models of visual literacy manifested themselves, for example, in the Hollywood film industry, where Standing Bear himself worked in such Westerns as Ramona (1916). I suggest this performativity, where native artists wittingly “play Indian” for non-native audiences, spread beyond the visual, and into literary representation.
In early 1900, when Standing Bear performed with Buffalo Bill, the American literary scene was permeated by a “Romantic revival,” a Kipling-esque genre of writing that paradoxically celebrated the revitalizing “call of the wild” for white middle-class readers, while enabling a bellicose nationalism, which drove the American empire into the Pacific to “tame” locales like the Philippines. I argue that the work of Standing Bear, as with other Sioux writers, must be situated in relation to this “Romantic revival.” Inverting the above “paradox,” Standing Bear strategically interrogated the legitimacy of U.S. imperialism, while “playing” the model “Indian” the romance offered its desirous reader.

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Through Our Eyes: Cultural Identity and Visual Literacy amongst Maori Youth in New Zealand
Joanna Kidman
He Parekereke: Institute for Research and Development in Maori Education, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

The ways in which young Maori ‘map’ their indigenous spaces is closely linked to the manner in which they learn about the world and ultimately how they act upon it. In this paper we present the findings of a nation-wide study conducted in New Zealand. The purpose of the project was to find out how young people ‘see’ the world they live in (literally through a camera lens) and how their perceptions of their social landscapes influence their interactions with people within their tribal communities and beyond. In the course of this project, Maori research teams worked with groups of young Maori in a range of indigenous environments and communities teaching them the photographic skills they would need to create imaged narratives of their everyday tribal community interactions. The result is a visual representation of Maori tribal landscapes and indigenous modes of understanding the world, as seen through the eyes of Maori teenagers.