Session 5b: Seeing Across Even More Divides

3rd Global Conference

Tuesday 14th July 2009 – Thursday 16th July 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford

How the Gossip Industry Enjoys Visual Literary?
Leila Tafreshi Motlagh
Faculty of Islamic Azad University- Karaj Branch, Iran

According to Wikipedia, there are nearly 400 magazines related to gossip in the news stands. Although People magazine avoids being a pure gossip magazine, one cannot neglect $1.5 billion revenue of 2006. Such revenue, more or less, comes from advertising, scoop, and gossip about unexpected divorce, secret date, next marriage, probable pregnancy. Such industry requires a precise semiotic analysis of its components. July 31, 2006 issue had 103 pages while 48 pages advertised directly. About one-third of advertisement is focused on imaginary eatable stuff. Indeed, idea of eating, drinking and cooking is implied in every three pages. 27 pages are focused on theme of physical attraction of famous people, however their main interest is to gossip. 5 pages are given details of a family gastric band surgery to lose weight. Before and after pictures are included in this report. As a matter of fact, there is a dualism. Half of ads encourage you to eat as much as you can. The rest are interested in helping you to lose weight and become attractive. Tailors and hairdressers have changed their names to fashion designers, while they remember that rise of fashion is a sign of economic crisis. Advertised cars, mobiles, laptops and websites convey the notion of communication. With whom and for what purpose people must communicate? The answer is embedded in every few pages. They visualize easy accessible love and give the promise of a unique one in the forthcoming issues. This commodification reminds the triangle of leaders, players and readers. Readers are those are sitting, eating, drinking, talking and waiting for the next gossip. Players are those who make a win-win profit by picture auction. Leaders are those who make a balance between supply and demand. However, they are aware that climax of a gossip is a sign of making a new ideal.

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Chorography: Reflections on its Place in Visual Literacy and Creative Arts
Jill O’Sullivan
School of Creative Arts, James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland, Australia

Chorography, as defined by Ptolemy in 149 AD, is a form of visual literacy qualitatively describing the inherent attributes of place and region. Ptolemy categorically stated chorography could only be rendered by a skilled artist, designating chorography to be a pictorial representation rather than written text. Chorography, originating within classical cosmographical philosophies, is a qualitative graphic narrative of specific region/choros or place that is characterised by homogenous components and regional commonalities. These may be physical, symbolic, conceptual, metaphysical or sensory. This qualitative and creative imagery communicates and illuminates the iconic, symbolic and the metaphysical of each era’s cultural philosophies of religion and place. In each period of history, chorography maintains its underlying premise as a qualitative and descriptive visual language. These historical applications indicate that chorographic visualisations of region and place informed and reflected contemporary views and needs, embracing and elucidating concepts of religion, politics and culture of distinct periods of time and place. However, chorography as a visual and conceptual literacy in contemporary art praxis is virtually unacknowledged in current art theory.

This paper determines the viability and relevance of a chorographic visual literacy engagement with contemporary creative arts practice to describe place and region. To establish this position, this discourse surveys a concise historical review of an ongoing chorographical visual literacy that informed medieval mappaemundi and portolan charts, Renaissance orthographic city views and seventeenth century Northern European vistas. Chorographic illustrations recorded explorations of new worlds from the early Modern period. The discourse also notes and discusses the influence of printmaking on the dissemination of chorographic visual scholarship from the sixteenth century. The paper concludes with a discussion of chorography and its place within contemporary digital media and virtual reality, finally examining the establishment of a chorographical lexicon informing contemporary visual praxis in traditional and new media art.

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Superheroes as Models of Cultural Synthesis
Oksana Cheypesh
University of Alberta, Canada

Gary Engle in “What Makes Superman so Darned American?” wrote that this character ‘protects the weak and defends truth and justice and all other moral virtues inherent in the Judeo-Christian tradition’. This paper will continue Engel’s inquire beyond Superman’s universality and unified nature, and will seek parallels among the hero’s characteristics and elements from four cultural domains, North American, Jewish, European, and Eastern European, potentially relevant to Superman’s origin. His predecessors in North American popular genres, Western dime novels, folklore ballads, and pulp fiction often were ‘lonely wolves,’ whose identity included individualism, lack of social adaptation, selfishness, trauma, and, according to Engle, ‘child-like innocence’ and ‘stubborn refuse to give it up by growing old.’ From the first, North American cultural domain, Superman preserved loneliness and exceptional destiny, while reworking trauma, selfishness, and developing his social adaptation.

Engle posits that Superman’s powers are metaphors for immigrants’ ethnic characteristics, while Clark Kent signifies socially acceptable pattern for Jewish immigrants’ integration into American society. The authors of Superman Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster originated mostly from Eastern European Jewish families. Siegel’s parents came from Lithuania; Shuster’s father was born in Netherlands, his mother was from Ukraine. European origin of the authors’ parents and their exposure to cultural myths of this domain can explain endowing Superman with the knight codex, significant for the European culture. The character protects truth and justice, his relationships with Lois Lane remind of elements of troubadour courtly love. Eastern European influences can be seen in matriarchal ideology of sacrifice, help and protecting the week.

Spider-Man, who appeared 30 years after Superman’s debut, revived influence of North American ‘lonely wolves’ and diminished immigrant dimension in the comics. Peter Parker had a trauma with a criminal background; he fights not for truth and justice, but against internal and external evil. Unlike Superman, Spider-Man’s main identity is not a superhuman entity.