Visualising everyday geographies: practices of vision through travel-time

Responding to recent debates in human geography on the need to explore more complex renderings of everyday visuality, this paper explores some of the fluid relationships between everyday visuality, materiality and mobility through practices of contemporary railway travel in Britain. Based on extensive empirical research, this paper explores three different but related visual practices experienced during the course of a railway journey. First, it looks at how sublime forms of vision emerge to produce a variety of passive embodied effects. Second, it looks at how more attentive visual practices are implicated in the temporal organisation of the journey and have the capacity to activate changes to routine. Third, it looks at how the physical materiality of the carriage interior serves to mediate the visual field in particular ways and gives rise to a series of freedoms and constraints. Whilst the visual consumption of landscapes viewed through a window is often taken to be an axiomatic part of the travelling experience, this paper demonstrates the importance of apprehending how a multiplicity of visual practices affect how perceptions of time, space and location unfold over the course of a journey.     

Connecting Things through the Visual Arts: Medieval Crescent Moon Pendants as Horse Ornaments

Medieval archaeology as a discipline is usually defined in relation to written sources and history, while other kinds of sources and scholarly traditions studying the same period are overlooked. With a small group of 14th-century crescent moon pendants of bronze from Finland as its focal point, the present article analyses the way in which archaeology connects with the visual arts and the discipline specialized in studying them, art history. Instead of some shared methodology, the inquiry proceeds along the tensions between the material and the visual. After the artefact and its technical qualities are examined in the framework of medieval material culture, the object is reduced, first, to an iconographical motif and, second, into a represented object. Third, the anthropomorphic features applied on the pendant are extracted and considered against the body of medieval grotesque art. This reveals how the visual is also an effective force in the sphere of material culture and human interaction. In the interdisciplinary work between archaeology and art history, the visual and the material emerge as travelling concepts destabilizing traditional approaches and inspiring new insights.     

Visibility Graph Analysis and Monumentality in the Iron Age City at Kerkenes in Central Turkey

Abstract

This paper investigates symmetry and visualization at two monumental gateways excavated in the late 7th–6th centuries b.c. Phrygian city on Mount Kerkenes (Turkish: Kerkenes Da?) in central Turkey. One of these, the Cappadocia Gate, is one of seven city gates piercing the 7 km stone-built defenses; the other is the Monumental Entrance to the Palatial Complex. We use visibility graph analysis (VGA), a branch of space syntax analysis, and viewshed isovists to demonstrate that a similar visual and symbolic conception underlay the design and furnishing of these two gates. Both were conceived to signal different messages to people entering and exiting the gates, and both manipulated the visibility of cultic statuary to achieve this effect. Other contemporaneous monuments, like the Midas Monument in the Phrygian Highlands, shared many of the same principles. VGA reveals fundamental characteristics of the experience of Phrygian monumental architecture and also indicates a degree of city planning.     

Beneath and before: continuums of publicness in public art

Public monuments traditionally appear in high contrast to their landscapes, an effect that sets aesthetic, ideological and social distances. However, Manmale, counter-monuments, and counter-hegemonic monuments (eg the AIDS quilt, Rachael Whiteread's House, Melbourne's Another View Walking Trail, Tiananmen's Goddess of Democracy, or Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial), challenge the norms of monuments in visuality, fixedness, and permanence, and suggest intricacies which mediate the interactivity of art, site and passers-by. In this paper, I consider three counter-hegemonic monuments in Vancouver, British Columbia – all installed in 1997/98 and all dealing with the issue of violence – sited within one neighbourhood. Via archival research, interviews, and extensive participant observations investigating how the monuments actually function in social memory rituals, I discovered that the characteristics of publicness in the landscapes that lay ‘beneath and before’ the monuments deeply affected their origins, designs, and current uses.     

Poster power: rural electrification,visualization, and legibility in the United States

This article examines graphic visualization and visuality in Lester Beall’s 1937 series of posters for the United States Rural Electrification Administration. The posters are commonly thought of as raising public awareness of the benefits of electricity in the rural America, but what was meant by public and awareness in 1937 in terms of rural reform in the United States has remained unclear until now. This article posits that to understand how these posters were seen in 1937 requires an acknowledgment of how Beall’s posters graphically visualized the complexities of rural electrification, and how graphic visualization was contiguous with bureaucratic communication and the visual sensitivity of a public.     

None daring to make us afraid

ABSTRACT

J.W. Breyer, the young South African military administration's first game warden in Namibia, was based at Namutoni on the south-eastern margin of the Etosha pan. Breyer died a lonely death and a meticulous inventory was rendered of Breyer's estate. Viktor Franke, the German commander in south-western Africa, and Cocky Hahn, the second South African commissioner of native affairs stationed at Ondangwa, similarly left a visual record of their intimate surroundings. An itinerary of their material worlds and hence of colonialism in Namibia is here revealed using photographs and other evidence, highlighting some of the complexities of the cultural practices of colonial administration and policing in southern Africa.     

ARCHITECTURAL GEOGRAPHIES OF THE AIRPORT BALCONY: MOBILITY, SENSATION AND THE THEATRE OF FLIGHT

Contemporary studies within the apparent ‘mobility turn’ focus upon airports as sites indicative of our mobile world, yet they tend to forgo investigations of the contextual architectural geographies that shape and inflect these mobilities. This paper examines the relationship between the architecture of the airport balcony and practices of seeing. While recent scholarship has taken airports to be incredible symbolizers of power and places of heightened visual scrutiny, the paper explores how through the architectural mediation of seeing, early airports were designed to instil specific inspirations, beliefs and messages within the airport user – constructing a new and modern experience. Far from a blank space evacuated of social presence and meaning, the paper investigates how airport design interacts with and shapes social experience. By examining the mobile practices and experiences of inhabiting the airport balcony, the paper advances conceptualizations of moving and seeing by complicating their practice as ‘collective individuations’ of social, architectural and sensual engagements, registers, and percepts.     

Perilous Journeys: Visualising the Racialised “Refugee Crisis”

This article explores the benign and malignant power of the visual in the racialised framing of the ongoing “European refugee crisis”. Bringing together literatures on racial discourses, visuality, storytelling and decoloniality for the first time, this paper breaks new ground in our understandings of the political possibilities that visual storytelling offers in shifting “lines of sight” in an increasingly vitriolic anti‐refugee climate. It does this by analysing prominent graphic narratives created by the non‐profit organisation PositiveNegatives, animating the refugee experiences of Syrian men in Scandinavia. We consider the affective engagements that such progressive storytelling promotes and the decolonial potential invested in it, arguing that the modality and content of narratives of this genre offer important scope to provoke encounter and empathy. Contributing to geographies of race, migration, visuality and decoloniality, we suggest that these narratives allow new and gently radical ways of resisting the dehumanising impetus of mainstream media discourses.     

Eclectic and pragmatic: the colours of Dutch social and cultural geography

In the Netherlands, human geography has traditionally been an applied, practical science. Close ties have always existed with spatial planning and regional-economic policy. With good reason, the first generation of planning specialists—in the 1960s—consisted largely of people trained as geographers. Geographers were also the socio-spatial engineers of the welfare state (de Pater 2001b; de Pater and de Smidt 1989).